SpaceShipTwo Flies Free For the First Time 164
mknewman writes "SpaceShipTwo was successfully dropped off its WhiteKnight 2 mothership today from an altitude of 45,000 feet and glided to a landing in the Mojave airstrip." From the article: "More than 300 would-be passengers have already put down more than $45 million in deposits for $200,000-a-seat rides on the plane. The experience will include a roller-coaster rocket ride to a spaceworthy altitude of more than 65 miles, several minutes of weightlessness, a picture-window view of the curving Earth beneath the black sky of space ... and spaceflight bragging rights for years afterward."
not so... (Score:4, Insightful)
and spaceflight bragging rights for years afterward
Hopefully, this won't turn out to be true. Brag in the short term, you bourgeois pig, but I'm still among the idealistic holdouts, with thousands of dollars in my hand waiting in line to sign up, who believe in Virgin Galactic and economies of scale.
Re:This is how train and air travel began, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Going on foreign holidays doesn't make financial sense either. People do it anyway, for fun.
To the early adopters - Thank you (Score:5, Insightful)
Please excuse the others saying how going first is wasteful/stupid/reckless, they do not understand.
Thanks for helping to push us forward.
Re:not so... (Score:5, Insightful)
That was one of my first thoughts reading the summary - I hope it's not *too* many years of bragging rights. I want to live in a world where "I saw the curvature of the Earth and experienced a few minutes of free fall" is worth about as much bragging rights as an American of today saying "I went to Canada once!" Sure, a lot of people still will never leave a 100-mile radius of their home town, but anybody who wants to will be able to go much further and see much more.
Re:This is how train and air travel began, too. (Score:3, Insightful)
Keep in mind space flight doesn't have as much use to the citizenry and businesspeople of the world when compared to traditional air flight. It's likely to remain a toy unless they can turn it into some kind of economically advantageous form of travel. You can fly around the world for under under $10,000. Or you can fly a quick trip into space and back for $200,000. Prices will go way down though, due to standardization and marketization.
Re:not so... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:not so... (Score:5, Insightful)
At the point where you will be in space for a few minutes, they will be in orbit. At the point where you are in orbit, they will be doing a flyby of the moon. When you are doing a flyby of the moon, they will be spending some time on a moon base...
(Well, not true exactly. There has to be some minimum practical level of fuel use that you just can't get below, and some cost to the energy that will bring about an affordability floor. And in all likelihood, energy will only be a part of such costs. For each of these steps, the fuel bill rises.)
Space Precautionary Act (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is how train and air travel began, too. (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't go anywhere.
They go up!
Re:This is how train and air travel began, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sub-orbital flights between two different destinations on the Earth is something that has been talked about in several cases, giving a huge advantage over airplanes in terms of travel time between two locations. For intercontinental distances, it is something that has been seriously talked about.
It is this that I believe the original poster is sort of hinting at too, BTW.
Something like this also gives the ability to have something like FedEx deliver a package to a destination yesterday (crossing the international dateline) for things that really need to get there. I'm sure there are things that people would be willing to pay $1000 per pound to deliver in that fashion if they could get from say New York to Tokyo in three hours. For some items there are people who would be willing to pay 100x that price if it could be done quickly.
Yes, there is a realistic commercial market for these kind of vehicles, even though SpaceShip Two isn't going to be able to pull off those kind of flights any time soon. It doesn't necessarily require a destination in space in order to be useful for point to point travel.
Re:This is how train and air travel began, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is how train and air travel began, too. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you have to continue accelerating in space? As the air thins, accelerate less. You're still doing Mach 10+ when you leave the minimum air density for your engines to work. (of course no one does JUST this, but it's an option to go along with rockets)
Re:deposit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Virgin Galactic is far enough along, as is SpaceShip Two, that I think any group of investors that takes over after Richard Branson is going to at least continue to offer SS2 flights for the foreseeable future. I think the flight deposits that have been offered so far will be honored and the flights are going to happen.
What might put a monkey wrench into the company would be if something happened where the engine on the vehicle couldn't be certified (it is still going through R&D development) or some sort of fatal flaw in the design is discovered during the flight testing that would cause the FAA to refuse to give an air worthiness certificate on the vehicle. That is a big deal and something that could conceivably still happen. I would put that as almost completely unlikely, but there have been aircraft development projects this far along that have failed before. On the other hand, Scaled Composites has plenty of experience with trying to pass that hurdle and is very closely working with the various bureaucrats to make sure that isn't a problem.
There is the tiny problem with the fact that the FAA-AST has never certified for regular non-experimental purposes any sort of manned spaceflight vehicle. The entire process is currently being worked out explicitly to get SpaceShip Two going, but it is possible that Congress might enact legislation or have some sort of brainfart that would kill any sort of vehicle from getting a certificate for flight. It would hit Slashdot if that happened and there would be a thousand cries of complaint about it happening among geeks if something like that happened, but worse has gone through the legislative sausage factory called Congress.
The worry about Richard Branson and Burt Rutan is that if either die, it is likely that SpaceShip Three will never be built. That one is supposed to be more for the point to point travel, or perhaps flights into orbit (depending on who is being asked). It would be a shame if the follow on spacecraft weren't built.
Still not even close to orbital speed (Score:3, Insightful)
They're still not even close to the first cosmic velocity.
Yes, you'll technically be in space but the problem is that your orbit will intersect the Earth. So it's nothing more than an expensive joyride. You can just as well jump up - for a split second you'll be in an orbit (which intersects the Earth as well).
Economy of scale? For what? Their current design is not scalable.
Long haul trips (Score:4, Insightful)
It still takes me 18 hours fly time + couple hours in transit somewhere in Europe to fly from North America to India.
Orbital technology promises to cut the time to a few hours. I think there is a market there. More so as we increasingly do business with India and China. Sure there is still some time before 65 miles turns to orbital, nonetheless this is a step in this direction.
It excites me that I can consider flying across the globe faster than Earth can rotate the same amount.