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."
I wonder if they considered United Federation of Planets. Even just for a fleeting moment?
Any day now, credit card companies will start offering Frequent Flier Light-Years, or something like that...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
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.
I can see a nice business here.
The catch line would be something like, "For those with nothing left to buy on Earth..."
And what exactly was the date that he expects to die alone on?
Dont worry folks, I will be here all week.
http://www.xprizenews.org/index.php?p=764
9 -656
Rep. James Oberstar [D-MN]) introduced a new bill:
H.R. 656: To amend title 49, United States Code, to enhance the safety of the commercial human space flight..
To amend title 49, United States Code, to enhance the safety of the commercial human space flight industry.
You can track and check for latest updates related to this bill at:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h10
This could be one of the first concerns for the leaders from the newly emerging Personal Spaceflight Industry that announced their intent to organize an industry federation to design and uphold the standards and processes necessary to ensure public safety and promote growth of the personal spaceflight 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
For the price of one shuttle launch, NASA could offer a very hefty, very inviting prize to private companies that can deliver a suitable payload to orbit and the ISS. NASA might offer some more modest sub-prizes for lesser accomplishments (e.g., delivering a small crew with no payload to ISS).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
Damn you, I wanted to be the first to make that joke! : )
Maybe they aren't allowed to influence the cultures of the countries in which they crash?
You can't take the sky from me...
Why Burt Rutan would offer his coattails to these other clowns I'll never know.
Because Burt Rutan wasn't always recognized as an aerospace genius. Once upon a time not all that long ago, he was the one being called a clown. You have to start somewhere. Burt Rutan realizes this. He also realizes that competition is GOOD. For the industry, even for him. Without people snapping at his heels, he probably wouldn't have nearly as much motivation to push the envelope and come up with some of the amazing work he has done.
Random and weird software I've written.
"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.
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.
Carmack builds a large base on Mars to conduct some shady experiments, and, well, you know the rest?
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
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
Right, except for one thing: Suborbital flight, even doing half an orbit, is a heck of a lot cheaper and easier than orbital flight. 30% delta-V less equates to a huge reduction in required TPS, greatly reduced ISP (and thus reduced maintenance) or greatly improved payload fraction, etc. The difficulty of getting out of a big gravity well scales geometrically with the required delta-V, not linearly.
;) ).
:P It probably could fill a niche industry - a combination of space tourism with Earth tourism.
Another bonus of suborbital is that you can do a lot more of the work on airbreathing engines - either tow-launch, carrier-launch, launch-and-midair-refuel (i.e., Black Horse, Black Colt, etc), or even surface launch on a craft with both jet and rocket engines.
Lastly, since it's in a suborbital flight path for so short of a period of time, you don't have to worry so much about thermal or atmospheric regulation as you would for a true orbital craft that would be up there for days. This could be an especially big advantage for simplifying hydraulics (although I'd like to see spacecraft move away from hydraulics anyways...
Lastly, you get much better economies of scale. All in all, I'd expect travel on a suborbital liner to cost at most 1/20th as much per kg if built properly, and probably much less. You might even be able to go under 100$/kg if you got enough passengers. No matter what, though, probably way too expensive for ordinary commuter flights
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
Virgin Galactic's web site has a new computer-generated
0 0002175.png 0 0002215.png 0 0002260.png
video available, which shows the full flight profile of the Virgin
Galactic craft. It's available for streaming at the bottom of this
page:
http://www.virgingalactic.com/news.asp
I took the liberty of capturing just about all the key frames from the
video, and posting them on the web:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
The most interesting images are seen right after the question "What
Next?" flashes on the screen. These are images of what appear to be a
Virgin Galactic space station, with a SpaceShipOne-style craft docked.
Of course, they're probably complete vapourware for now, but they
certainly look interesting:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
I've been told that these some of these images also appeared on the Discovery Channel's Black Sky: The Race for Space DVD, with descriptions from Burt Rutan.