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Subscribe to RSSVirgin Galactic has released a video that tries to put its suborbital spaceflight experience into a wider historical context — wide enough to encompass the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, John F. Kennedy's "We Choose to Go to the Moon" speech and the whole Apollo moon effort. Oh, and you also get to go to company founder Richard Branson's Caribbean island resort!
You could call this a nine-minute history of the commercialization of space, or a nine-minute commercial. Either way, selling $200,000 tourist packages for quick trips to outer space represents one not-so-small step toward opening up the final frontier to regular folks.
So when will the first suborbital space tourists fly? That's still an open question, but flight tests of the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane and its White Knight Two mothership have been under way for some time already. On Monday, White Knight Two took to the air for the first time since last month's landing-gear glitch. The next big step will be to drop SpaceShipTwo into the air for its first glide. The best guess is that Virgin Galactic's first passengers will get on board in New Mexico in 2012 or so.
That's in accordance with the two-year rule for future spaceflight. 2012 is also the year when Armadillo Aerospace and XCOR Aerospace could be offering suborbital rides, and when Blue Origin could be flying researchers and their experiments into space. How firm will those timelines be? Ask me again in 2012.
This week's announcement about a deal between the Boeing Co. and Space Adventures sets a longer time frame for orbital passenger service. 2015 is the current "no-earlier-than" date — not only for Boeing's spaceship, but for Bigelow Aerospace's commercial space stations as well. By that time the Russians could be back in the space-passenger business as well. Other potential players in the orbital passenger market include SpaceX, Orbital Sciences and Sierra Nevada — but right now those companies don't seem to be as focused on human spaceflight as Boeing is. (If I hear anything different, I'll let you know.)
Several other recent developments have hinted at the shape of spaceflight to come, at least as far as NASA is concerned:
• NASA has extended Boeing's engineering contract for the International Space Station through 2015, at a projected cost of $1.24 billion over five years. Boeing's Joy Bryant is quoted as saying the company's expertise can "set the stage to enable ISS operations until 2020, and potentially extend operations through 2028." That last date would imply a 20-year lifetime for the station, from the launching of the first pieces to the downing of the last hulk. In comparison, Russia's Mir space station lasted 15 years, from 1986 to 2001.
• Four companies are listed today in NASA's announcement of an umbrella contract covering up to $15 billion in launch services over the next 10 years: Lockheed Martin, United Launch Services, Orbital Sciences and SpaceX.
• The biggest question hanging over NASA's human spaceflight program relates to which vision for the program's future will prevail, at least for the coming fiscal year. It's clear that President Barack Obama's original plan won't make it through Congress, so it seems to be a choice between the Senate's version of the NASA authorization bill and the House's version. The Senate version is seen as friendlier to commercial space ventures (and the space agency's view as well), but this report from The Huntsville Times gives more exposure to the House version's backers.
• If this is the sort of thing that floats your rocket-powered boat, join me and host Jay Ackroyd tonight at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT/SLT) on "Virtually Speaking," which is being simulcast on Second Life and BlogTalkRadio. We'll be talking about the future of NASA. Maybe you can even set me straight on what kind of future that will be....
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I still think Mr. Branson has wildly overestimated the market. There just aren't that many willing to spend that much money for a half hour thrill ride, and even fewer willing to do it more than once. The ticket cost more than most people pay for a new house!
I disagree. I think you see the world and the people from a very poor perspective, perhaps because you are from low middle class. See i am from a post-communist Central European country with a population of ten million people and I see the way. Here are a lot of people who could afford it.
Lets take an example. The 200 000 dollars are like an expensive sports car, in this case an experience of a lifetime. Here goes a very conservative calculation. I take 100 people who could buy the ticket from the 10 million. The world has more than 6 billion people. That makes 60 000 paying customers for the whole planet. Multiply it with the ticket price (200 000 x 60 000 = 12 000 000 000) and the result is an incredible big number of potential income.
And this calculation is very very conservative. See the number how many dollar millionaires are living on the planet. In the whole world there are 8.7 million millionaires. (see link below after a swift google search) I took only less than 0,7% who would buy the ticket in my example.
I think there is a huge market waiting out there for the first successful flights.
http://ww-success.com/blog/index.php/2006/10/16/millionaires-in-the-world/
I think it is great that more people will have access to space, even if it has to be on a propellant based, reaction propulsion technology. But if we really want to "Visualize future spaceflight", spaceflight that is truly accessible to the masses, we must go a different route: antigravity.
Fortunately, people are beginning to take this idea more seriously. Check the reviews on the new book, Frontiers of Propulsion Science, Marc G. Millis (Editor), Eric W. Davis (Editor), 2009. There is still a giggle factor confronting this subject, but more and more scientists and engineers are taking it seriously.
When I was gathering material for an article on hyperspace navigation, I thought the whole presentation about faster-than-light spacecraft nagivation would just be a rehash of Special and General Relativity. But that turned out not to be the case. Einstein covered only half of the problem. His equations did not include the effect of three dimensions of time, nor the apparent inverse relationship between space and time, nor the increasingly non-local character of "space" at speeds comparable to light. All that means that "space" is not really what we think it is, and that travel to the stars should be much, much easier than is commonly believed.
One thing I noticed is that Einstein's cosmological constant implies an expanding universe. The "force" of this expansion operates contrary to gravity. Gravity moves things together, and the expansion moves them apart. But gravitation is distance dependent, and the expansion is not. This necessarily implies a distance where the two are at equilibrium--a distance I call the "gravipause". For stars it is apparently a few light years; for galaxies it is apparently a few million light years. Inside the gravipause objects come together and gravitational motion is three-dimensional (1/d^2 intensity), but beyond the gravipause things move apart and gravity is two dimensional (1/d intensity). The dimensional change is embedded in the calculation of the Hubble constant, but it also implies that the Hubble constant is NOT a universal constant. It would be dependent on the mass of the system which is being used as a basis by the observer. An observer in a globular cluster would get a different number than an observer in a galaxy. I am kind of dumbfounded that the scientific community has not noticed this, especially with all the renewed interest in Einstein's cosmological constant.
There is clearly a lot of work to be done on understanding the real nature of space and time, and its implications both for "propellantless propulsion" (a.k.a. antigravity) and faster-than-light spacetravel. Some people will have the "right stuff" to handle this problem (and the mental chaos that goes with it) and some won't. For those who can, it will be a fascinating and inspirational journey, probably even more exciting than today's space flights.
Links:
http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Fraser_NatureOfTime.pdf
http://scripturalphysics.org/4v4a/ADVPROP.html#MotionCancellers
http://scripturalphysics.org/4v4a/ADVPROP.html#TheSpeedOfGravity
http://scripturalphysics.org/4v4a/ADVPROP.html#SpeedOfElectricFields
Thanks for the updates, Alan. These are exciting times, even though it seems slow to those of us eagerly waiting. 100 years from now I'm sure it will all seem to have come together quickly.
Get in line next to the line for the perpetual motion machine.....
"That last date [2028] would imply a 20-year lifetime for the station, from the launching of the first pieces to the downing of the last hulk."
Ummm... 30 years, not 20. Russia orbited the first piece, the Zarya module, in late 1998, followed quickly by NASA's Unity module.
There really is no other future of manned space flight other than travelling outside of earth orbit to destinations like near-earth asteroids, Mars, or even Jupiter and its moons. But this kind of mission is too large for one country such as the US to carry out by itself. At this point, we have almost completed the construction of the largest man-made orbiting structure in history with the help of several other nations with the ISS. This kind of international effort is what is necessary, and this is what the Obama administration should be pushing. The time is right to propose a new international organization that will oversee the ISS as well as an all-out international effort to eventually send men to Mars and beyond.
You people aren't going anywhere. The government will never allow it. You can't even fly to Boston without extensive searches & queries. All for your protection of course. Do you honestly think that they will EVER allow you or your children to leave this planet without passports, visas, or whatever new permission slips they decide to issue? Quit dreaming and get back to work. If, When, or Until we get the government chained down like the slave it should be, we will be the ones in chains. Don't ever forget it.
pahalik, apart from the fact that the US has no monopoly on the technology, so what if there's the same security as in commercial aviation? You still get where you want to go, right?
Actually though, space may compare to maritime travel than aviation, in the long run. Consider how much trafficking in drugs and people exists already, and then tell me how sure you are that no one will find a way...