Space Tourism, Now and to Come 123
bart_scriv writes, "BusinessWeek looks at the latest in space tourism, from a $20 million Soyuz trip to a $200,000 ride via Virgin Galactic. The article looks at existing and planned opportunities, with a slide show of photos and artist's conceptions of vehicles and facilities. From the article: 'Among the other wonders of space is the planned Bigelow Aerospace space hotel. Similar in design to the International Space Station (which has kept a constant human presence in space since 2000), the hotel has a modular design that will allow it easily to expand. The key difference is that the hotel's modules will be inflatable. Bigelow Aerospace launched the Genesis I test module into orbit on July, 2006, and plans to send Genesis II in early 2007.'"
I for one... (Score:4, Funny)
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Great. Now the first space hotel will bring to mind a Rob Schneider movie (and one ripped off of Dan Akroyd's concept, at that.)
"Attention please. May I have your attention, please. Will all guests please report to the 'It's Pat!' room for flamenco tube floatdancing. Also, remember that at 8 o'clock, we will be showing a movie in the 'What is that thing? Oh, I know what that thing is...
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All towelhead religious stereotypes you can make up, apply also to nuts that read the new testament.
Religious nuts exist everywhere. And people to make lots of money with them, through warfare, too. There's no need to think they are all muslim.
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If this price comes down to 20,000 then I'm gone! (Score:5, Funny)
"Not really," I said. "After all, when I kick-it I plan on having my ashes and a sample of my DNA shot into space anyhow. As long as the rocket makes it to space first, I think it would actually be a pretty good deal."
Space Ball! (Score:3, Funny)
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40 years away? People are already assembling sports leagues to compete on the weightless flights operated by the Zero Gravity Corporation [wikipedia.org]. Here's an MSNBC article, Zero-gravity sports are close to reality [msn.com]. Of course, whether or not the business plans are economically viable remains to be seen.
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Amateur? Amateur? With the money required to get people into space, you're not even gonna pay 'em a token amount? They're supposed to help you profit on their own dime? Methinks the hotel will set up such a league and sell it directly to some network, if anyone cares.
Wait! I have a better idea.
1. Invent space travel
2. Make cost effective for tourists
3. Pr0n
Profit!
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Nah -- screw athletics. They only make money because they can appeal to a large number of low-income folks. Since the per-person travel costs are so high, you'll have to start at the upscale end of the ladder: Blue Man Group in space, Cirque de Soleil in weightlessness -- that kind of thing. You want to attract the people who'd not just be willing, but actually able to afford $200k to see Barry Manilow floating around.
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They could call their promotion company Gigsssss Innnnn Spaaaaaaaace....
3 words (Score:3, Interesting)
There's your 21st centure business model
Although, cleaning up afterwards would be a challenge...
More junk to monitor (Score:3, Interesting)
As if there wasn't enough junk to try to monitor in space and worry about falling to earth, now we're going to have private enterprise try to make a buck or two off of going to space.
Government contractors worry me enough, but what happens to a space hotel when the business runs out of money? I can see this going through a boom and bust cycle like just about every new business, and I want to know. It's not like running lots of fiber optic cable and then going bankrupt. Who's going to take care of the degrading orbit of the hotel?
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Interesting point (Score:2, Interesting)
I would imagine that once private industry is up there all the time, that "space junk" will become a valuable resource and won't be allowed to just de orbit and burn up. They'll do something with it.
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>> falling to earth, now we're going to have private enterprise try to make
>> a buck or two off of going to space.
>
> I would imagine that once private industry is up there all the time, that
> "space junk" will become a valuable resource and won't be allowed to just
> de orbit and burn up. They'll do something with it.
Never let a capitalist solution get in the way of a good old-fashioned socialist hate-on
spaced out junk (Score:1)
Re:More junk to monitor (Score:5, Interesting)
Gravity.
Interesting economic question: What's the salvage value of an abandoned ISS? If it costs $10000/lb to send something to orbit, the ISS is worth its weight in gold.
But if you buy an abandoned space station for $1.00, and use its $10000/lb "value" to finance the building of rockets that cost $1000/lb to send fuel into orbit before your space station's orbit degrades, you've just cut the value of an abandoned hunk of metal by a factor of ten. Oops, those were also your company's assets! The bank calls your loan, and you're sunk.
Then some other guy buys you out for pennies on the dollar, and flies your $1000/lb rockets to his space hotel, and makes a go of it.
I suspect that much like wiring a nation with fiberoptics, the early bird gets the worm... but the second mouse gets the cheese.
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Mycroft
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On Grandparent post - every rocket launched and payload developed has specific debris-mitigation efforts. US commercial payloads must pass through AST's debris process. Debris is an issue, but it's a small step compared to regenerative life support or deep space radiation issues.
Josh
The ISS is worthless. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope. A thing is only worth what someone is willing to pay, it's costs are irrelevant. There's no such thing as intrinsic value.
That means you have to start with... What is someone willing to pay for a week in orbit? Then ask how many people can we get into the thing, how long will it last. Then you have an approximate measure of what the ISS might be worth to a space hotel operator.
There are no space hotel operators at the moment and nobody else really knows what to do with the thing, which means that if the ISS were abandoned tomorrow, it would literally be worthless.
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Straw man arguement. ISS is worth it's weight in gold, or platimum, or whatever else you want to barter. Remember, it's in orbit, weighs nothing....
Bigelow is in the hospitality business, in a 'not small' way, I'm sure he understands a few fundamentals about building and running a h
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Actually everything in orbit has weight, as it's constantly falling towards earth. If the ISS was weightless it would fly off into space.
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Is this a problem? What's wrong with trying to make money by providing a service? Granted the first one's in are going to have to go through growing pains
but that is how innovation begins. Unless you want to go back to the horse and buggy? lol.
Regards,
MBC1977,
(US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)
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Inflatable != fragile (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Inflatable != fragile (Score:4, Interesting)
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"Description: The pictured box contains Mexican jumping beans..."
Definitely worth a look, but I'm not so sure it was worth shooting into space.
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The entire unit is just a test. So they sent up whatever was cool to look at. I mean, I don't think science is going to be majorly advanced by Jumping Beans and Magnetix.
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They included in their already launched, literal, not figurative "toy box", a car with wheels on it for rolling on the ground .
IDIOTS!
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They're probably confusing them with these guys. [imdb.com]
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For any readers who might be unfamiliar with Transhab, there's a rather nice history of the project, and its further development by Bigelow:
A History of the Genesis I Private S [blogspot.com]
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In the end i would rather be in the traditional deathstar rather than a
Space traveli (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't considering suborbital trips to be space travel, so I'm glad they're talking about some of the real players trying to bring orbital travel to be affordable.
My great fear is that the marketing machines are overselling suborbital "roller coasters", and when that is an abject failure, we'll see less investment in real orbital trips. Orbital is at least an order of magnitude harder than suborbital (if not more), so it's possible that some investors could be spooked away.
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Armadillo Aerospace Test Hover Video (Score:3, Interesting)
How High is Space? (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't Earth's escape velocity constant, regardless of how far you travel to escape it? I don't see dropping off quicker with only 1 mile "head start" so much of the acceleration to escape velocity is against less weight, with constant mass requiring constant acceleration fuel.
Wouldn't the Equator's 26 miles extra distance from the Earth's center (compared to the distance at the poles) make it an even cheaper launch site?
Even if all these factors count, isn't Ecuador's low lattitude and high altitude the best combination? Forget a space elevator, how about just an escalator up the Andes?
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Escape velocity is irrelevant; what you care about is orbital velocity, or rather, the delta-v (change in velocity) necessary to reach orbital velocity. The delta-v certainly does depend on your location, since both your gravitational potential energy and your kinetic energy due to the Earth's rotation vary with location and altitude.
Re:How High is Space? (Score:5, Informative)
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But as you point out, you don't have a "shorter t
Cheney's Inquiry & deposit required? (Score:2)
Rumor also has it that Johhny Depp, John Daly and well as other rock stars/bands and athletes would have to pay a hefty deposit. "It's damn hard to replace the windows although an advantage we have over our "grounded" competition is that should such hotel trashing take place, it would be fairly quiet. What many of these stars don't understand (well besides Sigourney Weaver) is that in space, no one can hear you scream".
Next big build out (Score:2)
Vacation on the moon! (Score:2)
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(sorry. couldn't resist.
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Space Gigolo (Score:2)
The first thing that comes to mind is regulation (Score:1, Insightful)
Who would be the regulating body? If we leave space up to the private sector and traveling by space becomes a viable alternative, what's to stop the private companies from gouging the consumer? I'm sure we could find a way to regulate on an international level through a conglomerate made of
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obligatory... (Score:2)
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Watch out for the jumblies!
Virgin Galactic....where do you land? (Score:1)
A sub-orbital jaunt could easily turn a 20 hour flight into a much shorter trip.
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The Sign of the Future (Score:1)
While I think it could be cool to be able to send contained personal stuff into space, I'm not so wild about the "big sign" possibility. Maybe I should be more worried about the
Note to Space Hotel Recreation Director: (Score:3, Funny)
Thank you,
Bigelow Aerospace Management
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Big heads (Score:2)
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> a big sack of gas with absolutely nothing to do and REALLY nowhere to go.
Just a bunch of wealthy, non-obese, non-elderly males and females, all alone, with no gravity. What to do? What to do?
To boldly go... or wimp out and stay home (Score:2)
eg. http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006410413,00
Ok, so maybe we should give the guy a break since he's 70-odd, but really if you got that far mightn't you just want to do that one last big thing whether it killed you or not?
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First female space tourist (Score:1)
X-Prize funder is next space tourist (Score:2)
What? (Score:2)
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If you have that much to blow, you should be doing something useful. Not tossing it out the window.
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Actually, forget the blackjack.
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And that'd be different from waking up in a puddle of it exactly how? Plus, it seems that it wouldn't be floating past your head, but toward the air intake.
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I've got twenty bucks- what'll that get me?
A blow job. From an alien. [theregister.co.uk]