SpaceX to Launch Private Astronauts in 2015
spacesafetymagazine.com
spacesafetymagazine.com
This is trolling because
a) that's a suborbital spaceplane (which the mention, but don't emphasize), which is obviously a much lower bar
b) the Lynx Mk I hasn't even started flight tests yet, as far as I can tell from their press releases
c) really, if they want to talk about suborbital space tourism (which is what the Lynx is), isn't Virgin Galactic the market leader here? probably?
d) you really think that if SpaceX wants to do crewed orbits by 2015, they won't be booking time on a Vomit Comet long before then (and thus logging microgravity time)? seriously?
But 2 to 3 years from now? Damn that is ambitious.
The craziest part is that I think they can actually do it.
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/2013/01/22/nasa-passed-fa...
The Grasshopper experiments are also going along really well. I am shocked how quickly SpaceX is achieving milestones.
But they've certainly hit all their milestones, eventually, which is much more than can be said for nearly every other private space venture.
Unfortunately, I can't find a good source for it (I remember reading an interview with Musk where he talked about it). I think everyone recognizes that they are standing on the shoulders of giants and says so frequently.
Interestingly, the Soyuz and Apollo programs, although their missions were similar, differed significantly in engineering culture. I heard a story about the Soyuz-NASA collaboration that lead up to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz_Test_Proje...): NASA engineers met with Soyuz engineers and asked for engineering specifications, but the Soyuz engineers couldn't give them (or maybe they just weren't very detailed) because most things were in people's heads rather than documented. The Russians were iterative and practical, and had very robust systems, but they were not nearly as formal as the NASA blokes.
In the end, I wonder if that lack of careful documentation on Soyuz' part diminished its long-term helpfulness? Or did they later record their designs more carefully? I would be curious to know. Apollo documents are apparently available for aspiring rocket builders. Hurray for openness in publicly funded research.
All the best to LSA, though.
The keywords here seem to be 'risks ITS astronauts'. With all the money they (rightly) have spend on human safety in an outer space environment they now assume somebody else will do it for them? This confuses me to no end.
So it's like getting test drivers for space vehicles now. Oh my, times sure have changed...
Other possible markets would include space tourism and research trips to private space stations, along the lines of what Bigelow Aerospace is trying to develop.
As to governments other than the US, SpaceX could probably sell launch services, but it would be a lot harder for them to sell the rockets (or, probably, spacecraft) to foreign governments. A lot of that technology comes under fairly tight arms trading regulations (for good reason; any launch vehicle can be transformed into an ICBM by reprogramming the guidance system).
How many years down the road will it be before we need to start privately training Astronauts for SpaceX?
* Peak oil, gas, coal, phosphorous, rare earth metals, uranium, copper, iron und su weiter.
Sorry Elon!
The first step? Stopping the senseless notion we will ever get off this rock and implement a "reduce, reuse, recycle and do without" paradigm akin to world war 2 rationing, will be the first step.
Elon Musk is working on that. He also owns Solar City and Tesla Motors.
>growth
Colonizing space can solve that. Plenty more room and resources.
>senseless notion we will ever get off this rock
It's looking less and less senseless every day, in part due to Musk and his team.
The earth had plenty of room and resources before we "decided" (we didn't, we're humans, like yeast we try to consume everything in our path until the overshoot is apparent and we collapse) that 7-9 billion people and American 1000 gallon a year per capita lifestyles were viable. Haha, what folly.