Bezos' Blue Origin revealed!

Jeff Findley wrote:



In space tourism, you write someone out a great big check, spend several
hours training, and then strap yourself into a acceleration chair.
Later you look out the window for a minute or two.



And your point is what?



It sounds pretty boring when you get right down to it.
I doubt anyone ever used the word "boring" in reference to scaling Everest.



This isn't really going to give the feeling of challenge or accomplishment
that climbing Everest, or even a fall smaller mountain, would. It's closer
to a wild amusement park ride - a pretty passive adventure when it comes
right down to it.



As my kids in elementary school have learned, what you wrote in those two
sentences is an *opinion* and opinions vary from person to person. Who are
you to say that a suborbital flight, which will surely involve some
training, won't give the participant a feeling of accomplishment?



It's a _fake_ feeling of accomplishment, like someone who thinks they
are a great fighter ace because they can play computer games like
nobody's business, and has downed hundreds of enemy planes.
The big difference being that every time they played that game the price
of losing the game wasn't death, like in the real world.
In 2020 you'll walk up to New Shepard, and boy will it really look like
something...you'll be taking your life in your hands flying on this
thing.....then you'll realize that the company wouldn't be in business
anymore and the FAA would have grounded the thing a long time ago if it
wasn't just about completely safe.
So all though it may look dangerous, it's actually about as dangerous as
flying in a autogyro; a bit odd and exotic to be sure, but not a born
killer.
It's a very pricey amusement park ride at heart.

And having done it once, you probably will feel a repeat of the experience
would be pretty ho-hum.



Just like amusement park riders never ride the same roller coaster more than
once?


Charge around twenty-five grand per ticket and see how many repeat
riders you get:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/378/1


This is clearly not the case. There are some people who spend a lot
of their free time riding the same roller coasters over and over. I ought
to know since I live a few miles from Kings Island and have ridden The
Beast, and other rides, maybe a hundred or more times each.



I think if this industry does get going, it's going to have a lot of
tourists for the first couple years or so.. then it's just going to dry
up, as there won't be anything that interesting or novel about doing it
after a few hundred or thousand other people have.



Again, that's an opinion. When Walt Disney built his first theme park,
there were those who thought the same thing, but last time I went to Walt
Disney World, it sure was crowded with people.



Try charging twenty-five grand per visit and see how many repeat
visitors you get.



"Oh, you've been to space too? Dad paid for me to do that on my tenth
birthday... or was it my twelfth birthday? I forget."



It's entirely possible that some riders would make the trip a yearly
tradition, just as other people make a yearly tradition out of going to the
same theme park at least once each year.



It's going to be an awful lot of money to spend for an experience that's
that short in duration.
Where's the bragging rights in doing something that's really very easy to
do? It can be you in the seat, or a sandbag.
The ship will fly the same way with either.
Besides, I heard a rumor that a monkey was going to make the first
flight. :-D



You're all hand waving and opinions today. We'll have to wait and see what
happens to the market, since these things are notoriously hard to predict.
Hopefully you'll admit to that.



This one won't be too hard to predict at all; I note the Russians
haven't built a giant orbiting hotel yet, and they've got a orbital
space tourist business operational.

Pat

Rand Simberg wrote:

Pat has some deep-felt psychological need to denigrate this market and
industry. I certainly don't want to rummage around in that messy
personality-filled-monkey-filled cranium to figure out why, though.



I just don't think it has any legs as an industry, I was re-reading "The
High Frontier", and by now we were supposed to be living in L colonies.
At the time that was really played up; yup, this was all economically
feasible within twenty-five years.
And it wasn't even vaguely economically feasible in that time frame, nor
will it be twenty-five years from now.
So now the big buzz is space tourism; this is the thing that's going to
open up space.
But as long as they can only do suborbital flights, it's going to lose
its novelty in fairly short order.
Orbital flight might work, but means developing extremely cheap means of
getting people up there and back (as in somewhere around a order of
magnitude cheaper than our present means, at a bare minimum.)
And frankly I don't think anyone outside of a government can afford the
investment that's going to require, because you are talking about
several billions of dollars if not tens of billions of dollars in all
likelihood.
I do like the desperation of this goofy idea though:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/378/1

"For those people who find even a $25,000 price tag a little too steep,
there are other options. Whitehorn noted that Virgin is considering
financing options once ticket prices reach those levels, in much the
same way that automakers offer financing for purchasers of new cars.
Virgin Galactic is also planning a game show where participants from
around the world will compete for a chance to fly, as well as an online
game of skill—which, unlike online gambling, is legal throughout the
US—for ticket giveaways. It may also be possible to redeem Virgin
frequent flyer miles for a ticket: Whitehorn said no value has been
placed yet on a ticket, but will likely exceed the current top award in
its program—a vacation at Virgin’s exclusive Necker Island resort in the
Caribbean—which goes for one million miles."

Now let's see...New York City to London...around 2,000 miles...500
trips...250 round trips... could take a while.

Pat

On Thu, 04 Jan 2007 15:45:39 -0600, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:



Rand Simberg wrote:

Pat has some deep-felt psychological need to denigrate this market and
industry. I certainly don't want to rummage around in that messy
personality-filled-monkey-filled cranium to figure out why, though.



I just don't think it has any legs as an industry

Yes, we know that. You've told us that repeatedly, with no basis, on
a nonsensical basis. Nothing you've put forth (including what I
snipped from this post) makes that case. Everything you've stated is
based on what *you* want. That probably makes sense to a narcissist
like you, but not to rational people, or people who actually analyze
markets.

So we're left with wondering, "why doesn't Pat want an industry that
might have a hope of actually opening up space, as opposed to all of
NASA's failure over the decades, to succeed"?

Jeff Findley wrote:

If one of these do crash, I wouldn't be surprised if future customers saw a
memorial to the dead before they flew. How many NASA astronauts haven't
seen *some* sort of memorial to their fallen comrades when they were on the
job?



That's true; how many times have I seen airlines put up memorials with
the names of all the passengers that died on their aircraft at major
airports?
You seem to be missing the boat here...this isn't about spaceflight,
this is about making a buck.
Spaceflight is just the bait on the hook to catch the fish.
And suborbital flight isn't what most people consider "spaceflight" when
they think about the term; they aren't going into orbit, they're just
going past a arbitrarily set altitude of 100 km.

Pat

Rand Simberg wrote:

More seriously, it makes the point that you continue to foolishly
confuse the demands of the market with your own unique (or at least
not universal) desires.



Well, we'll wait and see.
I think the market for these flights will fade fairly quickly.
You don't.
Time will tell.
The first problem they are going to run into is that Virgin Galactic now
has a competitor in Blue Origin.
That means prospective passengers now have a choice of means of doing a
spaceflight; which cuts down the share that either will get from the
prospective passenger pool worldwide, and that the monopoly is going to
vanish, meaning ticket prices are now subject to competition.
Two or three more companies come on board, and they'll fracture the
prospective market to the point none of them can make a decent profit.
At that point the ticket price wars will start.
Then all hell will really break loose, as at least one of them attempts
to cut corners on safety to lower launch and maintenance costs.*
And then the first ship will augur in.
And then? That could be when the FAA ends the whole concept, because
their ruling on this seemed to imply that around the time passengers
started to get killed, the regulatory hammer was going to come down.

* Something out of Russia or China, no doubt.


Pat

Jeff Findley wrote:



No one's life, including your own, is riding on your actions.



Nothing bad happens during powered flight if you pull on that emergency exit
handle, does it?


You'd like to think they'd sort those passengers out before the flight.
Of course they did put that religious loon in command of the Mars flight...



Just be a good little monkey, look out the window, pull the little lever
under the light when it flashes, and eat your banana pellet.
Oh....and make sure that's a cashier's check you brought us. :-)



Just like riders on a one minute roller coaster ride never come back, right?
Hell, I'll wait in line for an hour on a hot summer day just to ride Drop
Zone at Kings Island to experience a few pitiful *seconds* of zero gravity.
A few minutes of zero gravity, after a real kick in the pants rocket ride,
would literally be out of this world! ;-)




You keep forgetting that one key thing.
$25,000 for an exciting hour of fun.
The price of a fairly nice little automobile.
And that's after they get the price down from the current $200,000;
which is the price a fairly nice little house, around here at least.

Pat

On Thu, 04 Jan 2007 16:07:25 -0600, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:



Jeff Findley wrote:

If one of these do crash, I wouldn't be surprised if future customers saw a
memorial to the dead before they flew. How many NASA astronauts haven't
seen *some* sort of memorial to their fallen comrades when they were on the
job?



That's true; how many times have I seen airlines put up memorials with
the names of all the passengers that died on their aircraft at major
airports?
You seem to be missing the boat here...this isn't about spaceflight,
this is about making a buck.

No, it's about offering new experiences. And making a buck while
doing it. And about learning how to expand the capability.

On Thu, 04 Jan 2007 16:27:10 -0600, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

Just like riders on a one minute roller coaster ride never come back, right?
Hell, I'll wait in line for an hour on a hot summer day just to ride Drop
Zone at Kings Island to experience a few pitiful *seconds* of zero gravity.
A few minutes of zero gravity, after a real kick in the pants rocket ride,
would literally be out of this world! ;-)




You keep forgetting that one key thing.
$25,000 for an exciting hour of fun.
The price of a fairly nice little automobile.
And that's after they get the price down from the current $200,000;
which is the price a fairly nice little house, around here at least.

Again, you nuttily assume that you, and your neighbors, are the
market. How many of you own Ferraris? How many of you take bi-annual
trips to Europe and Asia?

On Thu, 04 Jan 2007 16:26:36 -0600, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:



Rand Simberg wrote:

More seriously, it makes the point that you continue to foolishly
confuse the demands of the market with your own unique (or at least
not universal) desires.



Well, we'll wait and see.
I think the market for these flights will fade fairly quickly.

You don't.
Time will tell.

Yes. Though it's more likely that time will tell on my side, because
I rely on market research, and you rely on *you*.

The first problem they are going to run into is that Virgin Galactic now
has a competitor in Blue Origin.

That's not a problem, you idiot. It's a sign that there's an actual
market. Have you not heard of capitalism, and competition?

Rand Simberg wrote:

Yes, we know that. You've told us that repeatedly, with no basis, on
a nonsensical basis. Nothing you've put forth (including what I
snipped from this post) makes that case. Everything you've stated is
based on what *you* want. That probably makes sense to a narcissist
like you, but not to rational people, or people who actually analyze
markets.



Well, give me some figures on how the economic math of this all works;
last time you did that you showed a nice little study that was financed
by a space advocacy group (The Futron Study), which wasn't exactly
unbiased in my opinion.

So we're left with wondering, "why doesn't Pat want an industry that
might have a hope of actually opening up space, as opposed to all of
NASA's failure over the decades, to succeed"?



NASA has gone to the Moon with people, and clean out of the solar system
with unmanned probes.
Nothing was stopping industry from doing the same thing in that time
frame if they'd wanted to and thought it was a money-making venture.
Remember those giant SPS systems of the late 1970's?
GE could have gotten together with the aerospace industry and built them
if they'd thought they'd been a profitable opportunity.

Pat