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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.
Until the first mishap. Private enterprise and investors can't survive the impact of things going wrong. Look at the numbers and you'll see an awefull lot of private satellite launchers go belly up shortly after a bad launch. The profit margins are just too thin to weather the downturn.
True. Just like in the old days it was tough to stay in the shipping business after your ship sank.
Understand that once you start the countdown on a rocket most of the money has already been spent (90% to 99% in my estimation) If that blows up without delivering the results that get you payed (satellite in orbit etc...) your business is dead and your creditors crying. That's life.
What is a real problem is that NASA got to be so large and wealthy a bureaucracy that they were able to under employ most of the best rocket scientists for over a generation. Then put their ideas throgh such rigorous scrutiny that nothing new got built. Until finally rickety old space trucks (Challenger etc...) blew up and took people with them.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Then put their ideas throgh such rigorous scrutiny that nothing new got built. Until finally rickety old space trucks (Challenger etc...) blew up and took people with them.
I am trying to fathom how you can lambaste Nasa for being too rigourous with their safety scrutiny in one sentence, then complain that they blew up (insinuating that they weren't rigourous enough) in the following one.
Pah, they have no ambition. I am *planning* to go to Saturn for 2011. Ok, I have no idea how but I could probably sketch up some Photoshop pictures of my rocket, I've got some technical drawings I made when I was 7 years old.
Seriously, can somebody point me at proof these companies can actually launch human-rated spacecraft? It seems that some fairly large nations are still struggling to make steps towards this. Can anybody explain why it will be any easier for a company like this than India, South Korea, Japan, ESA, etc? at least these companies/organisations have a track record of launching unmanned payloads of 10 -20 tonnes so I can believe they are on the way.
Feels like vapourware to me. What happened to that dozen or so original X-Prizes companies that promised they'd be in space and carrying astronauts by now? I seem to remember it was launched in 1996 and those companies were all promising launches in about 2003?
He is implying that, by vetoing all new ideas by way of ridiculously over-optimistic design standards, they've been stuck using ancient technology for far longer than is safe, economic, or reasonable.
The irony of the situation shouldn't be lost on anyone.
did you even READ the article?
The company is based in the mojave desert in CALIFORNIA! Just because the people they choose to employ are former members of the russian cosmonaut program does not mean this is a product of a "russian free market"
As a matter of fact, AFAIK so far all the MAJOR private space ventures are HQ'd in the US precisely because of the freedom afforded by the market.
Take your politics elsewhere or save them for political topics. This is about commercial spaceflight.
To be quite honest the post reeks of astroturf probably trying to capitalize on the recent annoucements from SpaceX and Orbital Sciences regarding COTS contracts for ISS resupply.
Also with SpaceX coming off the successful launch of RazakSat in July, and the upcoming Falcon9 test sometime this month(sept 2009 according the to website), the whole submission reeks of "me too" and from what I can tell, InterOrbital has not launched any mission hardware as of yet.
So the more I think about it, I think they are getting a little ahead of themselves here. I suspect that SpaceX will launch Dragon before 2011.
In short, I'll get excited about InterOrbital once they have some actual launches. I don't see how they can expect to get from "we're building the rocket" in 2009 to "we're sending people into space" two years later. Seems unrealistic considering the product life-cycle.
Private enterprise and investors can't survive the impact of things going wrong.
I agree with you, but I've been very impressed with SpaceX's persistence. I think that most of the private launchers will fail, but the lucky/persistent ones might actually pull it off. Presumably, each of them is convinced that they're the lucky ones.
That's right. Businesses have never killed people in the pursuit of profit.
The Dragon capsule is more capable than the ATV module in two important respects. First, it is designed to ferry people. Second, because it is designed to ferry people, it is capable of bringing cargo down from the ISS. The ATV, the Russian Progress, and the Japanese HTV are all incapable of doing that.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
When the business is the people who are paying you it's not a very good business practice to kill them off.
Um ... tobacco? Alcohol? Fast food? Automobiles? The corporate world has never shown any aversion to killing its customers if it thinks it can get new ones to replace the ones who've died.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Missed this the first time around...
But those are rocket powered airplane flights - not at all the type of flight usually considered when discussing space access.
Comparing these, and XCOR's work, to actual booster hardware is roughly as useful as comparing someone with a homebuilt go kart to a company building NASCAR racers and cars capable of threatening the land speed record - they simply aren't in the same league. They aren't even close.