Europe Unveils New Space Plane for Tourist Market

mrminator writes to tell us Space.com is reporting that Europe's largest space contractor, EADS, has just announced their plans to build a new space tourism vehicle. The new rocket, powered by liquid methane and liquid oxygen will carry passengers on a 90 minute round trip flight for somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 euros ($267,000).

Comments

90 seconds?

[Judinous]

Cost issues aside, I think that 90 seconds of weightlessness in a 90 minute flight is rather lame. Aside from the nice view, wouldn't it be better to just rent out a stripped-down 747 and go into repeated dives, like they do to train astronauts for zero-g?

Re:Cheap Thrill

[L. VeGas]

$200,000 isn't that much to many people, so a target of 4,500 customers per year by 2020 seems reasonable. Quite right, young man. I spend more than that in a week on fresh orchids and chewing gum.

Jeeves, fetch me my spats and pour me a brandy. I'm headed to the sky! Oh, and replace those twenty dollar bills in the lavatory with hundreds. The twenties are too scratchy.

Methane in Space

[DynaSoar]

To answer the posted question of "what's so special", it's the methane motor. NASA tested one, but nobody's flown with one yet.

All the major hydrocarbon fuels are within about 3% of each other in specific impulse. Methane, being readily available via natural gas, is very handy. However, it's a gas, compressed to liquid. That means its density is less than a liquid. The major liquid fuel (RP-1; pretty much JP-4/Jet A kerosene) is 22% more dense since it's a liquid. To make a methane engine worth putting into a human-rated craft will require a major step in pressure tank development. They'll need to cram a lot of gas in, and it'll have to fail safe (ie. not explode if it leaks). I suspect EADS made this part of their R&D for the project, or they'd have just gone with RP-1. For a comparison of fuels see http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/fuel_table. html