Posted on 10/07/2004 12:44:26 PM PDT by tricky_k_1972
Mojave CA (UPI) Oct 5, 2004 The world's newest spaceship is back at its spotless hangar at the Mojave Airport, serving as a backdrop for dozens of television news shows.
The day after its flawless third flight out of the atmosphere - a mission that captured a $10-million cash prize for its owners - it was quiet. Only a handful of the thousands of guests who came to witness the flight remained in town.
Still spanking new, SpaceShipOne has fulfilled its mission, forever retiring the notion that only governments can fly people beyond the atmosphere. Spaceship creator Burt Rutan plans to send his craft to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., but not before it fulfills one last mission.
The offers to sell sub-orbital spaceflights to government organizations and private agencies and individuals were pouring in even before SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition. Though Rutan and his partner - Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen - would like to make money from their investment, they have something bigger in mind: SpaceShipTwo, a commercial, passenger-carrying spaceliner.
My gut tells me that the additional flying we may do on this airplane before it goes to the Air & Space Museum should be focused on developing the very best space tourism vehicle, Rutan said at a news conference following Monday's prize-winning flight.
We may define reasons to fly SpaceShipOne in a research mode to gather more data, to get a few more pieces of information that will help us do a world-class job on developing a commercial spaceliner, he said. My gut tells me ... that's where I've got to focus all my talents.
SpaceShipTwo will be a five-person, sub-orbital vessel owned by a new venture called Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of Virgin Atlantic Airways. The inaugural flight is scheduled for 2007. Rutan, as well as Richard Branson, Virgin's eclectic chairman, say they will be aboard.
I think anyone who had the chance to go would want to go, said Trevor Beattie, a British advertising personality, who already has booked a flight.
The passenger list also is expected to include the winner of a consumer promotion by softdrink manufacturer 7 UP, which plans to unveil details of its competition next year. The company made the announcement following the completing of SpaceShipOne's landing Monday.
Ticket prices for the early flights are expected to cost about $190,000, but Rutan and Branson said they expect prices to fall rapidly as other companies stake claims in the space tourism business. Branson said Rutan will build five vessels over the next three years.
Tourists will fly even higher than SpaceShipOne's record-breaking altitude of 69 miles and experience about seven minutes of weightlessness.
Every one of those passengers will have a much, much bigger window, a spectacular view, Branson said. It'll be the most beautiful thing ever created by man. It's an adventure where we hope to make money because I don't think space has a future unless people make money.
Branson added that profits from Virgin Galactic will be re-invested in space tourism development.
Virgin's agreement with Rutan and Allen is not exclusive, however. Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the partnership created to develop SpaceShipOne and related projects, is considering offers from four or five other companies as well, Rutan said.
Opening space for private travel was the primary goal behind the X Prize, which offered $10 million to the first team that builds and flies a three-passenger vehicle to sub-orbital altitude twice within two weeks.
Following a test flight in June, SpaceShipOne flew its two X Prize flights on Sept. 29 and Oct. 4 - the 47th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. The basketball-sized Sputnik, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, was the opening shot in a Cold War battle that ended with the United States' landing Apollo astronauts on the moon in 1969.
Though 26 teams from around the world entered the competition, only one - the vessel designed by Rutan and financed by Allen - has flown. A Canadian team called the da Vinci Project had planned to fly this week, but postponed the attempt to continue building and testing its vehicle. Team leader Brian Feeney, who attended the SpaceShipOne launch, said he plans to fly before the end of the month.
Other companies that did not enter the X Prize are working on passenger spaceships as well.
XCOR Aerospace, also of Mojave, is designing the Xerus, a two-person craft that will cost an estimated $10 million to develop. The company is looking to offset development costs with government contracts for related technology development, said XCOR president Jeff Greason.
Many of the teams have models, test articles and detailed blueprints, but only SpaceShipOne has completed a successful flight. Rutan calls the project Tier One, the sub-orbital element of a multi-part program to revolutionize off-planet travel.
As a pledge to his commitment, Rutan plans to take off a small piece of SpaceShipOne before it is sent off to become a museum display. Part of the craft will be packed aboard a spacecraft bound for Pluto, the first deep-space mission planned without government backing.
You can't file a formal flight plan for the DC area thanks to 9/11.
Look like a reentry vehicle, get treated like a reentry vehicle...
From what I undestand, the regulation that's being proposed is relatively minor. The FAA wants to make sure that passengers know the risks, they want to make sure they aren't killing 95 year old cardiac patients by setting a fitness standard, and they want to make sure that these spacecraft aren't dropping booster rockets on other peoples property. I would personally support a law that prohibited over-land launches altogether. I like NASA's concept...launch from the shore and do all of the actual climbing over the sea so that if something DOES go wrong you aren't raining rocket fuel on peoples homes.
I don't think so, I think they have been involved with government contracts for far to long. I like the way Rutan is doing it, start with a new company and screw the government.
I really think this calls for all new blood and people who don't have the we can't do this mentality.
Low Earth Orbit is, energy-wise, halfway to anywhere in the solar system.
When you consider nuclear propulsion, the options for growth really open up once you provide routine access to low earth orbit.
Except that nobody makes airliners launch over water for fear of raining jet fuel all over homes. And any jets do jettison fuel in an emergency.
While I think nuclear propulsion is probably the best way to get from orbit outward, I can just see the environmentalist and anti-nuke groups having hissy fits about having what amounts to having large numbers of nuclear weapons orbiting overhead. Not to mention your various antagonistic nations wondering whether the bombs were there to move spacecraft or to blackmail them.
It's CEO is the same man who founded the X-Prize, Peter Diamandis.
Jet fuel simply ignites and burns up in a crash. Many rocket fuels are highly explosive and corrosive, and a few become lethally toxic gas clouds. We're talking about the difference between firecrackers and dynamite here.
Rockets, especially at this stage of their evolution, are also inherently more unsafe...a fact that both the rocket designers and the government freely admit. In the early days of the airplane, many town and cities banned overflights for the exact same reason, and only repealed those laws when airplanes became more reliable.
Besides, for the better part of the next decade suborbital spaceflight is primarily going to be an industry built aroung giving joyrides to rich guys. We can accept a certain amount of shared risk from commercial airline travel because it is a neccesary part of modern society. This isn't, and I don't accept that we have to deal with the possibility of completely innocent people getting killed because of someones stupid joyrides. There is no valid reason why these guys can't launch over the coast.
Piffle! A ride in your car will be far more dangerous.
As long as you use a NERVA type engine, you don't have "bombs".
If you look carefully at the stock holders, there is one L. Long.... from Missouri I think.
But, without the money and experience generated by giving those "rich guys" "joy rides" the industry will be hard-pressed to continue development of other aspects of space travel.
Nuclear propulsion (other than Orion, which isn't viable at all for commercial space) has no more to do with bombs than nuclear power.
I'll admit, there are other nuclear-type propulsions out there (like the nuclear "tea kettle" that runs reaction mass past the heat exchangers of a nuclear pile). However, they require lofting a nuclear reactor into orbit, which will give the greenies apoplectic fits.
Jet fuel is basically... kerosene. Rocket fuel is basically ... kerosene. Of course all manner of things can be used as rocket fuel, but in almost any application likely to be commercialized you are talking about hydrogen or kerosene and oxygen. None of these is particularly toxic or explosive.
Rockets, especially at this stage of their evolution, are also inherently more unsafe...a fact that both the rocket designers and the government freely admit.
That has very much more to do with the NASA way of doing things than the Burt Rutan way of doing things. Besides, if you are talking about NASA reliability/safety rates, you better stop talking about passengers right now because no government agency on the planet is going to let you operate anything that has a 1 in 50 chance of going boom.
There is no valid reason why these guys can't launch over the coast.
That the FAA is viewing their New Mexico location as a non-issue, it is clear they don't share your doomsday outlook on the situation.
Once the pointy-headed ninnies at the FAA get involved innovation is toast. They are itching to get their incompetent, bureaucratic hands on this wonderful toy and regulate it into oblivion. They can't help it, it's their nature. I'm sorry, I just have personal problems with the FAA.
So you are deriving your viewpoint on what is commercially viable from a science fiction novel about a last ditch military effort to save earth from hostile aliens?
I didn't say it was mathematically or physically unviable, I said it is commercially unviable.
And, as for being commercially unviable, one could say that for nuclear propulsion in general. The masses have been brainwashed into thinking that nuclear anything is bad (power, irradiated food, whatnot). Commercial nuclear propulsion in space is stillborn because of this.
If he did, he was on controlled substances.
And, as for being commercially unviable, one could say that for nuclear propulsion in general. The masses have been brainwashed into thinking that nuclear anything is bad (power, irradiated food, whatnot). Commercial nuclear propulsion in space is stillborn because of this.
People only care when something is in their backyard, and space is not in their backyard. The greens have a hissy every time we launch a RTG, nobody pays any attention to them anymore.
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