[extropy-chat] Millionaires in Space! was: millionaires in America

[Mike Lorrey]

--- spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> I think it will be ok to leave to your judgment
> what contributes to the list S/N ratio, keeping in
> mind extropy is about technology, transhumanism and
> the future, not ordinary politics.

And in that note, I shall redirect this thread in an extropic
direction:

http://www.space.com/news/050727_branson_rutan.html
Richard Branson and Burt Rutan Form Spacecraft Building Company 
By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 27 July 2005
03:09 pm ET
 
British entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson, has teamed up with aerospace
designer, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites to form a new aerospace
production company. The new firm will build a fleet of commercial
suborbital spaceships and launch aircraft.

Called The Spaceship Company [MSL - like the vehicle names, it sounds
like Rutan is a Sesame Street or Mister Rogers fan...], the new entity
will manufacture launch aircraft, various spacecraft and support
equipment and market those products to spaceliner operators. Clients
include launch customer, Virgin Galactic—formed by Branson to handle
space tourist flights.

The Spaceship Company is jointly owned by Branson’s Virgin Group and
Scaled Composites of Mojave, California. Scaled will be contracted for
research and development testing and certification of a 9-person
SpaceShipTwo (SS2) design, and a White Knight Two (WK2) mothership to
be called Eve. Rutan will head up the technical development team for
the SS2/WK2 combination.

Drawing from SpaceShipOne technology

The announcement was made today at the Experimental Aircraft
Association’s (EAA) AirVenture gathering being held July 25-31 in
Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The yearly event spotlights homebuilt aircraft,
antiques, classics, warbirds, ultralights, rotorcraft—as well as the
emerging commercial spaceflight business.

Both rocket ship and the carrier aircraft will draw from Rutan’s work
on SpaceShipOne and the White Knight mothership. The SS2/WK2 system
will adopt the reentry concept and hybrid rocket motor design work
hammered out for SpaceShipOne, licensing that technology from Paul
Allen’s Mojave Aerospace Company.

SpaceShipOne successfully snagged the $10 million Ansari X Prize last
year by staging back-to-back flights of the piloted craft to the edge
of space. 

Both of the new vehicles, however, are to be twice the size of the
earlier designs. 

Future operations

“We’re taking the technology of SpaceShipOne and developing it into a
usable commercial vehicle to give thousands of people the chance to
experience the majesty of space,” said Will Whitehorn, President of
Virgin Galactic—the space tourism venture that is a subsidiary of Sir
Richard Branson’s Virgin Group.

Branson told the Oshkosh crowd that the commercial spaceship can carry
7 paying passengers, along with a two-person flight crew. “We hope that
we can get those spacecraft built roughly two and a half to three years
from now,” he said.

Once the fleet of suborbital craft is built, a base from which to
operate the spaceships is to be set up within the United States. “We
still haven’t decided on which state the base will be,” Branson said,
adding that the space tourist-carrying vehicles could rocket spaceward
from the Mojave, California desert, Las Vegas, New Mexico, or possibly
Florida. 

“That’s all to be decided,” Branson said.

Seat price expected to drop

At present, seats onboard Virgin Galactic spaceships are price tagged
at $200,000 each.

But Branson hopes that this seat price will drop over time. “Our aim is
to bring the price down,” he said. 

“Our principal aim behind this is not to make money. The principal aim
is to reinvest any money we make into space exploration,” Branson said.
“We expect to double, triple, quadruple the number of astronauts in the
next few years that have currently experienced space,” he said.

To date, Branson said, about a 100 pioneers have been willing to pay
$200,000 to be the first people to go into space via Virgin Galactic.
“These are the kinds of people who are going to enable us to bring the
cost of space travel down,” he stated.

Charting the investment curve

Whitehorn said that Virgin Galactic has been negotiating with Rutan
over the last several months to chart out how best to move forward and
create a passenger-carrying rocket ship.

“We have decided that since this is such a new industry -- and so early
in this investment curve -- that we are actually going to act as the
manufacturer and developer of the ships alongside Rutan, Whitehorn told
SPACE.com in a phone interview.

The Spaceship Company will own the intellectual property of the new
spaceship design. Furthermore, the company will build spaceships -- not
only for Virgin Galactic and its initial order of five spaceships and
two carrier craft -- but for other customers as well, Whitehorn added.

Timetable: not hidebound

“We would like to be in development and in experimental test flying by
the end of 2007. And we would like to be operating commercially by the
end of 2008,” Whitehorn said. “But this is a unique project. We’ve made
it very clear
that we are not going to be hidebound to a particular
timetable.”

Whitehorn said that the new space tourist passenger vehicle is under
design, with a mockup to be unveiled at a future date. No details as
yet regarding the interior and exterior of the vehicle, but progress is
being made, he said.

At least 50 to perhaps as many as 100 test flights of the new spaceship
design may be undertaken at the Mojave, California spaceport. That
shakeout test period would stretch out over 9 to 10 months, Whitehorn
said. “There’s nothing at the moment holding us up in our tracks,” he
concluded.

-endquote-

While it appears that some 100 wealthy folk have ponied up the $200k
ticket price, this appears to be one more case of the wealthy paying
for the capitalization of yet another industry, with the industry
creators hoping to bring the price down over time within the reach of
normal folk. They'll likely get the price down to about $50k about the
same time that $50k is a months salary...


Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com