Slashdot Mirror
Virgin Galactic to Build Space Port in New Mexico
aapold writes "Virgin Galactic today announced plans to build a $225 million space port in southern New Mexico. Richard Branson will meet with governor Bill Richardson Wednesday to unveil the plans. Virgin Galactic is the company leveraging Spaceship One which, as reported by Slashdot, claimed the Ansari X prize for commercial space flight."
I think what they mean is that it is cheaper than an equivalent NASA attempt. NASA doesn't do sub-orbital launches, and therefore any similar launch by NASA would cost a lot more in terms of $ and safety. To get to orbit you can't use the hybrid engines that SpaceShipOne has, there's just not enough kick per unit mass. And the Shuttle only manages to crawl into space because of its solid rocket boosters, that massive tank in between the SRBs (liquid H2/O2 mix) contributes a small % to the overall thrust.
The technology for sub-orbital flights obviously has been around for a long time. Yet the costs involved for even sub-orbital launches have always been high due them being entirely governmental companies. The X-Prize was setup to find out the cheapest way to get the ordinary person into space, whereas the state space programs have always been about pushing the boundaries of human exploration. The cheapest way is to only go as far as the edge of space to save massively on the thrust and energy requirements. The savings that this makes can then be offset by using a less effective fuel (hybrid), but that has the advantage of being a lot safer. The hybrid engines use fuels that generally are easy to store safely (non of this cryogenic nonsense like the shuttle) and also can be switched off in the event of a malfunction (SRBs once lit burn all the way to the tip).
People will still have to pay $20 million to the russians to go into space for a few days, so there is still going to be a large gap between those that go sub-orbital and the few that can afford to pay for orbital space access.