Comments on: Space tourism history and skepticism in Boston

By: Terry Lipman

Terry Lipman — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:05:56 +0000

I’d like to repsond to the statement by Road Sagdeev regarding John Denver. John Denver’s claim that he had passed NASA’s physical exam and was a finalist to fly on the ill fated Challenger was absolutely true. To prepare for the flight as part of his training he certainly took the simulation training. The fact is that President Reagan decided a teacher should be the first to fly into space and Christa McAuliffe took John’s place. For information John worked diligently with NASA to help their “Citizen’s In Space” Program for which he received the NASA “Public Service Medal” for “helping to increase awareness of space exploration by the people’s of the world” normally reserved for spaceflight engineers and designers. I worked with John for a number of years and am currently developing a documentary inspired by his extraordinary life and would love to have any archival material you may have regarding John Denver that could be used in the documentary. Thank You

By: Jeff Foust

Jeff Foust — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 18:22:36 +0000

Red: good point on the science, although it may be more useful to have those discussions at meetings of more specific scientific groups (AAS, AGU, etc.) than at a more general meeting like AAAS.

Stellvia: One question to ask LainÃ© is how their efforts are going to raise funding to develop their vehicle. EADS could finance the vehicle internally, but have chosen to seek external investors; last I heard they were still looking, in part because of their very high estimated development cost (on the order of â‚¬1 billion).

By: Stellvia

Stellvia — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 18:13:36 +0000

“[T]he suborbital space tourism market, based on existing market studies, is probably too small to interest big aerospace companies.”

Robert LainÃ©, CTO of EADS Space is giving a public lecture in London on March 13 which suggests otherwise:-

http://www.rocketeers.co.uk/?q=node/151

By: red

red — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 16:31:40 +0000

“The number of vehicles needed to service the market is small, so you canâ€™t set up a big production line and get economies of scale as you can with airliners.”

The plan isn’t to build hundreds or thousands of suborbital vehicles and get economies of scale through repeated builds, it’s to build a few suborbital vehicles and fly each of them hundreds or thousands of times … like you can with airliners.

Anyway, instead of the AAAS discussing why the space tourism industry is bound to fail, I’d rather have them spend their time figuring out what they can do in terms of science with these vehicles.