Europe Unveils New Space Plane for Tourist Market

mrminator writes to tell us Space.com is reporting that Europe's largest space contractor, EADS, has just announced their plans to build a new space tourism vehicle. The new rocket, powered by liquid methane and liquid oxygen will carry passengers on a 90 minute round trip flight for somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 euros ($267,000).

Cheap Thrill

[biocute]

$200,000 isn't that much to many people, so a target of 4,500 customers per year by 2020 seems reasonable.

On top of that, by 2020, many more "poor" people might also be able (and willing) to save up $200K for a taste of pseudo-space.

More importantly, no businessmen will allow one company to tap into this multibillion-dollar industry unchallenged, which means ticket price can only go down.

Re:Pipe Dream?

[LWATCDR]

EADS is jumping the shark on this one over all I think it is a bad plan. Wouldn't it be better to get the A380 back on track and the A350 WXB off the ground before Boeing's 787 gets even more sales?
How far is the A400M behind? I know that the UK is leasing C-17s from Boeing to tide them over and may just buy them instead of the A400M.
I don't doubt that they could build this but seems like case of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

Re:Cheap Thrill

[MilesNaismith]

I don't know where you live, but here in the USA, the rich get richer and the other classes get poorer. My real wealth is lower than my parents.

Why would anyone pay

[hifisoftware]

I do not get why would anyone be willing to pay so much for a "extended" airplane trip. Riding a rocket to space and to the orbit is one thing. It takes bravery and provides an opportunity to live in really an outside world. But just to fly a bit higher then normal planes yet far far slower then what's needed for entering an orbit...? I just do not get it. Must be for people who really do not know what to do with their money. Some people think that private companies like that will eventually be able to fly into Earth orbit and beyond, but I think there is no reason to believe that it will happen anytime soon. Private companies can't brake laws of physics and are absolutely terrible with investing in fundamental physics research (the thing that costs tons and tons of money just to run an experiment that disprove a theory). So this is just a waste of money plain and simple.

Re:fifteen other groups have plans

[FleaPlus]

What so special about htis one, other than being six or seven years behind the crowd and just as expensive?

I think what's different about EADS is that they're the first already-established aerospace company to announce suborbital space tourism plans. Of course, this is also probably why they're announced development costs are so much higher than everybody else's.

Re:For that much money

[Rei]

I could tell right away that it was misleading. You can pretty much orbit the earth in 90 minutes. And it's not like they were just hovering; 90 minutes of hover is 9.8 m/s^2 * 60 * 90 = ~53,000 m/s delta-V, compared to the necessary ~7,800 m/s for LEO.

This whole "suborbital tourism market" is so stupid. You've got a dozen teams competing to share a market of people who want to spend 200k+ on a couple minute joyride when they could get the zero-G from parabolas and see the curvature of the Earth from a MiG for the tiniest fraction of the price, for hours on end. And yes, there are people who would want to do it. No, not several tens of thousands of customers *per year*. Especially once the reality hits home: rocketplanes have bad track records. These are not amusement park rides. Even widespread use, while it makes rockets safer, doesn't make them safe. Even on mature rocket systems, properly managed with good safety records, you're toying with a 1-2% fatality rate. That's a 1-2% fatality rate of people who find 200k to be disposable. It doesn't matter how many waivers you have people sign; that's a crazy amount of litigation that you're inviting. What sort of sane person's business plan involves killing several dozen multimillionaires per year?

Cue up poorly researched, incorrect comments stating "airplanes used to be like this!" in three, two, one ...

Re:fifteen other groups have plans

[Rei]

And why their odds of success are better than the abyssmal record of rocketry smaller companies whose gravesites litter international scene.

Karman Line

[kilo_foxtrot84]

I think some people here are missing part of the draw of such a venture as this. People aren't interested in spending the money just for a minute and a half of weightlessness... they're interested in considering themselves astronauts. Once you break the 100km altitude mark--the Karman Line [wikipedia.org]--you're in outer space. If you're in outer space, you're technically an astronaut. People want the title, as it is still somewhat exotic and mysterious.

If you think about it, space exploration is turning out to be just like the development of powered flight. It starts with a handful of daring, adventurous explorers, followed by governmental applications and novelties (like barnstorming and such), leading to common use by a large portion of society. Right now, we're moving through that second phase.

Re:Cheap Thrill

[lightversusdark]

Poor by U.S. standards is no doubt rich by global standards, but by European standards you are probably starving.
In Europe, at least, $200,000 (or £100,000 if you prefer) is a living wage. By modern banks metrics (being prepared to lend you 3.5x your annual salary for a mortgage), £350,000 to spend on a property in London will buy you a 1 bedroom flat if you are lucky.

Wherever you are, would you pay half what it costs to own a box room apartment, to fly to outer space?
Of course it's all relative, and an unfair comparison, as there is no social infrastructure in the American societal model and consequently any "salary" figure is considered differently according to whether you expect to pay for education, healthcare etc. out of your earnings, and how much you expect to be taxed.

What a load of trash

[WindBourne]

Throughout another article, they look down their noses at the efforts being undertaken referring to the engineering behind it all. [spacedaily.com] We have ruled out the idea of a simple rocket, which can not be used again, or of a small vessel attached to a large plane, the idea chosen by Virgin Galactic of Richard Branson, but which seems to us less safe IOW, they knock spacex, t-space, and scaled composites. This is the SAME group that is taking forever to do the A-380, which is poorly engineered and in trouble due to nationalistic politics. In addition, they had to obtain more funding from EU to do another aircraft to compete against the 787. But they promised that the 380 would be the last.

Now, they say that Burt Rutan has horrible engineering. Burt's multitudes of aircrafts have set a number of records. Even later in that article, they speak of using hamocks which is straight out of one of the poor American companies (t-space). Spacex is looking at having rockets launch at a fraction of the price of the ariane V with slightly more payload due to "poor" engineering (and that is without the rocket re-use that they will employ). And all of that is without any gov. subsidy.

As to the design behind Scaled's work, it has been the EXACT same idea that NASA wanted in the 70's (but nixon killed). In addition, so did EU, at first, before settling on Ariane's design. The idea being to not carry the jets and their covers to space. By taking the approach that they suggest, they will either have to take 3 tanks to space or use a dropped fuel tank. IOW, they have not learned the lessons that the American Shuttle vs. The Russian Shuttle (a theft, but better designed by moving the engines off the shuttle). Scaled did. They will be able to get to space MUCH sooner than EADS just due to this one item. Scaled's WK II will be used to carry not just the sub-orbital rocket (SS1.5), but will also carry SS2. It will be far easier to convert the SS1.5 to SS2. And they will not have to worry about WK.