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Space Tourism Isn't Worth Dying For
rudy_wayne writes with this opinion piece at Wired published in the wake of the crash of SpaceShipTwo, which calls the project nothing more than a "millionaire boondoggle thrill ride." A selection:
SpaceShipTwo is not a Federation starship. It's not a vehicle for the exploration of frontiers. Virgin Galactic is building the world's most expensive roller coaster, the aerospace version of Beluga caviar. It's a thing for rich people to do. Testing new aircraft takes a level of courage and ability beyond most humans. Those engineers and pilots are at the peak of human achievement. What they're doing is amazing. Why Virgin is doing it is not. When various corporate representatives eulogize those two pilots as pioneers who were helping to cross the Final Frontier, that should make you angry. That pilot died not for space but for a luxury service provider. His death doesn't get us closer to Mars; it just keeps rich people further away from weightlessness and a beautiful view.
Space planes will never be useful and there will only be 5 computers in the world.
Is this guy really so short sighted to believe that tourism is the only thing we could do in space? Or is this just click bait cashing in on the dead?
By going for a pleasurable drive, I will statistically kill something like a 10 millionth of a person. Should we therefore stop driving for pleasure? industrial accidents and shipping cause deaths. All for things that we can, in many cases, do without. Even constructing roller coasters, there's a risk of falling or being injured by faulty equipment. Do we want to put a stop to all of these?
It's tragic when people die but if we can't accept the risk of death at any price, we can't live.
Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee would say otherwise.
There is risk in setting foot in the unknown. Sometimes that risk is death, because the reward is so precious when we finally learn how to walk there.
You need to step out of your ivory tower of academia - or at least stop naysaying those brave enough o blaze the trail for you so you can avoid the danger.
If it triggers The Overview Effect in just 1-2 gazillionaires, the venture (but not really the death of pilots) is worth it.
And why is trasporting people so much nobler than giving them a thrill? Why is dying for the cause or 'trasporting people' more acceptable than dying for 'making people's lifes happier'?
I guess your answer to "what is the meaning of life" is quite opposite to mine.
It is highly unlikely to do that. Does not go high enough, does not stay long enough.
Wrong. Space planes were actually the preferred method of getting to space before the Apollo program. And the only reason we shifted to rockets was because we didn't have the time to screw with the planes.
Space planes are better if we can get them to work properly. It gets us to the upper atmosphere while spending a fraction of the fuel and getting us to a pretty good speed.
Obviously you need a form of propulsion that will work in vacuum... so the wings only take you so far. But it does effectively take care of the first stage of the rocket boost at a tiny fraction of the weight, fuel, etc. And it is reuseable which is HUGE if we're going to do a lot of launches.
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This is the sort of thing that leads to further understanding and optimizations of underlying technologies.
We already have the understanding. We know how to make proper orbital rockets, so why not optimize those (like Space-X is doing), rather than going back 60 years in time with a design that is only leading to a dead end.
So you are arguing that the best way to design an automobile is to start with a sawmill and hope you stumble upon something useful ?
The Hierapolis sawmill was already "something useful". Most technology is developed a step at a time, and the steps are not always in a straight line. SpaceShipTwo is not itself useful to reach orbit, but it is a test for new materials, aerodynamics, and perhaps most importantly, business models. Would you prefer that rich guys spend their money on bigger yachts?
No. I didn't say they were easier. I said they were better. Rockets are easier. Rockets were something we could do immediately. That is why we use rockets.
Space planes are HARD. Space planes are complicated. Space planes involved technology we still haven't figured out yet. Rockets we understood in the 1950s.
So no. We will use space planes because they are better but only after we've worked the bugs out.
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And chinese fireworks won't get you to the moon either but you learn something in the process that helps you get there.
No one is saying that Virgin is building the USS Enterprise that will go battle the Klingons or something.
What I am saying is that the technology informs a familiarity and builds a facility to get into orbit with similar technology.
Lessons learned and mistakes made. Look at the plane the Wright brother's flew. It was crap but it did fly all be it terribly.
Imagine if the plane crashed and killed one of the brothers. Then some stupid journalist shows up and says "this stupid hobby you're working on isn't worth dying over because it will never amount to anything."
It is ignorant. Point blank.
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