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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.
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 ?
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.
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.