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British Man Trades Frequent Flyer Miles for Space Shot
lvmoon writes "Start saving up your airline miles. Alan Watts, a British businessman, was able to use his 2,000,000 frequent flyer miles for a space flight, a ticket aboard a 2009 Virgin Galactic space flight." From the article: "Electrician Alan Watts said he flew to and from the United States on Virgin Atlantic flights more than 40 times in the past six years, earning him enough miles to take the trip into space with Virgin's space wing, London's The Sun newspaper reported Friday. The trip cost 2 million frequent flier miles, compared to the 90,000 miles required for a first-class flight from London to New York." Besides being funny, does this say anything about space travel in the 21st century? Is space is no longer the final frontier? I'm pretty sure Roddenberry didn't have frequent flier miles in mind when he came up with the Enterprise.
This story is from "The Sun".
That newspaper is the lowest of the low, the gutter press. Their normal faire consists of entirely fabricated stories and their conduct is entirely unethical. Do not place ANY credence to stories printed in this paper.
Space travel is a temporary situation. It will cost too much and become unfeasible in the next 50 - 100 years.
You have that back to front. The current difficulty of doing space travel is temporary, because it is the result of poor strength of materials and poor energy usage.
Materials technology is improving at an extraordinary pace, and there is now a whole industry dedicated to manufacturing nanotubes of one form or another, despite this being only the beginning of work on nanoscale materials. Much greater things are on the way. And with stronger, lighter materials you can build much better space-worthy craft, not only hugely safer in the hostile medium but also able to withstand greater dynamic forces more safely. And more cheaply!
Then we come to energy. Contrary to the daily propaganda of environmentalists, there is no shortage of energy on the planet --- the surface of the Earth receives about 150 thousand times more energy from the sun than mankind is forecast to need by the year 2020. Our "energy problems" simply reflect our poor ability to harness that near-zero-cost energy, currently.
But that can change, especially in the context of space flight.
For a start, we can rise up through the bulk of the atmosphere almost without any energy cost at all, and many outfits are already experimenting with that, to the very edge of space.
And secondly, once up there, solar energy is freely available, and as long as there is still residual atmosphere around you, this gives you matter which you can use for propulsion, slowly building up speed as you skip through the upper layers. A relatively small amount of extra reaction mass is needed to boost the orbit out the final few dozen miles once you have close to orbital speed.
In due course then, on materials and energy grounds there is every reason to forecast a very bright and buoyant future for space travel. NASA-type costs are not required, as long as you're not in a hurry.
Huh? Short of fresh water? There's a whole ocean of it, and it covers 71% of the planet! Oh, you mean it's salty? So what, do you think we can just drink whatever we find in space, without cleaning it up first?
Regarding minerals. Yes they are out there. But we are living on a pretty big rock ourselves. The minerals in space, are probably going to be most important for projects in space (if we ever get to that level of sophistication). Bringing them down to earth probably isn't worth the expense.
Unfortunately, at this time, automated robots are only useful for a very small minority of manufacturing tasks. And while orbiting factories sound like a neat idea, remember how much infrastructure is needed to keep just one factory running on earth. Given todays technology, we can't just build a factory in space. We would have to build thousands of factories, in order to make them support each other. Among the things that need to be produced, are: air, water, food, energy, fuel, space rockets, human habitats and clothing, as well as replacement parts for everything that's in orbit (which includes screws, plastic bags, pencils, ball bearings, microprocessors, aspirin, etc...)!
Sorry, that's just not compareable. America was fertile farm-land, just waiting to be colonized. Once you had paid your ticket for transportation, and brought enough money and supplies for surviving a year (worst estimate, many did well with less), you would be able to survive by farming your own land. People fled to America, just to get an opportunity to live there.
In contrast; You can't just fly off to space and live off the land. In order to survive in space, you need a huge expensive infrastructure, and a constant reshipment of supplies, where supplies even consists of such elementary stuff as air, water, and food. It is possible to imagine that future technologies will make this easier, but as of now, we don't have such future technologies. People fled to America, but if someone started a colony in space, asked colonists to pay their own ticket, and to pay for all supplies that will be shipped in later, no sane people would move there.
In any foreseeable future, space can only get colonized through massive government subsidies, and there's no payoff in sight. Which is probably the reason why we haven't colonized it yet.
Don't be pessimistic. The use of frequent flier miles to get a ticket into space means that spaceflight is finally here in a real sense. It's not just for governments anymore.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable