First Commercial Space Tourism Company

uberdave writes "The Canadian Arrow team (one of the contenders for the Ansari X-Prize) has joined forces with Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria, a leading American entrepreneur, to form a new corporation called Planetspace. The goal of the company is to make space flight available to the public within 24 months. Geoff Sheerin, President of Canadian Arrow, says that Planetspace has entered final discussions with partners who will establish a reality television show set in space, and with a company to hold an international lottery with space flight prizes. Planetspace expects to fly almost 2,000 new astronauts in the first five years of flying. Fares will start at USD $250,000 for a suborbital flight, including fourteen days training."

Comments

What about Virgin?

[Total_Wimp]

This may be interesting, but these guys are definately not the first.

TW

Re:Better Things to do with $250,000

[YrWrstNtmr]

If you've got the cash to consider dropping $250k for this, you've already got the house. And the beach house. And the Aspen condo.

Re:Yes, this looks do-able

[Rei]

Um, no. Most launches worldwide use kerosene-based fuels reacted with LOX, at least for the lower stages. Lower stages of LOX/LH (like the shuttle (excepting the boosters) and Arianne are actually relatively rare. Hydrazine is rarely used (off the top of my head, all I can think of present day for getting to orbit is the optional 4th stage to the Pegasus). Solids are usually only used on boosters and ICBMs, although there are a few systems (for example, Pegasus) that use them to get to space itself.

Even if that weren't the case (which it is), LOX is produced using electricity (mostly generated through fossil fuels), LH is produced from petroleum and compressed/chilled with electricity, etc.

And furthermore, you missed the fundamental error in the GP's post, which is that rocket fuel consumption is somehow relevant. It isn't. The world consumes 71.7 million barrels (3 billion gallons - about 24 billion pounds) of oil per day. If you can shove even close to that much oil into production of rocket fuel in a decade, I'll be impressed.

The shuttle (a large launch vehicle), for example, burns about 1.6 million pounds of hydrogen with every launch (corresponding to about 4 million pounds of oil, plus, say, a million pounds of oil for producing solid fuels and LOX). So, you'd have to launch five to six thousand shuttle launches in that decade to make up for one *day* of oil consumption.