BitBanger wrote:
This is a very exciting week for private spaceflight! In addition to
the Virgin Galactic announcement, hotel entrepreneur Robert Bigelow (of
Bigelow Aerospace) has mentioned plans to announce a $50 million
orbital space prize, to a team which produces a commercial space
transport capable of sending 5-7 passengers to a Bigelow inflatable
space module by 2010. This will be dubbed "America's Space Prize."
There's an article with photographs available he

LOL

$50 million for a spaceship carrying 5-7 passengers into orbit and bring
them back safely? What a joke. There's no way someone will be able to claim
that prize for a long time. Orbital flight requires at least 20 times the
energy compared to a suborbital flight, so the prize should be 20 times that
of the X-Prize (i.e. $200 millon).

SpaceX is selling their Falcon V (which hasn't flown yet, to be fair)
for $12 million plus range fees per flight, if you order the flight
this year.

That leaves you $38 million for combined R&D on capsule and eventual
profit, if you care to do the accounting in that manner.

For that kind of money, someone *might*
be willing to invest in such a venture, but that's a big 'if' IMHO, because
you're losing serious amounts of money if it doesn't work. And if it doesn't
work someone's likely to get killed.

Paul Allen put about twice the X-prize value into Scaled Composites'
project for SpaceShip One. They are *not* making money off the project
as a whole. They may well make money off followon business.

For this kind of craft to be anywhere near safe it would have to be a
capsule, and a big one at that.

It should fit on a Falcon V.

[...] and the U.S. isn't even
thinking about one at the moment (but I suspect that will change in the near
future).

Please research the NASA Crewed Exploration Vehicle and Moon/Mars
programs, BitBanger. NASA is paying right now for development
of capsules in this capabilities range, for their post-Shuttle
manned earth orbit access, the Lunar program, and eventual
extensions out to the Mars missions.

I believe this is far beyond private commercial enterprise's
capabillities at this time but I hope I'm proven wrong.

I don't think you are really aware of what private commercial
enterprise's capabilities are at this time, if you weren't
aware of who all responded to CEV and Moon/Mars. Plenty of
info out there, though, so you can hopefully educate yourself
pretty quickly if you care about it.


-george william herbert