There was a skeptical article about suborbital flight in the Independent, yesterday. There’s much to fisk here.

Going suborbital is like firing a cannonball into the sky and waiting for it to come back down again. It requires speeds of only about 2,500mph, and is the equivalent in terms of distance to going from Watford to Birmingham and back again. True orbital space travel – when you accelerate fast enough to fly continually above the Earth’s surface – can only be achieved if the space vehicle reaches 17,000mph.

The problem is that there is no halfway house – you are either in suborbital flight or true space orbit.

I don’t understand what this statement means. What kind of “halfway house” is the reporter seeking? What are its characteristics? And what is it that’s “true” about a “space orbit”? Is he saying that if it’s not in orbit, it’s not worth doing, or not in space?

This whole bit is quite misleading, because it implies that suborbital is slow, and orbital is fast. But the 2500 mph is just a minimum (and a good place to start, given our paucity of experience). Velocities all the way up to 16,999 mph can also be suborbital. In fact, one can go faster than orbital velocity and still be suborbital, if pointed the right way (that is you include in the definition of suborbital those orbits that intersect the earth’s surface…).

And if you reach orbit, there is the complex and dangerous issue of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, with all the friction and heat this generates – a phenomenon that led ultimately to the disintegration of the Columbia shuttle.

Entry isn’t a problem unique to orbit. It’s a problem for suborbital as well. After all, if you enter space, you have to leave it. The difference is that by starting in small suborbits, where the entry is relatively benign, we can gain experience with techniques and materials, and gradually increase the entry velocities, expanding our operational envelope until we can do it from full orbital velocities.

But the folks interviewed here don’t get it, so neither does the reporter.

Ellis says that a prize for a suborbital flight does little, if anything, to foster true orbital space travel. “It’s like being in the early 19th century and someone says, ‘Well, I’m sure one day someone will get to the South Pole, here’s a million-dollar prize for someone to go to the equator.’ Getting into space cheaply – genuinely into space, that is – is a very different thing.”

Alan Bond, the British rocket engineer who was the brains behind the ill-fated but revolutionary Hotol (horizontal take-off and landing) rocket engine, is equally scathing about the claims being made for the X-prize. “It’s very fringe, and in particular it is potentially dangerous. On paper you can lash up a rocket and get the prize, provided you can cut out the safety measures. But it is putting lives at risk for no possible gain,” says Bond, who now runs an Oxfordshire-based company called Reaction Engines…

…More important, Bond wonders, what would be the point of a suborbital flight lasting no more than 10 or 15 minutes? “Trips round the lighthouse have been popular for a number of years,” he says, but they serve no purpose other than amusement for people with money to spend.

Yes, poo poo. We can’t be bothered with that piddly suborbital stuff. We have much more important uses for the money.

And what’s the point? So what if people are willing to spend their own money to go into space? They aren’t going for reasons that I think are good, so it’s a waste of money.

A little background is in order here.

Alan Bond is a British engineer, one of the technology uber alles types, who believes that launch is expensive because we just haven’t funded the right concept (his, naturally). He has spent much of the past couple decades attempting to talk Her Majesty’s Government into parting with the funding needed to develop his airbreathing launch concept, which he believes holds the key to universe.

He can’t be bothered with all of this silly suborbital stuff, or the foolish dotcommers who would waste their money on it when they could be funding his project instead.

“Ellis” is Richard Ellis, a former Cambridge professor of astronomy now at Cal Tech. Let us put aside for the moment the nonsensical notion that a professor of astronomy would have any particularly useful insights into rocketry, or business–it apparently arises from the confusion between astronomy and astronautical engineering on the part of lay people, including journalists (hint, they’ve very little in common). Instead, just read this little vignette from earlier in the article:

Caltech was courting Bezos because it was looking for financial sponsors for its new, ground-based telescope. After a tour of some of JPL’s research projects, the party sat down to lunch. Bezos had brought along a few of his employees from Blue Origin, as well as the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson, a close friend and confidant of the internet billionaire.

Over lunch, the Caltech scientists realised that their dreams of receiving a large cheque for their new telescope were not to be. “It became obvious that Blue Origin was where Bezos was putting his money,” recalls Richard Ellis, a Caltech scientist and a former professor of astronomy at Cambridge University.

Sure, he’s a great unbiased source for opinions on the validity of these ventures…

The naysaying goes on to the end of the article:

But one cannot help but feel that the very rich men behind the private push to send people into space are not all in it for the benefit of humankind. As Richard Ellis says: “These guys have lots of money to spend, and they seem to be having fun.”

When he met Jeff Bezos, he came away with the distinct impression that the Amazon boss was having fun also with the idea of space tourism. “But I have to say I just didn’t see any evidence that Bezos and Blue Origin had an idea.” It will take more than a rich man’s intellectual distraction to get fare-paying passengers into space – and safely back again.

Well, I can’t say whether or not Blue Origin has a solid plan or not–they’ve been extremely secretive, but there are certainly a number of other companies that “have ideas,” and they’re implementing them, regardless of the blinkered views of frustrated astronomers and propulsion geeks.

It’s a shame that the reporter, Steve Connor, never bothered to interview anyone who actually understood the technical, economic and business issues.