My thoughts on Dennis Tito’s press conference yesterday, over at PJMedia.
[Update a while later]
Hmmmm…the post seems to have disappeared. I’ll bug them to find out what happened.
[Update a few minutes later]
I’ve sent an email to find out what happened, but meanwhile, here‘s Marcia Smith’s (semi-skeptical) report.
[Update a while later]
OK, it seems to be back up now.
Bad link–it redirects to the pjm homepage.
Strange, it seems to work for me.
I just went there and couldn’t find your article at all.
Seriously, what’s wrong with PJM and when are they going to fix it?
I don’t know. I just sent an email.
Likewise, I’m sent to the home page. What section should we expect to find it in?
It’s not there. It was showing on the home page, but now it’s gone, and the URL to it just redirects.
In a sign of how modest the price is, one of the team members at today’s event mentioned that a 6-year-old boy had sent a $10 donation and panel moderator Miles O’Brien joked that if 10 million kids sent $10 each that would be enough. Tito nodded.
There ya go folks… Under $300m (100+200)
Ken, if that’s right… heck, let’s double it, 600m, and that’s still less than NASA spent on a launch gantry tower for Ares.
If they can do this, it will be world-changing, and the flyby of Mars will be the least important part of it IMHO.
So why don’t they just do a Kickstarter project? Or a series of projects? Crowdfunding the final frontier can become the wave of the future.
*giggle.*
You do a crowdfunding campaign if you’re broke.
If you have $100M already and you do a crowdfunding campaign then you’re only going to get one response: a greedy millionaire is running a crowdfunding campaign.. what a bastard!
Both happened with Planetary Resources.
The link works for me. But:
the sesquicentennial year of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the earth
Sesquicentennial means 150 years. Maybe you meant semimillenial?
D’oh!
The more I think about it, the short timeline is actually a blessing. Without it, there will be the temptation of substituting the better for the good enough. Money, obviously, is the big variable.
At Cosmic Log…
Update for 8:25 p.m. ET: Tito’s plan has also gotten a vote of support from Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who is writing a book titled “Mission to Mars: My Vision for Exploration.” The Washington Post’s Brian Vastag quotes Aldrin as saying, “I’ve talked with Dennis, and I’ve strongly encouraged him.
“Are you crazy”? Why …. yes. In a heartbeat.
One thought that does come to mind is the death of a crew member mid-flight. I think it would make sense to have EVA capabilities not only just to get out of the can, but in the case whoever is left needs to have a Frank Bowman moment. I can’t imagine the health benefits of having a dead crewman in the capsule for 300 days of a mission.
Brian,
But tossing the body out probably wouldn’t work well as they would still be in the same basic orbit with you, only now floating by the windows every so often…
Depends on how hard you toss it since escape velocity for the gravity of the ship would not be much (You’ve been reading too much Jules Verne and not enough Chaos Theory.)