Space Tourism Isn’t Frivolous, or Impossible
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But these tragedies and tests were experienced in the early stages of within-the-atmosphere flight. While we are still learning about creating a safer and more efficient airliner, we had some bumps and tragedies we had to overcome in the past to get it to where it is now. Take for example the De Havilland Comet aircraft. It was the very first production jet airliner, but within a year of its commercial service, it had tragic accidents that led to 13 crashes with about 440 deaths total. We later learned that the stress in the edges of the square windows compromised the structural integrity of the fuselage which led to catastrophic failure.
This is why the windows on your 737, 747, etc are now rounded.
But through these tragedies and innovation, we not only gained knowledge on how to build a better aircraft, ticket prices also decreased substantially in price.
Space travel right now is right where the air travel industry used to be when it was just starting out: we are still working out the kinks, and to quote Sir Branson, "Space flight is hard, but worth it".
Of course every person lost is a tragedy, but in sheer numbers there's no comparison.
The media blows it completely out of proportion, and people freak out over it while many far worse tragedies (numerically speaking) happen every day without them noticing or caring.
Look at the number of people who've died during space flights: 18 total; 7 from Challenger and 7 from Columbia, 3 from a decompression in a Soyuz 11 and 1 cosmonaut from a failure in a parachute system.
More people die during the "safe" operation of tested equipment like cars, trains, boats, planes and helicopters.
The biggest issue in space flight is the inbetween. You're strapping yourself to a rocket that with a very small flaw turns into a bomb, or you're hitting the atmosphere at upwards of Mach 10 and expected to stop in what amounts to about 10m of water (that's the rough measure used for meteorite impacts).
By the realities, space flight is extremely safe because we do take so many precautions.
After that there have arguably been a few milestones, but IMO 'Aerospace' as currently envisioned (vertical takeoff rockets) is simply not practical and effectively we are just wasting time focusing on it. We also spent a lot of money optimizing vacuum tubes and in the end it was almost completely a waste of time.
There are actually a lot of far more practical options out there. Air breating craft, electrical propusion to mach 4+ (ed: on land), Space Tether, Launch loop, etc etc. Once your in orbit chemical rockets are also something of a dead end. Pick your Ion drive and pick your power source etc.
The specific energy of the best batteries we have at the moment is only about 2% of that of gasoline. And gasoline isn't that great for a rocket. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities...
If you want to talk about taking a jet to mach4, well, now things are starting to get really nuts. Airplanes only work because they can produce lift in excess of their weight. Putting enough batteries on an airplane to make it fly is completely doable; just look at RC airplanes and quadcopters. But getting to mach4 is bonkers at the moment. Drag goes up by speed squared. Doubling your speed quadruples your drag.
Of course, air breathing craft to get above most of the atmosphere are totally viable and so are space elevators (maybe not today but in the future) and the launch loop might be feasible too from a basic physics and material science standpoint.
Once you're in orbit ion drives still aren't awesome at least for human-scale space exploration, but they become viable.
http://www.gizmag.com/e-fan-airbus-electric-plane/31823/
(I'm just pointing out that they are further along than just RC stuff, not trying to argue that it is significant to space flight)
But mach4 is at least 1000mph or more (depending on altitude). So while the envelope of feasibility might be doable at 100mph or 200mph to go from 100mph->1000mph requires 100x the amount of power. Going from 200mph to 1000mph requires 25x the amount of power.
So here's the rub: not only are your power requirements going up but also your total energy requirements are going up. This is why the Concorde stopped flying. We're too cheap to go fast. Using energy at 100x the rate to go 10x as fast means that your total energy budget has to somehow miraculously go up 10x and 10x more batteries could easily keep a plane from flying.
As battery tech gets better we might find it's possible to do really useful stuff with electric planes. But until really major breakthroughs happen we won't see electric cargo jets or electric-to-launch-orbit. It's not nay-saying that will prevent this but basic physics.
The basic thought behind my comment was that people reading your comment might find electric airplanes interesting but not be aware of the progress being made.
I agree that: http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2014/10/rise-of-electric-ai... is just aboit pointless for rockets.
Building the 32km of track to hit mach 4 at 3g's of acceleration would one of many issues, but my point is simply building another rocket does not really change much. There actually fairly close to the limits of what you can do with a chemical roket.
After launch you’re going to want to rapidly gain altitude as fast as the passengers can tolerate (so ~3g), but even if you lose 30-50% of the input energy your still dramatically reducing your on board fuel needs as in ~30+ seconds of main engine burn.
More importantly you can have an air breathing sage without including a sub sonic air breathing engine which vastly simplifies your design. Further, one proposal was instead of trying to accelerate using an air breathing engine you simply try and maintain velocity as you gain altitude which further expands your useful design space.
Net result, reusable single stage to orbit, with a useful mass fraction, might be possible. Though, I agree trying to hit mach 4 near sea level is going to be a major design issue. But, Mach 2 is defiantly possible and probably a better first goal.
And you're right, I did misread what you had written earlier. Thanks for engaging rather than downvoting.
As to vertical track, you might be able to build a 2 mile near vertical track but you end up adding a lot of energy more cheaply with a horizontal track and for the most part it's energy that's important as you can trade horizontal energy for vertical energy inside the atmosphere. Don't forget for moderate cost you could use balloons to get a few tons to 50+km up where the air is vary thin. But altitude is just not that much of an issue.
The truth of the matter is that we have a lot of experience with chemical rockets because there is a huge technology overlap with ballistic missiles, from the original German V-2s to modern MRV ICBMs. We haven't yet used those other techs for space launch mostly because they less easily weaponized. So far, national superpowers have been the primary motivators in space development. When they spend money, they like to get some extra power out of the deal.
Air-breathing engines, while useful for initial acceleration of spacecraft, are also useful for moving a missile halfway around the planet. Launch loops, on the other hand, have no practical military uses.
A private space flight industry, with no need to develop dual-purpose tech, would tend to favor lowering the cost of 1 kg to LEO rather than refine the ability to deliver a payload. And that's what makes V.G. and SpaceX so great, even if they are stumbling around like toddlers just out of the playpen right now.
This always sounded apocryphal to me, considering ships have had round windows for ages before planes even existed.
> A year after entering commercial service the Comets began suffering problems, with three of them breaking up during mid-flight in well-publicised accidents. This was later found to be due to catastrophic metal fatigue in the airframes, not well understood at the time. The Comet was withdrawn from service and extensively tested to discover the cause; the first incident had been incorrectly blamed on adverse weather. Design flaws, including dangerous stresses at the corners of the square windows and installation methodology, were ultimately identified. As a result, the Comet was extensively redesigned with oval windows, structural reinforcement and other changes. Rival manufacturers meanwhile heeded the lessons learned from the Comet while developing their own aircraft. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet]
Perhaps (nautical) ships had round windows, but it was for an entirely different reason, and clearly some planes used square windows and found out a good reason not to use square windows.
It's just a high flying plane.
Its max altitude is still within the outer limits of the earth's atmosphere for pete's sake.
It can only hit 100km (62 miles):
International law defines the lower boundary of space as the lowest perigee attainable by an orbiting space vehicle ...
Due to atmospheric drag, the lowest altitude at which an object in a circular orbit can complete at least one full revolution without propulsion is approximately 150 km
There's a whole snowball effect. Tesla is doing the same thing with the electric car.
By the way, outer space does begin at 100 kilometers.
At 100km it is dark and cold but there is atmosphere.
That's not "space" in my book.
You are, of course, entitled to define "space" however you want in your own book, but be adviced that a lot of people will disagree with your definition.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Glider_mode [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth
The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale has established the Kármán line at an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) as a working definition for the boundary between aeronautics and astronautics. This is used because at an altitude of about 100 km (62 mi), as Theodore von Kármán calculated, a vehicle would have to travel faster than orbital velocity in order to derive sufficient aerodynamic lift from the atmosphere to support itself.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/11/spa...
Once there are orbital and lunar destinations where you can stay more than a few days with a reasonable number of other people then it might get past frivolous.
Waiting for space-stations/moon-bases/whatever before working on cheaper ways to get people there leads to a massive chicken-and-egg problem. We do have a reasonable idea of how to build space stations, once the demand is there.
Also, as well as ponying up the cash, they will also be risking their skins. We need human guinea pigs, and the super-rich are volunteering.
The deadly failure rate in manned space missions is less than 1/50.
For example, the Space Shuttle had 2/135 deadly failures.
The Soyuz spacecraft had 2/128 deadly failures, but it's probably safer now. They have no deadly accident in space since 1971. Nevertheless, they have a few "recent" non deadly incidents in 2003 and 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...
That's not too far off Everest's death rate, for which customers happily line up in hordes.
Annual Fatality Rates by Profession
(Deaths per 100,000 full-time equivalents)
Miners (2000-2010): 25
Commercial Fisherman (2000-2010): 124
Alaskan Bush Pilots (1990-2009): 287
*Alaskan crab fishers: 300
U.S. military in Iraq (2003-2007): 335
Everest Sherpas (2000-2010): 1,332
Everest Sherpas (2004-2014): 4,053
Anyway, the "no one is forced" argument has been used to justify (or minimize the negative image of) all manner of free-market labor abuses since the beginning of time. Of course, it ignores the crushing poverty levels which drive people to "choose" most high-risk professions on the first place.[2] Which tend to be basically unimaginable to most people making the "no one is forced" argument.
[1] http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/moun...
{2] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140418-evere...
But this opinion piece is definitely very frivolous indeed, in that it misses (by light years) the main argument against space tourism -- the amount of energy and resources needed (both in flight, and in on-ground support), is far greater than that of land-based travel, and will necessarily always be so (whatever improvements may be seen in terms of industrial efficiency, a gravitational well is still a gravitational well).
The article doesn't even mention carbon footprint, in fact. As if the author is unaware of the fact that even regular air travel is seen by many experts as an essentially unsustainable industry, in terms of carbon impact (on the scale that it exists, and in the unrestricted, no-penalties sense as we know it today).
(SpaceX has some sort of plastic-fuelled hybrid rocket though).
Personally I'm all for space exploration, but space tourism seems like a non-needed luxury.
Most of the first world live their lives based on non-needed luxury and it just seems mad to try and suddenly impose "need" as a requirement of a product.
> private chef
I can purchase a pre-prepared meal and heat it up in my microwave by pressing two buttons. That's pretty close!
Some past luxuries were just fads and go out of fashion, others address a lasting need but fail to scale up and remain extravagant luxuries only available to the ultra rich, others still also address a lasting need and are transformed into something that works on a societal level.
It may not be impossible, albeit debatably frivolous, but it sure as hell is dangerous as it will increase exponentially more damaging pollution and degradation of the upper atmosphere. I don't think people quite appreciate the risk with which we really are frivolously toying. Understand, there is no fall-back, no fail-safe, no do-overs, no mulligans. Once the atmosphere is damaged, once the already engaged process of global climate change is exasperated by millionaires and billionaires who want to fly into space simply to take a looksie at the planet from high up because of their narcissistic impulse for exclusivity and domination is blind and self-destructive; there is a point of no return, where the system of a human habitable ecosystem starts collapsing. There will be no god to save us, no god to fix anything. Once it's done, it's done. Finished, Fin, Ende, Finito.... Game Over... no lives left.
Some people claim, well, we'll just populate other planets. Again, a psychopathic and narcissistic mentality. So billionaires will ruin this planet and then jet off to another planet, leaving this one do wither and die along with the billions of people who you will surely also belong to? Is that the plan?
I hate to be the bearer of bad news that pops your fantasy dream bubble. Reality is that this whole idea of space tourism and inter-planetary travel and terra-forming is really the equivalent of a cat hoarder living in a squalid shit and trash smeared shack venturing out to figure out how to take on a predatory loan to buy a nice new car. The priorities are so delusional and screwed up, it's incomprehensible to anyone with any bit of a level head.
I fear the particular "brand" of space tourism offered by Virgin is probably frivolous in that it's at a level not too far removed from the "Vomit Comet" that astronauts, and paying customers, frequently use.
Space tourism that does reach Low Earth Orbit is probably a play-thing for the rich as well, but I see that as a stepping stone to a greater voyage in our solar system and beyond.
We're getting better at recycling our waste products and there is already a ton of research coming from the ISS on long-duration living in space. These alone have already contributed immensely to our understanding of the world around us and have lead to new technologies that are already in use or are about to enter the market soon. Likewise, space tourism will bring its share of productive advances.
Let's not forget that it took millennia after the invention of sailing to get to flight. Although it only took decades from flight to space travel, it's unrealistic to expect such exponential advances in the next phase of our exploration. I doubt we'll have humans landing on Mars in my lifetime, but I wouldn't put it past the lifetime of the next generation.