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First Private Manned Orbital Flight Announced
Miroslav Ambrus-Kis wrote in to tell us that Inter-orbital Systems has announced that Nebojsa Stanojevic and Miroslav Ambrus-Kis will be the astronauts aboard the first completely private orbital flight. This is part of their bid for the Google Lunar X-Prize.
Nebojsa is a perfect name for someone attempting a feat like this - it translates as "Fear not".
OrbitalSciences also looks as though its been profitable for a while (NYSE:ORB)
The space industry is going to move faster than I think anyone expects. We have China and India getting into the mix pretty heavily now as well. I think we could see space become bigger than it was in the 60's both politically and commercially.
This company managed to launch one high powered amateur rocket in the 1990s. That's it. Nothing since then. Complete vapor. The only serious orbital launch company is currently SpaceX. The only serious near term suborbital launch companies are XCOR and Virgin Galactic, with the various VTVL / lunar X-Prize people (Masten, Armadillo, etc.) filling in a different but useful niche down the road.
SpaceX finally succeeded in orbital launch after many millions of dollars of hardware and testing. XCOR has 66 manned rocket flights to its credit (the largest share of manned rocket flights worldwide since 2000.) Virgin/Scaled has SS1, Armadillo and Masten have a large number of VTVL flights under their belt and years of hardware development.
Interorbital has paper and mockups.
I fail to see how the Challenger disaster can be attributed to using the shuttle far beyond its intended service life when it was merely 3 years old... As for the bolt, the shuttle in question is Atlantis. The bolt has already been removed and the window certified safe for flight. But good work with the uninformed hysteria.
Thank you.
I was going to respond but you cleared it up better than I ever could.
Space travel is inherently dangerous. (Do I have to spell out why on Slashdot?). By trying to force enginears to eliminate rather thasn mitigate the danger NASA has taken far longer than it should to design an improved replacement for the shuttle.
By Improved I mean:
0. lower Construction cost
1. lower cost for throwaway components (boosters etc...)
2. Lower fuel consumption per payload/passenger pound.
3. Lower cost of serviceing between missions.
4. Shorter prep time for flight.
5. Larger cargo bay.
6. Less likely to blow up under stress. etc...
It's not that nobody came up with anything better than the existing shuttle in those years. It's just that none of the improved models met NASA's upgraded standards. Put another way, You are stuck driving an old Corolla because the best replacement anyone has proposed is Camry and your bosses want nothing less than an Armored Roles Royce Limousine that runs on solar and has a self driving AI.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?