One of the biggest changes in focus between the old plan and the new one is the de-emphasis on "NASA does all". As the online version of the Plan evolves, this will continue to change. I can't say when the commercial space budget will exceed NASA's, but it will be happen if all goes well. This may be a terrible example, but it kinda fits - Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore and map the Louisiana Purchase, and continue on to the Pacific Ocean, to learn what might be learned. Per this article, Jefferson originally asked for $2500 from Congress, but ultimately the cost was closer to $50,000, a 20 to 1 cost overrun that outdoes any modern overrun.
Lewis and Clark took two years and were actually given up for dead. But today, I can drive approximately the same route in three days. The point is that IMHO we are on the cusp of the transition from pure government financed exploration to the first 'trappers and hunters' going out to see what they could make of an opportunity. So either NASA will become less and less important and cease exploring, or more likely, will continue to transition their activities in support of the next phase.
NASA has been doing some very cool things to support commercial space entities and save money in the process - despite the less-than-sane meanderings of congressional politics. A case in point - the President's Commercial Crew Program 2017 budget, presently in negotiations in Washington, is being cut by $300 million, necessitating that NASA spend $600 additional million to buy launch services from Russia and delaying a return to US manned launches by four years.
I haven't looked into this recently. This is a good example why it's difficult to get traditional investment entities like VCs to invest in these highly speculative ventures - nobody really knows what's out there. Platinum is fun to talk about, but IMHO the markets for in-space re-fueling, satellite maintenance, possibly space tourism, a robotic lunar research facility (prototype self-constructing system), and similar more mundane aspects have higher near-term probabilities.
OTOH, platinum on Earth is extremely problematical. It's a horrible environmental mess, it's a horrible human mess with workers one step above slaves, direct mining takes huge amounts of ore to make a few grams of platinum. (I think more is produced as a by-product of copper smelting.) A high grade platinum source may be less than 0.5 ppm. 2010 production was 245 tonnes. Potential global demand at $10 per ounce may well be more than 1000 times that.
Part of the theoretical justification for platinum in asteroids is that, as a very dense metal, nearly all of it on Earth has sunk into the core. But many asteroids appear to be the remnants of proto-planets (proto-dwarf-planets?) that partially differentiated concentrating the heaviest elements toward their core, similarly to Earth, then were broken apart in collisions. We know that many asteroids are mostly nickel-iron (which in the long run will also be quite valuable as raw material for space manufacturing), and as such _should_ have platinum in veins, in solution with the iron, and/or in chunks from the deepest part of those cores.
One argument against asteroid platinum mining is the purported cost. However the negative cost estimates I've seen assume a full Earth->asteroid->Earth travel cycle, which is incorrect. If I were building a system, it would be launched once, then operated and maintained in space for 15 years at least. I would try to do as much refining at the asteroid as feasible, and return the concentrate or pure material to LEO (possibly via multiple intermediate steps), where it could be brought back piggy-backed on another return vehicle. Returning need not take anything like as much resources - fuel or anything - as launching. (A Falcon 9 launch involves about $300K of fuel but $10 million for the first stage hardware, used once.)
There are two copies actively engaged. The one that AFAIK is farthest ahead is Planetary Resources. I think their investors include James Cameron and Tom Hanks.:) I quote from their page on Asteroid Composition:
"One of Planetary Resources targets is an X-type asteroid, and may have more platinum that has ever been mined on Earth to date."
I recall that the head of PR was asked if bringing so much platinum back to Earth would crash the market, and he said he expected it. He thought they could make money at $10 to $100 per ounce (the present price is around $1300 per ounce). Platinum is especially interesting because it is a hugely useful industrial metal but its application has been minimal because of the cost. The catalytic converter in your care probably has an infinitesimal amount of Platinum. If it were cheaper, it could even be used to build catalytic converters for coal fired power plants! So this one item could improve industrial efficiencies and reduce pollution, improving the standard of living on Earth.
PR's first testbed launch is in space now - Arkyd testbed platform launched in July. They're still developing the technology.
PR is also looking strongly at the H2O market. Water in space is valuable as the raw material to make hydrogen for rocket engines. SInce the cost of shipping from Earth is presently on the order of $20,000 per pound, retrieving it in space from the Moon or an asteroid could be very profitable, and would reduce costs.
There is a communications satellite owned by IntelSat that failed some time ago. It was determined that the cause of the failure was that a thermal blanket popped loose on one end, probably due to a fastener failure, and draped across the solar panels. So that $150 million satellite has been moved to a 'graveyard' parking orbit. But if a small robotic satellite could get to it, pull the blanket back away and stick it down with some glue or something, that satellite would be ready to go. That's a trip worth at least $10 million.
To Dani's comment, I'll just add that, the day that an asteroid assay is done and proves that the thing is actually more than 1% platinum, or any other of the many proposed ways to make space economically interesting proves out, the land rush will be on. Private investment by institutions today is difficult because many of the business models are speculative, the terrain is unknown, the payout time frame of 10-20 years is way too long for VCs, who want to get paid in five or less. As soon as somebody shows that their business is more than a pipe dream, things will happen fast. But already the angel investors are working about a dozen deals per year in space-related startups. Many of these are for small companies that are already profitable or cash flow positive but don't have the cash to go to the next step. I look forward to when the majority of launches to LEO and beyond are for private commercial purposes.
My bad - I just plunked in an approximate number. Maybe I could count it as an imperial to metric conversion?:) Or astronomy/physics - it's within an order of magnitude, round up, or something. In Base 8 it's 37...
The company I work for, Bright Plaza, has a SAAS that can almost eliminate the risk of phishing attacks and several other threats, while improving the user login experience. (It's a proof of knowledge SAAS that can support almost any type of proof of knowledge, from text and picture passwords to cognitive self tests and others.) And, based on the number of Lamborghini's at the Healthcare IT conferences, there's no lack of money available. Even more, the HIPAA lawas make it extremely expensive to expose clients' personal data. But from our attempts to to get healthcare companies to consider actually implementing, or installing even dirt simple new features, they have zero interest in actually doing anything about this. Like lemmings, they will either keep running their own systems (often dating back years), or if they're already sucked into one of the vendor systems will just wait until EPIC, or one of the other big three vendors, provides some new halfway measures.
Not sarcastic. Hmm. I probably read that a long time ago, but I don't remember a thing about it. It's certainly not a new idea. Others have suggested having a big rock in front, but water seems like a better solution IMHO.
So a Thorium-based molten salt reactor fuel cycle, whose power levels can easily be throttled up and down (or even off), providing a few (hundred, thousand?) megawatts...:) Or someday fusion or antimatter...
Thorium is nice because it's only minimally radioactive, can be stored in huge piles without getting 'hot', and won't sustain a reaction without encouragement - hence throttling ability.
I think a ship with a multi-megawatt Thorium reactor could carry enough fuel to run for 100 years pretty easily.
Well, it took 20 to 30 years (depending on POV) before Unix became the accepted OS.:) I can't think of one right now, but there have been many scientific theories and experimentally proven technologies that didn't get any love for decades. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to build one of these experiments, but they don't look that difficult from the tiny pictures I've seen. So I suspect that there are several folks right now trying to build a higher power version in their garages, and planning to pump a lot more power into the rig to see what happens. The maker types are less interested in getting the official scientific stamp of approval than in making something 'go'. So I'm optimistically awaiting the first hobbyist version that is hooked up to some supercapacitors and gets a megawatt jammed through it. Maybe it'll blow up, maybe it'll work, maybe it'll do nothing.
Yes, IMHO that's a definite problem. It's very much like standing at the business end of a particle accelerator. As one approaches C that very thin interstellar gas is becoming much more like a bunch of cosmic rays. In the Great SF Novel that I think about writing, I figure I'll put a few hundred feet of water ice at the front end of the ship to absorb those. I'm not sure about 0.71c though - it's certainly better but I'm not sure how much better. One of the unknowns is how many actual rocks are out there as well... is 100 feet of ice enough?
"Dear Valve: Please go to http://ka.je/ to see a solution to your authentication problem. The Kaje Picture Password SAAS removes all passwords from your website, eliminates transmission of passwords across the net - they are converted to an encrypted hash in the browser - and prevents phishing attacks. The Kaje SAAS never knows anything about the user, so there is no way (short of hacking two different operating systems run by two different companies on completely separate networks, at least one of which is designed to prevent even a hack from being useful) for a black hat to get the user's info and password or other Proof of Knowledge. Kaje has built-in features to prevent keyboard and mouse snooping as well, and the vendor works diligently to know nothing about the user. There is no more private and secure method for user authentication or step-up authorization. And since the user uploads his/her own test challenge (picture or other), it acts automatically as two-factor authentication - much better than that "site key" that some banks are using, while being easier to remember."
Proofs of Knowledge include picture passwords, text passwords, cognitive self-tests, Captcha's and a bunch of others. NB - I work for the company. The founder is also the inventor of Self Encrypting Drives and has several patents related to online security.
A friend of mine points out that the only thing preventing us from colonizing the stars is the ability to generate 1G acceleration for a year, and do the same at the other end.
In one year at 1G a vehicle can be traveling at about 0.71c, which is an optimal speed for getting there quickly while minimizing the effect of time dilation - the traveler will only age about one less year in 16 vs. the observer.
From very long ago, I recall a similar calculation based on solar sails. IIRC if you can get 0.01G (= 0.1 m/s/s), you can achieve a significant fraction of C by the time you have gotten to the Oort Cloud. Quicky Wolfram Alpha : 3154 km/s or 7 million miles/hour. At 0.1G, that would be 31,540 km/sec = about 0.1c.
Ahem... that would be an _ostensible_ propulsion device, the working principle for which is (according to mainstream physicists) poorly described and violates commonly accepted physical principles. OTOH, I hope it works. I'll believe it when they cram a couple of megawatts in, and get it to lift its own weight - or better, 100 times its own weight.
I note that the Dr. Tajmar, the researcher whose name is on the paper, is still using terms like "... if true...". This is not yet a tried-and-true propulsion device. The articles I saw just now did not show actual numbers, but the NASA experiment used such low power that the apparent thrust was well below several of the potentially confounding effects; i.e. the noise was much higher than the signal. It may still turn out to be the result of some experimental error, an unexpected issue with the apparatus, etc. Again though, one hopes.:)
I suppose more like 50 people all pissing at once, starting such that the water arrives at the ground before the expected time of arrival and continuing past that time.
By way of evidence (in addition to the facts from Viet Nam), long ago when I was young and foolish, some other young'uns and I were staying on the 12th floor of a hotel in NYC during a field trip. We started playing around with water in the wastebasket, and after a few tries were able to dump a bucket full of water out the window so that by the time it fell 12 floors, someone walking by got dosed. We had to drop the water when they had just stepped onto the curb from the street. They walked about 1/2 block during the drop. We nailed a couple of unfortunate sailors, and immediately closed the window and played dumb.
I've read that in practice, the weight of a bicycle in use doesn't vary - the lighter the frame & hardware, the heavier the lock required!:)
The price of carbon fiber has been a major factor, along with the difficulty of using it in manufacturing. Both of those have improved by orders of magnitude, and if one company I'm familiar with succeeds, they'll cut the cost of the fiber by another factor of 10 while greatly improving the quality. These incremental advances are truly changing the equations for many of the things you're pointing out.
As someone peripherally involved in "New Space", I'll say that the advances in technology really are making some of those fanciful ideas possible, even economically feasible. People right now are putting their money into those new ventures, and they're not doing it for entertainment but because the numbers pan out at least as well as many of the dotcom ventures. SpaceX has cut the cost of launch by 50% just by using well-tried industrial cost management methods - faced with exorbitant pricing for turbine pumps, the company built their own at 1/10 the cost. If the reusable first stage pans out, that will cut the cost by about another 1/2 (they think it will be better than that, but I think their long term costs will be higher as they transition their systems to support the more rigorous requirements of manned launches - that will affect all of their systems, even the unmanned launch ones.)
Another example, 3D printing has already proven itself with multiple different entities successfully printing components and even entire rocket engines, with costs and production times reduced by 90%.
Bottom line - much of the extremely high cost of space has been the government-run cost-plus market structure and extremely careful engineering practices. In fairness, I think this was necessary for the early days, but now we can move past that and into a more market-driven economic model with fixed prices on off-the-shelf products. Consider that development costs on a rocket engine are going to be on the order of a billion dollars, regardless of whether 10 or 10,000 of that engine are produced; but if 10,000 are built the amortized cost is $100,000 vs. $100,000,000 per engine.
If reusability pans out, the fuel cost of a launch is less than $500,000.
I learned a while back that the cost of an F-18 was more than 1/2 software. The plane had 1600 VME boards. (VME was a common instrumentation/computer bus, back in the 1970s and 1980s). All that fancy over-the-horizon radar, integrated electronics, head up displays, etc. takes a lot of computing power and software. I'm sure that is even more true for the newer planes.
I read somewhere that flying NYC to LA on a corporate jet costs about $30,000 - not sure if that is total or per passenger. So that's something close to the cost target. If they can get you there in 1/2 the time, is it worth $60,000? These are the numbers they're probably working with. Note that Virgin Galactic has flights booked solid for seven years worth of flights at $200,000 each, and those flights are just up and down for entertainment.
The major US air carriers have definitely gotten out of their repeating-bankruptcy spiral and are registering record profits these days. Through mergers and other tactics, they have eliminated almost all of the low cost alternatives, and at nearly all major airports the majority of the gates and flights are 'owned' by one or two airlines, eliminating effective competition. Note that they raised prices when fuel prices went up, and kept them their afterwards, and added baggage fees, etc. - soon they will be charging extra for the right to breathe actual air, I'm sure.
I saw the SR-71 at the Abbottsford Air Show in British Columbia a long time ago. The plane took less than an hour from takeoff in San Francisco to arrival in BC. They did a 'slow' fly by, which was deafening. Then they did a faster fly by and went vertical into the low hanging clouds.
It's quite possible that Virgin Galactic, or some other entity working on suborbital flight systems, could make this whole idea moot. Rather than worry about sonic booms, get completely out of the atmosphere. Think of it as a two-stage passenger-carrying intermediate range ballistic missile, probably with horizontal take off and certainly horizontal landing. This system could provide 3000 mile / 5000 km flights at Mach 5, 10 or more, depending on where the economic sweet spot is, with near-zero concerns for sonic booms. I have heard that Virgin is considering this as a future service. Of course, if the Skylon project pans out, it's doable with one stage.
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One of the biggest changes in focus between the old plan and the new one is the de-emphasis on "NASA does all". As the online version of the Plan evolves, this will continue to change. I can't say when the commercial space budget will exceed NASA's, but it will be happen if all goes well. This may be a terrible example, but it kinda fits - Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore and map the Louisiana Purchase, and continue on to the Pacific Ocean, to learn what might be learned.
Per this article, Jefferson originally asked for $2500 from Congress, but ultimately the cost was closer to $50,000, a 20 to 1 cost overrun that outdoes any modern overrun.
Lewis and Clark took two years and were actually given up for dead. But today, I can drive approximately the same route in three days. The point is that IMHO we are on the cusp of the transition from pure government financed exploration to the first 'trappers and hunters' going out to see what they could make of an opportunity. So either NASA will become less and less important and cease exploring, or more likely, will continue to transition their activities in support of the next phase.
NASA has been doing some very cool things to support commercial space entities and save money in the process - despite the less-than-sane meanderings of congressional politics. A case in point - the President's Commercial Crew Program 2017 budget, presently in negotiations in Washington, is being cut by $300 million, necessitating that NASA spend $600 additional million to buy launch services from Russia and delaying a return to US manned launches by four years.
(According to this inflation calculator, that $50,000 was equivalent to $1,027,500 today.)
I haven't looked into this recently. This is a good example why it's difficult to get traditional investment entities like VCs to invest in these highly speculative ventures - nobody really knows what's out there. Platinum is fun to talk about, but IMHO the markets for in-space re-fueling, satellite maintenance, possibly space tourism, a robotic lunar research facility (prototype self-constructing system), and similar more mundane aspects have higher near-term probabilities.
OTOH, platinum on Earth is extremely problematical. It's a horrible environmental mess, it's a horrible human mess with workers one step above slaves, direct mining takes huge amounts of ore to make a few grams of platinum. (I think more is produced as a by-product of copper smelting.) A high grade platinum source may be less than 0.5 ppm. 2010 production was 245 tonnes. Potential global demand at $10 per ounce may well be more than 1000 times that.
Part of the theoretical justification for platinum in asteroids is that, as a very dense metal, nearly all of it on Earth has sunk into the core. But many asteroids appear to be the remnants of proto-planets (proto-dwarf-planets?) that partially differentiated concentrating the heaviest elements toward their core, similarly to Earth, then were broken apart in collisions. We know that many asteroids are mostly nickel-iron (which in the long run will also be quite valuable as raw material for space manufacturing), and as such _should_ have platinum in veins, in solution with the iron, and/or in chunks from the deepest part of those cores.
One argument against asteroid platinum mining is the purported cost. However the negative cost estimates I've seen assume a full Earth->asteroid->Earth travel cycle, which is incorrect. If I were building a system, it would be launched once, then operated and maintained in space for 15 years at least. I would try to do as much refining at the asteroid as feasible, and return the concentrate or pure material to LEO (possibly via multiple intermediate steps), where it could be brought back piggy-backed on another return vehicle. Returning need not take anything like as much resources - fuel or anything - as launching. (A Falcon 9 launch involves about $300K of fuel but $10 million for the first stage hardware, used once.)
Some of the numbers and discussion here.
Sigh. "copies" => "companies". And the other one to mention is Deep Space Industries. There are some others as well.
There are two copies actively engaged. The one that AFAIK is farthest ahead is Planetary Resources. I think their investors include James Cameron and Tom Hanks. :) I quote from their page on Asteroid Composition:
"One of Planetary Resources targets is an X-type asteroid, and may have more platinum that has ever been mined on Earth to date."
I recall that the head of PR was asked if bringing so much platinum back to Earth would crash the market, and he said he expected it. He thought they could make money at $10 to $100 per ounce (the present price is around $1300 per ounce). Platinum is especially interesting because it is a hugely useful industrial metal but its application has been minimal because of the cost. The catalytic converter in your care probably has an infinitesimal amount of Platinum. If it were cheaper, it could even be used to build catalytic converters for coal fired power plants! So this one item could improve industrial efficiencies and reduce pollution, improving the standard of living on Earth.
PR's first testbed launch is in space now - Arkyd testbed platform launched in July. They're still developing the technology.
PR is also looking strongly at the H2O market. Water in space is valuable as the raw material to make hydrogen for rocket engines. SInce the cost of shipping from Earth is presently on the order of $20,000 per pound, retrieving it in space from the Moon or an asteroid could be very profitable, and would reduce costs.
There is a communications satellite owned by IntelSat that failed some time ago. It was determined that the cause of the failure was that a thermal blanket popped loose on one end, probably due to a fastener failure, and draped across the solar panels. So that $150 million satellite has been moved to a 'graveyard' parking orbit. But if a small robotic satellite could get to it, pull the blanket back away and stick it down with some glue or something, that satellite would be ready to go. That's a trip worth at least $10 million.
These are just a few examples.
To Dani's comment, I'll just add that, the day that an asteroid assay is done and proves that the thing is actually more than 1% platinum, or any other of the many proposed ways to make space economically interesting proves out, the land rush will be on. Private investment by institutions today is difficult because many of the business models are speculative, the terrain is unknown, the payout time frame of 10-20 years is way too long for VCs, who want to get paid in five or less. As soon as somebody shows that their business is more than a pipe dream, things will happen fast. But already the angel investors are working about a dozen deals per year in space-related startups. Many of these are for small companies that are already profitable or cash flow positive but don't have the cash to go to the next step. I look forward to when the majority of launches to LEO and beyond are for private commercial purposes.
This was my bad, due to laziness, not Wired's :)
My bad - I just plunked in an approximate number. Maybe I could count it as an imperial to metric conversion? :) Or astronomy/physics - it's within an order of magnitude, round up, or something. In Base 8 it's 37 ...
The company I work for, Bright Plaza, has a SAAS that can almost eliminate the risk of phishing attacks and several other threats, while improving the user login experience. (It's a proof of knowledge SAAS that can support almost any type of proof of knowledge, from text and picture passwords to cognitive self tests and others.) And, based on the number of Lamborghini's at the Healthcare IT conferences, there's no lack of money available. Even more, the HIPAA lawas make it extremely expensive to expose clients' personal data. But from our attempts to to get healthcare companies to consider actually implementing, or installing even dirt simple new features, they have zero interest in actually doing anything about this. Like lemmings, they will either keep running their own systems (often dating back years), or if they're already sucked into one of the vendor systems will just wait until EPIC, or one of the other big three vendors, provides some new halfway measures.
Not sarcastic. Hmm. I probably read that a long time ago, but I don't remember a thing about it. It's certainly not a new idea. Others have suggested having a big rock in front, but water seems like a better solution IMHO.
So a Thorium-based molten salt reactor fuel cycle, whose power levels can easily be throttled up and down (or even off), providing a few (hundred, thousand?) megawatts ... :) Or someday fusion or antimatter ...
Thorium is nice because it's only minimally radioactive, can be stored in huge piles without getting 'hot', and won't sustain a reaction without encouragement - hence throttling ability.
I think a ship with a multi-megawatt Thorium reactor could carry enough fuel to run for 100 years pretty easily.
Well, it took 20 to 30 years (depending on POV) before Unix became the accepted OS. :) I can't think of one right now, but there have been many scientific theories and experimentally proven technologies that didn't get any love for decades. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to build one of these experiments, but they don't look that difficult from the tiny pictures I've seen. So I suspect that there are several folks right now trying to build a higher power version in their garages, and planning to pump a lot more power into the rig to see what happens. The maker types are less interested in getting the official scientific stamp of approval than in making something 'go'. So I'm optimistically awaiting the first hobbyist version that is hooked up to some supercapacitors and gets a megawatt jammed through it. Maybe it'll blow up, maybe it'll work, maybe it'll do nothing.
I know, I'm just hoping. :)
Yes, IMHO that's a definite problem. It's very much like standing at the business end of a particle accelerator. As one approaches C that very thin interstellar gas is becoming much more like a bunch of cosmic rays. In the Great SF Novel that I think about writing, I figure I'll put a few hundred feet of water ice at the front end of the ship to absorb those. I'm not sure about 0.71c though - it's certainly better but I'm not sure how much better. One of the unknowns is how many actual rocks are out there as well ... is 100 feet of ice enough?
"Dear Valve: Please go to http://ka.je/ to see a solution to your authentication problem. The Kaje Picture Password SAAS removes all passwords from your website, eliminates transmission of passwords across the net - they are converted to an encrypted hash in the browser - and prevents phishing attacks. The Kaje SAAS never knows anything about the user, so there is no way (short of hacking two different operating systems run by two different companies on completely separate networks, at least one of which is designed to prevent even a hack from being useful) for a black hat to get the user's info and password or other Proof of Knowledge. Kaje has built-in features to prevent keyboard and mouse snooping as well, and the vendor works diligently to know nothing about the user. There is no more private and secure method for user authentication or step-up authorization. And since the user uploads his/her own test challenge (picture or other), it acts automatically as two-factor authentication - much better than that "site key" that some banks are using, while being easier to remember."
Proofs of Knowledge include picture passwords, text passwords, cognitive self-tests, Captcha's and a bunch of others. NB - I work for the company. The founder is also the inventor of Self Encrypting Drives and has several patents related to online security.
A friend of mine points out that the only thing preventing us from colonizing the stars is the ability to generate 1G acceleration for a year, and do the same at the other end.
In one year at 1G a vehicle can be traveling at about 0.71c, which is an optimal speed for getting there quickly while minimizing the effect of time dilation - the traveler will only age about one less year in 16 vs. the observer.
From very long ago, I recall a similar calculation based on solar sails. IIRC if you can get 0.01G (= 0.1 m/s/s), you can achieve a significant fraction of C by the time you have gotten to the Oort Cloud. Quicky Wolfram Alpha : 3154 km/s or 7 million miles/hour. At 0.1G, that would be 31,540 km/sec = about 0.1c.
Ahem ... that would be an _ostensible_ propulsion device, the working principle for which is (according to mainstream physicists) poorly described and violates commonly accepted physical principles. OTOH, I hope it works. I'll believe it when they cram a couple of megawatts in, and get it to lift its own weight - or better, 100 times its own weight.
I note that the Dr. Tajmar, the researcher whose name is on the paper, is still using terms like "... if true ...". This is not yet a tried-and-true propulsion device. The articles I saw just now did not show actual numbers, but the NASA experiment used such low power that the apparent thrust was well below several of the potentially confounding effects; i.e. the noise was much higher than the signal. It may still turn out to be the result of some experimental error, an unexpected issue with the apparatus, etc. Again though, one hopes. :)
I suppose more like 50 people all pissing at once, starting such that the water arrives at the ground before the expected time of arrival and continuing past that time.
By way of evidence (in addition to the facts from Viet Nam), long ago when I was young and foolish, some other young'uns and I were staying on the 12th floor of a hotel in NYC during a field trip. We started playing around with water in the wastebasket, and after a few tries were able to dump a bucket full of water out the window so that by the time it fell 12 floors, someone walking by got dosed. We had to drop the water when they had just stepped onto the curb from the street. They walked about 1/2 block during the drop. We nailed a couple of unfortunate sailors, and immediately closed the window and played dumb.
I've read that in practice, the weight of a bicycle in use doesn't vary - the lighter the frame & hardware, the heavier the lock required! :)
The price of carbon fiber has been a major factor, along with the difficulty of using it in manufacturing. Both of those have improved by orders of magnitude, and if one company I'm familiar with succeeds, they'll cut the cost of the fiber by another factor of 10 while greatly improving the quality. These incremental advances are truly changing the equations for many of the things you're pointing out.
As someone peripherally involved in "New Space", I'll say that the advances in technology really are making some of those fanciful ideas possible, even economically feasible. People right now are putting their money into those new ventures, and they're not doing it for entertainment but because the numbers pan out at least as well as many of the dotcom ventures. SpaceX has cut the cost of launch by 50% just by using well-tried industrial cost management methods - faced with exorbitant pricing for turbine pumps, the company built their own at 1/10 the cost. If the reusable first stage pans out, that will cut the cost by about another 1/2 (they think it will be better than that, but I think their long term costs will be higher as they transition their systems to support the more rigorous requirements of manned launches - that will affect all of their systems, even the unmanned launch ones.)
Another example, 3D printing has already proven itself with multiple different entities successfully printing components and even entire rocket engines, with costs and production times reduced by 90%.
Bottom line - much of the extremely high cost of space has been the government-run cost-plus market structure and extremely careful engineering practices. In fairness, I think this was necessary for the early days, but now we can move past that and into a more market-driven economic model with fixed prices on off-the-shelf products. Consider that development costs on a rocket engine are going to be on the order of a billion dollars, regardless of whether 10 or 10,000 of that engine are produced; but if 10,000 are built the amortized cost is $100,000 vs. $100,000,000 per engine.
If reusability pans out, the fuel cost of a launch is less than $500,000.
I learned a while back that the cost of an F-18 was more than 1/2 software. The plane had 1600 VME boards. (VME was a common instrumentation/computer bus, back in the 1970s and 1980s). All that fancy over-the-horizon radar, integrated electronics, head up displays, etc. takes a lot of computing power and software. I'm sure that is even more true for the newer planes.
On the Titanic, steerage pasengers paid IIRC $8, while the top tickets were $30,000. I think that's the equivalent of $1,000,000 or so today.
I read somewhere that flying NYC to LA on a corporate jet costs about $30,000 - not sure if that is total or per passenger. So that's something close to the cost target. If they can get you there in 1/2 the time, is it worth $60,000? These are the numbers they're probably working with. Note that Virgin Galactic has flights booked solid for seven years worth of flights at $200,000 each, and those flights are just up and down for entertainment.
The major US air carriers have definitely gotten out of their repeating-bankruptcy spiral and are registering record profits these days. Through mergers and other tactics, they have eliminated almost all of the low cost alternatives, and at nearly all major airports the majority of the gates and flights are 'owned' by one or two airlines, eliminating effective competition. Note that they raised prices when fuel prices went up, and kept them their afterwards, and added baggage fees, etc. - soon they will be charging extra for the right to breathe actual air, I'm sure.
I saw the SR-71 at the Abbottsford Air Show in British Columbia a long time ago. The plane took less than an hour from takeoff in San Francisco to arrival in BC. They did a 'slow' fly by, which was deafening. Then they did a faster fly by and went vertical into the low hanging clouds.
It's quite possible that Virgin Galactic, or some other entity working on suborbital flight systems, could make this whole idea moot. Rather than worry about sonic booms, get completely out of the atmosphere. Think of it as a two-stage passenger-carrying intermediate range ballistic missile, probably with horizontal take off and certainly horizontal landing. This system could provide 3000 mile / 5000 km flights at Mach 5, 10 or more, depending on where the economic sweet spot is, with near-zero concerns for sonic booms. I have heard that Virgin is considering this as a future service. Of course, if the Skylon project pans out, it's doable with one stage.
I forget - cube => square