This Sunday marked the World's first manned commercial spacecraft flight! Although to be fair, the pilots were the only ones on board.
The spaceship, VSS Enterprise, completed a successful free flight from a mothership at 45,000 feet to a landing in Mojave, California. Eventually in the future, the rocket plane will be shot 60,000 feet above the earth and fire rockets to propel itself into space. It is expected that in 2011 it will go first to a free glide and then to a powered flight before commercial flights will commence.
"Virgin Galactic is now well on the way to becoming the world's first commercial space line with 370 customer deposits totaling $50 million," the company Virgin Galactic that was behind the flight said.
Virgin has stated that they believe that when their commercial flights go into full action, there will be one flight a week for the spaceship, with six tourists aboard on each flight.
Each passenger has to pay $200,000 for the ride. Approximately 80,000 people have already placed their names on the waiting list for seats.
They hope the onset of the technology will lead to a new way of traveling, by jetting people across continents and oceans faster by using suborbital routes. (so cool!)
Can I just say, this is AWESOME. We are finally approaching the much-anticipated futuristic space age people in the 1980's pictured when they thought of the 2000's (aka "Back to the Future"). In my opinion, this is a pretty BIG deal. In a few years, regular people (well regular really really rich people) will be able to casually fly into space, and hopefully a few years after that, actually normal income-level people will be able to travel to space! Virgin has also said that affordability is one of their ultimate goals. "What we want to be able to do is bring space travel down to a price range where hundreds of thousands of people would be able to experience space, and they never dreamed that (they) could."
Is it just me or has space enthusiasm completely died down in the past few years? I feel as if it is very rare for people in our generation to get really excited over space. What do you think is the reason for that? It may not be man landing on the moon, but crazy stuff like this VSS Enterprise flight is happening! I say we get more excited about space, it is the future of humanity after all. What do you think?
6 comments:
Nice blog post Danielle. It does seem that we're reaching the period of space travel that people have only dreamed about for years. For one thing you can get a clear view of the night sky anytime you fly, so any seat will get you a killer view if sub-orbital international flights do become available within a decade or so. Although it currently does cost $200,000 to get a seat, at least that's affordable in comparison to what people might've had to pay to get a seat on the space shuttle way back when. But people do also have to look at the possible dangers as well. Space, in all of its apparent beauty, is quite a dangerous place. Possible electromagnetic pulses from the sun could shut down all insrumentation on the passenger flights, micro-meteors could punch through the hull of the plane, and reentry into the atmosphere causes the nose and other parts of the body to heat up to thousands of degrees at times. Still, it does represent a huge milestone in humanities history. I think that with challenges that arise with sub-orbital flights, more technological advancements to deal with these dilemas will cause technological developement in that area to skyrocket, so to speak. And as for space seeming to loose its enthusiasm, I believe quite the opposite. Hundreds of planets have been discovered and are being reviewed, and an observatory in Santa Cruz has even discovered a planet 3 times the size of Earth, but very likely habitable as well. So I'm glad that we're finally beginning to extend our reaches to the stars above.
Just a little side note on your last paragraph, a little over a year ago NASA launched a shuttle called LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) and sent it to the moon. It's mission objective was to determine whether there was water on the moon. A few months after the launch, water on the moon became official. The fact that water exists on the moon gives an even bigger opportunity of creating a moon base simply because water is a necessity of life. What puzzles me is that there wasn't much of a big craze about this mission apart from myself. Honestly though, water on the moon? That's pretty big...
Space is definitely the future of humanity, but unfortunately the interest of funding for space exploration is declining within the government. Being in the state of an economic crisis, people are swayed to think that giving NASA government funds should be the last bill on the list (even though only a few cents are taken from each taxpayer per year to fund NASA)
While I do find this post to be very interesting as well as informative, I do have some problems with this so-called advancement in commercial flight. First of all I would like to point out that the ticket price will stay at a high rate for a very long time. If anything the price will increase even more as fuel becomes scarcer and scarcer! Also I do not believe it is wise for us to invest so much time and money into a project that may or may not bring us any benefit in the long run. With the economy at its current state companies cannot afford this kind of frivolous spending on these gigantic publicity stunts. Also, doesn’t the current system of travel we have today work just as well? This could be the future of commercial travel, but that future is looking far away right now. We must look at the present before dreaming of the future.
We can't do this yet! We need to have WWIII before this happens and after we launch a ship with a warp drive in it to make first contact with Vulcans!
Anyways, it will take a long time before it becomes a viable method of transportation around earth, if it ever become viable.
By the way, dibs on proving Einstein wrong and making a warp drive
Sir Richard Branson is quite a futuristic thinker, isn't he? While I think that it is great news that space travel is entering a new commercial era, I'm more concerned about another point that Danielle raised; interest and jobs in space are fast diminishing in the United States, caused by government focus on issues other than NASA funding.
Usually, about .5% to 1% of the federal budget goes to funding NASA. However, "[a]s the space shuttle program nears the end of its scheduled life many workers begin to lose their jobs. Thanks to budget revisions and budget cuts NASA has been forced to cut back on space flights and development significantly for the coming years. As a result thousands of highly skilled workers will be losing their jobs at NASA" (http://knowelty.com/thousands-prepare-to-lose-jobs-following-termination-of-space-program/873598/). "Not only is the termination of the space shuttle program affecting NASA workers; it is estimated that upwards of 15,000 employees from contractor companies could lose their jobs. NASA and the space program depend heavily on outside corporations to supply parts and technologies; the termination of this project essentially removes the need for most of those outside companies."
Although I know the country is experiencing economic hardships, it is worth noting that these cuts were not even made recently: "[o]f course the termination of the space shuttle program is no surprise; it was announced initially in 2004 for that 2010 would be the official completion of the space shuttle program."
I think this act reflects a greater trend of only lukewarm attitudes towards science that seems to be affecting the United States. We don't seem to have the same sense of urgency as we did during the Cold War when it comes to scientific development, and that creates the perfect opportunity for other countries to surpass us in the distant future.
To respond to Aaron Oppenheim's post, companies have the leeway to make profits any way they choose so long as it's legal. Furthermore, "[w]e" are not investing in this project, Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group is. And I'm SURE that this project, taken on by a $18 billion conglomerate (Virgin Group), is NOT a publicity stunt. I do recall that in an interview many years ago, Sir Richard Branson assured the public that this endeavor was going to be profitable. Just imagine; with 6 seats and $200,000 per seat, one trip yields a $1.2 million revenue. Of course, I don't know the exact cost of operating this, but I'm positive that this company would not pursue a project that would result in a net loss of money.
I do understand the concerns about the current state of the economy, but keep in mind two things: 1) companies must think of the future to keep innovating, and 2) while pursuing this project, the Virgin Group is still a running company that responds to the current economy.
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