Virgin Galactic Unveils SpaceShipTwo 129
BoulderDad writes, "Richard Branson presented a mock-up of the new SpaceShipTwo in New York. From the article: 'Future passengers aboard Virgin Galactic spaceliners can look forward to cushioned reclining seats and lots of windows during suborbital flights aboard SpaceShipTwo, a concept interior of which was unveiled by British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson Thursday.' The video is worth watching; the spaceport details are more concept than reality, but the depiction of the phases of space flight is very good."
Shotgun! (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Shotgun! (Score:4, Informative)
I get the shotgun seat!
You can have it.
I saw Burt Rutan (the craft designer) talking at the Oshkosh EAA convention a couple months ago. He explained how they plan to allow exactly that. The typical SpaceShip 2 Flight will have 8 people on board... That's one Virgin pilot, and 7 "revenue" seats. 6 passengers will typically show up just a day or two before their flight for some brief training. The seventh guest will pay a lot more, and will arrive 2-3 months before the flight for extensive training. They will be the official co-pilot for their flight.
I'm sure you will need to be a licensed pilot going in, so start working on that training now!
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[OT] This article is useless without pictures (Score:1)
And, yes, I was here the day or so that Slashdot's allowance of the IMG tag was exploited back in the day. I still regret scrolling past the mug shot of Bill Gates and seeing...well, what shouldn't be seen. Brain bleach. It doesn't work.
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No thanks.. I'll stick to text.
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Comfy... (Score:1, Funny)
Ahh suborbital relaxation. Do I get a glass of Veuve with that as well?
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bin space? (Score:4, Funny)
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Probably just easier to leave them out.
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Hmm, maybe I should have taken the Aussie approach and said "lockers"
Orbit? (Score:5, Informative)
But when will private industry make it into orbit and back.
You need that if you want to stay for more then free fall.
Its the speed of orbit, and reentry from that speed, that makes this hard.
A real space tourist will want to stay a while.
As for several minutes of weightlessness, you can get
that from conventional aircraft.
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Re:Orbit? (Score:4, Insightful)
As for several minutes of weightlessness, you can get
that from conventional aircraft.
True, but what you don't get is the blue sky disappearing to be replaced with the blackness of space. I'd also imagine you can see the curvature of the earth quite well from 60 miles up. Weightlessness is kinda cool I'm sure, but I think the selling point for all the millionaires will be the visuals, the G-forces, and of course telling all your too-rich friends that you officially went into space. I imagine if this thing is successfull it could fund the next stage, which would be an orbital vehicle.
the view :Orbit? (Score:1)
I almost did not put that last line in there.
What I would like to see is a space elevator.
And people are working on that as well.
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And people are working on that as well.
People aren't the only thinking working on the elevator [slashdot.org]. Well, I wouldn't call it WORK, but you get the idea...
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Or extremely high parchuting! I remember reading a short sci-fi story about something like this once. They had a tower that went up into the stratosphere/leo region, where you take an elevator ride to the top, put on a space suit with a dish shaped heat shield, then jumped off. After re-entering the atmosphere and slowing down enough from drag, you jettison the dish, then procede like a normal jump. Soun
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Go for MOOSE [astronautix.com] short for "Man Out Of Space Easiest". Which may be "easy", but certainly would not be unscary.
The idea is to re-enter from orbit wearing nothing more than your space-suit, a foldable foam heat-shield, a small hand-held rocket-motor with sufficient trust to make you slow orbital speed until you touch the atmosphere (from which point air-friction does the rest)
After entering in your own personal 6-
Suborbital transportation (Score:2)
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And a 17-hour wait in the start airport while your DNA is checked to make sure you aren't really an evil terrorist trying take over and crash the craft to some large building.
Fast travel between countries is problematic in
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(Quick, name the first guy brave enough to fly to Hawaii [firstflight.org].)
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(While he claimed it was a mistake, it's believed that he probably meant to go to Ireland and filed a false flight plan after the FAA refused to approve him for a solo trans-Atlantic flight)
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But when will private industry make it into orbit and back.
You need that if you want to stay for more then free fall.
True, but the first thing you have to do before you worry about orbit is making sure you can get up and down safely. Look at how NASA conducted Project Mercury - a couple of sub-orbital lob shots to prove they could do it, before trying to boost a guy into orbit.
In the beginning, commercial space travel will be the arena of the commercial traveller, and they will be more interested in
Re:Orbit? (Score:4, Informative)
Virgin Galactic's (Rutan's) method is not scalable to orbital velocities. It's not even new or unique.
We have been launching small rockets off airplanes for decades now.
There is no reason to take this step. It doesn't put them going towards orbit.
It is Rutan and Co.'s marketing department that has convinced people this is a necessary step to the commercialization of space.
All it is a scam to milk $250,000 people off those that can afford it and he used the X-prize as a form of advertising for it.
Who pissed in your cheerios? (Score:4, Informative)
Great where can I get a ride on one - oh, only if I am one of a handful of jet pilots in the Air force or government space program.
Sure there is - because it can and will be completed within the next decade, unlike the private man-to-orbit projects under way. It will also likely be much more affordable than the orbital trips, even when they do come to fruition. Bungee jumping will never scale to orbital velocities, but that does not make it worthless.
Yeah, and damn that rafting company who scammed me out of $50 by providing a desired service in exchange for a mutually agreed upon sum. Dirty Capitalists.
That was the whole point of the X-prize. It was never intended to go towards orbit, and the hope was that it would lead to a commercial venture. The people who provided the money for the X-prize don't feel cheated, and are very happy about Branson's deal with Rutan to develop it into profitable business.
Oh, and you people bitching about the environmental impact need to get some perspective. There are thousands of flights across the world every day, and millions of vehicles being driven and thousands of coal plants spewing CO2 and soot. And you are worried about the pollution that one sub-orbital launch a week is going to do.
Seriously, I am used to people on slashdot being critical jerks, but this thread is ridiculous. Rutan is an excellent high-performance plane designer, and rather than sitting around bitching about how he wished there were private alternatives to get into space, he took what knew and did something about it. In just a few more years he will be providing an opportunity to people that has never existed before, and which no one will match for many more years to come. You may not think it is worth the price, but thousands of other people do, and are more than willing to pay the $250,000 to get a glimpse of space. Sure I would prefer to see an orbital trip. But I will always be far more excited to see concrete progress in the present, no matter how small, than I will be to dream about vaporware.
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And when the market is there... (Score:4, Insightful)
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The theoretical maximum duration in zero G for a subsonic maneuver is less than 70 seconds. That would involve a ballistic trajectory initially going straight up at the speed of sound, only recovering once you are going straight down at the speed of sound. 331.5 m/s / 9.8 m/s/s * 2 = 67.65 seconds.
Practical zero-G maneuvers for conventional (i.e. subsonic) passenger aircraft typically get 15-25 seconds of weightlessness.
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All in all, when jobs start here, they will be high paying jobs, not McDonald/Walmart jobs. This combined with Bigelow will lead Americ
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I'd say this is already the "go-cart for the upper class" stage -- "go-cart for the rich and famous" is a $20M ISS visit; this will cost only 1% of that. Yes, it's still (way) out of reach for normal people, but it'll put space-flight within the reach of a whole lot more people.
(And yes, of course, this little hop is nowhere near the same thing as actually visiting the Space Station, but it is technically "goin
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Buoyant flight? Sure. Advanced airship designs? Absolutely. Fuel-less flight? Well, if you've got some sort of magic fuel-less air compressor that can power air compressors, sure.
People aren't starving because there's not enough food. People are starving because their governments find it expedient to have them starve. I agree that that's a problem to be solved, but the solution is not a pretty one.
food (Score:1)
We are lucky we are rich in the US generally speaking and can afford to import more, and have such a large n
Re:Money poorly spent... (Score:4, Insightful)
When was the last time you went out to eat?
Have you ever spent $20 on a good meal? $40? $100?
If so, for the price of your one meal, dozens of hungry people could have been fed. Using your logic, I'd say everyone should only eat the least expensive foods they can get their hands on, never have any entertainment expenses (you don't buy games, do you?) and give all of their non-necessity income to the poor.
Somehow, I don't think you're doing that. And you shouldn't.
There aren't many good answers for getting around the system and feeding the world's hungry, but "rich people shouldn't spend their money on things they want to buy" is at the bottom of the barrel. Unless you're willing to make the same sacrifices in your everyday life, I wouldn't expect others to - it's really just a drop in the bucket either way.
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1. Not doing something which could prevent a death is just as bad as doing something which causes a death.
2. Giving just $1 (or something equally trivial) to person X will prevent their death.
3. Therefore any time you spend even $1 more for some random item you're contributing to person X's death.
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4. Therefore you might as well just kill people at random, because you are anyway.
Which, of course, is an illogical conclusion, therefore proving, by contradiction, that helping others is pointless.
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No, since killing more people is even worse.
The chain of reasoning up to point 3 is logical, just unpleasant since it disturbs consumeristic hedonism. Point 4 is wrong, as I stated above. But even if it was all illogical, it wouldn't prove that "helping others is pointless", because "don't lift a finger
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Ok, I never said it isn't his "right" to piss it away how he sees fit.
I just said it could be used in other ways more beneficial to people
who are in need of help, and are not panhandlers.
Real people with real problems.
But on here, I get modded flamebait because I question the expenditure
of millions long term, on something that is literally a quick up and down ride.
Just because it is some cool techie rocket ride.
As for when is the last $20 meal I had, I'd say it was over a
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Throwing money at the sort of developing money you suggest is going to have little to no impact in the long run (if the development of infrastructure will end up paying dividends, investments will come and it will develop anyway), and little in the short term. What THIS is is potentially opening up a futu
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The fact that people are dying everday worldwide from "easily" preventable circumstances, and lack of food makes me question the value of this to just go up and down on the world's most expensive rollercoaster.
Two problems with the "lack of food", one is that there isn't really a problem with lack of food, it just doesn't get to where it's needed and because of politics food isn't produced where it used to be grown. Those "illegal immigrants" people in the US complain about, many of the Mexicans were fa
dang (Score:1, Funny)
Why school? (Score:2)
For those with more money than common sense. (Score:4, Insightful)
200K for "several minutes" in space? Sorry, I'll wait until 2010 for Bigelow's space hotel.
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For those with more money than common sense.
200K for "several minutes" in space? Sorry, I'll wait until 2010 for Bigelow's space hotel.
Yes, but imagine the fun you will have watching other rich people having space sickness, nausea and vomiting in 0 G!!!
someone doesn't chew their food properly...
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And naturally, since your priorities are different from those of others, you've got to insult us.
Tell you what. After I land, I'll let you know whether or not I felt it was a good investment. Enjoy waiting in Bigelow's line for the next 20 years.
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I'd suggest getting of your high horse and realize that people with a lot of money actual tend to have MORE common sense (not all, most) - you need it to either make it and\or retain it. And besides, its theirs to spend it how they want - to be able to go into space, even for a mere few seconds, would be a trip of lifetime.
Meanwhile, in an alternate universe (Score:1, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Movie Quality (Score:1)
cargo (Score:2)
Beyond that, I am curious to see the whiteknight 2. I would also guess that it will be big enough to launch SS3.
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In the words of astronaut Melania Slozar: (Score:2)
-S
Where the real money is at. (Score:5, Funny)
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No need to use future tense...
http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/movies/uranus
Space tourism (Score:2)
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A lot of the cost of business class travel between Australia and Europe is the accomodation cost of the full day you spend in transit. If you could cram 20 business class travelers into a semiballistic vehicle you could get perhaps half a million dollars of revenue for a half hour trip. Passengers save time and you get more work out of your capital, assuming that your turn aroun
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Anyone remember HOTOL [wikipedia.org]? As I recall there were talks of quick flights from the UK to Australia (or wherever) with a couple of orbits thrown in for free as it would also carry a satalite into orbit, and maybe recover old satalites for repair to help cover costs. Obviously, this was a LONG time ago and it ne
Popular Science Not Slashdotted Yet (Score:3, Informative)
Armstrong set foot on the Moon in 1969. (Score:1, Insightful)
Powerbook? (Score:1)
Second-second-system effect? (Score:2, Funny)
FF (Score:2)
Oops, my bad, I guess you can
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/gb/frequentflyer /fcpartners/virgingroup/virgingalactic.jsp [virgin-atlantic.com]
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To heck with the space tourism aspect... (Score:2)
--- SER
Exterior of SpaceShipTwo (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/first-imag
One of the images compares the size of SpaceShipTwo [gizmodo.com] to other vehicles, such as SpaceShipOne, the Bell X-1, and a Boeing 747.
Somebody should have said this (Score:3, Funny)
Environmental impact (Score:2)
Wow, that's a great CO2 budget. But what about methane?
Re:Blue's Clues Spaceship Cruise? (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you're going to build a spaceship, you've got to build a green spaceship," Branson said, adding that the carbon dioxide output from a single spaceflight is on par with those of a business class seat aboard commercial aircraft.
So, they aren't going to pollute much at all. As for being for rich people only, well, that's generally how new technologies work. Commercial air travel was, at the beginning, a luxurious way for the wealthy to travel. New technologies are expensive, and tend to be geared at first toward people who can afford them. As these flights become routine, and as the technology improves (and especially as competition enters the market), prices will fall.
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So, they aren't going to pollute much at all.
FTA: Launched from 60,000 feet.
I don't suppose they're lauching these ships by these energy friendly means [slashdot.org].
More like they latch this bugger onto a jet, take off with it and then launch the space ship from it. Can't say that sounds as efficient an ordinary old business class jet.
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Let "business jet" = "1 distance unit (DU)" = "1 pollution unit (PU)"
Let "spacecraft" = "3DU" = "1PU"
With these figures, consider a travel distance of 4DU:
4 x Business Jet = 4PU
(1 x Business Jet) + (1 x Spacecraft) = 2PU
Obviously, for travel over 2DU or less, a regular business jet would be just as green or greener (not to mention much more e
launch craft emissions (Score:2)
More like they latch this bugger onto a jet, take off with it and then launch the space ship from it. Can't say that sounds as efficient an ordinary old business class jet.
From the article:
FalconThe WhiteKnightTwo will also rely on new, cleaner-burning jet engines
Spaceship 2's environmental reality (Score:1, Insightful)
Flying up to 60,000 ft then riding a rocket spewing nitrogen oxides and carbon/sulfur soot-laced exhaust is not going to pollute more than a ride in a Gulfstream IV? Branson is like most executives today who find it useful to pander to environmentalists. He is lying through his teeth. The early passengers will be in enormous danger if Spaceship I flights are any indication. I wish them well, but I would not be surprised if they lost a ship early on.
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Flying up to 60,000 ft then riding a rocket spewing nitrogen oxides and carbon/sulfur soot-laced exhaust is not going to pollute more than a ride in a Gulfstream IV?
Maybe his private jet runs on old car tyres, thus disposing of them and fueling his craft at the same time.
The way I see it Fuel_take_off_from_land(Launch_Vehicle,Rocket) + Fuel_lauch_flight_and_land(Rocket) + Fuel_return_and_land(Launch_Vehicle) must be very efficient or his personal jet really is in desperate need of a refit.
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Spreading particulates in the stratosphere is one way to fight global warming. Given that human nature is to ignore problems as long as possible, I expect that within 50 years we'll be intentionally injecting megatons of soot or some similar substance into the stratosphere in a heroic effort to keep Florida above water.
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But first, you need to have somewhere to go. After you go through the 1,000 people on the planet that can afford to do this AND want to do this for fun, you need to do something else. I'd say 2-hour flights from NY to Bangalore would be a great start. Maybe sub-hour flights across the pond. Get that stuff going and you'll get regular flights from the Concorde set. Then m
Re:Blue's Clues Spaceship Cruise? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just had an image of a slashdotter from last century saying the same thing to the wright brothers...
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They never targeted their airplane business at very expensive, short, rides.
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The sky's the^H^H^H no longer the limit.
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Zero.
Reading is Fundamental! (Score:2, Redundant)
"If you're going to build a spaceship, you've got to build a green spaceship," Branson said, adding that the carbon dioxide output from a single spaceflight is on par with those of a business class seat aboard commercial aircraft.
"If It's in the news, it must be true"-Bullwinkle (Score:2)
From TFA
"If you're going to build a spaceship, you've got to build a green spaceship," Branson said, adding that the carbon dioxide output from a single spaceflight is on par with those of a business class seat aboard commercial aircraft.
So we're now in the business of believing everything he says rather than doing the simple math ourselves? No wonder he's a billionaire and we're just pottering around until our pensions.
Re:"If It's in the news, it must be true"-Bullwink (Score:2)
emissions (Score:3, Insightful)
Whitehorn and Branson both said that SpaceShipTwo will rely on a new type of hybrid rocket fuel, one slightly different from the rubber and nitrous oxide mixture that propelled SpaceShipOne into suborbital space three times in 2004.
"If you're going to build a spaceship, you've got to build a green spaceship," Branson said, adding that the carbon dioxide output from a single spaceflight is on par with those of a business class seat aboard commercial aircraft.
Re:Blue's Clues Spaceship Cruise? (Score:4, Funny)
I thought it looked more like a sleek, white running shoe [wikipedia.org], but that's pretty improbable.
global warming (Score:2)
Space ships for a few high-flying thrill seeking, rich tourists, from the man who just pledged 3 Billion $ to reduce jet emissions [innovateforum.com] and fight global warming? How much more junk will these rockets put in the atmosphere? Maybe he's just following up his good karma with the balancing karma?
Per the article:
Falcon"the carbon dioxide output from a single spaceflight is on par with those of a business class seat aboard commercial aircraft."
Re:Richard Branson is scum for using imminent doma (Score:2)
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The same kind of people who can afford it. If the cost of a flight is not a biggie to you, it doesn't matter that it's a biggie to someone else. You already have a mansion (or ten, around the world), a personal helicopter (and pilot) (and jet), a garage full of sports cars, other expensive hobbies (like casino gambling, formula-1 racing, etc...); and so on. These kin