20k Down Can Get You Up Into Space

TheOzz writes "Virgin Galactic announced this week that space tourism will be a reality by 2008. The company is already taking $20,000 deposits for the estimated $200,000 seats on their new spaceships. You can reserve your seat today at the Virgin Galactic web site. The Virgin Group's Branson teamed up with SpaceShipOne builder Burt Rutan to form The Spaceship Company that will build these new commercial spaceships. They are building 9-person spaceships that will carry 7 paying passengers and two crew members, according to space.com. They report that test flights should start in 2007."

Comments

Rate

[northcat]

$200,000 for going to space without going out of your ship is fair, but $1 million - 5 times as much - for going near the moon without going out of your ship is unfair?

Re:Rate

[Rei]

Not very likely - they probably won't get 20 minutes in "space". They have almost no horizontal velocity, and thus, their gravity losses are only reduced by the minimal distance gain away from Earth. I.e., gravity losses are almost essentially the same as they are when you're a foot off Earth (9.8 m/s^2).

Assuming that they're not going to go for horizontal velocity (which seems almost certain, since they want to land where they start), the only extra time that they can get must correspond to a rocket burn. If your rocket provides 3g acceleration, that's only buying you three times the duration of the burn in fall time. They're not going to be able to tack on that long of an extra burn, because, with such a low ISP, it would require the scaling up of the engines, propellant and oxidizer amounts (and oxidizer tank), structural support, and everything to such a large degree that it's not realistic for a $200k flight.

Of course, don't take my analysis's word for it - take Rutan's. They're only tacking on another 90 seconds of free fall (i.e., time in which air resistance is insignificant, i.e., space)

Virgin Galactic business strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Take $20k down.
2. Invest.
3. Refund original $20k in 2008
4. Profit!

This is way cool.

[BigZaphod]

I'm too chicken (and far, far too poor) to be one of the first people to go on a trip like this, but I'm very happy to see it being done. I'm 25 and have many childhood memories of how space was the future and how someday I'd get to visit the moon (maybe even live there) and all that. Somewhere along the line all of that kind of talk just ended and space faded from people's view. It has indeed been a sad thing to not have some kind of huge bigger-than-seems-possible goal to strive for as a nation or even as a species. I hope this new commercial space industry can bring some of the magic back.

Re:This is way cool.

[jav1231]

I think it's great too. As great as NASA is, they've kind of been slow to find the next leap forward. The Shuttle Program is a great accomplishment but it's become routine almost, recent disaster aside. The ISS is a neat idea but it's kind of stagnant too. Perhaps the private sector can move us along so that we may all have the chance to see Earth from space someday.

Re:This is way cool.

[kesuki]

Somewhere along the line all of that kind of talk just ended

If every penny we spent on the cold war had been spent on a combination of nuclear and space technology we'd be paying 2 cents/kwh for electricity, and we could have built any number of of the potential 'low cost' space sytems, (electro magnetic rail 1st stage booster ramps, or a 'true' space elevator, at the equator) and a full city on the moon, possibly more than one.

So you see what happened to the dream? we built big weapons to blow the world up a few thousand times over instead of building a space infrastructure. It looks like the space race is back on again, but america no longer has the talent or resource to lead the race. Especially with people so adamantly against the deployment of cheap, nuclear power. If china builds enough nuclear reactors to power to light up all of aisa they'll probably be the first to build on the moon.

Re:This is way cool.

[kesuki]

Defence of a nation isn't just a gimmick dreamed up by politicians, you know.

I said If, I didn't say we 'could' have. I was postulating what that kind of investment into space and nuclear technologies could have been realistically expected to yeild. And someone sle pointed out that once we had enough nukes to destroy the world one time over we no longer needed to build any more... we could have 'won' the cold war spending 1/4 the money on it that we did... if people had decided that we needed superior nuclear power and space launch capabilities, instead of 'more nukes , more planes, and more subs' we would have been much further along, but then again hind sight is 20/20

Russia would have bankrupted itself trying to catch up to us on our nuclear and space technologies if we had focused on them instead of just better subs and making too many bombs. It was the trident subs that really won us the cold war, so we would have needed to do the sub technology, but satelite weapons without a deployment infrastructure, and making vastly more nukes than needed was down right wasteful.

And where does this go?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they actually go into space? Do they orbit? Or do they just do the spaceshipone "we've breached the top of the atmosphere, then come back down! whee!"

Annoying

[Reality Master 101]

Am I the only one that's annoyed by this?

This is not space travel. I don't care that a bunch of geeks in a room defined "space" as 100KM, space travel means CONTROLLED space travel. This is just shooting people really high and letting them fall to earth, at which point it's normal air travel.

We could fly before the Wright Brothers, but what made their accomplishment noteworthy was that it was controlled, powered flight. This is uncontrolled powered space travel. It's a stunt.

Space travel means an orbital insertion. Controlled powered space travel.

Granted, this is a necessary step. I'm glad they're doing it. But I hate all the hype they're putting into this. I'm afraid that people, once they figure out it's a very expensive stunt that isn't really space travel, are going to poison the well for this sort of thing.

Be honest: Would you really be impressed with someone who rode this thing, other than the fact that they were able to shell out 200 grand? Would you look at them as Astronauts? I wouldn't.

Bah.

Re:Annoying

[mOoZik]

You know what annoys me more? Geeks like you who dissect every good thing, every litte progress just so you can feel better about the fact that you won't be able to enjoy it, even if it was to "actual" space. No one said this was space travel. However, this is as good a view as you're gonna get for $200,000. But nooo, it's not good enough for you!

Re:Annoying

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

Space travel means an orbital insertion. Controlled powered space travel.

I'll be sure to mention that to Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom.

Re:Annoying

[demachina]

First off you are totally off base using the word "CONTROLLED" here. SpaceShipOne is totally controlled. It has a pilot that lights the engine and can shut it off. He uses a stick and pedals to steer it. In fact he is more of a pilot than Space Shuttle pilots are. SpaceShipOne has no flight control computers. I think the Space Shuttle's computers could with some tweaking fly an entire mission without astronauts aboard. I suspect it would be dangerous to impossible to fly a Shuttle launch or reentry by the seat of the pants, if the computers all went down. The SpaceShipOne's feathered wing is fantastic innovation that make piloted reentry possible and safe, though of course its not bleeding off as much speed as the Shuttle is coming from LEO.

I think the subject of your rant is not "control" but duration and maybe velocity. The fact is SpaceShipOne is getting to the same elevation as the lowest of low earth orbits, you will get the same view, its just brief. It just lacks the speed or fuel to stay there. This is exactly like the Wright brothers, their first flights barely left the ground too. With time, more R&D, better engines they increased the duration of their fligths, so will Rutan. The Wright Brothers had to scrape together private funding for their R&D so does Rutan.

"Would you really be impressed with someone who rode this thing"

No but I'd be really impressed if I could ride the thing. Its important to note I'm note really impressed with people who ride in the Space Shuttle either, nobody really is. Most of them are just passengers too, and again the flight computers do most of the flying not the "pilot" or "commander" they are mostly flipping switches per a carefully written script. Fact is todays real astronauts are boring, no one knows their names, they are only "heroes" when they get killed.

I think it would really relight enthusiasm for space travel if LOTS of people could get astronaut wings and we would break down the barrier between ordinary people and NASA astronauts. At this point we NEED for people to realize they can get in to space without doing what astronauts do, devoting their entire life to the pursuit, being an overachiever to the point of being obnoxious, have a high tolerance for bureaucracy(NASA), and be very adept at kissing ass to get to the top of the heap to get a ride.

Virgin Galactic and Rutan are trying to make the very important step where space travel starts turning in to something more like airline travel and people can buy a ticket and go if they want for fun or if they want to do business there.

Fact is there just aren't many adventures left in this world. Climbing Mt. Everest has been done so many times its not special any more. Affluent thrill seekers will probably snap this up because its something new. Once it stops being new then there will be the next goal, getting to LEO and to a space hotel, and then beyond.

show me

[harkabeeparolyn]

When Burt Rutan and Paul Allen have the guts to ride that fucker then I'll get in it. If it's such a fun thing why haven't they been up in it yet?

Re:We know what we're getting into.

[Radak]

u paid 200,000 for a trip that will last a few minutes. you better justify that.

I did justify it. I told you I knew what I was paying for and it was worth it to me. What other justification is necessary?

My point to the naysayers is that Virgin, while good at PR hype, isn't misrepresenting this and they're making the people who are seriously interested fully aware of what they're doing and how they're progressing. To the people like me who think it's worth it, it's worth it. Nuff said.

Re:But is it space?

[JeffTL]

It's not the Sci-Fi that makes the Shuttle look like a hunk of junk.

It's the memory of the Saturn V and the present-day versatility of the Soyuz (though admittedly Soyuz can't carry as much of a payload as the shuttle).

Re:We know what we're getting into.

[Anonymous Coward]

And we know what you're getting the rest of us into. The eventual lowering of cost for the rest of us to go and continuing developments towards eventual privately built and flown orbital flights.

NASA does science, they do a pretty good job at it overall (lots of smart people working there doing some pretty amazing things) but to anyone that thinks NASA is really paving the way so that one day you or I might be able to afford a ticket into space is just fooling themselves. It's going to take visionaries and brilliant engineers like Burt Rutan coupled with funding from venture capitalists to get the common man into orbit and beyond. It's people like the above poster that's going to make the initial investments pay off and bring in even more capital, more R&D, and eventually make it possible for the REST of us to get into space and even orbit one day. So my hat's off to not only the engineers and folks taking the financial risk to fund these sorts of projects but also for the folks willing to support the future of private space travel because they can see that their $200k isn't just for a fun/quick stunt, but also goes to help support the future of space tourism (and like ot or not, space tourism is going to be the first primary money making industry that drives the development of privately manned space travel).

Re:Down payment

[Free_Meson]

A well known scam in the US involves taking investment money and buying a home in Florida. Then, once bankruptcy is called, the home that all of the investment is locked up in, gets sold by the individual. As I understand it, even if the court knew this for a fact, it's against law in Florida to seize someones home. A court can pierce the corporate veil in cases of fraud or self-dealing similar to this one, allowing corporate debts to be collected against the owners/shareholders. Also, while many states protect a person's homestead from bankruptcy proceedings, I doubt any of them protect property obtained with the proceeds of a crime (here, fraud).