Why oh why do reporters imagine that cosmologists know anything about spacecraft?
Dr Xing Li, an Aberystwyth University expert on astrophysics and cosmology, said as a scientist it would be “beautiful” to be one of SpaceShipTwo’s privileged passengers.
But SpaceShipTwo travels at a super-sonic 2,500mph – more than four times faster than a passenger jet – and Dr Li believes it’s difficult to imagine anything that goes at that speed becoming affordable.
He said: “Now we don’t have supersonic flights because of the cost issue. At the moment I don’t see that it will be possible even in 30 or 40 years. It will only happen if we have some technological advance that would bring down the cost.”
Ask a frickin’ engineer, not a scientist.
Engineers, scientists, technicians .. they are all the same eggheads in lab coats, arent they ? I mean i’ve seen it in Futurama.
Well, he’s nailed the reason that most air passengers travel in Zeppelins.
You remind me why I need to retire to the smoking cabin with Mary J.
It’s the same reason they always ask astrophysicists about space business: they’re clueless and suck at their jobs. I honestly don’t see that changing anytime soon. I expect space coverage (especially the economic and business aspects of it) will be weak for the foreseeable future.
Same ol’ same ol’. Imagine what the opinions of the uninformed would be on air travel or computer systems prior to key inventions and breakthroughs there. Even when the early micro-processor kit computers were coming out the common opinion was that “real” computers needed to be big and expensive. They did, after all, perform THOUSANDS of computing operations per second, contain many thousands of individual components; and require experts to program them. The idea of a computer that could be built out of a handful of micro-chips and use massive economies of scale in leveraging develop,ment of commercial software was too unusual to contemplate by most people. Similarly, the idea of multi-million dollar jumbo jets being able to operate with such a high duty cycle for such a long lifetime and thus amortize those costs over a huge number of low priced tickets was also hard to imagine.
A new 777 or A380 or really any modern brand new jumbo jet is much more expensive than a Falcon 9 rocket. And the prospect of safely ferrying hundreds of thousands of passengers over the lifetime of the plane, all of whom fly without an escape system available, requires unbelievable levels of reliability in such a complex machine. Yet somehow we are to imagine that the costs imposed by developing rockets via bloated, bureaucratic government procurement and thrown away after each flight are somehow an inherent part of the enterprise.
I hope that Gwynne Shotwell is right and SpaceX is able to provide reusible Falcon 9 flights at around $7 million in the next few years. It’ll be almost as satisfying to see how quickly so-called experts shut up as it will be to see mankind’s future in spaace finally being rescued from the many, many missteps of government run development.
$7 million is still well out of the reach of most people. That’s not a “microcomputer” level of technology, it’s a VAX mini.
The real revolution will come from the low-end systems no one takes seriously because they “can’t run COBOL compilers.”
Shotwell, at that event, said 5-7 million. What I look for is that price going to Bigelow Aerospace for doing cargo runs with second hand dragons used for the ISS. Experiments and other cargo would be at a bargin rate compared to putting something on the ISS.
That was the price of a Falcon launch, independently of what the payload is. Dragon or customer are irrelevant.
Hey, you can get VAX 11/780 CPU or just about any other VAX board for $47 on E-bay. You can get a PDP-11/23 for $500, too, but I’m surprised the VAX didn’t push PDP-11 prices far lower. Don’t people realize the VAX rendered them obsolete?
It’s a huge step in the right direction. And the amazing thing is that it’s seemingly achievable in the near term with just reuse of the first stage alone! And that with a vehicle design that was only modified for reusability. The next generation vehicles like the MCT and other launchers that share design elements will likely be even better. With LOX/Methane the longevity of the rocket engines should be tremendous, which puts the limiting factor for longevity down to the frame and fuel tanks. Perhaps within as little as a decade the next generation of fully reusable launch vehicles could be serving the market. And if we’re lucky perhaps over the next few decades a burgeoning commercial manned spaceflight industry will be advancing R&D and pushing down flight costs bit by bit over time.
And that could very well bring costs down into the realm where tickets could be affordable by many people, not just the super rich. Keep in mind that $7 million is the cost of the whole rocket, and a manned Dragon should be able to fly on a reusable Falcon 9. Obviously there is a lot of overhead for launching a Dragon as well but if the Dragon proves to be highly reusable as well and if that overhead can be minimized then per seat costs in the $1 million range are not out of the question. And that’s with near-term systems. If we imagine vehicles designed to minimize ticket prices then you’d get into next gen vehicles like the MCT launching much larger vehicles which had much higher passenger counts, true “shuttles” beyond what the STS was ever capable of. And then sub million dollar ticket prices start to become possible, dipping down into the range of sub-orbital tourism today.
Meanwhile, with $1,000/kg launch services to LEO the industry would expand like we’ve never seen before, on both the manned and unmanned side. First off, a whole crapton of R&D becomes much, much cheaper. Want to launch a propellant depot proof of concept mission? Today that looks like a multi hundred million dollar project, which requires government funding. Now that SpaceX has proven their Falcon 9 to be very capable it might look like a much cheaper project with only $50m needed for launch. But at $7m + development costs it becomes vastly easier to justify and fund. Indeed, it becomes the sort of thing that you can fund via kickstarter (other projects have raised more money). And then the idea of satellite constellations comes back, satellite phones and satellite based broadband becomes a much more competitive service, fully commercial GPS fleets start to seem like a practical idea, and so on. And luxury orbital hotels start increasing the population of LEO by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, more and more infrastructure keeps getting built to facilitate orbital operations of various sorts. Why? Because it’s so damned cheap. Satellites don’t get launched to GEO any more, there’s a fleet of space tugs which haul them from LEO up to their GEO slot (or at least to GTO), using orbital propellant deliveries to refuel and maybe aerobraking to save on fuel. They also collect satellites that have been damaged and repair them or scrap them on orbit. Pretty soon there starts to be a substantial off-Earth industry, which runs as a positive feedback loop. There’s money in space so people invest in providing services, which boosts the off-Earth economy, and so on. All of that would be enabled by a mere $7 million per flight Falcon 9, let alone future developments. I’d say that classifies as a bit of a revolution.
How many Kickstarter projects have raised $7 million??? In the real world???
That’s the same sort of claim that “NewSpace” made for MirCorp, BVSE, “Alpha Town,” etc. — one failure after another, because no one bothered to look at the numbers. Enthusiasm is no substitute for due diligence.
Do you expect a cost-plus, FAR-based, NASA human-rated monopoly (the direction CCDev is headed) to be cheap, just because the contract goes to SpaceX? Sorry. What’s made space transportation so expensive is the lack of competition, not the lack of Elon. (Yes, I know I speak heresy here.)
I suspect they need it put in terms they (might) understand. Would you go ask a poet laureate about how pens are made? Some poets might indeed know about such things, but they wouldn’t be the first people I’d talk to.
A poet wouldn’t presume to be an expert on the engineering of pens.
Paul Spudis and Neil Tyson (for example) assume that studying rocks or gazing at the stars makes them experts on how to design rockets, though. And hardly anyone in government or the Fourth Estate questions their claims.
There is no sign that will change in the near future.
They are just looking for people who know more than they do. Sure an engineer could give a better answer but they don’t know how to contact any. A professor is easy to find and also knows more about the subject than the reporter.
“They are just looking for people who know more than they do.”
For most reporters, that would be anyone with an IQ higher than a turnip.
Though the way SS2 uses a rocket and a lift aircraft does suggest that he’s probably right by accident.
I don’t see that model becoming efficient and cheap per passenger/trip.
This is why the first people going to mars should not be primarily scientists. If we want science to go at the fastest pace, send them after farmers and technicians whose main job is making life comfortable. You’ll get magnitudes more science done that way.
These young talking heads have no experience or knowledge of history (they do know the latest pop idol.)
Is the naked news about news?
It’s not just just journalists. Politicians do it, too.
Look who they appointed to the Aldridge Commission. An astrophysicist (Neil Tyson). Three geologists (Paul Spudis, Maria Zuber, and Laurie Leshin). A politician/lobbyist (Bob Walker).
Walker was probably the best of the lot, but still… it’s notable that the Aldridge Commission declared human spaceflight would “remain the providence [sic] of government” a few weeks *after* SpaceShip One made headlines and Mike Melvill received the first FAA Commercial Astronaut wings.
The Challenger accident investigation board was headed by a former Secretary of State. The Columbia investigation board was loaded up with people like political scientist John Logsdon (who proceeded to hire his grad students as “investigators”).
This practice is not limited to space. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a lawyer and TV reporter with no relevant training or experience, was appointed vice-chairman of the National Transportation Safety Commission. Later, of course, she ran for the Senate and began to design launch vehicles.
This is why we must take space transportation out of the hands of politicians.
Actually I suspect supersonic flight is cost effective for a lot of people. Modern low-bypass military turbofans seem to indicate that. A modern aircraft does not need to turn on the afterburners to go supersonic. The problem is getting government permission for overflights.
How long and far can any military aircraft cruise supersonically?
The F-22 can cruise a considerable distance supersonically (IIRC ~ Mach 1.4 to 1.6) without afterburners. I don’t know the plane’s range in supercruise, it may be classified.
The F-16XL can cruise supersonically without afterburners. But Lockheed would rather sell the JSF, because there’s more money in it, and DoD would rather buy JSF because, well…
Just making some educated guesses about the dry thrust at Mach 1.6 and 40,000 feet with a specific fuel consumption of 0.886 (similar to the F135 engine on the F-35, which is a F119 derivative), i’d guess somewhere between 700 and 1,000 miles between mid-air refuelings. Allowing for takeoff, climb to altitude, acceleration, landing, and reserves, it would of course be much shorter.
“Concorde routinely supercruised most of the way over the Atlantic.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise
High by-pass military turbofans would undoubtedly improve fuel efficiency, so perhaps a large business jet with speed/range performance similar to Concorde would now be possible?
It’s not that it’s not possible, but whether or not it’s economically viable. It will always remain a niche market until they solve the wave drag problem.
Or until jet fuel drops to 10 cents a gallon, in which case people could afford to hop in the back of an SR-71. A 737-900 can get 99 passenger-seat miles per gallon on a 1000 mile flight, while the Concorde only got about 14. The average for all US airlines is currently 64 passenger-seat miles per gallon. If fuel were really cheap, the major hit from going supersonic would be to range instead of ticket price.
From a quick google, there are a few companies designing SS business jets with ~4000 miles range at speed, they’re talking a price tag of $80 million. I doubt the fuel price is as big a factor as you think in that market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_business_jet
No, the fuel price isn’t the issue — land overflight and range are. Those won’t be solved until they solve the wave-drag problem, and until they do, it will remain a small market.
This one’s claiming “the two-engine gull-wing aircraft was designed to create a sonic boom only 1% as strong as that generated by the Concorde”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAI_Quiet_Supersonic_Transport
I realize that the chances of these any of these concepts actually getting to market is very low. And even if there were no sonic boom at all there’d be legal obstacles to SS flight over inhabited areas.
Range is a complicated issue when it comes to fighters, since they want a long range but a high top speed. If you optimize for a high top speed in supercruise, like a Concorde, then in the subsonic low-drag region around Mach 0.85 your turbines are running very far from peak efficiency (at maybe 30 or 40% of dry thrust) and their specific fuel consumption is actually pretty lousy, which hurts your subsonic range and thus your maximum combat radius. By having the engine run near peak efficiency (which is usually about 80% of dry thrust) at high subsonic, and using afterburners for combat dashes, you can get a good combination of range and top speed.
Supersonic flight may not be competitive with coach (or even first-class) air travel, but it is affordable for scientific researchers. Just ask Alan Stern and Dan Durda. So, Xing Li starts out with a bad assumption.
And on the topic of VG’s SS2, Chinese millionaires are banned as passengers because they might steal rocket technology.
Daily Mail link
Slightly off-topic but did you see the big ULA air force launch buy news? Looks like the ULA is using its cozy government/air force connections to get some business locked in for the next few years before the F9/FH takes it away.