I have watched/listened to the various news stories about billionaires building private spaceships. (Spaceship 1 etc). The stories all seem to assume that these vehicles are just a couple of years from flying up to the space station for the weekend. I don’t understand.
My definition of a spaceship is a vehicle that can reach earth orbit (and orbital speed) and return.
Are there any private programs that are working toward this goal? Is there something wrong with my definition?
I am just puzzled by the hype. As I understand only two organizations have ever even tried to build a spaceship-NASA and the Soviet Space Program. Both succeeded at the cost of many billions. (The chinese spacecraft is a heavily modified Soviet design). Is anyone else seriously working toward a spacecraft (as defined above)? I know ESA is considering a manned design, but as far as I know is not planning on building even a prototype at this time.
If there are private organizations working toward a spaceship design, how are they planning to handle reentry?
Your objections are the same ones I’ve been spouting. Forget about touristing into the upper atmosphere. Return somebody from orbit and then I’ll be impressed.
I don’t expect to be impressed for a very long time.
There are people thinking about orbital flight. There is a $50 million competition going on right now for a private, reusable orbital space vehicle called the America’s Space Prize. The deadline for the prize is January 2010.
You are right that getting all the way to orbit is a more than a few magnitudes more difficult than the SpaceShipOne style suborbital flight which won the Ansari X-Prize a few years back. I’d be fairly comfortable in betting against anyone claiming the prize by the deadline. It looks as if Rutan’s group seens more concerned with getting “Virgin Galactic” up and running than pushing orbital flight at the moment, plus they had that nasty rocket motor accident earlier this year.
The good people at SpaceX seem very, very serious about the venture. Their founder (Elon Musk) co-founded PayPal (i.e., he’s a billionaire) and they’re not messing around with suborbital. I read a few interviews with Musk, who comes across as both driven to succeed, yet realistic about the problems.
As much as I like Bert Rutan - I went to see SpaceShipOne’s maiden flight into space - he builds composite airplanes that maneuver at the edge of space. Musk wants to build heavy lift vehicles.
OK, SpaceX wants to get to orbit. It is nice to hear that Mr. Musk is realistic about the problems. So… what are they doing that NASA hasn’t tried 20 years ago?
Put the entire program on a cost/revenue basis rather than a “achieve the mission at any price” basis. The government space programs have been part of the military-aerospace establishment since birth, and it shows. I don’t doubt that many early investors will lose big money, just as lots of airplane manufacturers came and went in the early days of aviation. But eventually someone will come up with the right concept; and even if it’s only a luxury for millionaires at first, it will get improved as long as someone can make a profit by doing so.
Yea, I can’t really tell what the difference is between SpaceShipOne and the X-15 rocket planes the airforce (err, or NASA, I forget) were flying in the 50’s. I imagine that even a successful commercial program to build an orbital spacecraft will also end up retracing NASA’s path and end up with a rocket launched ship thats more or less similar to what NASA’s already done.
Which raises the question of why the billionaires funding these things just don’t pay Lockheed Martin to alter one of the designs they already have experience building and flying, rather then reconstructing more or less the same thing from the ground up. It seems like it would be a lot more cost efficent and lead to the same results.
I wonder whether space tourism efforts can hope to show the sort of safety and reliability needed for them to work long-term. (They’ll need to be a lot better than the Shuttle.) It will be telling to see what happens if (when?) a serious accident occurs.
So by “spaceship” you mean a manned orbital spacecraft? The previously mentioned SpaceX is working on unmanned orbital launchers. I don’t know of any serious privately-funded efforts to build a manned orbital spacecraft. Scaled Composites says the SpaceShipThree would be orbital, but that’s only after (and if) SpaceShipTwo is successful.
If you’re including unmanned - most of the launchers are designed and built by private companies such as Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital Sciences, Arianespace, etc. Some are based on government projects, but I believe at least the Orbital Sciences Pegasus was developed commercially.
Actually even the Space Shuttle orbiter is built by Boeing and Lockheed. I suspect they can build an orbital spaceship for any customer who wants to order one.
Flipping through wiki articles, it looks like even the most reliable current space launch systems have failure rates of a few percent. And these are systems that have gone through several generations of development and fine-tuning, I imagine a new system would have to go through a period of higher failure rates before it even got to that level. And as you suggest, it would be hard for a nascent space tourism industry to recover from even one boatload of billionaires getting blown up. Of course there will be a few people willing to take the risk, but I think your potential pool of tourists will shrink quickly if there is a 1 in 100 chance of death with each trip.
This makes me even more convinced that if a space tourism industry does develop, it will have to use a system that has already been tested and tweaked by a private company or gov’t that used it to launch either unmanned satellites or gov’t employed astronauts, rather then come up with a relatively untested new system from scratch.
We’ve been in space for half a century and we still have a failure rate of a few percent.
Is it possible that there is no way to beat those records and anyone going up will just need their lucky rabbit’s foot?
On a similar note… Airplanes. A known failure rate. Helicopters, a known failure rate. Cars… A known percentage of the population will die in an accident.
All of these are less than one percent. But none are going into space.
What if one or two percent of going round the Earth is just the one in a million of flying to Orlando to N.Y.?
I think that the chances of becoming Popsicle Man on your way up to Mount Everest are grimmer than that, yet still there doesn´t seem to be a shortage of climbers aiming for that summit.
I’m having deja vou here (I’m not looking for the accents… sorry).
I vaguely remember answering a question to something like the above post (r.e. Everest).
There’s actually groups that climb Everest to pick up trash left by tourist climbers. And I know of someone who climbed Everest in the 80s… I believe. A big hiker nut… Not exactly the richest guy on the block… So its not like its exclusive, expensive, or even the most dangerous thing ever (I know I wouldn’t risk my life to go pick up cans of coke from the base station all the way to summit… Ok… I know its O2 tanks… but cans of coke are a funnier idea).
Actually thought about that, but I can’t find any percentages on the chance of dying on Everest per attempted ascent. All the sites I can find give the chance per successful ascent, which I think is somewhat meaningless since I vaguely recall that most attempts don’t reach the summit.
In anycase, I think your right that there are people who will risk it, but the number of people that can drop the money that will be necessary to book a seat is small to start with, and after you take away the people that aren’t willing to endure a 1 in a hundred chance of firey death, I think you’re left with a pretty small pool of folks.
And the number of people that attempt Everest per year isn’t that big. A space tourism agency will need to recoup billions of dollars in initial investment before they can turn a profit, I don’t think the thing will stay solvent for very long if the just send up a handfull of customers a year.
Sorta wandering out of GQ territory anyways, though its an interesting thread to continue in GD. I’d say the factual answer to the OP is that while several companies have expressed a vague intention to build some sort of commercial orbiting spacecraft (notably Spaceshipthree) no one has gone so far as to indicate they have any concrete plan for such a craft.
The New York Times cited a surprisingly detailed study on this very thing, as a matter of fact. It says that 1.5% of all climbers die, and 5% of those who are 60 years of age or older, a group that counts for 4% of climbers.
This isn’t too far off from space shuttle fatality rates, which are about 2% to 4%.
20 years ago NASA was still locked into the “winged orbiter” paradigm - they’re just now trying to break out of it. SpaceX is, if anything, more akin to NASA 40 years ago - liquid-fuel rockets, hopefully culminating in manned orbital launch capacity using a capsule w. ablative heatshields for reentry and parachutes for landing.
SpaceX are using rocket engines (the Merlin and the Kestrel) that have been designed from scratch within the last few years, with a few neat features - the ability to be recovered from a splashdown and reused among them, along with a design with a low number of components to break.
And they hope to offer to put a 3/4 ton payload into LEO for $7M in two years, which is not too shabby. If their design scales as well as they plan, they’ll be able to develop reasonably cheap and reliable capacity both for heavy payloads and higher orbits.
In all fairness, SpaceX is working on a capsule - the Dragon - which they expect to man-rate eventually. They’re serious enough that NASA has signed a contract for the capsule to be developed as a supply vehicle for the ISS.
Scaled Composites, OTOH, will need to step up their game in a serious way if they want to go orbital.
