John Carmack To Cut Space Tourism Prices 50%

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like John Carmack, through Armadillo Aerospace, will be battling Burt Rutan and Richard Branson to make space travel affordable. From the article: 'Space Adventures is going to use an Armadillo Technologies rocket to launch amateur astronauts 62 miles into the sky. Nothing new, except that they will do it at half the price of Virgin Galactic's ticket, and in a real rocket!' Perhaps I'll visit space, after all."

Comments

Re:and they still make a big markup/ profit

[blair1q]

NASA isn't doing "tourism", it's doing science. A big part of what it does is continuous improvement and modification of the mission capabilities of their systems. These guys won't be able to afford that. They'll have to do one or two rounds of refinement then lock it in place for several dozen "missions" in order to break even, because if they don't break even, they go bankrupt and stop flying. NASA breaks even by getting the science done, wowing the taxpayers, and getting approved for another year of funding.

BTW, NASA invented almost all of the stuff that these guys are now using, but these guys don't have to pay NASA a nickel in royalties. If they did, these tourist flights would be an order of magnitude costlier. NASA's successes paid for Carmack's profit projections.