FAA Grants Sub-Orbital License to SpaceShipOne 200
abucior writes "The FAA announced today that Scaled Composites has been granted a launch licence for a series of sub-orbital flights over a one-year period for Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne. Is X Prize finally entering the end-game? Space.com has more information on the move."
Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:eek (Score:2, Insightful)
A good thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:eek (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind that stuff like this will not be launched form populated areas (deserts, etc. probably) so any liability only comes in if it can make it far enough to hit something, which in itself is a sign that it has potential, and so is more likely to be sufficiently safe. Think of it this way: conditional on it being able to make it as far as a populated area the probability that it will crash it low.
Re:what happens? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Crock of Shit (Score:1, Insightful)
Dumbass.
Come on (Score:2, Insightful)
(Especially if they're all out of work because their jobs went overseas!
FAA authority (Score:0, Insightful)
Legally, a case could be made that the FAA has no authority to regulate any team that did not specifically get a certificate from the FAA.
As a bureaucracy, the FAA does not automatically get to make its own rules binding on everyone in the U.S. (Only Congress can do that!)
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
The Moon, the planets, and the great unknown beyond should not be 'owned" by a government. Like the unexplored world that existed in the 1400's, they should belong to those willing to make the sacrifices, and devote the resources to explore and colonize the unknown!
My bet is that the "governments" of the world will get out of the way and allow the exploration and colonization of the known and unknown universe. To do otherwise implies a vision and long range planning capability that does currently exist in ANY govenment that I know of.
Space, like the "old West" of the US [my appologies to the Native Americans], belongs to those who are willing to go there!
John [looking for Ringworld] Miller
Re:Throwing stuff into space ... legally. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:eek (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition, if the thing isn't safe enough to test without endangering the public, it's nowhere safe enough to fly in actual service. The thousands of homebuilt and homebrewed aircraft flying legally every day shows that safety and experiments are not mutually exclusive requirements.
Re:Come on (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't underestimate what a leap an efficiency the X-Prize represents.
Not that I disagree with you, just keep one foot in the part of reality that remembers that X-prize isn't going to LEO, and isn't even getting close to LEO. Unless you hit LEO, your reusable spacecraft is just a great ride. :)
Don't get me wrong, though. After they've hit the low target they've set with the reusable requirements they've got I expect the design to be pushed to LEO pretty quickly, pretty much as soon as it gets covered up with funding from both the X-prize itself and all the VCs and other investors that learn by virtue of the X-prize that you have a viable technology.
Burt Rutan (Score:4, Insightful)
The guy is a genius and an innovator in a field that does its best to discourage innovation.
If I have understood correctly, lawsuits have basically killed innovation in general aviation. Check it out the next time you are airside: most of the designs of small aircraft are fifty years old. I wonder if we will be saying the same thing about software in fifty years.
www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/GENERAL_AVIATI
Re:Come on (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention the fact that the Shuttle launch costs you note covers more than fuel, it also covers all the maintenance, prepation, testing, etc. that a craft in service must have, while a vehicle that only has to fly twice can get away with far, far less infrastructure. (The key to reducing costs isn't reducing vehicle costs as many believe, but in flying the hell out of the vehicle and spreading the costs across many vehicles and flights. Ask the airlines.)
Don't overestimate it either. The X-Prize vehicles are highly specialized test and experimental vehicles, it's a long leap from there to vehicles capable of routine operations. (Not just in general concept, but in raw performance.) Consider the long step between the Wright Flyer and the Ford Tri-Motor or the DC-3. That's how far the X-prize vehicles are from useful and cheap space transports.Re:The Man Who Sold the Moon (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, sorry to burst your bubble, but this has absolutely no comparison to DD Harriman and company. See, DD Harriman was the guy at the top of the power conglomerate, and as such had much more power than the government itself. Be thankful we don't have that kind of world--yet. He was also an idealist, so I have a real hard time believing he got to be where he was in the story in any fashion that resembles real life corporate politics. ;)
Re:license for 312,000 ft? (Score:3, Insightful)
X-Prize and space (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because someone's doing something for money they will necessarily do it well. Microsoft does stuff for money. It's not like the X-prize will turn space into a real industry -- real industries aren't dependant on private philanthropy.
I'm all for throwing more resources into spaceflight, but having many small teams keeping secrets from eachother doesn't sound like a big improvement on having a few large teams that work together. Having many small teams that work together might be better still, but probably not by much. Remember, improvements in spaceflight will be built by engineers -- no one else. If the engineers are serious about what they do (and any who revolutionize spaceflight would have to be) then they'll concentrate on the problem at hand and ignore where their funding comes from, be it government, corporate, private, academic or bank fraud.
It seems to be an article of faith among many slashdotters that anything the government does it will automatically mess up. It might be worth remembering that all achievements in space flight so far have been government-funded, and that the so-called commercial airlines exist only because of government supsidies.
Re:More paper mass to lift than payload! (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I think that the FAA regulatory process for suborbitals is very lightweight compared to aircraft. It's not like the general public can just step on board; and they are currently cutting them some slack.
The problem is that if they don't do this, then spaceflight can never, ever get going. Reliability of entirely new classes of vehicles is simply not going to be like a 777. The regulatory authorities (particularly the FAA people who work on suborbitals, and whose jobs depend on it succeeding), know this and are actually on the side of the embryonic industry.
Re:Come on (Score:5, Insightful)
The shuttle's 60,000 lb cargo capacity is wasteful and useless. It costs more per pound (even accounting for inflation) to launch on the shuttle than it did to launch on the Saturn V. It'd be fine if the shuttle provided an economical way to launch bulk cargo, but it doesn't. Better to stick with unmanned expendables for that kind of stuff - at least for the time being. As for the 9 passengers/crew, they cost so much per person to launch that only a small elite are permitted to fly. The 4 passengers on an X-Prize vehicle may only be going suborbital (for now), but at least they're going.
The key to reducing costs isn't reducing vehicle costs as many believe, but in flying the hell out of the vehicle and spreading the costs across many vehicles and flights.
True. But that's part of the point of the X-Prize. The shuttle design simply cannot support a flight rate sufficient to make its costs reasonable. Plus it requires a standing army of several thousand just to operate it. The shuttle is not capable of operating in an airline mode. The X-Prize is encouraging designs that are capable of rapid turn-around (and thus high flight rate), and require minimal infrastructure. The X-Prize designs will (hopefully) be capable of airline-like operations.
Consider the long step between the Wright Flyer and the Ford Tri-Motor or the DC-3. That's how far the X-prize vehicles are from useful and cheap space transports.
The first flight of the Wright Flyer involved a mere 12 seconds of flying time (the third and longest flight of the day attained a whopping 59 seconds). Only 10 years later the airplane was a major player in the Great War. Ok, the world had to wait another ~20 years for the DC-3. But commercial aviation was already well-established before the DC-3 came along. Useful and cheap are relative terms. The X-Prize vehicles may be closer to both of them than you think.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Come on (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't know much about engineering do you? The more people that work together, the less likely it is that anything gets accomplished. Read up on competitive learning, competition in general and its role in society. Then think about where we would be today if nobody had a competitive spirit and just shared secrets with eachother.
Re:Come on (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be willing to debate both of those assertions. However, I do agree that it depends a lot on what you include in your launch cost roll-up (and what you define as "overhead" and "infrastructure cost")
The reality is that the marginal cost for a Shuttle flight is around 150 million a flight, but the overhead kills it when spread across so few flights.
The reality is that the shuttle cannot support a higher flight rate, so the marginal cost is somewhat meaningless (and is dominated by the fixed costs anyway).
The passengers on an X-Prize vehicle are no more going somewhere than are the riders of a roller coaster.
Cute analogy. But you are conveniently missing the point. The X-Prize passengers will be going into space, a realm that has, until now, been restricted to hand-picked astronauts, self-made multi-millionaires, and congressmen on junkets. So what if it's only sub-orbital for now. That at least puts them on a par with the early Mercury flights. The Wright Flyer flew only a few hundred feet to begin with. That doesn't detract from the fact that it flew.
Like every aviation prize before it, the X-prize is encouraging vehicles designed specifically to win the prize.
And the prize is specifically designed to encourage vehicles that support fast-turnaround with minimal infrastructure. Those two features are essentially what the launch vehicle community is referring to when they talk about "airline-like" operations (and relative to the way launch vehicles are currently operated they do represent something much more like the way an airline operates). Ok, so you won't be using an X-Prize competitor like an actual modern airliner. But as you say "It took the airlines and manufacturers decades to achieve those levels." They did it by trying lots of different stuff, discarding what failed, and keeping what worked. The beauty of the X-Prize is that we're finally getting away from NASA's stale "one true way" of doing manned launch, and experimenting with a variety of approaches. All of these approaches must, as a result of the competition rules, give at least some consideration to reusability and operability. Some will work. Some will fail. We'll learn from them all, and probably learn a lot more than we would from the endless paper studies that characterize NASA's attempts at manned launch. The current crop of X-Prize contenders may not be the equivalent of a space-going DC-3, but they sow the seeds from which such a craft can eventually emerge.
hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Come on (Score:3, Insightful)
In my book we'd be looking at two distinct types of craft. Lets build something specifically for shifting stuff into orbit as cheaply as possible, and then lets build something else for shifting people.
I'd wondered about a massive rail gun that could fire small-ish canisters into orbit, where they could be caught by a space station somehow. This setup could potentially fire a canister every few minutes containing unbreakable commodities - oxygen, water, pies, that sort of thing - and do so very cheaply (once you've build the rail gun!). The bodies of the canisters would also be a source of raw material for orbital construction projects.