Deja Vu

Alan Anderson ) wrote:
: [ SpaceShipOne]

: "curlyQlink" wrote:
: If a private businessman wants to waste all that money and effort repeating
: history, that's fine.

: Your premise is that manned spaceflight is risky and expensive, and you
: gave NASA programs as "proof". Scaled Composites "repeated" a good
: portion of the X-15's ability to reach space with much less expense and
: no obviously major risk.

When they orbit and de-orbit, get back to us.

: Maybe by some entrepreneurial magic he'll even be
: able to make it turn a profit. Not.

: Virgin Galactic apparently has a good business plan -- as long as the
: regulatory environment doesn't actively trip things up.

What is it, 9 out of 10 businesses fail, yet every single one of them has
a business plan.

I don't mean to rain on your parade, but I suspect that you need a few
more floats for it to even make a difference; if you know what I mean?

Eric

Alan Anderson writes:

[ SpaceShipOne]

"curlyQlink" wrote:
If a private businessman wants to waste all that money and effort repeating
history, that's fine.

Your premise is that manned spaceflight is risky and expensive, and you
gave NASA programs as "proof".

I'm affraid nobody has ever tried it without learning that it's expensive and
risky. The Russians, ESA, Chinese - none of them can come up and say "hey,
it's cool - moderate to zero risk, and it doesn't cost that much after all!"

So, it seems it's not only NASA.

Most probably, the space travel is not intrinsically risky and expensive.
With the current state of the art in technology, however, it looks like it is.

Scaled Composites "repeated" a good
portion of the X-15's ability to reach space with much less expense and
no obviously major risk.

Building up, to a great extent, on the knowledge, experience, and technology
provided by the tax-financed pioneers.

Besides, IIRC, the SS1 flight did experience a series of unexpected and
uncontrollable rolls toward the end. The pilot (Melvill?) decided to ignore
the "abort" command from the control and pushed on. He managed to accomplish
his mission. Hadn't he been so lucky, however, the SS1 would now not be a
glaring example of how far private iniciative can bring us, but rather a
big smoking hole in the ground.

I'm very happy it ended as it did, but let us not pretend it did not
involve any significant risks.

Maybe by some entrepreneurial magic he'll even be
able to make it turn a profit. Not.

Virgin Galactic apparently has a good business plan -- as long as the
regulatory environment doesn't actively trip things up.

They still need a vehicle to implement that plan, don't they? The scaled
page is being quite silent about the progress of the SS2/WK2, almost
one year after the historic SS1 flight. I hope this is just because
they're too busy to update their pages.


Cheers, alex.

alex pozgaj wrote:

Scaled Composites "repeated" a good
portion of the X-15's ability to reach space with much less expense and
no obviously major risk.

Building up, to a great extent, on the knowledge, experience, and technology
provided by the tax-financed pioneers.

That's not relevant. Both government and private spaceflight have the
pioneers' work to build on, so you can't use it to denigrate the lower
costs demonstrated by Scaled.

But did taxes finance the development of SS1's hybrid rocket motor? Its
"feathering" descent stabilization scheme? Its composite construction
techniques? Its avionics?

Besides, IIRC, the SS1 flight did experience a series of unexpected and
uncontrollable rolls toward the end.

That was the very first flight out of useful atmosphere; unexpected
events were, um, expected. They did figure out the cause of the roll
*and* the way to mitigate it for the actual X-prize-winning flights.

The pilot (Melvill?) decided to ignore
the "abort" command from the control and pushed on. He managed to accomplish
his mission. Hadn't he been so lucky, however, the SS1 would now not be a
glaring example of how far private iniciative can bring us, but rather a
big smoking hole in the ground.

If the pilot had lost consciousness, perhaps that might have happened.
But SS1 was designed to have good aerodynamic stability, and with a
pilot at the controls it would almost certainly still have landed fine
even if the first-flight roll had ended up making it miss its altitude
target.

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 19:16:12 +0000 (UTC), in a place far, far away,
(Eric Chomko) made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

: No, nothing of the kind has been proven. All that has been proven is
: that NASA's current approach to it is.
:
: Go take a logic class.
:
: Learning from experience is not a flaw in logic.

: It is when one illogically learns the wrong things, as you apparently
: have.

Ad hominem...... a way of life.

Eric, don't use big words when you don't know what they mean.

Rand Simberg wrote:
On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 19:39:33 +0000 (UTC), in a place far, far away,
(Eric Chomko) made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

: Problem isn't the design. It's the whole approach. There simply isn't any
: compelling reason to put people in orbit.

: Of course there is. They want to go. No reason is more compelling,
: and no more reason is necessary.

Are you going to put your tourists to work or treat them like it is Las
Vegas?

I suspect that you really wonder why astronauts even bother to collect
their pay, don't you?

No, Eric. I just wonder why you take such joy in broadcasting your
cluelessness and inability to follow a subject on a daily basis. It's
an eternal mystery.

The eternal mystery to me is that year in, year out, Rand Simberg
continues to protest too much about engaging with people he claims to
think are idiots/fools/logically impared and one of a dozen other
"Randianisms".

So much so that he contributes almost a quarter of the traffic of the
newsgroup.

What particularly astounds me is that he'll respond to questions with
flame bait designed to perpetrate even more postings.

Why Rand? Why?

Dave

There's still hope that airplane might come along and provide for
practical means of air transportation.

-kert