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Two Radically Different Approaches to Private Access to Space (gizmag.com)
Zothecula writes: Commercial spaceflight company World View came a step closer to carrying tourists to the edge of space with a successful test flight last weekend. At Page, Arizona, a one-tenth scale replica spacecraft was carried by high-altitude ballon to a height of 100,475 ft (30,624 m) to demonstrate the technology that is intended for use in a full-size version slated to begin commercial flights next year. And with a note on the other end of the size spectrum for private access to space, reader Habberhead writes: As reported first by Wired Magazine and followed on by others including Discovery News, start-up company ThumbSat is aiming to provide turn-key access to space for students, experimenters and citizen scientists with a new femto-satellite and creative business model. Small payloads and experiments in space for $20k, including the launch? Sign me up!
Taking a balloon up to the Karman line? Sending up postage-stamp-sized payloads up to the Karman line? What a joke.
Not to be confused with the state of the art WorldView series of commercial imagery satellites...
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
At Page, Arizona, a one-tenth scale replica spacecraft was carried by high-altitude balloon
What is this, tourism for ants?! It has to be at least...3 times bigger than this!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
You people offering to pay to launch him into space are really mean.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Tourism != Colonization
Someone is already working on luxury accommodations, gourmet space food sticks and setting up the duty free shop at the end of the rainbow.
100,000ft is nowhere near 100km. About 30%. But still, if this is an experience people are willing to pay for, good for them.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
SpaceShipTwo is having a hard time becoming commercial. At least six years so far beyond their announced launch date. Perhaps too much new technology, too many parts ...
one-tenth scale replica spacecraft
it's not a spacecraft! It's not going to space!
was carried by high-altitude ballon to a height of 100,475 ft (30,624 m)
30 km is not space!
Memorize this: if you can float in the air, you are still in the air.
So, if you can float in the air, it's not space.
That sounds right up there with "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." in terms of predictions. Just because something is not possible today or is horrendously expensive does not mean that future advancements will make it cheap and commonplace.
That quote was made about 70 years ago when computers were in their infancy, kind of like commercial space flight is right now. My mind can not even comprehend what we might accomplish in the next 70.
Seems like squandering a critical resource in short supply
fuck these guys, bigelow is where it's at.
SpaceX is commercial spaceflight. OSC is commercial spaceflight. Cheapo rockets that pop nearly straight up to 100km then fall back down aren't anything like commercial spaceflight. They're built around a very different flight envelope, very different performance characteristics, and consequently don't share much more in common than needing a pressure vessel. These things are joy rides for the wealthy.
I care about companies working to bring down actual access to space - that is, reaching orbit. These toys are not steps in that direction.
To point out the difference: These things go to just over 100km, because that's defined as the boundary of space. Actual low-earth orbit is more like 300-400km. But getting up is the easy part. Getting to a velocity of 7800 m/s / 17500 mph / 28000 kph that's the hard part - it takes 10 times as much energy as the getting-up part in an ideal situation (7-8 times in practice due to aerodynamic and gravity losses). Basically, they're doing ~30% of the task that makes up 15% of the actual task of getting to orbit, which is pretty much the bare minimum that matters for anything but upper atmospheric research. Given that the demands on rockets scale exponentially with the required delta-V (both in terms of thrust as well as other factors such as surviving reentry when you've got such high potential energy to burn off), it quickly becomes obvious that something in the sort of flight envelope of these joyrides isn't even touching on the actual challenges of spaceflight. They get away with cheap, easy materials and cheap designs with low-ISP propellants and far less weight-optimized designs because, well, they can. And when you only play around with the "easy stuff", you're not pushing the state of the art on the "hard stuff" forward.
To put it another way: we shoot tons of bottle rockets off every year, but they don't do a darn thing to make launching spacecraft to Mars any cheaper.
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."
Not sure that I would agree that non-orbiting flights do not lower the costs. Basically, it builds up manufacturing lines for sealed crafts, with same seats, suits, life support, etc. However, I would argue that these companies will build up interest in space flight and gives the wealthy a taste of what space flight has to offer. In fact , it might be useful for billionaires to use this for training.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Airtight craft" are FYI anything but new and anything but rare. And as covered extensively above, when you're given way, way more mass you can throw around, you're never going to choose the difficult solution that actually going to orbit requires, you're going to pick some cheap solution for your "sealed craft", your "seats", your "suits" (most plans either call for no suits or jet pilot suits), your life support (also made far, far easier because they're going up for such short periods of time - even a scuba diver's "life support system" is more complicated), etc.
They're not pushing new ground for rocketry any more than making bottle rockets is.
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."