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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."
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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).