While these ventures have a futuristic outlook, what no one questions is whether the planet, already inundated with harmful emissions, needs yet more of them from space vehicles that serve no other purpose that to give rides for people with money to burn for a brief personal adventure.
Planes provide needed transportation and scientific rockets hopefully will benefit humankind. But do we really need to unload more fuel emissions into the skies with tourist rockets while we haven’t yet brought the Earth’s present overload of toxic gases under control? Just wondering.
This is not the first time this issue has come up; Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic tried to head this issue off at the pass last year at the SpaceShipTwo cabin mockup unveiling in New York by claiming that each SpaceShipTwo flight would have one ten-thousandth the environmental impact of a space shuttle launch, or about the same carbon dioxide emission as a single Virgin Atlantic business-class passenger on a New York-to-London flight. Other suborbital vehicles under development will probably have environmental impacts of roughly the same order as SS2, given the relatively short duration of the powered portion of their flights (a few minutes of rocket power, and in some cases additional time under jet power.)
Even in the most robust market scenarios the number of flights will only be in the hundreds or low thousands per year for years to come, which means that the total environmental impact of suborbital spaceflight will be an almost infinitesimal fraction of the overall commercial aviation industry. Couldn’t the Telegraph’s editors reached that same conclusion with just a modest amount of research? Just wondering.
In his speech at the ISDC in May, Jim Benson said that the reentry forces that his company’s redesigned suborbital spacecraft would be less than the 6 Gs that SpaceShipTwo will experience. He wasn’t more specific then, but this week the company announced that their vehicle will subject passengers to no more than 3 Gs during reentry by spreading the deceleration forces over a wider range of altitudes. The vehicle will accomplish this through something called “Variable Ballistic Coefficient” slowing, which involves a number of vehicle configuration changes, most notably the dive brakes; the company has filed a patent application for this approach.
Something like this could prove to be a good differentiator over time: lower G forces will result in a more comfortable experience for passengers and perhaps allow people that for health reasons can’t tolerate higher G forces to fly at all. It may be less of an issue in the near-term, though, since people who are the most eager to fly (and have the means to pay for the flight) will probably be willing to put up with the inconvenience of a momentary surge of G forces.
Just a couple of months after becoming the executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, Rick Homans announced today that he is resigning to take a job in the private sector. Homans, who stepped down as the Secretary of Economic Development for the state to take over as head of the authority after the untimely passing of former executive director Lonnie Sumpter earlier this year, had planned all along to be only an interim head of the authority. However, he said he had an opportunity to take a job with an unidentified “environmental technology company” that plans to set up its headquarters in New Mexico, an opportunity that “arose imperatively”. Homans had been a major supporter of what has become Spaceport America since shortly after becoming the state economic development secretary in 2003, working with Gov. Bill Richardson and other state officials to lure Virgin Galactic, the X Prize Cup, and other space ventures to the state. A replacement for Homans has not been announced.
Anderson added that, on the orbital front, his company is working with the Russian space agency Roskosmos to try and increase the number of Soyuz flights to provide more flight opportunities for space tourists. Also, he hopes that the first tourist spacewalk from the ISS could take place in 2009.
Today (assuming you’re reading this in the next few hours) is the third anniversary of the first flight into space by SpaceShipOne. A couple people emailed me to ask if I was going to post on this, and while I thought about taking a deep big-picture view of the significance of the anniversary, but realized what I wrote last year on the second anniversary of the flight is still valid today. Progress has been made (and continues to be made, as recent developments have demonstrated), but you still can’t fly into space on a suborbital vehicle. Perhaps by this time next year that will be different, at least if you’re a test pilot for one of the leading vehicle developers.
Evidently being executive director of the National Space Society isn’t keeping George Whitesides busy enough (hard to believe, given all the energy he puts into NSS activities): he has signed on to be a “senior advisor” to Virgin Galactic, according to a report by Space News (subscription required). He’ll work with Virgin on government and regulatory issues, according to the report, as well as being a general advocate for the company; he’ll split his time between Virgin Galactic and the NSS. Perhaps now he’ll get a discount on the reservations he and his wife, Loretta, have on SpaceShipTwo…
Spaceport America, the new commercial spaceport being developed in New Mexico, remains on schedule even though construction won’t begin until next year, state spaceport authority officials said Tuesday. Construction of the spaceport will begin in April of 2008, shortly after the state anticipates receiving a spaceport license from the FAA. The state is currently working on the environmental assessment portion of the licensing process, as well as engaging in Virgin Galactic in discussions about the spaceport design. The cost of the facility is still pegged at $198 million.
Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of the first flight into space by SpaceShipOne. As a reminder of that event, and the potential for the future, here’s a video I stumbled across recently, featuring a talk by Burt Rutan at the TED conference last year. He talks about the stagnation he sees in the aerospace industry (which he measures in part in terms of the top speed of aircraft over the decades) and the need for innovation, which he believes will be spurred by a “new capitalist space race”. If you’ve seen Rutan speak previously, you’ll find the theme and content familiar, but it’s a good encapsulation of his thoughts about the emerging private spaceflight industry.
Burt Rutan, contacted by SPACE.com, doesn’t think much of the plan. He thinks it, and other rocket-powered aircraft that take off from a runway under rocket or jet power, will be more expensive to develop and operate, and also have greater operational risks. “The non-recurring development cost of a suborbital spaceship that has rocket and jet engines — both of which leave the atmosphere and experience reentry — will be far more than our SpaceShipTwo program,” he said.
The vice president of the European Commission, Guenter Verheugen, is also dissatisfied with the Astrium proposal, but for very different reasons: “It’s only for the super rich, which is against my social convictions,” he told Reuters. (One wonders what he thinks of the many terrestrial luxury items and resorts that are also affordable only by the “super rich” in Europe or elsewhere.) The article also notes that an Airbus official “declined to answer a question on the apparent paradox of a company trying to cut emissions in one area while investing in a project to blast rich travellers into space.” Perhaps because the paradox wasn’t apparent to him or others.
Also, thanks to a few readers that helped alleviate my ignorance about the seating inside Astrium’s “space jet”. It turns out the seats are hinged on each end, allowing the seats to rotate into the proper position during ascent so that the g-forces are aligned on the Gx vector through the body. It turns out there’s an illustration in a brochure about the vehicle, although, curiously, no matching image in a photo gallery. In any case, it makes much more sense to me now.
The online edition of Space News reported late Wednesday that Rocketplane Kistler missed its May milestone in NASA’s COTS program (subscription required). That milestone required RpK to have completed a second round of private financing by the end of the month; it has yet to complete that round, according to a NASA spokesperson contacted by Space News. NASA doesn’t plan to penalize the company for the missed milestone at the present time, instead choosing to work with the company “on a plan that would provide the company additional time to meet its goal while also meeting NASA’s needs.” RpK, by all accounts, has been making steady technical progress on the K-1 vehicle, announcing back in February that it achieved a systems requirement review for the vehicle three weeks ahead of schedule.
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Suborbital spaceflight and the emissions myth
Saturday’s issue of the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph has an editorial raising questions about the environmental impact of suborbital spaceflight. The article is based on a recent AP article about the growth of the suborbital space tourism field, specifically mentioning the recent investment in XCOR Aerospace. (You can tell that the editorial is not going to be that positive when it refers to Boston Harbor Angels, the group of angel investors that made the investment into XCOR, as “fat cats with money to spare”.)
The Telegraph editorial’s key section is:
This is not the first time this issue has come up; Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic tried to head this issue off at the pass last year at the SpaceShipTwo cabin mockup unveiling in New York by claiming that each SpaceShipTwo flight would have one ten-thousandth the environmental impact of a space shuttle launch, or about the same carbon dioxide emission as a single Virgin Atlantic business-class passenger on a New York-to-London flight. Other suborbital vehicles under development will probably have environmental impacts of roughly the same order as SS2, given the relatively short duration of the powered portion of their flights (a few minutes of rocket power, and in some cases additional time under jet power.)
Even in the most robust market scenarios the number of flights will only be in the hundreds or low thousands per year for years to come, which means that the total environmental impact of suborbital spaceflight will be an almost infinitesimal fraction of the overall commercial aviation industry. Couldn’t the Telegraph’s editors reached that same conclusion with just a modest amount of research? Just wondering.