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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?
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..."
An industry that doesn't even exist commercially yet has to start out somewhere.
With this attitude, the Wright Brothers may not have bothered to get off the ground for the short time/distance/altitude that they did at Kitty Hawk.
Suborbital flights have the possibility of leading into full blown orbital visits to an orbiting hotel, which could lead into commercialization of the Moon, Mars, and eventually the outer solar system. These goals are definitely viable and achievable without government funding if entrepreneurs can find a way to make them work.
Suborbital flight has a novelty factor, cache, and is the first baby step towards breaking free of this mess we call 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
"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.
>>Private business cannot, and without huge incentives, will not develop the kind of destinations that you and I are describing.
Private businesses are the one who founded the USA. it was refugees using private merchant vessels that created Plymouth. Jamesville, though had the honour of the kings blessing.
The expansion west. Sure the goverment sold land cheap as an incentive. but that's about all the goverment did. WE have the tech to build a resort in space. Sure the first ones might only hold a cuople of dozen guests and a handful of employees. But you have to start somewhere.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
"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.
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
> With this attitude, the Wright Brothers may not have bothered to get off the ground
How many bike shops do you see nowadays making commercial passenger jets?
> Suborbital flights have the possibility of leading into full blown orbital visits
Not from any direct descendant of SS1, I'll tell you that much. Heavy tank mass + low ISP engine design = Not Going Anywhere. They'll have to start from scratch with, as a bare minimum, a non-self-pressurized higher-ISP oxidizer. This in turn will not only require a radical redesign of the entire craft (everything except for the cockpit - but that will have to change for othre reasons, discussed later), but will involve the use of at least a single stage turbopump. Even the simplest of turbopumps are rather nasty beasts, with seals that can fail, whole additional engines and turbines just to spin the thing, stringent materials requirements, etc. However, even if he used LOX (which would require dealing with all of the risks and costs associated with working with cryogenics), I'd be surprised if a simple single stage turbopump plus polybut would get better than, say, 320 ISP and a rather weak thrust. You'd realistically only get to orbit with a payload on that kind craft with multiple stages, and even then your payload fraction will be really awful. You generally want at least a LOX/Kerosene level of performance to compete.
Then there's the materials factor. A fiber vehicle just won't cut it (yet, that's where Rutan's experience lies). It doesn't come even close. You either need a good hot frame (titanium plus leading edge shielding plus internal component insulation, for example) or cold frame (aluminum-lithium or other good aluminum alloy plus an extensive TPS that a company like scaled couldn't dream of making on their own - I doubt they could shield a hot frame well enough on their own) design. The higher operating temperature of the engine plus using a better oxidizer will mean a lot more corrosion, requiring a lot more complex and expensive engine maintenance (a common killer for reusable craft). The cockpit is completely off for reentry; those windows are nice for suborbital, but they'd be serious weak points on *real* space travel.
Then there's the general issues with real orbital flight. You have to handle *everything* needed to keep people alive for long periods; even developing a toilet that will work in space (and all of the associated infrastructure to run it) is no easy task. SS1's hydraulic controls suddenly become serious liabilities: in space, your craft cools and heats in dramatic cycles depending on whether you're exposed to the sun. Hydraulic lines, tanks, and actuators all require an extensive system of heaters, sensors, and sometimes cooling. Maintenance of this system on reusable craft, like the shuttle, is very expensive. Air quality maintainence becomes a lot more complex - and if you want to be truly safe, you're going to need to do spectral or other analysis on the air to determine atmospheric composition percentages. They'll need changable CO2 scrubbers, nitrogen and oxygen balance, etc. Temperature regulation in the cabin can get complex, since you can't just "run an air conditioner" or whatnot to cool down. If you want a direct heat pump, you need a very good radiatior outside the craft; this generally isn't realistic. Consequently, heat regulation is generally done by using water or cryogenic fuel in a closed loop; any cryogenic boiloff then needs to be vented. Naturally batteries are insufficient for how long you're in orbit; you need fuel cells or generators designed to operate in the hostile environment of space. Etc.
Then there's problems with the "carrier" method of launch. Unless they get some serious ISP improvements, the size of the White Knight would scale beyond any realistic level. Unless they plan to launch from a Cossack (the Buran Shuttle's carrier, and largest airplane ever built) in order to simply take a few people to orbit, they *have* to get some serious ISP improvements or switch to ground launch.
I could keep going with the issues, but I think you get the idea: Orbital and suborbital spaceflight aren't even remotely the same sort of beast.
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.