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Not that a suborbital trip wouldn't be cool, but it'd be so short (planned maximum altitude of 70,000 feet, with six minutes of weightlessness)... Time in orbit is interesting to me, but they're not offering that for a price less than, what, 20 million dollars?

For $200,000 I have to ask myself what else I could buy. So do I want six minutes of weightlessness more than I want to travel anywhere in the world for three or four weeks every year for the rest of my life? Probably not.

Edit: 70km, not 70,000 ft. My bad.

there is a lot more I can do with 200k than a wimpy trip to (really, 70k?, I think it is way higher. but anything sub orbital is weak).

BUT if i HAD an extra 200k, as in I had hundreds of millions of dollars, sure.

The whole concept is fascinating and will be interesting to see how far it progresses, don't ya think?

To paraphrase Branson he said that he is surprised that NASA didn't think of it. Do you think we will ever see a time when NASA sells trips into orbit?

How realistic is Branson's dream of a hotel in space?

With business jets flying at 60 thousand feet now this is merely a carnival ride with a parabolic arc that gives the rider the feeling of weightlessness. It is not up into micro-gravity. Just a zero-G parlor trick. No Thanx.

jon

 
There are a number of small companies playing with some very interesting projects. There's a company called Armadillo playing with Nasa doing a lot of the x project luner lander type stuff. I've been out there watching their thing fly. Coolest toys I've ever seen in my life.

Some of these little high altitude vehicals do look interesting, not so much for what they are now but for what they could one day be. There was some really cool shit going on in the old x program. A lot of people think they should have gone forwards with it rather then pouring all there funds into Mercury and the later programs.

This might be a chance to take another look down that path. Tourest in space? no. But an inexspencive orbital vehical? If you could put up a cheep satalite you could make a mint. How about mixed fuel long haul jets? A large lear jet that would breath air down low and burn a rocket to push it over a suborbital bump to cross the atlantic?

I wouldn't compleatly dismiss these ideas. If you want an example people used to pay the money to fly on the concord.

Lee

Armadillo Aerospace was started by John Carmack, the inventor of the quake video engine that is now the basis of many video games. He is working on terrestrial Apollo lunar-type ships to go to about 100 km. The testing so far has only resulted in about 100 feet, not 100 km. It's a tough project.

The flights that were managed by Spaceship 1 are a long way from launching a satellite. I'm not sure most people appreciate how far...

For the space shuttle in orbit, 90% (plus or minus a few percent) of the energy that's been added since it was on the ground is kinetic energy (due to motion). 10% is potential energy (due to altitude). Spaceship 1 arrives at just 100k, about three times lower than the space shuttle orbits, with very little kinetic energy. All told, that means that it'd take about 30 times as much energy to put Spaceship 1 in orbit. Spaceship 1 is as close to launching a satellite of any kind as a Cessna tottering along at 3,000 feet is to being suborbital.

Edit: Screwed up the numbers the first time through and figured it at just 10 times as hard.

 
Yes, but look at what a tiney little pos it is. Let's talk instead about some of the later X planes. Even those were basically just proof of concept vehicals testing things like dual control modes. Makeing that transition from atmospheric control surfaces to reaction jets and back. But I seem to recall they had early plans for a much larger plane with a large booster that could make longer flights even orbit. The funding went else where. I'm laying here in bed and can't recall the details. Maybe one of you has a better memory.

Lee

[ACK! Sorry -- altitude for Virgin Galactic's flights will be 70 km, not 70,000 feet, of course. Didn't make the same mistake in the rest of my numbers, so that all holds.]


I'm not saying that SS1 isn't a great achievement -- just that it's really, really premature to start talking cheap satellite launches. People often go on about how NASA is doing a horribly inefficient job of putting stuff in space, but the fact is that underneath any inefficiencies (of which there may be many) there's a big chunk of "just hard to do".

As far as the X-planes go, I've never been clear on why success in one type of "hard to do" is so often taken as evidence that we'll eventually manage to crack any particular, very different, challenge.


I suspect the project you have in mind is the X-30, which was scrapped in part due to persistent technical problems.

Space adventures pays ME to go to space.
(not really, but close)