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A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me :
I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun.
I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats.
I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality,
and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm
an idealist? I did, OK.)
I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with
practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand
with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Monday, October 04, 2004
Go SpaceShipOne!
As any geek worthy of the title knows by now, SpaceShipOne has flown its second of two required flights necessary to secure the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. This is a remarkable achievement, and it's a clear step in the direction of everyday, private space flight.
There are now three directions for follow-on development. The first, as highlighted by the Virgin Galactic deal, will be the commercialization of SpaceShipOne-class vehicles as short-hop thrill rides to the edge of space for the well-heeled, starting at about $20,000 per ride. The second will be the development of more capable suborbital vehicles for commercial use. (I'll be very surprised if we don't learn in 10 years or so that the US military isn't already operating "black" suborbital vehicles of some sort, but that's another topic.) Suborbital cargo or passenger carriers could revolutionize commerce and transportation every bit as much as overnight package delivery and jumbo jets have done. But the long-range payoff will be on the third follow-on, which would be a private orbital space vehicle. The challenges for this are formidable, because getting SpaceShipOne to 100 kilometers is nowhere near as difficult as pushing it to orbital speed once it's reached that altitude. And once you're in orbit, then you have the problem of getting rid of all that speed in order to come home again. Remember, we lost one Space Shuttle in the process of pouring on the speed to get into orbit, and another one in the process of shedding speed to come back to Earth. Both parts of the problem are difficult and dangerous. Nevertheless, someone will do it at some point. And with any luck, I'll have saved enough money for a ticket by that time.
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As any geek worthy of the title knows by now, SpaceShipOne has flown its second of two required flights necessary to secure the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. This is a remarkable achievement, and it's a clear step in the direction of everyday, private space flight.
There are now three directions for follow-on development. The first, as highlighted by the Virgin Galactic deal, will be the commercialization of SpaceShipOne-class vehicles as short-hop thrill rides to the edge of space for the well-heeled, starting at about $20,000 per ride. The second will be the development of more capable suborbital vehicles for commercial use. (I'll be very surprised if we don't learn in 10 years or so that the US military isn't already operating "black" suborbital vehicles of some sort, but that's another topic.) Suborbital cargo or passenger carriers could revolutionize commerce and transportation every bit as much as overnight package delivery and jumbo jets have done. But the long-range payoff will be on the third follow-on, which would be a private orbital space vehicle. The challenges for this are formidable, because getting SpaceShipOne to 100 kilometers is nowhere near as difficult as pushing it to orbital speed once it's reached that altitude. And once you're in orbit, then you have the problem of getting rid of all that speed in order to come home again. Remember, we lost one Space Shuttle in the process of pouring on the speed to get into orbit, and another one in the process of shedding speed to come back to Earth. Both parts of the problem are difficult and dangerous. Nevertheless, someone will do it at some point. And with any luck, I'll have saved enough money for a ticket by that time.
