I just got the following (registration required) from an aviation mailing list. There’s certainly nothing hard to believe about it (though it would also be possible to do the same thing as a parody, I suppose).
The European Union’s industry commissioner on Thursday blasted companies’ plans to offer space flights to tourists, calling them a gimmick for the
privileged elite.“It’s only for the super rich, which is against my social convictions,” European Commission Vice President Guenter Verheugen said.
EADS Astrium, the space division of the European aerospace consortium, said this week it planned to build a craft that would be able to carry a handful of tourists on brief forays outside the earth’s atmosphere from 2012.
Other groups are considering similar ventures including British entrepreneur Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic service expects to make its first commercial flight next year.
The EADS aircraft, about the size of an executive jet, would be able to carry four passengers around 100 kilometres from the earth, where they would be able to experience about three minutes of weightlessness and see the curve of the earth.
At a price of EUR150,000 to EUR200,000 euros ($200,000-$265,000), the experience would be reserved for a small number of rich sensation-seekers, although as many as 15,000 passengers a year are expected to be ready to pay for a trip by 2020, according to consultants Futron.
That would represent a considerable expansion from the tiny number of truly rich adventurers so far who have been willing to pay as much as USD$20 million for a place on a Russian Soyuz rocket to see space.
Verheugen, a German center-left politician who holds the industry and enterprise portfolio within the EU Commission, said the new space race left him uneasy.
“I have strong reservations,” he said. “It will always be a very privileged type of tourism.”
EADS Astrium expects to build about five craft a year and thinks it can capture about 30 percent of the market.
The EADS Astrium project will be mainly privately financed, and Astrium will not operate flights itself, but Verheugen made it clear that he did not believe it deserved assistance from governments or the European Union.
“I have no sympathy for this. It deserves no support.”
Verheugen was speaking at the margins of an awards ceremony to commend EADS’s Airbus unit for its efforts to reduce carbon emissions from its aircraft, a coincidence that underlined another potential concern about space tourism.
At the same ceremony, Louis Gallois, head of Airbus and co-head of EADS, declined to answer a question on the apparent paradox of a company trying to cut emissions in one area while investing in a project to blast rich travellers into space.
Airbus recently announced a 25 percent increase in its EUR350 million budget to research the cutting of emissions, a figure dwarfed by the estimated EUR1 billion in expected development costs for the new spacecraft.
Emphasis mine. With morons like this in charge of “Industry and Enterprise” in the EU, is it any wonder the place is such a stagnant economic mess?
This is so stupid and stereotypical, that one hardly even knows where to begin, and the arguments have been made (many times) before.
Yes, of course, at first, only the “privileged” will use the service. That’s how one gets the price to drop so that the “non-privileged” can eventually afford it. But the point isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about subsidizing rides for the rich (assuming that subsidies are involved at all–this economic illiterate seems to think that even private funds shouldn’t be spent on it–he knows better how to spend other peoples’ money than they do, of course). The point is that by developing these kinds of vehicles, we can ultimately reduce the costs of getting into space for everybody and everything, including many things that presumably even our socialist bureaucrat might find to his liking, such as remote sensing satellites for environmental monitoring, etc.
As for the environmental issues, the amount of environmental damage caused by rocket planes, even if they burn hydrocarbons, is spitting in a hurricane compared to commercial and other jet traffic at any reasonable expected flight rate in the near future. In the far future, they may go to LOX/hydrogen, which will of course pollute the atmosphere with that deadly dihydrogen monoxide, which many think should be banned completely. But again, when it comes to the environmental effects, one has to look at the benefits as well as the costs. Most sensible environmentalists should want us to move as much polluting industry off the planet as soon as possible, and the only way to make this happen is to reduce costs of space access, which is only likely to happen from the competitive environment and economies of scale that a space travel industry will provide.
But then, “sensible” is not the first adjective that comes to mind in reference to people like Herr Verheugen. In fact, it’s not even on the list. I have no fear of the EU as long as his type remain in charge.