New Mexico Spaceport Nearly Ready For Business 96
Cutting_Crew writes "I am sure many of us have heard about this story, but it looks like Spaceport America is finally ready to take off (no pun intended). The latest construction pictures [Note: database might be slightly flaky] are up to view. Want to be one of the first to take a ride? It will set you back $200,000. I don't know how many people will be able to afford such a trip, outside of Las Vegas, Hollywood, Cupertino, Redmond, and few retirees, but I suppose they are thinking that they can make their money back with this project in the long term. Touring the space frontier seems a little steep. A lot of people are just trying to make living without being foreclosed on."
What a stupid summary... (Score:3, Insightful)
Either become a journalist and write your stupid "Oh my god, the world is so unfair! There are rich and poor people, OMG!" or you write unbiased, nice summary for slashdot.
What does this summary here serve? Some author who wants to point the moral finger? That, yet nothing else, was indeed achieved...
No pun intended? BS (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate when people use the phrase "no pun intended". Especially when it's typed. Especially when its obvious the phrase was, in fact, there to POINT OUT the pun... sigh
Anybody else reminded of first contact? (Score:1, Insightful)
Was anybody else reminded of Star Trek first contact by the summary? The scene there seemed to exhibit quite a bit of wealth disparity too. It's the same old story.
Ladeling out soup at the local shelter is a dull necessity--it probably didn't inspire the people of the 1930s the way airships, airplanes and Buck Rogers movies did. All of those things could have been dismissed as frivolities. Today, airlines employ thousands and soup kitchens are still... soup kitchens.
Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with charity. It's just that it doesn't inspire everybody in the same way, and there can actually be an immoral side to charity. It's the side where the giver feels an undue sense of importance, and subconsciously partners with those who perpetuate the need for charity...
Re:Moron submitter (Score:0, Insightful)
Sorry, the car was solving a real need. People mostly don't buy them to indulge themselves, you know, but to haul their asses and cargo to where they need to go. Nobody freaking needs to go for a suborbital flight, other than to entertain themselves. That's the difference you missed.
It's also a short hop, tourist rush (Score:4, Insightful)
Locations are not that much of a problem, a lot of Earth's area is an ocean. Also, industrial complexes tend to be near coastline (even if their specific area is unsuitable for launches, it makes for an easy means to transport large cargo). Besides, the spaceport in question is also in rather desolated area. And generally, it's largely also about planned "crashes" of staging.
Those scramjet vehicles, that pop out now and then, might be possibly better described as "missile demonstrator" or "weapons carrier"
When you really seriously do the math (like they did with HOTOL, for example), ~winged orbital vehicles using the atmosphere during launch turn out not really better than a "dumb rocket" using comparable materials
And X-34 (plus few others being worked on, Dream Chaser for example) is just a payload of ordinary rocket.
More generally, historically, everybody at first expected "aerodynamic" or "spaceplane-ish" shapes from reentry vehicles, and worked towards it hard. They proved relatively unworkable. Blunt shape entry capsule was quite late innovation, an improvement; and a bit of a surprise. There's nothing wrong with capsules. Physics, rocket equation, are a bitch - and they override dreams (here, about expected modes of space travel); dreams unduly extrapolating rates and directions of observed progress. Look at those airplanes [goo.gl] from "our" times (imagined during rapid advances of marine tech; and we can even build them - take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy... still a horrible idea vs. "boring" reality [wikimedia.org]).
Consider how the "spaceplanes" came to dominate scifi... around the 40s, during rapid advances of airplane tech (I can see a pattern...); how the designers and decision-makers of the Shuttle were undoubtedly raised on those works of fiction. How they gave us an analogue of Catalina, at best (Spruce Goose, at worst); but something which looked very soothing and "inspiring" to the already constrained public imagination, already quite accustomed to airliners / Concorde. Something which probably robbed us at least of a decade of progress; was conceptually obsolete (with automatic rendezvous, docking and routine return of large valuable cargo done since the 60s) before it seriously got onto drawing boards. Wasting most of upmass on airframe; a lot of good that does in space
Grandiose, fabulous, "awesome" styles typical of scifi (again, works of fiction) mostly just constrain public imagination, make them expect something palatable, nothing too uncomfortable and too