Sure, people were interested in America after the Mayflower, but you have to keep in mind that there were returns on the investment of going to America. (tobacco sales, freedom from persecution). If simple tourism is the only revenue source for post-XPrize private space travel, I worry for its future. I will admit there are the hard-core folks out there who would travel to space for the sheer thrill of it, but once they've done it once they're likely to move on to bigger/better thrills.
The first time there is a safety problem with any of the spacecraft, all hell will ensue. The public will become fearful of visiting space on a private tourist craft, and the governments of many western nations will undoubtedly begin passing laws to regulate the industry. Space tourism has a future, but I'm not so sure it's as lucrative as the foundation would have us believe.
I predict that soon, a group is going to fulfill the BARE MINIMUM requirements for the X-Prize competition, and we will see the death of non-governmental rocketry/space-travel. I mean, can't we just use Russia for space tourism? Seriously, though, once one group has succeeded, what is the immediate benefit to other groups who may succeed afterwards? No $$ usually leads to seriously reduced efforts.
You can also look at the losses in this case as being a loss of real time and effort on the part of the people who created/obtained the virtual items. Sure it's a mock court, but the philosophical principles upheld are real in many ways.
Is there an easy way to run a pathping in linux? I suppose I could run traceroutes and pings manually or with a script and try to reconstruct what pathping does (according to the M$ site). It would be nice to have a way to do it because pathping seems as useful a utility for network admin as nmap, etherape, and ethereal.
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Sure, people were interested in America after the Mayflower, but you have to keep in mind that there were returns on the investment of going to America. (tobacco sales, freedom from persecution). If simple tourism is the only revenue source for post-XPrize private space travel, I worry for its future.
I will admit there are the hard-core folks out there who would travel to space for the sheer thrill of it, but once they've done it once they're likely to move on to bigger/better thrills.
The first time there is a safety problem with any of the spacecraft, all hell will ensue.
The public will become fearful of visiting space on a private tourist craft, and the governments of many western nations will undoubtedly begin passing laws to regulate the industry.
Space tourism has a future, but I'm not so sure it's as lucrative as the foundation would have us believe.
I predict that soon, a group is going to fulfill the BARE MINIMUM requirements for the X-Prize competition, and we will see the death of non-governmental rocketry/space-travel. I mean, can't we just use Russia for space tourism?
Seriously, though, once one group has succeeded, what is the immediate benefit to other groups who may succeed afterwards? No $$ usually leads to seriously reduced efforts.
You can also look at the losses in this case as being a loss of real time and effort on the part of the people who created/obtained the virtual items. Sure it's a mock court, but the philosophical principles upheld are real in many ways.
Is there an easy way to run a pathping in linux? I suppose I could run traceroutes and pings manually or with a script and try to reconstruct what pathping does (according to the M$ site).
It would be nice to have a way to do it because pathping seems as useful a utility for network admin as nmap, etherape, and ethereal.