Subject:
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Re: NASA IS GOING BACK BABY
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.space
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Date:
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Mon, 5 Feb 2007 22:45:21 GMT
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Viewed:
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4896 times
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In lugnet.space, Brian Davis wrote:
>
> Well... I'm trying to figure out a good reason for manned commercial
> spaceflight. Note that implies a commercial (profitable) reason. Space tourism,
> to me, actually looks like the only bootstrap (well, most likely bootstrap -
> resources is a nice thought, but your product has the annoying tendancy to be at
> the wrong end of a very deep gravity well).
Tourism will be the initial market for suborbital space transports. The prime
example of this sort of craft will be Space Ship Two (Virgin Galactic).
> Same reason we see Antarctica being populated and developed largely by
> commerical interests... except wait a minute, that's right, it's not :-).
Actually, I thought that there was already some concern on the part of
scientists that there is alreay too much tourism on Antartica.
Here's a page that lists several tours you can take (scroll down to the bottom
of the page for the links to the actual tours):
<http://www.iexplore.com/dmap/Antarctica/Overview>
Some have also compared space tourism to climbing Mt. Everest. It's not
especially cheap and there is a real chance of dying. There are companies today
that do everything for you in terms of planning, equipment, sherpas, and etc.
It's gotten so bad that there are "traffic jams" near the summit. Discovery
Channel had a good program on this.
> Which could actually be competing governments. I would agree, however, that
> commercial (or other) competition is a great way to spark rapid development. But
> it may not be in the direction you "want" it to go in (i.e., robotic in this
> case, not manned). Two fun SF books on this topic are "Red Mars" (& sequels)
> from Kim Stanley Robinson, and "Encouter with Tiber" by Aldrin (yes, *that*
> Aldrin) and another guy whos name escapes me.
Bigelow Aerospace is currently pursuing development of a low earth orbit space
hotel and is looking into using Atlas V as a launch vehicle for a passenger
capsule. Bigelow is very serious about this, and he's using his own money to
fund development.
As far as "exploration" goes, I don't disagree that governments did a lot of
this work, there has also been a lot of exploration done on this planet funded
privately.
Jeff
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: NASA IS GOING BACK BABY
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| First off, (having missed the start of this thread), I really wasn't all that shook up by the announcment for the simple reason that the announcement doesn't mean anything. Any more than it did with the previous "we're going to Mars" pushes. (...) (...) (17 years ago, 4-Feb-07, to lugnet.space)
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