X-Prize flight Monday

M

Meson

Swabbie
Banned
Just so you know, there is an X-Prize flight this Monday at 9 am EST. If the flight is succesful, we would offically have private space travel. Some companies are already trying to buy licenses for the craft design.

According to the cable network's promos, the Science Channel is going to air the launch live.
 
The main site says that this is SS1's second test flight. This is not really true since SS1 had been flown into space once before this most recent flight. However it was not carrying the weight equivalent of two passengers necessary to qualify for an X-prize flight. So Monday's flight will be the third test flight, but the second X-prize flight.
 
To be fair, it still is newsworthy to do it without throwing umpteen zillion governent dollars at it, and Mercury capsules kinda lacked as far as the ability to recycle them went.
 
I think LOAF might be talking about the X-15 flights which did leave the earth's atmosphere several times.

What makes the SS1 so special is that it is privately funded and privately piloted and making repeated successful space flights (2 at this time, hopefully 3 in just a few hours)
 
The idea's not new, and I guess more importantly this isn't feasible space flight in the way that it can get useful amounts of payload into the orbit.

Until heavy lifting allows payloads into at least geo-synch orbit you're not gonna see any major developments up there aside from tourism.
 
there is a first step to everything. Charles Lindberg (he seems to be a popular allusion lately) couldn't have carried passengers or cargo with him when he crossed the Atlantic, nor could his plane have been improved much upon to do so. However, what he did was open minds and prove that it was possible for a normal person to perform the seemingly impossible.

Spaceship one wasn't built to carry large loads (although it can carry 3 people totaling ~600 lb), it was built to make it to space and land safely, which is what it has done twice now. Other private sectors will do the job of building vehicles that can carry large amounts of passengers and/or cargo into suborbital flight and land safely. Then maybe some day we or our descendants will see private orbital flights and privately launched satellites.
 
I'm interested in Spaceship 1's flight attempts because as someone mentioned they are privately funded (a huge step towards a strong space outreach), but I'm far more interested in the other competitors in the contest since many of them are now setting their objectives to achieve orbit around Earth...if they can do that then we're even farther along then we think.
 
I know, a completly revolutionary concept! Ok, ok, so it's not groundbreaking but I believe (although I'm not completly sure) that all of these competitors are running their vehicles at a mere fraction of the cost of a NASA shuttle. Again, the focus is on the private sector here, people without a huge government backed budget...just a huge corporate backed budget. Just kidding, some of these competitors are completely on their own. I saw a story on one guy who was building his in his backyard...hail to him if he survives his flight.
 
I still think it's a great thing. Even if Loaf likes to dimish it. Let's plaster a Confed logo on spaceship one's side and he'll probably like it.
 
I agree, Ed, space flights have been restricted to government (mainly US and Russia) funding and developing the concept of private companies organizing such flights is very important for the progress of space exploration.
 
Ok, ok, so it's not groundbreaking but I believe (although I'm not completly sure) that all of these competitors are running their vehicles at a mere fraction of the cost of a NASA shuttle.
Click to expand...

They're also *completely* useless, whereas the shuttle is only *mostly* useless. :)

Seriously, I'd love to see private space missions - but throwing a guy up and back down isn't the way to get there. We (well, Americans) advanced from suborbital to orbital *historically*, but there's no logical reason to do so forty years later.
 
CNN is holding a (yet another) stupid poll at their site:

"Is space travel safe enough for the general public yet?"
 
Well, it depends on what you want to define as useless...I can think of a lot of things in today's society that are really actually useless but because of the demand for them they go for high prices. Let's say low rider jeans for example...they're jeans just like any other pair on the market but because there is a demand for them they can be expensive. There's a demand to make cheap affordable trips to space available for the general public so although you may term the independent space projects useless...there is a demand and as such they are developing a means to satisfy this desire. If one of these private vessels can put a man in orbit at a fraction of the Shuttles cost I would say that is not a useless endeavour because Tito was willing to pay 35 million to go to space whereas these craft don't cost nearly that much...they could put several people in space for far less. The CEO of Virgin wants to do it for as cheap as $115,000 per person...now that's still a lot and all he's planning on doing is sending them up to like 65 miles or so but if one of these others make an effective and comparatively cheap vessel that can make orbit...the price may drop to soemthing affordable to the average person and thereby opening a huge market. I don't know, I'm just excited that some positive focus has been on the space outreach and it's doubly good that it comes from the private sector since if we leave it to the government and NASA (and this is NOT a knock on them it's just a statement) the "colonization" of space would take a great deal longer then if many of our massive corporations got involved. Private sector development has spurred growth in so many fields, look at the automobile industry look at how far we've come, the airplanes industry just barely over a 100 years old. I'm disappointed that although man has been to space closing in on 50 years how little we've come from our first expriments. I mean, we put a man on the moon but we still haven't developed beyond 1980ish space shuttles...let's get the private sector involved with some good old fashion capitalist competition involved and open this thing wide open. If the market was there we could have already had a station on the moon I feel...let's not wait for the government to do all the work for us, let's get these companies in there spurring growth. Just some random thoughts there.
 
Dude, paragraphs are your friend.

Or they should be, at least, if you're concerned about others actually being able to follow what you say.

(Anyone trying to be a smartass by taking it to the other extreme, and turning every single sentence or word into its own paragraph, will be given a one week vacation from the boards. Save the petty shit for someone else's bandwidth bill.)
 
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