2008, The Year of the Spaceship

DynaSoar writes "2008 Could be a the year of the Spaceship. Virgin Galactic intends to unveil White Knight 2 as well as Spaceship 2 during the next year, at this point planning for January. Burt Rutan, always reticent to comments on progress of any project, says nothing to support or contradict Virgin Galactic's announcement. However, the report states that Spaceship 2 is 50% complete and White Knight 2 is 60% complete. In addition, Virgin Galactic is considering using White Knight 2, or possible its successor White Knight 3, to put small satellites in orbit for a cost of US$3 million, less than half the current front runner in (projected) low cost orbital launches; SpaceX's Falcon at US$6.7 million. Tourism aside, this could be an extremely lucrative spin off of Virgin Galactic's original plans. If this turns out to be a profitable endeavor, the cost of tourism flights could drop significantly."

Comments

Re:Year of the Spaceship?

[ByOhTek]

No, but recently I went to buy a microwave.

My requirements are simple, I should, at most, have to hit one button, enter the time I wish to cook my food, and then hit start. It can have optional temp control, etc, and I'm fine, but some of the microwaves I saw had all kinds of complex and barely useful functions that I found unecessary, and the interface had simply putting in the time more complex than needed.

I had a similar experience with a blender - on, off, speed, that's all I need. I found several with different food type modes, but no specific speed control.

Analyzing all of their modes, determining what they mean (and if you agree with them, often they don't agree with other makes and models) gets incredibly annoying. I don't need someone to tell me how to cook my food.

I'm not saying that we should avoid anything complex, but we should keep things as simple as possible for the job at hand, and not add extra coplexity at the cost of simplicity. My microwave, for example, has all of those extra modes (which I don't use), but it didn't put them in at the cost of simplicity, it acts very straigthforward, unless I press one of the mode buttons.