Comments on: EADS reinvents Rocketplane

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:19:19 +0000

Hello Jeff, you actually miss another key point about the seats : they slide (along a sort of rail) to minimize the G-force ! Good idea isn’t it ?!!

Congratulations for your website !

… and sorry if they are any english mistake, I’m a french galactic websurfer !

By: Reda Anderson

Reda Anderson — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 06:14:20 +0000

Another reason the seat design doesn’t make sense is that we humans are of various heights. I’m 5′ 6″. With stretch room, the vehicle would have to be say 6′ 6″ wide on the inside (thus, my eyes would be 6′ from the far window!). But a man might be 6′ 6″ which would mean the vehicle would need to be 7′ 6″ on the inside. Rich basketball players might have to be eliminated because they are too tall for the width of the space plane.

By: Reda Anderson

Reda Anderson — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 05:47:53 +0000

Based on my experience of diving to the Titanic in a submersible, the windows in this schematic are way too far from the passengerâ€™s eyes. In the submersible my nose was practically on the porthole almost 100% of the time. This position gave me, due to the thickness of the glass about a 160 degree angle of vision outside the sub. Had I sat as far back in the sub as this schematic shows, you engineers figure this out, I would have had about a 10 degree field of vision. As Rocketplane XP’s first passenger, the schematic for this spaceship is unacceptable for the simply because the #1 reason for both diving to the Titanic and taking the space ride is to look out the window to see the view.

By: james lee

james lee — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:44:50 +0000

What’s interesting to me is the Development Budget.

Astrium Says It’s a Billion dollars to build a tourist spaceship.
Virgin Galactic says it’s $250 Million Dollars to do this.
Rocketplane says it’s $13 Million.

One suspects the Rocketplane staff of having slipped a decimal
somewhere important.

By: Mikael Wozniak

Mikael Wozniak — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 20:53:54 +0000

Hi,

I think you missed another point in your article. Your talk about the wierd business plan which needs 1000+ flight to pay for the 1bâ‚¬ investment doesn’t really make sense to me… EADS doesn’t plan to operate those rocketplanes, just to build them and then sell them to some tourism/spaceliner companies. Let’s say the price is 40 million for each plane, they need to sell 20 of them and that’s it (for paying the initial development/testing/prototypes costs).They don’t really care about what happen next.

Let’s say one company buy one, they will need to fly it 50 times to pay for its price (not including operational costs).

The risk in terms of number of flights recquired is divided and taken by other companies operating it, they just need to sell the planes.

(obviously the numbers I have used here are examples)

For those interested, the coverage has been quite good in France with all major TV news programs and main newspapers mentioning it. Also, lots of comments from readers have been posted on newspaper websites regarding that news and a fair share of them is quite negative, especially concerning the environment facet of the plane: “We let rich people kill the planet” and the like which is going to make Astrium’s search of investment quite tricky (EADS spokesmen said they wanted some regional/EU public investment too)

Anyway, good luck to them!

By: Personal Spaceflight » More on EADS’ suborbital vehicle plans

Personal Spaceflight » More on EADS’ suborbital vehicle plans — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:27:00 +0000

[…] reaction (and clarification) on the EADS Astrium announcement this week about its plans to develop a suborbital vehicle for space tourism […]

By: Garrett Smith

Garrett Smith — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 12:11:10 +0000

Hello Jeff, You missed a key point on the seats. They pivot around the attachment points so that the passengers are aligned rearside to the spacecraft x-axis (body aligned on Gx-axis) during launch acceleration and they are rearside on the negative z-axis during weightlessness and reentry. I find this actually to be a novel way to provide good seating while freeing up space in the cabin for floating around. It is like a space hammock that swings to the best position depending upon acceleration forces.