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| | :: Thursday, July 22, 2004 :: |
Cold Water In Space
OK, this amuses me. Jeffrey Bell, one of Spacedaily.com's leading NASA-bashers, has turned from criticizing public sector spaceflight to start a new private sector backlash, going after SpaceShipOne. As usual, he puts together an entertaining mix of grumpiness and quasi-facts. To wit:
It's not a spaceship or even a precursor to one. The energy required to boost SS1 into orbit would be about 50 times what it currently expends to make its short zoom-climb into "space".
It's true that it isn't, and won't be, an orbital spacecraft. Hard to say that it's not a precursor to one, since there are rumors that Scaled is already drawing up plans for an orbital craft. To say that it's not a "spaceship," though, is just a semantics game. Is flying into space enough to make it a "spaceship"? Depends. There are those who argue that the Shuttle is the only manned spaceship ever. And SSO has more in common with what makes the Shuttle a spaceship than it does with non-spaceships like Apollo. Personally, I'm more than content to allow that flying into space makes it a spaceship.
SS1 is really a stuntplane intended to whip up public interest and favorable news media coverage.
Um, why? Rutan's a pretty savvy businessman. What does he stand to gain for building interest if he has nothing to deliver?
It's not even a viable vehicle for the "suborbital tourism" market. SS1 is narrowly designed around the X-Prize competition and lacks many features customers would demand.
It may be true that it's not going to be a tourism vehicle. Certainly, it's very likely the that SSO itself won't, but that doesn't mean that there couldn't be SS2 and SS3, etc., if there were a market for them. Rutan has no interest in being the space equivalent of an airline, he wants to provide vehicles for "spacelines." However, it is not true that SSO was designed around the X Prize, since Rutan was already working on it before the X Prize was announced. It's factual errors like that which make it difficult to take Bell seriously.
Put some space images on the windows and you have most of the suborbital tourism experience for a longer time at a much lower cost. If the suborbital tourism market really exists, why isn't somebody doing this?
Um, they are. Space Adventures already offers Zero-G flights in Russia, and a new company is booking them in the U.S. That said, anybody willing to shell out money for a spaceflight isn't going to be fooled by "space images on the windows." Again, just a wee bit of research would make it easier to take him seriously.
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