Slashdot Mirror
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."
From the web page:
The first flights are planned to begin in 2008. We are now starting to take reservations and deposit commitments for the first year of operations. The ticket price has been set at US$200,000 and the minimum, fully refundable deposit to secure your spaceship seat is US$20,000.
Isn't that a synonym for Slashdotters in Space?
Your seat cushion can be used as a heat shield during the rapid descent.
I think the real news here isn't the fact that they're taking deposits (they've been doing this for a while), but that Branson and Rutan have started up a new business, "The Spaceship Company."
... or Fours) for Virgin Galactic, and for any other spaceline company that wants a suborbital craft. You can assume that the company is structured so as to avoid running into export roadblocks, while keeping the British financial backer in the loop.
From here:
But today's announcement reflects a finer appreciation of the financial and regulatory realities. Several months ago, Rutan complained to Congress that U.S. export restrictions [NOTE: These are ITAR restrictions, the same ones which turned this tattoo of encryption code into a munition a few years back] were making it difficult for the British Virgin Galactic project to move forward.
The new arrangement restructures the deal: The Rutan-Branson venture, called The Spaceship Company, will license SpaceShipOne's technology from Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the company set up with financial backing from software billionaire Paul Allen and intellectual property from Rutan's Scaled Composites.
The Spaceship Company will then do the actual building of SpaceShipTwos (or Threes
If you are in a place in your life where spending $200,000 to be taken up above the atmostphere for a little while seems like a good idea, you probably don't give a shit about $20,000.
Note to those who are mere millionaires instead of billionaires: It would be much cheaper and almost as good to get one of your rich asshole friends to take you along for a ride on their Gulfstream V jets sometimes. Those private gets fly high enough that the sky is dark blue in the daytime. Very cool. Plus, there's no need to wear a gay-ass looking space suit.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
After 2001 debuted, someone at PanAm got smart and instead of hanging up on what they thought were cranks looking for tickets to the moon, they started taking cataloged down payments on the first PanAm flights to the moon...
One way or the other, I want to visit my one acre on the moon!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Will they accept a personal check the day of the launch? ;)
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
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.
I think what most people want from a trip to space is to muck about in zero gee. If that's the case they could get much more bang for their buck with this. Just the down payment for Branson's Most Excellent Adventure would buy five of these trips.
Virgin's already got my deposit. I'm going.
The naysayers can say what they want, but those of who are actually involved and actually paying for tickets are fully apprised of what the spaceship is, where it's going, and for how long.
It's been my dream ever since I knew space existed to get there, and since I can afford it, $200,000 for a few minutes there is worth it to me.
No, this isn't controlled orbital insertion, but it is still a flight into space, hence spaceflight, and flights like these are a vital first step toward getting real civilian orbital travel working, and I'll be first in line for that, too. If I have any money left, that is.
You guys can whine about ballistic space travel not being real spaceflight all you want. I know what it is, I have no doubts about its value to me, and I'm going for a ride on a rocketship!
I just got back from the Experimental Aircraft Association convention and flyin at Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, Richard Branson, Mike Melville, Brian Bennie and a bunch of Scaled Composite and Virgin people were there. Mike Melville flew the White Knight to the show, carrying Mr and Mrs Rutan in SpaceShip One.
I heard a press conference and no less than six 90 minute talks about Rutan's space program from SpaceShip One and SpaceShip Two principles.
Here are some more or less random factoids that were discussed in detail at Oshkosh:
1) The White Knight with attached SpaceShip One were remarkably graceful in flight, far more so than the videos I had seen would have suggested.
2) Allen said that the cost of the entire SpaceShip One program were about the same as a ride to the ISS on Soyuz, i.e. on the order of $20 million dollars.
3) Rutan and his people reveled a number of problems that I had not seen in the press prior to this week. For example, on one of the early White Knight flights one of the nose wheels struck a rough spot in the runway during the take off roll. This nose wheel shimmied to the point were the nose wheel detached from the airframe. White Knight had to make a three wheel one stump landing.
4) The first flight into space exceeded 100km of altitude by only a little more than 100 meters. There was great concern that the motor didn't have sufficient impulse to attain the X-Prize goal of 100km altitude when carrying one human pilot and two passengers or 400 pounds of ballast. They went so far as to buy solid rocket booster motors from Thiokol. In the end they were able to improve the performance of the basic engine without needing these extra boosters. Rutan was coy about exactly how this was done, but the two official X Prize flights did exceed 100Km by comfortable margins. He did mention that engineers from both the winning motor company, SpaceDev of California, and the losing company, EAC of Florida, assisted in improving the motor. They have one more complete motor that was not used.
5) The maximum temperature during reentry was on the order of 200F. The craft experienced greater heating on ascent rather than descent. This heat was control by 14 pounds of Scaled proprietary thermal protection material on the leading edges of the wing.
6) Both pilots were effusive in their praise of the "care free" feathered reentry system. They both said that flying the ascent was very demanding, but that during re-entry they had nothing to do except enjoy the ride.
7) SpaceShip Two will be "one hundred times safer than any previous manned space system" according to Rutan. His goal is to attain a safety level equivalent to the airliners of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
8) Scaled Composites will design SpaceShip Two. The SpaceShip Company will manufacture the craft, Scaled will test and certify the craft. Spacelines such as Virgin Galactic will purchase and operate SpaceShip Two and its carrier aircraft.
10) Each SpaceShip Two and carrier will be individually flight tested and certified. This is an approved alternate certification method to that used for mass produced aircraft. By testing each craft individually, they do not have to provide conformity data back to raw materials as is done with airliners.
11) Rutan anticipates 50 to 100 test flights prior to certification and paid passenger travel. Rutan will fly on some of these flights. In fact, he expects that during the test phase, prior to paid passenger flights, more people will fly into space on SpaceShip Two than have ever flown in space by all other craft.
11) SpaceShip One flew straight up, and recovered straight down. SpaceShip Two will fly 200 to 300 miles down range. Rutan anticipates that Virgin will launch SpaceShip Two over the Pacific Ocean and recovering it at Mohave. This will provide several minutes of atmospheric flight at Mach 2-3 during ascent and descent, providing a Concorde like experience.
12) Li