SpaceShipOne has taken off!

[Butterbean569]

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996463
It's on the ground and safe.
Looks like things have worked out. May the new Xprize winner go forward with their work.

Well, they need to do it again in the next two weeks to win the Xprize....but they're planning on doing it in only one week so it sounds like they're pretty confident. Sweeeeet

[Sea Skimmer]

Yes, but the VSS is a suborbital flight with an order-of-magnitude decrease in delta-V neccessary

That doesn't matter; the real money is in selling this to the US military, if they can make it fly for less then a million dollars a mission (which I would assume includes a handsome profit) and find a way to drop a 1000-pound penitrating bomb from around the peak of its flight then we would have a very formidable anti bunker weapon.

[Broomstick]

Actually, most astonomers and space/aeronautics engineers agree that there isn't really a future for manned spaceflight since robots can do it for cheaper, less cost and less risk.

By that reasoning people should never take business trips or visit distant relatives - e-mail, phone, and videoconferencing fulfills those needs sufficiently. We should never go on vacation to other parts of the world, Just stay home and watch travel shows on TV or buy a video about the country or territory in question. Science may not need us in space (although I could dispute that) but that doesn't mean the human animal has no desire to go there. Science and logic are not the sole motivating factors here.

"The trajectory was good, the roll was off," said Dick Rutan, a test pilot and brother of Burt Rutan, the SpaceShipOne designer. "I was worried. That wasn't the way it was supposed to be."

Hmm, looks like them big gummint heads might have had a better idea what they were doing than people thought.

Hmmm... Perhaps. If you ignore the numerous launch failures - blown up, off-course, and destroyed rockets - that occured on the way to manned flight. Not to mention the Apollo 1 disaster that burned three men alive. Rutan didn't lose any prototypes - SS1 is the prototype. Nor has anyone, as of today, died in his rocket. Granted, Rutan is benefiting in no small way from an additional 50 years of technology, but since his rocket uses different fuel than NASA's there was a limit to how much he borrowred.

[Broomstick]

Yes, but the VSS is a suborbital flight with an order-of-magnitude decrease in delta-V neccessary

That doesn't matter; the real money is in selling this to the US military, if they can make it fly for less then a million dollars a mission (which I would assume includes a handsome profit) and find a way to drop a 1000-pound penitrating bomb from around the peak of its flight then we would have a very formidable anti bunker weapon.

That's the called an "inter-continental ballistic missile" or ICBM, which the military has had since the 1960's.

I disagree the "real money" is in the military. Yes, the military would be a valuable customer, but if the price comes down sufficiently then it's really in civilian transport the money rolls in - a reliable sub-orbital flight system with a quiet re-entry could bring back the concept of trans-sonic civilian flight without the noise problems of the Concorde, which, as much as the expense, was the deal-killer there. And that's even without reaching actual orbit.

[Iceberg]

Yes, but the VSS is a suborbital flight with an order-of-magnitude decrease in delta-V neccessary

That doesn't matter; the real money is in selling this to the US military, if they can make it fly for less then a million dollars a mission (which I would assume includes a handsome profit) and find a way to drop a 1000-pound penitrating bomb from around the peak of its flight then we would have a very formidable anti bunker weapon.

Given that the planned format for tourist flights is five passengers at 200K a pop, one would expect that the anticipated cost of flying the spacecraft, given five passengers at 90kg or less per person, is somewhere in the neighborhood of $200-300 thousand per mission.

[phongn]

That's the called an "inter-continental ballistic missile" or ICBM, which the military has had since the 1960's.

An ICBM is too inaccurate and too expensive to carry a conventional munition.

[Gil Hamilton]

Besides, why would you waste something as expensive as an ICBM on a convential bunker buster. You can bust bunkers just as well with bombs dropped from planes or shorter ranged missiles.

[Sea Skimmer]

That's the called an "inter-continental ballistic missile" or ICBM, which the military has had since the 1960's.

An ICBM is a completely different type of craft, and one, which costs 70 million dollars while still lacking the accuracy to make a conventional warhead effective. Its the economy that comes from Spaceship 1's air breathing and reusable first stage, combined with the fact that it doesn't need to follow a ballistic trajectory, that would make it attractive for an anti bunker mission. Its a cheep way (relative to the common suggestion of dropping something from orbit) too get a tremendous striking velocity, very huge bombs can approach the speed of sound when dropped from 40,000 feet, which is about as high as they can be hauled, but with this sort of setup you could have a bomb plunge down at multi mach velocities. Even if it had to be a solid mass of tungsten (having an explosive filler might make it too prone to breaking up) you'd still greatly annoy in an incapacitating manner, anyone inside the target.

I disagree the "real money" is in the military. Yes, the military would be a valuable customer, but if the price comes down sufficiently then it's really in civilian transport the money rolls in - a reliable sub-orbital flight system with a quiet re-entry could bring back the concept of trans-sonic civilian flight without the noise problems of the Concorde, which, as much as the expense, was the deal-killer there. And that's even without reaching actual orbit.

The price is never going to come down for this sort of craft to make regular travel routes possibul. Simply the fact that you need to operate two separate craft for this sort of thing to work will see to that. Safety concerns are also going to be a killer.

[dragon]

Actually prize will eventually come down when the technology gets more refined or new techs are invent for the next prize. At that ould be the 50million dollar for the first orbital flight.

[Jon]

The VSS Enterprise, how satisfying.

Virgin Galactic- Genius.

[Broomstick]

I disagree the "real money" is in the military. Yes, the military would be a valuable customer, but if the price comes down sufficiently then it's really in civilian transport the money rolls in - a reliable sub-orbital flight system with a quiet re-entry could bring back the concept of trans-sonic civilian flight without the noise problems of the Concorde, which, as much as the expense, was the deal-killer there. And that's even without reaching actual orbit.

The price is never going to come down for this sort of craft to make regular travel routes possibul. Simply the fact that you need to operate two separate craft for this sort of thing to work will see to that. Safety concerns are also going to be a killer.

Are costs going to come down for this particular model? No - it's a prototype. That doesn't mean the price won't come down for future private spacecraft. Compare the cost of airline travel in, say, 1962 to the cost of the same trip today, after adjusting for inflation. Will it ever be as cheap as, say, a trip in a 747? No, probably not - but speed is part of what you're paying for in a trip like that, and that will always cost some money

As for safety concerns... well, airplanes went from being pretty hazardous to the safest form of mass transit in history in under a century. Leaving the ground hasn't become inherently lesss risky, but our coping mechanisms have improved immensely. Space won't stop being dangerous, but as our technology and, more importantly, experience in dealing with space improves the risks will go down. Not vanish, no, but problems will be better anticipated, planned for, and dealt with. The prospect of a fiery crash form of death hasn't stopped airline travel and the prospect of dying in space (or going to or from it) won't stop space travel - unless you let the nanny-state bureaucrats get ahold of it and decide, on your behalf, it's "too dangerous" for human beings.

[Symmetry]

Hmm, looks like them big gummint heads might have had a better idea what they were doing than people thought.

I wouldn't say that. The government was pretty good at hiding the near misses they had, and many only came out in various astronought's memoirs. There were lots of incidents a lot more threatening than this, like the Gemini 8 one for instance.

[Mayabird]

The second flight is currently set for a 1400 GMT launch tomorrow (I think that's 9 AM EST; the rest of you folks will just have to figure out the time for yourselves).

Whee!

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

The second flight is currently set for a 1400 GMT launch tomorrow (I think that's 9 AM EST; the rest of you folks will just have to figure out the time for yourselves).

Whee!

0800 CST. History will be made and I will be asleep...

[Broomstick]

This is completely nuts - I'm not flying it, I'm not going to watch it, I'm not even going to be able to see it on TV... but I'm so damn wound up by this Ansari X-prize thing I can't sleep!

Good luck to the guys tomorrow AM, may it be as routine and uneventful a flight as possible.