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Space Tourist Trips To the Moon May Fly On Recycled Spaceships
thomst writes "Rob Coppinger of Space.com reports that UK-based private company Excalibur Almaz plans to offer commercial lunar-orbital tourist missions based on recycled Soviet-era Soyuz vehicle and Salyut space stations, using Hall Effect thrusters to power the ensemble from Earth orbit to the Moon and back. The company estimates ticket prices at $150 million per seat (with a 50% profit margin), and expects to sell about 30 of them. Excalibur Almaz has other big plans, too, including ISS crew transport, Lagrange Point scientific missions, and Lunar surface payload deliveries. It expects to launch its first tourist trip to the Moon in 2014."
Trips around the moon for paying tourists in 2 years time? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
...but she's got it where it counts, kid.
Not that it makes any real difference to me, I guess... It's not like I have a spare $150 mill.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Several articles on /. along these lines recently. Humble beginnings from actual private space enterprise closely followed by science fiction from space charletons.
for the privilege of spending days in outer space in a recycled soviet era capsule with absolutely no backup for rescue does not really sound like a good idea to me.
No? Okay. I'm easy going. I take no for an answer. I understand.
Soooo, I have this great bridge I want to sell you.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
But Space Adventures have been offering this, at the same price point, for years ... and I don't believe there have been any takers yet.
What's the USP here that's going to create the market that SA couldn't?
It would be interesting to recast the entire "space tourism" options in terms of energy costs.
I wonder just how much of the "costs" are associated with each element of a trip (not specifically the trip in TFA, which I haven't read). I would guess that energetically, getting out of the earth's gravity well is going to cost by far the most - beyond that (and presuming infrastructure is in place - a big presumption I know), energetically things become easier. I guess what I am musing on is whether space tourism might become something slightly feasible if there is a destination.
Beyond weightlessness and seeing the earth's curvature, super rich paying to go to the ISS has always seemed like a bit of a dead-end. The ISS isn't for tourists, and so you are left with a mental image of them floating about on a science base just throwing money about the place and everyone else going "who is the dick with the cash on-board?". Now if the destination was specifically a tourist moon base and you went there for a month then it might seem like it had some sort of point. Fixed costs to get that running would be crazy - but ongoing costs might be affordable (energy from PV, moon H2O providing water & oxygen - with full reclamation).
Wishful thinking that it would ever happen or that I would have enough money to do it if it did exist! But better to do that than what has been allowed to happen in society over the last 30 years of sitting about becoming a reductive species, more interested in silly gewgaws than true hope and progress.
...Eat recycled food! It's good for you, and it's good for the environment!
Is anyone else excited that we are entering a period where merely going a quarter of a million miles away from earth (and jobs, and ex-wives) and circling the nearest spatial object, one that has been seen by every civilization of man to ever have lived, is considered lame?
Hall effect thrusters are NOT high thrust devices. He's not talking three days to Luna, more like three MONTHS.
Each way.
Somehow, I'm not seeing this as terribly practical.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Yeah. Not to mention the exciting "whoosh" sound you make during re-entry.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
if that's the time frame. I'm pretty sure there is not enough space on those old capsules for the food, water and air needed for that length of time.
If they only promise you a "flight to the moon and back", without ever leaving the capsule, they don't have to cut a deal with NASA to rent the sound stage that was used to fake the lunar landings back in the 60s and 70s.
I understand that NASA has since replaced the gray sand on that set with red sand in preparation for "manned Mars landings".
Hall effect thrusters have a good specific impulse and a great reliability record, but they have thrust in the milliNewton range, which means 6 months to a year or so to get to the Moon. Now, you could imagine putting a whole bunch of them together to get a higher thrust, but then, where is Excalibur going to get the 100 megawatts or so they would need for reasonable trip times?
Excalibur would be better off trying to get some of the flight qualified NERVA rockets refurbished, or do what Space Adventures plans, and fly a new Zond around the Moon.
For those unfamiliar with the tradeoffs: Hall effect thrusters make fairly efficient use of the reaction mass - about 2000s, compared to ~250 for solid rockets or ~300-400 for liquid rockets. That means a considerable increase in your delta-v - since you only need 10-20% as much reaction mass for the same impulse, you get 5-10x more delta-v. Great, right?
The trouble is that you need a power source. Liquid fuel rockets just burn the propellant. Hall effect thrusters (and other ion thrusters) need a power source in addition to the propellant.
This is a great tradeoff for stationkeeping on satellites - you only need tiny amounts of thrust, so you can easily generate enough power using solar cells or a RTG. Thus the very efficient use of reaction mass means a much longer useful life, or more useful payload in your satellite for a given launch mass, etc. It's just plain more efficient.
But this isn't like that. They seem to want to use them to perform the Hohmann tranfer. That means having a very high thrust for a short duration - not just because you want to get there more quickly, but because it's much more efficient than a long continuous burn.
They're talking about 100KW. That seems low. Ballpark 5000 newtons of thrust... Compare to the Apollo command/service module at ~90,000 newtons. Thus they'll need a fairly long burn at that power. How the heck are they generate that kind of power for a long duration?
Actually, I sort of agree with the GP.
I would love to visit New Zealand--I hear it's beautiful. But I'm not sure I'd want to just fly over the country at 30,000 feet and then come home.
Similar thing here. Traveling 500,000 miles or so to visit our nearest space neighbor and then not landing would be frustrating. Imagine how Jim Lovell must have felt about traveling to the Moon twice--but never landing there.
For the price of the trip several dozen well-heeled millionaires can pool their resources to send a low-flying satellite that would send back hi-res photos and images of, say, the Apollo landing site or the poles of the moon. Because that is all that a trip AROUND the moon is going to get you, tourist photos and videos with no hard rock souvenirs you can hang around your neck to prove you're were a lunar explorer.
Do they take checks?
I'll postdate one for 3012.
"To the moon, Alice!"
Alice: "Okay."
Table-ized A.I.
The technology currently available can guarantee people a seat to the moon and back for less than $40k a piece assuming the cost of maintenance isn't substantial. The problem is setting up the initial system to get there and back for the cost. It would require new state of the art "origami" aircrafts that operate in various stages and can fly into space without spending so much on fuel. The rest is just a trajectory thing with minor adjustments along the way. The setup for these high-tech ships, space ports, and other things could cost tens of billion dollars. The tens of billions of dollars part is what kills the price for such a system. Not only that but insurance both for the passenger and the ship itself would be enormous. After all, Space is a harsh soulless bastard. A system as such could possibly be completed by 2020 IF at this very moment there were enough funding and investors ready to hire some incredible talent. The price by 2020 assuming it were to be completed would be roughly a few million per customer until they can start netting and even then they could use more investors to open it up to even more tourists at a lower cost. But this is in an ideal world where everything goes just as planned but we all know such a world isn't on Earth.
Excalibur Almaz is NOT a UK company. It is an Isle of Man (or Manx) company. It's been said for a few years that the Isle of Man is the fifth most likely country to be next to put a man on the moon. I guess this project is part of that.
In 1969 Thomas-cook took bookings for moon-trips. I wonder if they quoted a trip fare plus annual inflation.
Amazing fact: in a world of vapor projects Excalibur-Almaz is one of the few new-space companies with flight proven hardware. The VA capsules and TKS modules are heritage Soviet equipment with upgrades. This is some of the finest spacecraft designed by one of the greats of the early space age.
Hopefully they actually get to (lunar) orbit with paying customers. Also, 15X reusability plus integration on Falcon has strong cost implications after first flight.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
The reason the Isle of Man is a hub for this kind of activity is because it's a a tax haven. It's not a continent sized country full of engineers, launch facilities and research universities: more like 200 square miles in total. So while it might be the fifth most likely country to put somebody on the moon, this is mostly because it's an attractive place to have your offices.
By this rationale, I guess Monaco, Liechtenstein, Andorra and the Seychelles are more likely to put a man on the moon than the USA, Russia, or China?
Good luck on them and it would be quite fun if the Manx flag did fly on the moon soon, but as far as I can work out their space facilities comprise of one former RAF aircraft hanger. This is not to dismiss they might have several billion dollars salted away in the local offshore banks to spend on Russian hardware and engineering expertise....