Alan Boyle has an email interview (something that I should have done long before now, if I hadn’t been buried in other issues recently) with John Carmack, in the wake of this past weekend’s vehicle loss (though not necessarily test failure). What was most interesting, though, was a little aside at the end of his column:

…Sunday’s explosive rocket mishap put Space Transport Corp. in the national limelight as an X Prize underdog with a can-do spirit.

The result: A slew of investors have e-mailed the cash-strapped company, saying they are interested in making an investment in the partners’ dream of developing space tourism.

“The national attention has been great. We’ve gotten a flood of e-mail, a lot from potential investors,” Space Transport vice president Eric Meier said Monday after he, company president Phillip Storm and volunteers cleaned up the wreckage and debris of Rubicon 1 on the beach near Queets.

“I’m trying to raise some money, and am responding to people who have expressed interest.”

Of course, it remains to be seen whether these were serious investors. We’ll find out in the next few weeks and months.

Alan Boyle has an email interview (something that I should have done long before now, if I hadn’t been buried in other issues recently) with John Carmack, in the wake of this past weekend’s vehicle loss (though not necessarily test failure). What was most interesting, though, was a little aside at the end of his column:

…Sunday’s explosive rocket mishap put Space Transport Corp. in the national limelight as an X Prize underdog with a can-do spirit.

The result: A slew of investors have e-mailed the cash-strapped company, saying they are interested in making an investment in the partners’ dream of developing space tourism.

“The national attention has been great. We’ve gotten a flood of e-mail, a lot from potential investors,” Space Transport vice president Eric Meier said Monday after he, company president Phillip Storm and volunteers cleaned up the wreckage and debris of Rubicon 1 on the beach near Queets.

“I’m trying to raise some money, and am responding to people who have expressed interest.”

Of course, it remains to be seen whether these were serious investors. We’ll find out in the next few weeks and months.

Al-Reuters has a story about Bigelow Aerospace:

The hotelier-cum-space entrepreneur cites his refusal to spend public money as the single most important factor in keeping his costs relatively low.

“It’s substantially important to use private money,” he said of space development. “You can’t do it on time or on budget on government money.”

It might be nice if, in addition to what he’s already doing, he or someone else would emulate another hotelier.

The latest revision of what used to be H.R. 3752 has been released by Sen Inhofe. The new bill is S. 2772 (no static link: go to Thomas and search for “s2772”). Changes are to the definition of suborbital rocket:

`suborbital rocket’ means a vehicle, rocket-propelled in whole or in part, intended for flight on a suborbital trajectory whose thrust is greater than its lift for the majority of the rocket-powered portion of its flight.

I’d prefer “thrust greater than weight,” since lift is a bit harder to keep track of without extensive instrumentation, but that’s just a matter of preferring the easier quantity to measure. Still, it’s a good definition. This eliminates the problem that Rocketplane Limited (formerly Pioneer Rocketplane) had with the definition.

There are some other relatively minor changes, and then this:

The Secretary of Transportation shall not require any additional license, permit, certificate, or other legal instrument be obtained from the Department of Transportation for any activity, including flight and return, for which a license or experimental permit has been issued under this chapter.

This is a nice addition, since it further lowers the bar for flight testing of suborbital vehicles. The experimental permit referred to is similar to the experimental permit for flight testing of aircraft, with the same intent: to lower the regulatory bar to new vehicle development. The entire homebuilt aircraft industry is built on the existence of aviation experimental permits. Anyone contemplating building their own suborbital spacecraft should read the portion of S.2772 dealing with experimental permits (section 3(c)(8) of the bill, about halfway down the page). Read the whole thing 🙂

Hat tip to Randall Clague of XCOR for letting me know about this development.

Maybe not permanently, but it’s clear that when it comes to winning the prize this fall against Scaled Composites, this team is out of the running.

The Christian Science Monitor has an article up on space law (pointer from Michael Wallis). Most of it is the usual stuff that many readers will be familiar with, and they miss the most important contemporary development in law and space, namely HR3752, which will make major changes in how spaceflight is regulated in the USA.

There’s the usual fluff like this:

“Outer space is a province of all mankind,” says Sylvia Ospina, a member of the board of directors at the International Institute of Space Law. “There is not, and should not be, any privatization of outer space. It is a common thing that should belong to all.”

Which is unfortunately a view that has significant traction even within spacefaring nations. I’m quite sympathetic to concerns that a land grab by spacefaring nations would leave huge chunks of the solar system in the hands of a few countries, effectively excluding most of mankind from the opportunities available offworld. The solution is simply to require actual working of resources in order to stake a claim, not to declare everything to be owned by the UN. In effect whichever body makes the laws regarding extraterrestrial resources is laying claim to the bodies in question, but there’s a substantial difference between a claim which only becomes active when a body is being worked and a claim which effectively forbids working a body without explicit permission.

It’s important for the long term future that we work out a method of assigning ownership and jurisdiction for extraterrestrial bodies that is widely accepted as fair. The alternative is to plant the seeds of future conflicts like the range wars which marred Americas westward expansion.

A lot of space geeks look forward to a future in which the high frontier contains libertarian utopias and so forth. Chances are good that some of the earliest settlers offworld will be going with the explicit intention of founding new societies with new ways of living together. This requires ownership of the resources on which the new colonies are founded. The flipside of this is that it is virtually certain that some of the new societies will have much more in common with Jim Jones’ People’s Temple than they will with Heinlein’s visions of the high frontier. You and I may be comfortable with that, but the folks back home are unlikely to be willing to sit back and do nothing as images are beamed back from the lunar farside of human rights violations on a grand scale. If there isn’t already a regulatory framework in place which has international credibility before that happens, there will be one after, and it will not be favorable to the free frontier mentality.

No law at all on the high frontier is not a realistic option. The sooner we realize that the sooner we can work to make sure that what law there is stems from rational understanding of economics and human nature. The two main things to watch out for are statist overreaching (with homilies about “the common heritage of all mankind”) and corporate entrenchment in the regulations so that only megacorporations can plausibly be players. This second possibility is much more worrisome to me than the first, since I think most people are blind to the ways in which large corporations game the regulations to exclude competitors and create comfortable oligopolies for themselves. One example of how this could be done is simply by requiring a single large up-front lump sum payment to get into the game. The Dinocorps can afford to pay, but the little guy cannot. This sort of thing is relatively straightforward to arrange under the guise of either environmental protection or worker safety.

As many speculated, the Da Vinci team announced today that they are in the race, with a first attempt on October 2nd. They claim to have gotten funding from a sponsorship by an on-line gambling site. I’ll bet that this sponsorship wouldn’t have been forthcoming absent Burt’s successful flight in June. More evidence of the diminishing giggle factor.

If they can really pull it off, it will make for much more excitement. There’s plenty of overlap on the dates, so if Burt gets his first flight off without a hitch, it may come down to turnaround time.

[Thanks to Andrew Gray for the tip, over at sci.space.policy]

[Update at 2:15 PM PDT]

Clark Lindsey has a lot more links, and points out that Burt is hinting that he’ll be a passenger on one of the flights.

Here’s the press release from the casino.

Over on Nature online there’s an article on inducing hibernation in humans, with applications to space travel. Long story short, it’s at least a decade away, and there are lots of unknowns. The first thing that springs to mind for me when I think about this is that before hibernation is applied to something like a Mars mission they’ll have to send some poor sap up to ISS and leave him passed out cold up there for 9 months, just to be sure there’s no unforeseen problems due to hibernation in microgravity. In practice the experimental subject would probably have to spend at least a couple of weeks up there prior to hibernating and also a month or so after coming out, so it wouldn’t be as bad as just flying up, going to sleep and then coming straight back. Still, being a mission specialist whose task is a nine month nap is a little shy of the image of the Right Stuff.

Burt Rutan says that NASA will be eating his dust.

“Thirty years ago, if you had asked NASA — and people did in those days — ‘How long would it be before I could buy tickets to space?’ the answer was, ‘About 30 years,’ ” Rutan told reporters in June.

“If you ask today, you’ll get about the same answer, ’30 years.’ I think that’s unfortunate. There’s been no progress at all made toward affordable space travel.”

There’s a fairly in depth look at scramjets in the latest edition of The Industrial Physicist. It’s got enough meat on it to be worth reading, though I have a visceral dislike of scramjets. It’s nothing to do with the technical merits – it’s just that they are yet another technology that’s constantly being held out as the technical breakthrough needed to bring down launch costs. Someday I suspect scramjet powered vehicles (at least missiles) will be practical. In the meantime they are a kind of interesting technology that’s worth understanding just for curiousity’s sake.

Incidentally, I’m not singling out scramjets here – space elevators also trigger my “here we go again” reaction. Ditto electromagnetic accelerators.