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Canadian Arrow Taking Applications for Astronauts
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Nov 15, 2002 07:26 AM
from the adventurers-needed dept.
from the adventurers-needed dept.
Christian Nally writes "The Canadian Arrow X-Prize team is taking applications for its X Prize attempt. It's going to be a show down between this group and many others including John Carmack's Armadillo. Let's hope that the X-Prize foundations 'end of 2004' deadline doesn't inspire people to cut corners on safety."
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Prize is just at $5 mllion (Score:4, Interesting)
Me thinks thats not gonna be very safe
Re:Prize is just at $5 mllion (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Prize is just at $5 mllion (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Investing in Snake Oil (Score:2)
Um. Yup. A drop in the ocean compared to the cost of a single launch, never mind a whole programme. The US space shuttle costs ~$400 million a launch. The whole programme costs the ~$4Billion per year. The ISS is expect to cost ~$100 billion.
'not gonna be very safe'
for whom ? The passengers or investors?
IMHO this will make the DOT-COM bubble look like loose change.
Re:Prize is just at $5 mllion (Score:2)
Besides, the whole point of the program is for private manned spaceflight to be feasible at US$10M. Sure, you can throw a gazillion dollars to a space program and make it SUPER safe, but that's not what this is about. This is about risk, exploration, daring. The same kinds of things that made Lindberg famous and motivated an entire industry to make trans-atlantic flights open to the public. Remember this competition is modeled after the one lindberg won.
Most likely someone will die trying to win the prize and they know it. So do the competing teams. I can't find a link, but the Xprize promoters themselves have said so.
Re:Prize is just at $5 mllion (Score:2)
Nope. The teams intend to sell flights to the general public. I mean, that's what the prize is trying to encourage, right? So they can borrow/invest money as well towards their expected income.
Canadian Secret X-Prize Program (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Canadian Secret X-Prize Program (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, the Avro Arrow is one of the things that every Canadian learns about in history class and there certainly wouldn't be a canadian aerospace engineer who wasn't familiar with the story. So I'm wondering if the name is some sort of inside joke to them or if possibly some suit decided it was a good name and the engineers couldn't explain the stigma that goes along with it.
Well, redardless, good luck to them.
cut corners on safety (Score:5, Funny)
Re:cut corners on safety (Score:2)
On safety (Score:5, Funny)
Unless Lance Bass really gets to go this time. Then, let's not.
Carmack (Score:2)
Re:Carmack (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Carmack (Score:2)
Space temp (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Space temp (Score:2)
Re:Carmack (Score:2)
Kind of detracts from my point, but I still needed to clarify that quote.
Re:Carmack (Score:2)
Sweeet! (Score:5, Insightful)
Grow some balls.
Cheap rockets = Kids' Satellite kits? (Score:2, Funny)
cut corners on safety (Score:5, Interesting)
Safety is very important, but when it reaches a certain point its ridiculous. Attitudes like that will confine us to $10,000/pound low orbit flights for the next 500 years.
Re:cut corners on safety (Score:2)
Go for it! The slashdot community stands behind you united.
You go kablooey, we'll provide applause and karma.
Pamela Anderson-Lee (Score:3, Funny)
I'd dim the lights just a touch and in she walks... beautiful delicious Canadian flesh, right there in front of me! The strapless evening-wear would probably burst at that point, and I'd jump her then and there in front of all the lesser dudes on the committee. Oooohh. Powerrrr.
somebody slap me
coffee. i need coffee
Hep-C (Score:2, Funny)
In her (immune system's) defense, as one late show commentator said, "If you are married to Tommy Lee and all you walk away with is Hepatitis-C, you did O.K.!"
Rad bod or not, I like my liver more than PamAn.
Knunov
Carmack (Score:4, Informative)
Some might, but the seriouse competitors won't (Canadian Arrow is serious, at least with PR and blowing someone up in space, well
Re:Carmack (Score:3, Interesting)
Why, yes they are: Armadillo at X Prize [xprize.org].
Burt Rutan's entry with "Undisclosed Rocket Power" sounds interesting... [xprize.org]
Space tourism? (Score:3, Interesting)
Shoulda had a V2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Shoulda had a V2 (Score:2)
Safe, conventional designs, off the shelf, but that means that you'll still need something the size of an Atlas to actually put something into orbit. Hopefully some of the other teams are trying something new.
Re:Shoulda had a V2 (Score:3, Informative)
Almost all modern liquid fuel engines use regenerative cooling (a technology developed by amateurs in the US, IRRC).
On the other hand, the V2s used pendular integrating gyroscopic acceleromiters (PIGAs) to shut off the fuel supply once the V2 hit a certain velocity. (One nice thing about PIGAs is you can put a counter on one of the bearings to irectly measure velocity instead of having to integrate acceleration yourself.) PIGAs are still used the US MX ICBMs. A couple of summers ago I worked on some replacement technology, but PIGAs are still the most accurate acceleromiters that can withstand the hundreds of Gs encountered on rentry. (They're also pretty resistant to EMP and radiation degredation from being stored long term near a sphere of plutonium.)
BTW, if you should ever fire electrolytic capicitors out of a 105 mm howitzer, be aware that thier capaitence will go out of spec before they leave the barrel and not get back into spec for a few days afterward.
Ack! JATO's! Don't We Know.. (Score:5, Funny)
Sheesh. Some people never learn! :)
sounds like plot from Michael Flynn sci-fi novels (Score:2)
Central part of plot is a corporation developing aircraft that can fly into orbit, at commercially viable cost. Good hard sci-fi reads!
Mike's our space cadet (Score:2)
Does anyone else find it fishy... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does anyone else find it fishy... (Score:2, Informative)
Another poster mentioned that they say secure server but it's not, and he is correct: The link they give is to a completely plaintext, totally insecure link. Some moron forgot the s (i.e. https://secure.golden.net/cdnastro/online-pilot-a
I grew up in the town where this project is based, but I have to say that something smells incredibly fishy about this...non-refundable "dream" applications for a pipe-dream? If anyone is actually sending in money, please be aware that I have a really big bridge for sale.
Arrow (Score:2)
Huh? The Arrow may have been an advanced jet, but it wouldn't be able to fly in space for the X Prize.
Has Mr. Carmack learned nothing (Score:5, Funny)
Rickety experimental space-craft *always* wind up deserting the occupant on an alien planet infested with demons and high powered weapons.
For the pilots sake, I hope he makes sure to equip every craft with atleast a chainsaw.
Recruiting from /. crowd (Score:2, Funny)
flight to space impossible.
Armadillo is a sourceforge project! (Score:2)
I didn't know that Carmack's Armadillo was a GPL rocket downloadable from sourceforge. Clicking on the Armadillo link sends me to sourceforge.net, not an obvious rocket-associated page, thus I assume the "rocket" is a game similation. Sim-space-tourism?
Or is it merely a plugin for The Sims?
Re:resources (Score:4, Insightful)
As any fule know... :-)
If we're postulating mass space tourism, we can probably get away with postulating efficient solar or fusion power to go with it... they're both pipe-dreams hovering somewhere in the technological middle-distance. Then you can have your hydrogen by electrolysis without trouble.
To make space tourism economic, we need to either (a) make it possible to get into orbit using far less energy, or (b) make energy available much more cheaply. So nobody's going up there without some major breakthrough that would massively reduce the resources required.
Parent
Re:resources (Score:2, Insightful)
they're both pipe-dreams hovering somewhere in the technological middle-distance. Then you can have your hydrogen by
electrolysis without trouble.
To make space tourism economic, we need to either (a) make it possible to get into orbit using far less energy, or (b) make energy available much more cheaply. So nobody's going up there without some major breakthrough that would massively reduce the resources required.
That's only true of real mass-space tourism, something which is still some way off.
What's more likely,is the development of limited space tourism, for the very rich only... it has already started, and as the price drop a bit it will get more common.
Most likely, this will use traditional rocketry in a cheaper form, and it will polute a LOT. In particular, the upper atmosphere will suffer.
In short: if there is a way to make "cheap" space trips, space tourism will develop. Wherever it's polluting or not is sadly not the question.
Re:resources (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the same sort of postulating went on about mass air transport, road transport
There has realy only been 5 revolutions in how we have powered transport over the last million(?) years
Walking
Horses
Sail
Steam
Oil
Another is electric transport but is only limited to some railways.
If clean fuels were a priority, they would already be used in the exisiting mass transport systems. Thinking that a new power source will develope through space transportation is, as you say, postulating.
Re:resources (Score:3, Interesting)
To make space tourism economic, we need to either (a) make it possible to get into orbit using far less energy, or (b) make energy available much more cheaply
This is just wrong. People make a big deal about fuel costs, but that's really the smallest part of the cost of getting into space. If fuel was all that mattered, you'd be able to go to space for maybe a thousand dollars. As it stands, it costs millions. This is because NASA's launchers are fiendishly complicated, and require a tremendous staff of engineers to check, recheck, and replace tens of thousands of components.
Even the cost of the components themselves is dwarfed by the cost of paying 10,000 people for the 6 months that it takes to prep the shuttle for launch.
If we can do away with all this personnel by making the designs simpler, then we will have realized the dream of cheap spaceflight.
( and don't think it's not doable! Companies like Armadillo and XCOR may accomplish this! )
Re:resources (Score:2)
Re:resources (Score:2)
Who the hell other than NASA would use that fuel system? dangerous, unstable, harder to deal with..
More than likely they'll use a simple kerosene/oxidizer rocket... more thrust per pound of fuel, easier to get, doesnt explode violently when you get a spark in the tanks.
Hell we went to the moon that way.
Nah Re:resources (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
The fuel cost is very, very low actually; less than $10/lb of payload.
I worked out that if I was to go into space, I'd have to spend about as much fuel putting me there, as my car burns in a year. But unlike my car I ain't doing this every week or even every year. The number of people going into space for the forseeable future is only a few thousand; the number of cars out there are incredibly high, in the hundreds of millions, so the relative environmental impact of rocketry is quite, quite negligible.
And there are plenty of space technologies that have a positive environmental impact. Would the ozone layer hole have been found without satellites? I actually believe that overall, space will have a very significant net positive environmental impact.
Parent
Re:Slighty OT but interesting... (Score:2)
To hell with launching, just give me the rocket, a tanker of orange juice and dump truck full of limes. Oh, and a big straw.
The V-2 (A-4) actually did use alcohol (Score:2)
However, the A-4 can't launch anything very heavy into space -- it wasn't designed to be able to. It couldn't even when made into a two-stage rocket for the WAC-Corporal program. One of its descendants finally did, though -- the Jupiter-C rocket, a modified Redstone (itself an A-4 derivative) launched Explorer 1 (the first US satellite) into space in January 1958. But Explorer 1 was not all that massive.
So the Canadian Arrow rocket is just going to end up re-creating Alan Shepard's flight, more or less. Rather just, I think, considering that he was launched by a Redstone missile.
Re:That rocket looks like... (Score:2)
Re:x-prize (Score:2)