Space Tourism, Now and to Come

bart_scriv writes, "BusinessWeek looks at the latest in space tourism, from a $20 million Soyuz trip to a $200,000 ride via Virgin Galactic. The article looks at existing and planned opportunities, with a slide show of photos and artist's conceptions of vehicles and facilities. From the article: 'Among the other wonders of space is the planned Bigelow Aerospace space hotel. Similar in design to the International Space Station (which has kept a constant human presence in space since 2000), the hotel has a modular design that will allow it easily to expand. The key difference is that the hotel's modules will be inflatable. Bigelow Aerospace launched the Genesis I test module into orbit on July, 2006, and plans to send Genesis II in early 2007.'"

Comments

I for one...

[BlahMatt]

am excited to be travelling through space in a large inflatable ball... what could go wrong?

If this price comes down to 20,000 then I'm gone!

[w33t]

Of course, my friend asked me, "Are you worried about the rocket blowing up?"

"Not really," I said. "After all, when I kick-it I plan on having my ashes and a sample of my DNA shot into space anyhow. As long as the rocket makes it to space first, I think it would actually be a pretty good deal."

Inflatable != fragile

[FleaPlus]

Every time there's an article about Bigelow Aerospace here, there's a dozen or so commenters who are convinced that because the modules are self-expanding, they must therefore be delicate and vulnerable to space debris. In reality however, the walls of their modules are quite durable, probably even more so the aluminum walls of the International Space Station. The walls will be composed of multiple layers of materials like kevlar (the stuff used in bullet-proof vests) and vectran, resulting in a wall 16-inches thick. They've done a number of projectile tests, with results which compare favorably to NASA's.

Re:Inflatable != fragile

[AKAImBatman]

In fact everyone can now see for themselves what the Bigelow station looks like. Surprisingly, it looks a lot like just another space station. Seeing it deployed like that, it looks a heck of a lot sturdier than Slashdot impressions would lead you to believe. :)

Re:More junk to monitor

[Tackhead]

> Government contractors worry me enough, but what happens to a space hotel when the business runs out of money? I can see this going through a boom and bust cycle like just about every new business, and I want to know. It's not like running lots of fiber optic cable and then going bankrupt. Who's going to take care of the degrading orbit of the hotel?

Gravity.

Interesting economic question: What's the salvage value of an abandoned ISS? If it costs $10000/lb to send something to orbit, the ISS is worth its weight in gold.

But if you buy an abandoned space station for $1.00, and use its $10000/lb "value" to finance the building of rockets that cost $1000/lb to send fuel into orbit before your space station's orbit degrades, you've just cut the value of an abandoned hunk of metal by a factor of ten. Oops, those were also your company's assets! The bank calls your loan, and you're sunk.

Then some other guy buys you out for pennies on the dollar, and flies your $1000/lb rockets to his space hotel, and makes a go of it.

I suspect that much like wiring a nation with fiberoptics, the early bird gets the worm... but the second mouse gets the cheese.

How High is Space?

[Doc Ruby]

"The site's elevation 4,700 feet above sea level will also make for a shorter trip into space, saving on fuel costs."

Isn't Earth's escape velocity constant, regardless of how far you travel to escape it? I don't see dropping off quicker with only 1 mile "head start" so much of the acceleration to escape velocity is against less weight, with constant mass requiring constant acceleration fuel.

Wouldn't the Equator's 26 miles extra distance from the Earth's center (compared to the distance at the poles) make it an even cheaper launch site?

Even if all these factors count, isn't Ecuador's low lattitude and high altitude the best combination? Forget a space elevator, how about just an escalator up the Andes?

Re:How High is Space?

[paladinwannabe2]

No, escape velocity is dependent on distance from the Earth. Remember that gravity gets weaker the further you are away from its source. It is slightly easier to escape from the equator than it is at the pole, so you are right that the Andes would be one of the best places to put a space elevator (or just a launch pad).

The ISS is worthless.

[Colin Smith]

If it costs $10000/lb to send something to orbit, the ISS is worth its weight in gold.

Nope. A thing is only worth what someone is willing to pay, it's costs are irrelevant. There's no such thing as intrinsic value.

That means you have to start with... What is someone willing to pay for a week in orbit? Then ask how many people can we get into the thing, how long will it last. Then you have an approximate measure of what the ISS might be worth to a space hotel operator.

There are no space hotel operators at the moment and nobody else really knows what to do with the thing, which means that if the ISS were abandoned tomorrow, it would literally be worthless.