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Construction On Spaceship Factory Set To Begin In the Mojave
angry tapir writes "A production facility that would build the world's first fleet of commercial spaceships is set to begin construction on Tuesday at the Mojave Air and Space Port. The facility will be home to The Spaceship Co, or TSC — a joint venture owned by Mojave-based Scaled Composites and British billionaire Richard Branson's space tourism company, Virgin Galactic."
My suggestion is to have tiny crates all around with scraps metal and drugs.
-Woof woof woof!
Will those spaceships run on Windows Mojave?
Headlines like that give me goosebumps.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
saying "We require more Vespene gas"
TFA mentions the factory will produce:
- three white-knight IIs
- five SpaceshipTwos
so, what will happen after these 8 builds? Any plans for spaceshipThree?
Cool stuff though, if branson can build some type of spaceshipthree which does orbital flight en masse, this might be the beginning of true private spaceflight
People, what a bunch of bastards
They should call this facility REPCONN Aerospace
.. and P.F. Hamilton likes to include timelines, e.g.
2020 — Cavius base established. Mining of lunar subcrustal resources starts.
2037 — Beginning of large-scale geneering on humans; improvement to immunology system, eradication of appendix, organ efficiency increased.
2041 — First deuterium-fuelled fusion stations built; inefficient and expensive.
2044 — Christian reunification.
2047 — First asteroid capture mission. beginning of Earth’s O’Neill halo.
I'd love to see this story as one of those timeline points...
And only the terminally ill need apply ??
Yes, everyone is terminally ill, but some are closer to their terminal.
What a way to go. Better than shitting yourself in your final weeks.
Taco? You signed up ??
... when the headline starts with "Construction On Spaceship Factory Set To Begin In..."
How long it took NASA to grow to a level where it could launch big rockets! That is the Government inefficiency baby. Look at private enterprise. They launch rockets, even before they build the factory. http://www.lanewsmonitor.com/news/California-Missile-Mystery--Real-Missile-Launch-Or-Jet-Contrail-1289389883/
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yawn. Wake me when they start building an orbiting spaceship factory.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
A giant insect that produces fertile eggs without the need for a mate. Not sure I'm liking this one. You guys have seen [insert bug related sci fi flick here] haven't you?
16 comments and no one mentioned the obvious Civilisation V reference? I am a sad panda.
"..."
The truth is that these are not spaceships in the sense that the shuttle is. They do not flew as high as the shuttle nor do they reach the Mach 25 speeds of the shuttle. What Virgin Galactic will be flying are special high altitude airplanes, and nothing more.
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
Altitude is quite irrelevant. It's velocity we need!
The potential energy of 1 kg at 250 km is 2.5 MJ/kg.
The kinetic energy of 1 kg at 7000 m/s is 25 MJ (10x as much!).
The atmosperic drag adds less than 20% to the energy requirements.
The point I try to make? We need velocity! How fast does that Space Ship go? (No, I didn't RTFA - it may be in there...)
p.s. 100 km is half orbital only because low earth orbit is at about 200 km.
Soon the workers will start wishing for a nuclear winter!
It is a spaceship factory, if a few tens of Km over the surface of the Earth can be considered "space". But, let me not spoil it for the future "space tourists".
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
How come this isn't tagged "REPCONN" yet?
Why not call it Mos Eisley?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I just pictured the ship yards from Star Trek and then I squealed a little to loud and woke up the dog.
"It is a spaceship factory, if a few tens of Km over the surface of the Earth can be considered "space". But, let me not spoil it for the future "space tourists"."
Transatlantic air tourism across the Pacific Ocean in Boeing 747s began with retired WW1 pilots charging passengers to sit in the back seat of shaky 2 seater military planes for bumpy flights a few metres off the sea over the English Channel in the early 1920s.... Let's see where this goes before sneering too quickly.
haha, correcting myself! well if I am going to talk about "transatlantic" of course I should be referring to the Atlantic Ocean not the Pacific! doh! but you get what I mean about small steps leading to larger ones, I am sure...
It's going to be hard to feel safe in a spacecraft until we have something like General Products hulls.
Am I the only one this page is all messed up for? Things are out of position and there is a big black area where the text matches the background and I have to highlight it to read it. I'm using Firefox.
but the very fact that there is such a thing as a commercial Spaceship factory, it makes me giddy.
I did this quest, but at the end I decided to betray the ghouls and make the rockets crash into one another.
Wait... this isn't the New Vegas thread?
I'd say Branson IS a new clear winner!
Free Martian Whores!
Their first mistake was not building the factory in China.
Hey, can we stop complaining already? NASA and the rest of the space "industry" has had 50 years to make the geek dream of going into space possible for the (more or less) common man. Sub-orbital still counts as space, although it would seem it's not "enough" space for some.
NASA's manned program hasn't done much more than allow a select few to pedal circles around the planet since the end of Apollo. Sure, there were some amazing developments and innovations from that, but the act of getting to orbit? Who cares? You did that 50-ish years ago as well. The shuttle should never have gotten off the ground, and certainly should have been mothballed after Challenger. It was obvious by then that the program was vastly more expensive than expected anyway. All those satellites would have still gone up on conventional rockets, and much of the science could have been sent up in automated labs.
Imagine what 10 or 15 years of the manned spaceflight budget going into finding some other way into orbit might have produced. There have been proposals and ideas for decades, but with the shuttle eating up most of the budget, there was never the funding to really TRY. Sure it may have produced nothing at all (unlikely i think), but we'll never know.
Not trying to sound like a NASA hater, I love space and spaceflight. What I don't love is trillions of dollars spent to go in circles and make work for the astronaut corps.
Three ships laden with ghouls flying off into the dawn sky.
Don't tell me this isn't a sign.
It should be noted that Scaled Composites has been a unit of Northrop Grumman for a couple of years now. With Burt Rutan retiring, it will become more under NGC control. However, NGC does not have a regular rocket launch unit as Boeing and Lockheed does, so there's no reason that NGC will not continue allowing Scaled Composites to prosper.
*emo tear* i am SO glad the first comment is from F:NV :)
Shouldn't it be called 'shipyard' instead of 'factory'?
Why would they have plans on hand for orbital spacecraft, what would those do
If someone wants to mine the moon this is someone they can go to
Exciting junk
I don't want to go straight up and come right back down again. Can't they sub-orbit my ass to Sydney or something useful?
It's like dipping your toe into the Atlantic Ocean and then claiming you've been to Europe. Space Nutters are hopelessly deluded, romantic naive fools. Oh well, keep getting excited over your overgrown fireworks, I'll keep rooting for life extension.
TSC expects to employ up to 170 people when production is in full swing. It has begun posting job openings on its website for engineers and technicians.
See that? 170 engineering and technician positions (that's folks that assemble and build things, no college degree required) necessary to operate a production line for three spacecraft. Give this company some money, cross your fingers for success, and next thing you know we will have a whole new industry helping gear our species back out of the economic plunder created in the last few years. If we really want to haul our asses out of a recession, then the answer isn't to throw huge sums of money at every problem that comes along. The answer is to create new industries, new jobs in places where there were no jobs before! (See also, the robotics industry).
So for those of you that have been complaining about the recession, news like this should make you beam with joy. If the civilian space industry comes along, then there will be a whole new industry which can employ workers at all levels. That's why progress on fronts like deep-sea exploration, robotics development, and space exploration are important. This species has to progress or stagnate and die. The stars are merely one more frontier to progress into.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
They can't be serious. Leading experts agree they must first build a SpaceshipFactoryProvider.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
TFA mentions the factory will produce: - three white-knight IIs - five SpaceshipTwos
so, what will happen after these 8 builds?
My first guess is that they will then renegotiate tax breaks and subsidies with the state of California before deciding where to do additional production. California is a pretty hostile place to to production/manufacturing unless you are high profile enough to get a deal and or/waivers from the state.
Last I heard, these are spaceships only in the very most technical sense. About the same way a Roomba is "a robot." You get what, a few minutes of free fall, and that's it. I don't know about you folks, but that's most emphatically not what I've been thinking of when I thought "space ship" over quite a few decades. It's more the kind of thing I was hoping a long-hop high speed transport would do. And the price... good grief.
Methinks more waiting is called for.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I love Fallout New Vegas. They should just call this REPCONN so everyone already knows them.