Merry Stranger Day!!
Here is your Stranger Gift. I went with the traditional wrappings of orange & purple, I don’t like how the hipsters are using brown & pink. Over here we have maple nog & jellyfish stuffing, help yourselves. 
…d&r…
No one is saying never, just right now and for the foreseeable future there is no need.
Also what would military personal be doing that can’t be done easier & cheaper with satellites and ICBMs?
Repairing the on board computer as the astronauts did on the space station this morning.
I offer this not as argument, but as an timely example of Elon Musks “bold talk” relating to private involvement in space exploration. In this interview, he talks about using a Dragon (launched by Falcon Heavy) for a potential unmanned mission to Mars. Supposedly it could land on Mars with several tons of payload. Imagine what you could do with a couple Mars Science Laboratory rovers and another ton of stationary instruments…
And what is the ISS doing that can’t be done easier and cheaper with unmanned spacecraft?
Doing science experiments with someone to observe and fix them.
Photography with someone to fix cameras.
There seems to be a theme here. Just insert it for your next question. 
And if someone had mentioned naming a holiday after Burt Rutan then you would probably have some sort of point…or something. I would say that if someone figured out how to get to America from Spain and back again for an order of magnitude or less money and resources than it took Columbus within 50 years of his trip then, while they probably wouldn’t have had a holiday named after then it still would have been ‘pretty impressive’…
-XT
Just launch twice as many experiments and cameras and computers, so you don’t care if they break occasionally. It’s still cheaper than launching humans.
I’ve often wondered what happens to one of those drones if a duck flies through the windshield.
Maybe China, Japan or India might take over space exploration as they all have space projects; and would appear to be less squeamish about risks, and more hungry for the profits/resources( and lets face it, the power over human affairs) that are likely to be accrued in due course from this.
Meh. From a space enthusiast position, any means of getting “to space” might be impressive, but the reality is that the technologies demonstrated by Space Ship One aren’t extensible to orbital flight, or even antipodal flight (ballistic hypersonic trajectories from point to point). The only use for it is as a manned sounding rocket (of which I haven’t seen any particular demand) or space tourism (the market for which is vastly overstated). I was more interested in vehicles such as the now-defunct Rocketplane Kistler K-1, or the quietly progressing Blue Origin New Shepherd, which actually advance the state of the art and provide capabilities that can be scaled up.
Actually, the mission costs allocation of manned missions versus unmanned is generally considered to be a ratio of somewhere between 50:1 and 100:1. In other words. 98-99% of the cost of a manned mission is just keeping the astronauts alive and bringing them back. The other 1-2% is the cost of getting equipment or experiments to do anything of actual scientific value.
Stranger
Yes, but if someone where near Spirit with a jack…
Plant.
Probably never 
we’ve become a bunch of absolute wusses
I don’t want to sound too down on that Virgin Flight. The fact that it was done with private money was cool, but only in the ‘small picture’ sense. Sure, an eccentric billionaire can pay to put together a team of scientists, engineers, and support staff and pull off a successful sub-orbital flight.
But it was still just a one-off ‘stunt’. It was not a ‘space program’, nor the beginnings of one, nor the groundwork for (a practical) one, nor did it do or use anything different or revolutionary from how NASA did it a half century ago. The reason it was so much cheaper is because, well, what you saw was it! There weren’t factories across the country tooling up to churn out a couple dozen more of those things. And there never could have been because even Branson could not have afforded that.
Any true ‘manned space program’ is still going to be an unbelievably exorbitantly expensive undertaking, and it is all so still in its infancy that profit margins DO NOT EXIST! Not for manned missions. And, baring any unforeseen technological breakthrough, they won’t in any of our lifetimes.
Maybe, just maybe, you could build a reliable, safe enough ‘space tourism’ orbital vehicle, but to recoup all your R&D and ever see a profit you’d have to fly a couple dozen (flawless) missions each packed with at least a dozen or two billionaire passengers paying $250 million per ticket. Even then you’d be lucky to break even…
Does that include Gemini and Mercury, which didn’t do much except keep the astronauts alive and learn about rendezvous?
Roughly speaking, yes. Consider: the cost of the Gemini program, which used the purpose-built Titan II Gemini Launch Vehicle (GLV) containing numerous safety and redundancy features not found in the standard Titan 23G space launch vehicle, and the Gemini spacecraft (consisting of the Equipment Module and Command/Reentry module). There were two (2) unmanned Gemini flights and ten (10) manned flights, at a program cost of about $26B in 1994 dollars, or roughly $2.6B dollars per manned launch amortized over the program. (I’m discounting the unmanned launches as they are part of the cost of developing and verifying the system for the used of manned launches with no ancillary scientific or mission goals.) The Clementine mission, launched in 1994, cost an estimated $80 million dollars including spacecraft development and construction and launch/operation costs of the Titan 23G vehicle. (I selected Clementine in particular because like Gemini it focused on using development and improvement of largely heritage technology to assess the limits of technical capability and develop information for future missions.)
This gives a ratio of about 32:1 on a per mission cost, which is somewhat less than the range 50:1-100:1 I cited before. However, consider that the longest Gemini mission was of 14 day duration (Gemini VII) and the greatest distance it travelled from the Earth’s surface was about 740 nmi (Gemini XI). Clementine travelled to and entered orbit around the Moon and operated for a total mission duration of 115 days, longer that the sum total of all man-days of Project Gemini (~81 man-days of operation), so in terms of normalized mission duration of operational payload (assuming that the Clementine spacecraft is equivalent to one astronaut), we have a ratio of about 460:1. Even if we restrict the credit to Clementine to just the actual scientific portion of the mission of about two months, we still get a ratio of about 240:1. In terms of scientific knowledge, Gemini gave us a very modest amount of data about the space environment and space physiology of humans beings in free-fall. Clementine gave revolutionary insight into Lunar geology and highly detailed cartography. There is scarcely even a comparison on a per-capita information basis for return on the dollar.
I like stories about people flying around in space committing heroic deeds as much as the next person. Certainly, humans are easier to relate to than robotic probes and rovers. But the reality is that it takes an extraordinary level of effort to place human beings in space with any acceptable degree of safety, and even more to sustain presence indefinitely. Any long term human space mission, like sending astronauts to Mars or another planet, will require simulating terrestrial conditions including simulated gravity, normal atmosphere, protection from radiation, et cetera, that is vastly beyond the current state of the art. Stories like Star Trek are almost pure fantasy in terms of the technology and representation of what future human space travel could be like.
Stranger
Forgive me, but what to Gemini and Mercury have to do with Star Trek?
Sarcasm aside, New Mexico is wasting aboatload of money.
[moderating]
Since this calls for conjecture, I’ve moved it from GQ to IMHO.
[/moderating]
I will take that bet, sir! Ten years! Soil and waters, for the heck of it, I’m not aware of any realistic sea-launch plans at the moment, but it’s worth mentioning.
The last (and as far as I am aware) only proposed sea-based space launch vehicle large enough to carry a manned payload was the Robert Truax designed Sea Dragon (part of the SEA LAunched Rocket or SEALAR concept). The SEALAR was a very interesting concept that, among other things, offered dramatically lower costs for launch processing and facilities; what it gave up in propulsive efficiency (being essentially a pressure-fed Big Dumb Booster for both the launch stage and upper stage) it gained back in mechanical simplicity, raw thrust, and the ability to launch from virtually any latitude and azimuth it could be towed to, and achieved high trajectory so readily that it was easy to assure that nearly all of powered flight would provide a land track over broad ocean area (minimum hazard).
By not requiring a fixed launch platform it reduced much of the support costs that are associated with launch facilities, though how well that would work for a manned mission is questionable, and it would require both high reliability and the ability to remotely monitor the pre-launch condition of the vehicle. In the pre-TDRSS/INMERSAT era, you would have to have a series of ground- and sea-based range tracking stations to assure telemetry and comms. Still, a TRW study of the concept validated the prospective launch costs, which were on the order of a US$100 (~1962) per kg to LEO. The Sea Dragon got circle-files as part of a descope of NASA future programs.
I wouldn’t take Hyperelastic’s bet as stated, as I would say that there is at least a break-even chance that SpaceX will launch a manned mission on the F9/Dragon, whether at the behest of NASA or for their own publicity. I question that it will be cheaper than launch systems based upon existing launch vehicles that are capable of lofting a CEV-type system to LEO. I also suspect that their effort will not meet the same degree of rigor with regard to reliability and safety as required by current specifications. I personally wouldn’t want to ride in the vehicle for any amount of money, much less pay for a ride, until they demonstrate a far better record of success than they have to date.
Stranger