Posted on 07/06/2006 9:03:48 AM PDT by Paradox
The public space travel business is picking up suborbital speed thanks to a variety of private rocket groups and their dream machines.
Joining the mix is Blue Origin's New Shepard Reusable Launch System. It is financially fueled by an outflow of dollars from the deep pockets of billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com.
The Bezos-backed Blue Origin, LLC commercial space outfit has recently turned in a draft environmental assessment (EA) for their West Texas launch site to the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation (AST) in Washington, D.C.
The document is the best glimpse yet of what Blue Origin is scoping out to develop "safe, inexpensive and reliable human access to space."
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
I'm waiting for some garage genius to invent an anti-grav machine and beat the rocket guys into space by converting his VW bug into a space going vehicle.
Andy Griffith already did that!.........
Dude. Love the tag line!!!
I owned a '78 Camaro once and wound up living in a trailer park.....................
I hope I live long enough (am 35) to see the first nuclear powered spacecraft reach half the speed of light and reach Alpha Centurai. The journey is 4 light years meaning 8 years to reach it... Too bad the anti-aging stuff is taking so long to perfect I would love to live to see us colonize the stars...
> I fail to see the over riding advantages of a powered landing, vs one with parachutes.
Operations. Apowered lander can, in principle, simply gas up and go again. It can land on the launch pad. It can have *nearly* the operability od a helicopter. It has fewer systems than one that uses a parachute.
However, parachutes provide a safety margin in that they are pretty reliable, and a winged vehicle can land on a runway.
I expect that someday there'll be some sort of general commonality for such suborbital vehicles, just as most airplanes look *generally* alike in planform. But all the methods will have to be tried before then.
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