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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?
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.
http://www.xprizenews.org/index.php?p=764
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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.
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