Slashdot Mirror
Personal Spaceflight Leaders Form New Federation
Neil Halelamien writes "A number of entrepreneurs in the nascent commercial space industry are establishing the Personal Spaceflight Federation, an industry group which will work with federal regulators to come up with standards to promote crew and passenger safety. The founders include both suborbital and orbital spaceflight entrepreneurs, such as Armadillo Aerospace's John Carmack, Scaled Composites's Burt Rutan, SpaceX's Elon Musk, and t/Space's Gary Hudson. Commentary available on MSNBC, Space.com, and Space Race News. In related news, NASA is looking at commercial options for resupply of the International Space Station."
What is the big deal with flying into space? Space tourism is about as interesting as sitting in your cubicle with added nausea to keep you on your toes.
The goal ought to be a real destination, the Moon, Mars, some asteroid, but without government money, that isn't going to happen.
So the next best thing is to make a space "plane" that can transport passengers from New York to Sydney in less than an hour. NASA had plans for something like that (someone can provide a link, I'm sure), but scrapped it in favor of Bush's latest drive to get to Mars (or the moon, I forget).
Who wants to sit on a thousand pounds of explosives and not go anywhere? Space flight ought to be seen as a means to an end, not the end itself.
They haven't even gotten there yet and they're already looking for reasons to control who goes there and how. Safety is the given reason but it will take a lot to convince me that setting themselves up as "recognized" experts/authority figures isn't the true motivation. That's a bankable position to be in.
"We're in! Let's close the door behind us"
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
A number of entrepreneurs in the nascent commercial space industry are establishing the Personal Spaceflight Federation, an industry group which will work with federal regulators to come up with standards to promote crew and passenger safety.
Wow! That's great! It's good to see that they've shunned lobbiests.
It isn't like these guys aren't here to craft laws to make themselves richer. Instead, they want to promote safety, just like the Cigarette industry!
" NASA is looking at commercial options for resupply of the International Space Station."
:) Or more realisticly the Russians can just undock the modules they built and control from the NASA tidbits and let them burn up. Their modules are a full, self contained space station, a Mir2 if you will and they don't actually require the American parts.
I think the Russians are way ahead of NASA on both keeping the ISS going, and on the CEV.
The Russians are going to be showing a full scale model of their Kliper reusable capsule at the Paris air show this June.
This is their planned replacement for the venerable Soyuz. It will carry 6 astronauts or 700 kilos of cargo. The article sounds like they are a little cagey on the schedule, it just says a few years. I'll bet you they have a manned launch about 5 years sooner than the CEV.
If they hang one of these on the ISS as an emergency vehicle they will enable bringing the ISS up to nearly its planned manning level, and might actually allow people to do research on the thing, instead of spending all their time maintaining as the 2-3 man crews have been doing.
Kind of looks to me like Russia is planning to go it alone when the U.S. gives up on the ISS and the shuttle. The other source of friction is that since Russia is trading with Iran and the U.S. has embargoed Iran NASA is officially forbidden from having any financial relationship with the Russian Space agency. I wonder if they will have to paint a white line down the middle of the ISS and have a U.S. half and a Russian half
For comparison to Kliper, the CEV is going to have Lockheed and Boeing launched an unmanned, half baked prototype in 2008, pick a winner between the two and wont have a manned launch, probably just to LEO, before 2014 at the earliest.
By contrast NASA went from a nearly standing start to putting a man on the moon in way less than 10 years in the '60's when it had never been done before. In summary, NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are today, officially pathetic. As nearly as I can tell the CEV, and the Bush Moon/Mars initiative is mostly just an excuse to pump money in to the pockets of Boeing and Lockheed and put the milestones that count so far out there it will be a miracle if they program isn't killed before they actually have to do anything serious for the subsidies.
@de_machina
Ding ding ding.
If this were Delta, American Airlines, and JetBlue, wouldn't we be screaming blue-bloody-murder that airlines can't be trusted to develop safety regs? What about chemical companies and chemical handling procedures? Corporations and financial reporting standards? Nightclubs and fire safety regs?
There are hundreds if not thousands of examples where businesses (and entire industries) of all sizes willfully (and gleefully) ignore the public interest, safety, and so on.
This seems like an excellent way to make sure there are space-company-friendly rules in place, by writing them before anyone else does and saying "well, ours are already written, and we're the experts!" Wrong. Much as I dislike NASA- they are the experts, they've been down the "safety" path before (including the pressure to go on with the show routine; do we honestly think things won't be WORSE with a corporation making that decision?) and they've been working with commercial travel(aka airlines) for a long, long time. They're certainly more qualified than John Carmack.
Please help metamoderate.
"Without government money, that isn't going to happen."
What a load of crap. Spaceflight isn't something the government needs to be involved in except perhaps to regulate externalities. It's affordable to private industry, it's being developed in a mature market economy, and the potential rewards are sufficient to drive investement without any government intervention.
It is imperative that we get an extra-terran human colony but the government is the wrong institution to do it. I will grant that government funding in the early days of the space program was crucial but it's time to let private industry take over.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
I can't think of one single new industry (if you really wanna call it that -- how about "exploratory push"?) that was helped by creating safety measures before people pushed ahead. That's the whole problem with the space industry. We started concerned about saftey and then haven't really gone anywhere. Were the early trans-atlantic sailors concerned with safety? how about early pioneers of flight? automobile developers? nope nope nope. They were pushed by a drive to get something done and frankly lots of people got killed or injured, and that's tragic, but they did get something done. If you look at any major human developement the safety measures came much later, after the new technology or territory or whatever was well developed. Hell we didn't have seatbelts required in cars until the 70's(?), well after the auto was largely fully developed. Shipping is still plagued with mis-haps due to largely inadequate safety reg for commercial ship building.
;-)
Now look at space exploration. We've only lost a handful of astronauts due to massive safety efforts from day one -- and that's great! meanwhile we've done little more than throw some rocks up in the sky and watch them fall back down. If we'd taken some real risks -- put some willing guys on the end of a bomb and chucked 'em out there and see what happens, then we'd probably be a lot farther along than we are today. True , we'd have lost a lot of people, but its sort of the price you pay to develop something.
I would think that commercial exploitation would be opposed to early safety reg for just these reasons. Its generates more upfront cost, lowers your initial ROI and generally makes it a big PITA to get things done.
that said, I'm not gonna sit on top of time bomb anytime soon...
man, I feel like mold.
Frankly, I'm convinced the space elevator is the way of the future. It's clearly showing significant potential and even NASA has begun to take it seriously.
If they'd spend more money on getting a space elevator built and less money on rockets, we'd be in much better shape.
Let's face it, sticking people or anything else on top of a big firecracker is always going to be really dangerous and really expensive. The space elevator will be cheap (over the long haul) and very safe in comparison.
Why don't we just concentrate on getting that built? Then all you need is little orbital ships that can ferry people and crews around. And since these orbital ships can either be ferried by the elevator or built in orbit from ferried components, you're talking a significantly safer way of dealing with space in almost every way.
Yes, we have some advances to make to actually build it, but if we spent nearly as much money on researching the needed advances as we do on maintaining the space shuttle fleet, we'd probably have the research done pretty quickly.
What happened to the entrepeunerial spirit here in the US. Why all of this worry up front of what the government thinks. This country used to be lead by innovation and the government would figure a way to deal with the consequences. Now we have become a nation that first thinks of regulators and liability first and innovation might just find it's way into the equation.
I suspect "Starfleet" is now trademarked by Universal for commercial ventures. Whether they will feel the same when an interplanetary alliance of space navies is asking to use the name is a different matter.
"Any day now, credit card companies will start offering Frequent Flier Light-Years, or something like that..."
Admittedly, that was tongue-in-cheek, but it does get you wondering what entirely new industries will spawn from an undertaking such as this.
I'm sure the automotive industry pioneers in their day could not have conceived of custom airbrushed paintjobs, fancy aluminum rims or even fuzzy dice manufacturers. I suppose if I'd put more thought into it I could've come up with better examples, but it'd be interesting to look ahead a couple of hundred years to see what new roads our economy has blazed because of this.
Shortly after the WW1 and before commercial air travel became popular, "barnstorming" aviators would "buzz" small towns or county fairs, using of one of the local farm fields as a temporary runway, and offer airplane rides to customers. These flights didn't have a "real destination". The purpose was not travel, but experience.
The emerging space tourism industry is about to begin it's "barnstorming" days, selling rides for the experience, not the destination. Initially it will only suborbital flights. Soon, they will be competing for altitude and duration of weightlessness records. Then someone will start offering a "once around" package.
Space flight as a means to an end is not going to happen until you have and end with meaning. Why "sit on a thousand pounds of explosives" to go to the moon? There's nothing there but grey rocks and dust. Mars, same thing, but the rocks are red. There's no real destination, no purpose in going except for the experience of being there, and that won't change until we get some sort of permanent outpost set up there.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad