Whitehorn said that it has taken governments four decades to get 500 people
to space. “We hope to do that in year one…and eventually be carrying up to
10,000 people a year by the later years of the project,” he said.
Furthermore, they're not going by any kind of NASA model. They're developing new technology for this and also a new kind of spaceport (although there are very few of those already, they pretty much all look like Cape Canaveral).
Spotlighting the natural beauty of New Mexico, Whitehorn said that spaceport facilities will be underground as much as possible, “actually hidden from the ground, but visible when you’re in space and coming back to the Earth.”
And this about the actual spacecraft they'll be using:
In a statement from Rutan’s Scaled Composites today, the group congratulated Virgin and New Mexico on their spaceport plans.
On October 4, 2004, Rutan’s SpaceShipOne rocketed into history, becoming the first private piloted spacecraft to exceed an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) twice in as many weeks, thus claiming the X Prize Foundation’s $10 million dollar Ansari X Prize. SpaceShipOne’s development was bankrolled by Microsoft’s co-founder, Paul Allen.
In July, Branson and Rutan announced their signing of an agreement to form The Spaceship Company to build a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceships and launch aircraft.
Under license from Paul Allen’s Mojave Aerospace Company, The Spaceship Company will adopt the “care-free reentry” concept and the “cantilevered-hybrid” rocket motor technology developed for the Ansari X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne.
Scaled’s development work on the commercial suborbital spaceliner design will be performed in its current Mojave, California facilities. The Spaceship Company production is also planned to take place at the Mojave Spaceport.
I think this is more than some curiosity. I think we're witnessing the birth of the second space age. Remember, once commercial interests get involved, as long as there's money to be made and people to get that money from, new areas of business can expand very quickly. Once spaceflight is a commercial industry, we're going to see a lot more development done very quickly. This may be a good or bad thing depending on what you believe, but corporations are probably going to put up space stations much more quickly than the ISS went up.
Hopefully, all of humankind stands to benefit from commercial space development, and this is the first step in that direction.
5 comments:
Good story. My father works for Scaled and was heavily involved in SS1's testing and development. It's exciting to hear from him about upcoming projects such as the Global Flyer and Virgin Galactic development. I think NASA's space strategy has become both wasteful and stagnant at this point, and it's time to start looking towards private industry to move space exploration forward.
That's quite an incorrect characterization of my stance. I don't generally favor government control of industries, but I also don't favor complete deregulation of industry. Of course businessess have to take the lead in development of a new marketplace, while the government goes along to oversee things.
I'm not calling for completely unregulated development. I don't want to see 100-mile long ad banners floating through the sky and I don't want corporations to put a bunch of junk in orbit and let it be everyone else's problem. Nor do I want corporations to think that they can "own" space simply by going out there and claiming it. All of this will require legislation and worldwide cooperation.
I think you've misunderstood my point of view because I don't subscribe to the idea that market forces are the best way to regulate industry in every case. It's not as if that makes me some kind of communist. For example, to restate an earlier argument of mine, legislation would be the best way to manage these SUVs that overburden the system. You can't always leave that up to the consumer, because while they may come to the right conclusion in 20 years, it's better for us to be doing the more practical thing now.
And what's wrong with space exploitation for now? It'll be a natural market force to drive costs down for launching cargo into space. That's always been seen as the major barrier to more commercial space development. And then it gets into the natural business cycle: the more units sold, the cheaper you can sell it for. It opens up the way to a lot of new things.
Thanks for the clarification. So are you saying you don't favor commercial development of space resources? Is it that you think the traditional approach is the most practical one?
Just to weigh in with my opinion, like Nat-Wu I've never been per se in favor of regulation or government control of certain types of operations (like welfare.) For me it's more a matter of who's going to do it so that the end matches up with the purpose of the program the best. I think when you consider privitization in general, there are some things that industry can do better than government, and vice versa. I think definitely think space exploration is one of them. For me it comes down to a matter of who the private company feels their obligation is towars. When you privatize a public program, the duty owed changes from government to private citizen, to private company offering services to the government. That's not the best way to make sure that the private citizen's interest is met; the only chance they have for recourse for wrong-doing (or just bad service) is to turn to the government, which then must turn around and influence the company that is saving it money. Contrast that to space exploration, where the company's duty is going to lie essentially with whoever's paying it the money to take their goods or people into space. In those circumstances I think the market functions efficiently, as both buyer and seller have the most direct influence over each other.
Oh I definitely agree with you on that point, Whitey. I do favor close and severe scrutiny by the government of this venture. Still, I think commercial development is the only way that anything significant is going to be accomplished in the field of space development (at least at anything faster than a glacial pace). We'll have to let them take some risks, but hopefully the government will be there to make sure it doesn't result in spaceplanes falling out of the sky (too often). You can sort of parallel this to the airline industry, where you can obviously make a case that government oversight is absolutely necessary, but at the same time government interference may keep the industry from operating naturally and profitably. In short, I'd rather we have Southwest as the model than American Airlines.
As far as your concern that this industry really won't be anything other than a novelty for the rich, it's possible, but I'd like to think that it could parallel other novelty developments. For example, VHS players(and tapes) once cost hundreds of dollars. Those were designed with luxury entertainment and educational institutions in mind. The initial cost was way out of bounds of what the average person could afford, but the popularity of the technology brought prices crashing down rather quickly. Now obviously this is not going to be exactly the same as that case; however, there is another reason to believe it could be a successful industry which caters to the general community. Sub-orbital flights could also be a much cheaper and more efficient way to travel around the world, thus this could become a standard method of travel for long distances. If that was the case, I think we can easily see the rise of a major industry. I'm sure there would be plenty of people (who aren't rich) who would pay for reasonable ticket prices on a spaceplane which could cut an 18 hour flight down to 2. The military would love to be able to do that without having to pour billions into research and technology and then building everything by themselves. They'd be able to buy commercial spaceplanes.
All I'm saying is that we do have some good reasons to think that this could be the wave of the future and not a mere footnote in the history of space exploration. Even being realistic about it, I think we have reason for optimism.
The last factor is the unknown. People will always come up with ways to use a resource that the original developers never thought of (ie. the internet). Who knows where this development could lead us?
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