One wonders if Representative Olson, or his staff, even know what the word “suborbital” means.
These are the people running your space program. And your country.
14 thoughts on ““Suborbital Taxi Cabs…?”
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One wonders if Representative Olson, or his staff, even know what the word “suborbital” means.
These are the people running your space program. And your country.
Comments are closed.
Some character in comments over there thinks COTS will cost five times as much as shuttle.
Maybe he was talking about the Ares I-X?
No, he was definitely talking commercial. He linked to a website called ghostnasa.com. Seems like a bit of a crank.
I prefer the term “suborbital trucks,” vehicles that are “launch now, launch often” and not some huge prima donna that’s going to just remind us of the early Vanguard attempts writ on a massive scale.
Eric, that’s Gaetano Marano, a well-known Italian space troll.
Darkstar,
“Barnstorming” is a better analogy than trucks or taxi cabs, unless perhaps you’re talking about point-to-point suborbital flight, which isn’t being seriously developed yet (corrections on that point are very welcome!)
If you haven’t seen it yet, you might enjoy this video by Alan Stern and Dan Durda – it is an elaboration of the barnstorming analogy,
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2010/02/video-storming.html
Darkstar,
What pray tell would a “suborbital truck” carry and where would it carry it to at great expense and a godawfully big hurry? Isn’t that what a ballistic missile does?
OT, I remember an AF SSGT I worked with regaling a physically impressive airman-ette with tales of a previous tour of duty at Grand Forks AFB doing “in-flight missile maintenance”, at which her eyes got big and she said, “Wow! That must have been exciting!” Queen of the Roundheels, she was, and utterly useless for anything but that and answering telephones.
Larry, I don’t mean to be rude but you can keep “exciting.”
I, and others here, look forward to a day where there are a large group of launchers of various sizes and manufacturers available for commercial or government work. Throwing most of our money into one large basket labeled “Ares” I think is foolish.
“Seems like a bit of a crank.”
A bit? He is the most worthless poster in the cosmos of space boards with the lone exeception of hate-monger Thomas Lee Elifritz.
Just to clarify, I actually meant, “Maybe Rep. Olson is talking about the Ares I-X as the ‘suborbital taxi cab that places the US further behind China and other nations.'” 😉
Maybe Olson is getting the Ares program mixed up with The Fifth Element, the way the Nomad probe got its original program mixed up with that of the alien probe in that old Star trek episode.
Now if we could harness that dyslexia and get the AGW acolytes in Congress to combat budget warming…
Darkstar, of what use is a “sub-orbital” launch vehicle except for delivering warheads and taking tourists on brief “edge of space” flights?
I also want real launch vehicles that can deliver usable payloads into orbit, but “sub-orbital” by definition cannot do that.
Larry, point-to-point travel is the answer, for Fed-Ex (when it absolutely has to be there in 2 hours), for business travel (ex-Concorde users), and even for troop transport (look up the US Marine Corps Small Unit Space Transport concept called SUSTAIN).
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/suborbital-tourism-is-stepping-stone-to.html
On the other had, maybe the math doesn’t work — here’s the counter-argumet:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1118/1
I also want real launch vehicles that can deliver usable payloads into orbit, but “sub-orbital” by definition cannot do that.
That’s like saying regional jets are useless because you want to go to Tokyo. Or biplanes were useless because you wanted the Wright Brothers to build a supersonic transport.
You want to put payloads in LEO, so you think suborbital is useless. Bob Zubrin wants to go to Mars, so he thinks LEO is useless. Tom Matula wants to go to the Moon, so he thinks all of those are useless. There are people who want to go to Alpha Centauri, who probably think the Moon is useless.
Instead of fighting a WWF death match over which destination is Politically Correct, take a look around. None of you can afford to go anywhere, because space transportation is so expensive. Solve that problem, and there will be no need to climb into the ring. It will be possible to go to *many* destinations.
All the universe or nothing, which shall it be?