Lord British on Personal Spaceflight

FleaPlus writes "The Space Review has an interview with Richard Garriott (aka "Lord British"), best known as the creator of the genre-defining Ultima series of role playing games. In the interview he talks about his current work as the vice chairman of Space Adventures, and his thoughts on private-sector spaceflight in general. It includes an anecdote about how he funded the initial Russian studies which opened the door for Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, and Gregory Olsen's flights to the International Space Station, but was unable to go himself after the late-90s stock market bubble burst."

200k

[lockefire]

I think that 200k is a fair price. They do bring up some interesting points. If 10% of American's want to go there should definitely be a market...

Gotta Love the Russians!

[phobos13013]

But the Russian answer was more interesting. They said something like, "Well no! To even see what would be involved with that kind of mission would cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars just to see how we would do it, then to actually do it would be millions more!" So, the door was opened.

Of course the US says no way no how if its not our way its the highway. The Russkies say rather slyly, oh no we could never it would cost this much... We couldnt afford that, and come on who could our fine American friend? There is nothing that the right amount wont get you in Russia. Whether legally or illegally or that lovely gray area in-between. Some might call it corruption (i tend to call it that when its illegal or hazardous) but i like to call it the TRUE land of opportunity!

Re:200k

[JonN]

10% of American's want to go there...But can even 5% or even more even afford to? The biggest issue is cost, which is definatly not effective at this time.

Not really.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

but the $200k pricetag is a cost that break the bank of most everyone

I don't think so. 200k is well within the reach of many many Americans (and other nationalities as well). People here spend near that on collections of toys all the time, and at least in Western Washington State, 200k is well below the average price of a 3 bedroom house. People think nothing of financing a $70,000 car, add to that a nice boat, a vacation to some beach or Europe... 200k is peanuts.

Re:200k

[lockefire]

Well, there are 7.5 million [wsws.org] millionaires in the US with $11 trillion in assets who need to spend their money on something. This looks like a very good option to me and I think our upperclass would flock to it much like luxury cruising in the 30s.

Re:Long term business model for space tourism?

[QuantumG]

It's a stepping stone. There's all these business models that you can do to make a profit, gain experience and drive down the price of space access which people are pursuing now. Everything from launching people's remains into space as a secondary payload (cheap to do, and LOTS of people will pay for it), to suborbital and orbital space tourism, to satellite constellation based radio, broadband access, and tracking. Then there's the guys at the top of the spectrum. Orbital Recovery [orbitalrecovery.com] are developing a space tug to interface with communications satellites and extend their revenue-producing lifetimes beyond original specifications. The space tug is a critical part of space infrastructure. If you want to build a space hotel at the ISS and drag it out to the L1 point (where Earth and Luna gravity meets) you'll need a space tug. Once you've got that in place you're half way to the moon. It's not conceivable to build massive landers in space, with enough equipment to extract oxygen from the luna soil (or that water they keep talking about) and boost it up. That reduces the amount of oxygen that needs to be brought up from earth which reduces the costs for your space tourists. Now that you've got a presence on the moon you can go prospecting. All those craters on the moon, each one created by a planet killer, most of them contain vast amounts of precious metals. Most notably the Platinum Group Metals. If you're on the moon anyways, you might as well pick them up, process em and send em back to earth where they can be used in fuel cells, jewelry and Carmack style monoprop rockets which are capable of single stage to orbit, reducing the costs of space access yet again. And so it goes and so it goes. It's not the Saturn V, flags and footprints space exploration of our parents generation, or the triple stage tractor factory military operations of Wernher van Braun, but eventually the commercialisation of space will result in enough people living and working in space that we can claim with a straight face that our society is interplanetary.

Re:Private Sector is already hot on the ball

[AaronLawrence]

Space offers extreme opportunities in manufacturing, research, power generation, medical studies, propulsion research, materials science, and a multitude of other investment possibilities.

Same old, same old. It doesn't really offer any of these things. Space isn't a magical fairy land where energy is free and the laws of physics are different. If anything, I think the various space stations have shown that there isn't anything particular exciting to make or research in space, just an awful lot of work, energy and technology even to just stay alive, or get there and back.

The one big thing it does offer is that lots of people want to go there: tourism and adventure. Hence the only things showing signs of commercial life are tourism and adventure companies.

I too want to go to space, but I have come to accept that there isn't anything particular interesting to DO there. Science Fiction made it all seem very exciting but most of those things don't seem likely to happen: warp drives, exotic but livable planets, aliens, new technologies.

Possibly in the far distant future terraforming and colonisation, but the economics have to change before that will happen on a significant scale (ie. big enough to be self-sustaining if Earth goes away).

I suppose that it would be possible to do some propulsion research like nuclear drives, but for that we have to get out of orbital space (for safety) and be able to build things entirely in space - something that hasn't happened at all yet.