Large New World Discovered Beyond Neptune

[Bandit LOAF]

The way I see it, here's what's gonna happen. Now that somebody's won the X-Prize, over the next few years we'll see the winner of the X-Prize trying to figure out how to bring the costs down so as to allow people-who-are-rich-but-not-millionaires to afford orbital tourist flights. In the meantime, someone will propose a new prize (for sake of argument, we'll call it the M-Prize) for the first private ship to orbit the moon. Once somebody wins that, we'll be all set for new manned moon landings, and beyond that... Mars awaits. Of course, this won't happen overnight, it'll take many years.

The X-Prize was grand for headlines and such... but people don't seem to realize that putting something into orbit is a substantially different task from a suborbital flight. NASA made swapping a Redstone for an Atlas look easy way back when -- but there's no such fundamental plan for improvement built into Spaceshipone. The X-Prize is much more analagous to the X-15 project than it is Mercury. Getting a private manned spacecraft into orbit is going to take a lot of money and a lot of time.

There's also no real evidence that space tourism by the semi-rich is a remotely substainable industry. For all the ranting about how great the X-Prize is for private citizens, it's not overly special -- companies have been perfectly able to put whatever they want in orbit on a commercial basis. If there was a profit to be made by putting men into orbit then a company like Boeing could do it easily -- as it is there's only money from commercial satellites and the like.

And meanwhile, the government? Well, though I hope to be proven wrong, I get the impression that in fifteen years' time, nobody will remember that the US government committed itself to getting to Mars in that timespan. Not unless the Chinese decide to try it...

Well, yes and no. On one hand it's entirely likely that NASA will have its budget cut at some future date when the political climate changes... but on the other hand the 'new vision for space exploration' *is* different than previous such declarations in that it has actually become the agencies policy. It's unlikely that a future president will have the interest or the clout to focus NASA on Earth sciences again instead of going to Mars... and until that happens you have a large government agency whose job is to put men on the moon and Mars.

(I'd also wait to see about the Chinese. They certainly like to talk about how grand their man in space program is... but so far all they've managed is a single flight using a Soyuz-copy -- and that was two years ago. We like to set China up as the big bad agressor nation following in the Soviet Union's footsteps for the 21st century, and while no one would like for that to be the case more than they would, there's a lot of infrastructure issues that prevent it from ever being true.)

 

[Quarto]

The X-Prize was grand for headlines and such... but people don't seem to realize that putting something into orbit is a substantially different task from a suborbital flight.)

Yeah, I know. But headlines are really what's needed in this case, I believe. One thing the X-Prize has demonstrated is that there's plenty of eccentric millionaires out there willing to waste twenty or thirty million dollars just to get a ten million dollar prize. These are the people whose attention we need to focus on space - because indeed, the idea of true space tourism is so risky that no big company would be able to try it (companies like Boeing would simply have no way to justify the risk to their shareholders). It may well be that this effort will ultimately prove futile - but it certainly helps to keep the money flowing, and the public's attention on the space programme far better than shooting a probe into a comet does.

 

[Happy Camper]

Meh, I really don't think anything vaugely affordable or comfortable will be developed in my lifetime... unless I get crygenically frozen, which as regualr forum browsers will know has now been done.

 

[Maj.Striker]

One thing the X-Prize has demonstrated is that there's plenty of eccentric millionaires out there willing to waste twenty or thirty million dollars just to get a ten million dollar prize. These are the people whose attention we need to focus on space

Haha...yes, let's leave the development of space up to the crazy people with lots of money. I understand your point, it just sounds funny.

 

[ChrisReid]

How the hell did we get so far off topic?

 

[Death]

I don't know, but it's fixed now.

And it'd better stay fixed, as in take the "geneticly handicapped" stuff elsewhere.