After the X Prize 275
rscrawford writes "'Robert Bigelow, chief of Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace, is apparently setting higher goals for private spaceflight endeavors with America's Space Prize, a $50 million race to build an orbital vehicle capable of carrying up to seven astronauts to an orbital outpost by the end of the decade,' according to Space.com. Anyone think it'll happen?"
Getting them up is the easy part (Score:5, Funny)
NASA should enter (Score:3, Funny)
The end of the decade timeline is just stupid. Kennedy gave Nasa more time to build the Apollo program and that cost many billions of dollars. To get it done so quickly.
Re:NASA should enter (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:NASA should enter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NASA should enter (Score:2)
I dunno, the thought of riding something with a self-destruct (sorry, range safety device) mode just does not make me a happy camper.
I think the visionaries understand that space flight is hard but not nearly as hard as some people make it out to be (Boeing, LockMart) and they figure it's worth a stab to see if they can be a big player in yet another industry.
Re:NASA should enter (Score:3, Insightful)
The Falcon, oddly enough, doesn't. They are the first vehicle certified for range safety without requiring a bomb... errr... explosive flight termination device.
It's not incredibly hard to make an existing booster "man-rated". Generally, it just means that you need a certain level of redundancy over that necessary for payload operations, favorable possibilities for abort, etc. The Falcon series is already designed
Re:NASA should enter (Score:4, Informative)
See, the problem is that a explosive flight termination system is nearly required.
As far as the current licensing regeme is concerned, the lives of the passengers are not important. What is important is the possibility of a worst case impact on populated areas. You basicly need to assume that every steering device on your craft will conspire against you and send it hurtling towards the nearest populated area.
So, Black Armadillo isn't allowed to have a parachute in case the engines run out of juice/fail/etc. Because they have to assume that it will deploy in conspiracy with the steering system, all at the worst possible moments, and take it into populated area.
So if it fails, it pancakes, as one of the recent videos shows. The next one has a streamer, which should give the passengers more options for not becoming hot man-salsa.
It's going to be decades before these things will be loosened, I fear.
Sure it will... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sure it will... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Duke Nukem Forever is a 1999 game and we think that timeframe matches very well with what we have planned for the game." - George Broussard, 1998
"Trust us, Duke Nukem Forever will rock when it comes out next year." -Joe Siegler, 1999
"When it's done in 2001." -2000 Christmas card
"DNF will come out before Unreal 2." -George Broussard, 2001
"If DNF is not out in 2001, something's very wrong." -George Broussard, 2001
"DNF will come out before Doom 3." -George Broussard, 2002
The Voyager 1 spacecraft has travelled approximately 2.5 billion miles since the announcement of Duke Nukem Forever.
The rovers Spirit and Opportunity were proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched and successfully landed upon Mars within the timeframe of Duke Nukem Forever's development.
The majority of the children who were entering high school the school year following Duke Nukem Forever's announcement are now eligible to drink.
considering that... (Score:2, Interesting)
Norrköping, Sweden - 27th of September, Meqon, an up and comer in the physics middleware industry, announced they have been selected by 3D Realms as the physics engine provider for their long awaited game Duke Nukem Forever.
I think it's quite possible to assume that this new prize will come and go before DNF will be on the shelves...
Re:Sure it will... (Score:4, Funny)
Getting to LOE is hard (Score:5, Informative)
For the technically minded, here's a short article [spacefuture.com] with the specifics.
Hard, but possible (Score:3, Informative)
Doing it in a multistage vehicle is difficult because it then becomes much harder to reuse it. Even if you ignore the cost issues of throwing away hardware you really want reusability because otherwise every launch you are using brand new hardware with unknown problems. It's hard to get reliabil
Scaled? (Score:4, Interesting)
-Jesse
Rutan's on it... (Score:5, Interesting)
What will be interesting to see if they can come up with a vehicle that could rendevous with the ISS; the orbit really was poorly chosen for jeverybody except for Russians.
Reaching ISS could seriously be the next challenge.
myke
Re:Rutan's on it... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just the energy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Conversly, redevousing with an object orbiting the equator from a launch point close to the equator
Rutan could build such a space vehicle. (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember the Delta Clipper? Or the aborted X-33 project? They may not be complete successes but it gave Scaled Composites the learning experience that could lead to a cheap reusable Low Earth Orbit space vehicle.
By the way, there is an easy way to do this: launch it on top of a modified 747-200B. Given the large number of 747-200B's that have been retired in the last 3-4 years Scaled Compos
More importantly: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More importantly: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:More importantly: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:More importantly: (Score:2)
Personally, I'd prefer them to be under it.
John Carmack (Score:2, Funny)
Fact or opinion? (Score:4, Funny)
I call opinion. We won't have a definitive answer unless someone stabs him in the heart and he doesn't bleed.
Re:Fact or opinion? (Score:5, Funny)
Inquiring minds want to know.
Re:Fact or opinion? (Score:2)
It'll be ofcourse be considering cheating in the more "elite" gaming-circuits, but in the name of science I say: do it!
Re:Fact or opinion? (Score:2)
Re:John Carmack (Score:2)
for those that don't know, he had a 9 second Ferrari also... so he excels in everything that he does
Hell, anyone with half a million can have a 9 second Ferrari. Or they could go buy a Porsche and run it on an actual race track.
Re:John Carmack (Score:2)
Re:John Carmack (Score:2)
I'm not enough of a gear head to have any reference point for that. This is sorta like when CNN referred to the "200" club for motorcycle people earlier today (in that case they explained it, a kid was going over 200MPH, which appears to be something that is hard to do on a bike). Nobody believes it, because appearently, it's something
Seems very possible (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems extremely difficult with chemical rockets. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the increase in difficulty is far, far greater than the increase in either energy or delta-v required seems to warrant at first glance.
There are two regimes in which a rocket can operate. In one, the delta-v required for the mission is much lower than the exhaust velocity. In this scenario, fuel is only a small fraction of the total craft weight, and scales linearly with delta-v. This is the easy scenario, and it includes the X prize's "get a rocket to a relative altitude of 100 km".
The second regime, the hard scenario, is the one in which the delta-v required for the mission is much higher than the exhaust velocity. In this scenario, the craft weight is dominated by fuel, and the fuel-to-everything-else ratio goes up exponentially with delta-v. Truly exponentially, not the "this is a quadratic but I'm calling it exponential" variety that I see so often around here. Craft design goes from "really hard" to "damn near impossible" to "outright impossible" very quickly.
Ground-to-orbit is balanced right on the knife-edge of "really hard" and "damn near impossible", and that's only when we use multi-stage rockets. Reusable single-stage-to-orbit chemical rockets are well into the "damned near impossible" regime, even with the advanced composites we have now. If the earth was even a little heavier, we wouldn't be getting off of it with chemical rockets at _all_. Orbital velocity is about 8 km/sec, escape is 13 km/sec, and the highest-Isp chemical rockets have an exhaust velocity between 3 and 4 km/sec (with SS1 having one in the range of 2 or so).
There are ways that you can make the hard scenario marginally easier. One is to use multi-stage rockets, though that's generally pretty much _assumed_ past a per-stage mass fraction of 5:1 to 10:1. Another is to use high-Isp chemical fuels - but these make your craft far more expensive due to handling concerns, and in the limiting case this can even be counterproductive (H2 is a lousy fuel for anything that launches from deep in the atmosphere or under a lot of acceleration, due to low storage density and large tank size). Another is to use as small a craft as possible to take advantage of stress scaling laws, but a) that means an upper-atmosphere launch instead of a ground launch, and b) your minimum cargo weight places a lower bound on the craft weight.
The only realistic options for a 7-human manned craft are a big, expensive multi-stage chemical rocket with disposable boosters (because refurbishing to man-rated spec costs an insane amount of money), or an exotic craft with a high-Isp drive, to push the problem back into the "easy" regime. The only high-Isp craft we can build right now with the required thrust is one with a NERVA-style nuclear drive. A remotely laser-powered craft can work too, and we have a good idea how to build these, but full-scale engineering of these haven't been done yet. Orion is _too_ large scale, and would be even less popular than NERVA.
So, I don't expect any vehicle-based solution to be easy to build or cheap enough to run to make the prize offered a significant attraction.
A single-passenger craft would be much easier, due to reduced craft mass (materials scaling, again).
Las Vegas? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Las Vegas? (Score:3, Funny)
"I'm hungry, how about some soup"- guest
"That'll be $150,000, please" - space attendant, " and another 20 minutes of air will be $50,000, don't forget the tip!
Re:Las Vegas? (Score:3, Interesting)
There is some seriousness to this though - what are the legal implications for something in orbit? Las Vegas is a gambling capital partly because it is one of the few places in the US where casino gambling is legal. Would US la
Re:Las Vegas nothing- let's have (Score:2)
Re:Las Vegas? (Score:2)
Though, IANAL also...
Re:Las Vegas? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Las Vegas? (Score:2)
Re:Las Vegas? (Score:2)
Re:Las Vegas? (Score:2)
Thus fulfilling his lifelong dream to become (Score:5, Funny)
The problem is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The problem is... (Score:3, Interesting)
a. be made cheaply enough that losing it in the ocean or having it burn up isn't a big deal,
b. be made to survive high altitude descent without burning up and use a flotation device so it can be recovered, or
c. be made with a pop-out glider assembly or parasail and the smarts to glide to
Re:The problem is... (Score:2)
I know this isn't "ask slashdot" but what's against using lots of earthbound fuel to shoot something into space? Is it simply the length of the required rail/tunnel/whatever or is it something different? Obviously you would want to keep the acceleration within certain levels...
I saw the idea with the baloon, but I think th
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Virgin (Score:5, Interesting)
Should they not be allowed to do it? If scientific research were limited to government funded research facilities then it is likely that research would just become even more of a battleground for politics than it is now.
At least consumers can decide whether or not this will continue, instead of voters. I would think that consumers would make a more educated decision, especially considering the cost of a ticket.
Re:Virgin (Score:2, Funny)
Then we can use GENTOO boxes to decided whether or not this will continue.
Re:Virgin (Score:2)
They are going to be shelling out the seven digits for this.
Re:Virgin (Score:2, Funny)
seriously though, space is big. There is enough room for everyone to go. Looks like democrats want to stay earthbound for the moment.
Virgin is going suborbital, not orbital. (Score:3, Informative)
Orbital is going to take some serious doing beyond what Rutan et al have come up with.
Armadillo has a lot better shot at it than Virgin.
Re: (Score:2)
Will it happen? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems possible to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps something like this [wikipedia.org] could be scaled down rather than a flyable craft? Although I am kind of partial to lifting bodies. Bring on the Dynasoar!
Re:Seems possible to me (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Seems possible to me (Score:3, Informative)
I forgot to address this point. The Russians DID build a winged craft: The Buran. Their one design mistake was the choice to make it cargo capable like the US shuttle. If they'd built something just large enough for people, and left the cargo to the Protons and Energias, they might still be flying them today.
Re:Seems possible to me (Score:3, Interesting)
The $54 million contract covers the costs to complete the preparations for the launches of four GPS satellites scheduled to occur during the 2005 fiscal year.
Re:Seems possible to me (Score:4, Interesting)
With a few modifications, the craft should be able to be modified for reentry. Alternatively, we could for-go the wings and just return a capsule on a parafoil. That was the plan of the Big Gemini craft, and I see little reason why it wouldn't work now. Especially since we have a lot of experience with reentry shielding and parafoil recovery technology.
Re:Seems possible to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like we need a new moderation category - "Understatment".
Re:Seems possible to me (Score:5, Informative)
(grin)
Honestly, reentry isn't THAT bad. The shuttle has it particularly difficult because it's designed for a very shallow reentry angle. As I understand it, the military demanded a large cross-range ability so that the shuttle could go up, perform spy stuff over the USSR, and hit the ground again after one orbit.
A steeper angle requires less shielding. The idea (as I understand it) is to accept a faster increase in heat buildup in exchange for a faster rate of deceleration. Once the craft is deep enough in the atmosphere and has shed enough speed, the atmosphere will actually begin to cool the surface.
The Apollo missions used a simple and inexpensive shield that consisted of an ablative epoxy/silicon material. Such a shield could easily be made replaceable after every flight. The shuttle's tiles OTOH, are supposed to be non-ablative and reusable. However, the number of tiles that they ended up needing resulted in very expensive post-flight inspections.
Honestly, the tech isn't that hard. The early space-modules were nothing more than some sheet metal, a space suit, a few maneuvering jets, and a heat shield. The early Mercury capsules even used a simple, non-ablative shock plate that pushed the atmospheric plasma around the edges of the capsule, preventing heating of the craft itself.
Is The Kitty Big Enough? (Score:4, Interesting)
Rutan has already talked about going orbital, and there is a lot of buzz about this subject from all sorts of people. It is a good time to be alive!
More details (Score:5, Informative)
Of Course... (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course we think it will happen.
As long as someone can sell X units of Y product of service that costs less than X * Y to provide, then they will try to get that business model off the ground (pun intended).
If we can make a wheel, we can make 2. If we can make 2, we can make a bicycle. So if we finally can get a commercial program to send up 3 people, there should be a way to get 7 people up there.
If people can scam people from their money, why can't someone raise money for an X-Prize type prize?
su
It will happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone think it'll happen? (Score:2)
Rockhound : You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?
Just like Star Trek said... (Score:3, Insightful)
It will be a "Joe Blow" who comes up with the warp drive...
And not NASA....
burt rutan will do it, if anyone (Score:3, Insightful)
Already Happened (Score:5, Insightful)
The trick isn't building such a spacecraft. That's been do-able since the 1960's. The trick is figuring out how to make a profit operating the damn thing.
What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
WHAT THE HELL.
If anyone on the planet would say "wonderful, now we've got an incentive to get to the next stage", I'd think it would be the people here on Slashdot - but all of a sudden it's too difficult to reach orbit, with a fifty million dollar budget, in half a decade?
Did anyone really look at the X-prize and say "Oh, that's easy, no problem"? Then why are you looking at this and assuming it will be a problem? There's a lot of time to work on it and at least one group that's already a significant fraction of the way there.
If you think it's hard, okay, sure, no argument, it's hard - but how many times have you learned something new by practicing easy stuff over and over again? It's an opportunity to invent some new low-cost fabrication and launching techniques. It's research. And possibly, it'll even lead to true commercial spaceflight.
I think this is a fantastic turn of events. I can't wait to see who decides to tackle it.
One X-Prize contestant going there (Score:2)
Here's The Question (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens if 10 years from now we have a private space station (or, horror of horrors 2 or 3 stations) with tourists going up and still the ISS isn't completed? How are all of us going to feel about all of those tax dollars we're pouring into the shuttle and ISS now?
Wouldn't it be better take a couple of billion right now and set up a series of prizes that take us from suborbital all the way to mars? You could stretch it over 20-30 years, and make the prizes high enough to keep the independents in the game. Isn't this better than putting all of our tax money in one basket and hoping the basket holds up?
Make chaos work for you, not against you.
FTA - some thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
By offering the $50 million prize he is essentially forcing someone else to do research and development. He already promised to dump $500 million into the space hotel project, so he really can't afford to put another couple of hundred million into something else.
if they don't insist on an exciting trip (Score:2)
Deadlines are a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
This is exactly the kind of thinking which caused the Challenger disaster.
Deadlines like those of the X-Prize and this new one create an incentive for unsafe behavior, as is being seen by the Da Vinci Project's insane plan [davinciproject.com] to have their first test flight be a manned prize attempt.
I wish the deadlines would be reconsidered -- competition between teams should be enough to insure urgency.
Re:Deadlines are a problem (Score:2)
Re:Deadlines are a problem (Score:2)
Making your first test flight a manned prize attempt is at best crazy and at worst suicidal.
It is clear that this would not be happening if the X-Prize deadline weren't fast approaching.
Ansari may have blood on their hands soon. I hope it doesn't happen, but if it does I hope that at least it will convince other prize organizations to alter their rules and get rid of these
Re:Deadlines are a problem (Score:3, Informative)
Most likely, this $50 million isn't all being put in a bank somewhere to wait for somebody to win. (I know the X-Prize was done this way, at least, but I haven't really read about this one, so I could be wrong here.) Instead, they basically buy an insurance policy. The insurance company cranks some numbers, decides that there's a (say) 20% chance that somebody will win, and charges $10 million. If somebody actually wins, the insurance company pays
Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, the things holding us back from manned space exploration is lack of a reason to do it. If someone found out that you could manufacture CPUs that are twice as fast by doing it in zero-G, I'm sure Intel would have a space station within the decade. If you could make toothpaste that would get your teeth extra white while giving fresh breath that lasts for twelve hours by doing it in zero-G, P&G would have a space station within the decade. But none of these things are true. All the reasons for sending men into space mostly come down to "humans have an innate drive to explore", etc. It's true but that doesn't motivate investors to put together the many millions of dollars needed to do this. That's why governments do it: taxpayers have such low expectations of getting something in return for their tax dollars that governments can build space shuttles, the Big Dig [wikipedia.org], etc.
Of course, pretty soon we will have to have more manned missions to Mars to figure out what's going on over at Union Aerospace's secret research facility [ua-corp.com].
Re:Yes (Score:2)
Intel certainly wouldn't build a space station simply to manufacture chipsets. The cost involved in something that like would be greater than building a second state of the art factility on solid ground. Sure, it would be great to have the double speed CPU, but at what cost? No company would devot
$ as motivation (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd say someone needs to offer a prize for finding a way to make orbital and space travel pay!
Someone here on
Re:$ as motivation (Score:2, Informative)
Getting people into orbit and back (Score:5, Insightful)
In the early 1990s research was done on quick turn around vehicles for low cost space access. Two very good articles by Dr. Jerry Pournelle [jerrypournelle.com] are The SSX Concept [jerrypournelle.com] and SSTO Revisited [jerrypournelle.com].
You may or may not agree with Dr. Pournelle, I sure don't, on a lot of things, but he's spot on about what happened to the SSTO concept, NASA got control of it, let a contract out to Lockheed to develop the X-33, spent a whole bunch of money and didn't produce any real hardware unlike the SSX project which spent 60 million dollars and produced a prototype that was able to take off and land twice with a 26 hour turnaround with a support crew of 14 and which also managed to land safely after a hydrogen explosion tore off part of the aeroshell [nasa.gov].
$50M is almost too much (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be a shame to award the prize to some old technology that doesn't build on the inherent economies of the reusable first stages being developed by the Ansari X-Prize contenstants.
As Robert Truax [astronautix.com] told me, people keep studying what the optimal number of stages for an orbital launch vehicle should be and they keep discovering the answer is "2". The first stage is always lower exhaust velocity and cheap per kg. The second stage is always higher exhaust velocity and more expensive per kg.
The ideal first stage derived from the Ansari X-Prize entrants would be one that is cheap to:
Rutan's technology doesn't really fill the bill here because fabricating hybrid rockeet motors is expensive compared to refueling. Also its unlikely his aerodynamic body scales up as cheaply as does simple tankage with vertical takeoff.
As it turns out, John Carmack just reported [armadilloaerospace.com] his team has reached probably the most critical milestone for such a first stage by demonstrating a scaled up version of their methanol/H2O2(50%) mixed monoprop engine [google.com].
This could be the really big deal -- not just for manned spaceflight but for cheap access to space generally.
More info on Bigelow inflatable modules (Score:5, Informative)
The inflatables themselves (photograph here [spaceflightnow.com])are quite interesting, with a docking mechanism designed to attach with either a Russian Soyuz, a Chinese Shenzhou, and/or whatever vehicle comes out of the aforementioned America's Space Prize. A one-third size prototype of the inflatable module will be launched on the maiden flight of SpaceX [spacex.com]'s Falcon V [wikipedia.org] rocket, which is itself a very interesting vehicle (~3000kg into LEO for $12 million, and the first orbital vehicle designed to be man-rated since the space shuttle). The first full-size inflatable habitat will be up by 2008, and it's planned to have a crew by 2010.
What's exciting about this is that the inflatable modules appear to be designed, built, and have undergone some preliminary tests. The outsides of the modules have withstood projectile impact tests fairly well. Pretty much all that needs to happen now is for them to undergo further tests and be launched. Bigelow's use of multiple contractors for the same part will allow him to ramp up production if there's a demand for it, and sell the inflatable modules for ~$100 million each to whoever wants them.
Regarding the prize itself, I'd actually be quite interested to see if somebody ends up just designing a descent capsule and sticks it on a Falcon V.
Is this to go with his planned... (Score:3, Funny)
Ugh, and to think the Physics building at my alma mater is named after him....
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
As for when people start dying, I reckon all the people likely to go up in the near future will be adults who are well aware of the risks they are taking and are more than happy to take their chances for the experience of flying into space. People die mountaineering, people die skiing. Lets try to keep some perspective.
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Funny)
Astronomical boost.. yeah, that's the ticket... that should get us into space!
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
They go to Heaven. Or possibly Hell.
Seriously, what's the point of the question? People die in privately-funded adventures from time to time. But if they want to do it, that's their business. Perhaps they seek historical notariety, perhaps they look forward to possible commercial gains, or perhaps they just want that "extreme thrill" that nobody else has. Either way, it's their money/life, and it's not hurting anybody else, so it's their choice.
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank you, and give me my welfare check.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is, once you lower the cost to orbit (As any orbital tourism vehicle would) there's a lot of markets or improvements to markets that can open up.
National Geographic routinely sends out photographers exploring the world. If they could offset the cost of an expedition by magazine sales, you know they'd be launching their own space exploration missions. It's just too expensive right now.
Imagine communications satellites with 100x th
Re:Hmmm (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
People dying may put off a few more people in this day and age, but it won't scare away the ones who believe in pushing manned space flight forward or those who want the adrenaline rush.
Now, if one of the rockets or space craft fall onto a city, that will affect private space flight programs (Maybe they'll just outsource
that will depend... (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm (Score:2)
To some extent, I think that's going to be one of the biggest benefits of opening up the space race to private concerns - if it's a government program and someone dies, it results in a slowdown of everything while a massive investigation takes place and no progress is made on future research and development. If it's a private program and someone dies,
Re:Where is the station? (Score:2)
Re:Clarify (Score:2, Interesting)
It starts on 00 or 01, take your pick.
Nerds that think school = reality believe it begins at 00, realists too blind to see the logic of the nerds think it begins at 01.
As far as I'm concerned, a significant change in the digits = new start point, ie:
1999 to 2000 =
end of decade
end of millenia
end of y