White Knight & Spaceship One
Scaled Composites, which is aircraft designer Burt Rutan's company, has photos of their private spacecraft system, and datasheets on same. Fascinating stuff.
The F.A.Q. on the site has this tantalyzing question and answer:
Q: How much does it all cost?That's quite a tease. But if "it all" means the whole space plane system, and "Soyuz ride" is a sly reference to how much space tourist Dennis Tito spent to get his ride on the Soyuz a few years ago, that means the total cost should be only about $20 million.A: This is generally not known until the program is complete, but projections place it close to a Soyuz ride.
I'm going to try to avoid editorializing excessively until this thing is tested succesfully a couple of times. But it's hard not to get excited.
(Thanks to Joe Katzman for the links.)
* Update * Own Strawn forwarded this Space.com article on Spaceship One that's also worth a read.
Ahhh, the X-Prize does indeed warm my heart. With Rutans guys, Xcor and others firmly on the hunt for it, we may end up with a Space Industry yet!
It has been mine and my husband's thougth for a long time that the best way we are going to see progress in space exploration/space utilization is through private enterprise, rather than the government. NASA seems to be the favored punching bag as far as downsizing funds for, yet they are also practically the only govnt agency that actually PRODUCES anything.
There is a local launch pad about 60 miles away in Brazoria. The owner has been trying to drum up support/funding etc through the locality for this launch pad.
If hubby and I had extra money to play with, our thoughts had been to invest in companies that spent its money doing the work to get a workable space craft. News of this is very exciting indeed.
I found some more articles at http://www.nasawatch.com (which I found from http://www.andrewsullivan.com):
http://www.aviationnow.com/avnow/news/channel_awst_story.jsp?id=news%2F04213top.xml
http://www.msnbc.com/news/903100.asp?0cb=-213151818&cp1=1
I think its great that Bert Rutan and the other competitors for the X-prize may be able to give us RELIABLE (even if at this point, suborbital) space flight.
A couple of missions a year by machines never intended for long term usage, that needs must be essentially rebuilt for each mission, and have an attrition rate of 40% don't seem to me to be the logical torchbearers of the tradition that put us on the moon. What kind of spacefleet gives its crew effectivly ZERO chance of survival if thing go FUBAR.
When I look back at the early missions... the Mercury and Apollo missions I thought that by the 21st century we'd have a long term base on the moon, and working hard for one on Mars. But I was only 12 and didn't understand it was to become so politicized.
The nuke non-proliferation treaties knocked out Bucky's "atomic bomb powered" ships and we've been limping along, underfunded, bureaucratized by comittee ever since, effectivly working with 8088 chips instaed of Pentium 4s.
If the complacency shown by NASA and the so- called experts can only give us tragic errors in planning and foresight like '86 and '03 then maybe private guys with vision and incentive to make spaceflight work (good ol' profit motive) is the answer.
On a humorous note, it brings to mind some of the pulp SF novels of the thirties, in which the "heros" basically built a spaceship in their shed and took off into the void, ignoring the bureaucrats, the anti-science government, and most everyone else ...except the heroines, of course.
If that's what it takes then GO, Bert, GO!
Dear Sir or Madams,
this is ZDF German Television writing. We are planning different shootings in December in California.
We just wanted to know if there is any chance to get an interview with BURT RUTAN and footage of Space Ship One and White Knight?
Thank you very much!
Best wishes,
Christiane Burkert