Space Tourism

Six reasons it matters.

As I often point out, people who complain about “joy rides for the wealthy” shouldn’t watch media devices like Blu-Ray players, because they were once just “toys for the wealthy.” As were the computers on which they type such complaints. I do think that, that some people, and particularly Virgin, overhype point to point. And it’s not clear what Virgin’s path is to either that or orbit with their current vehicle design. It doesn’t scale well with velocity.

73 thoughts on “Space Tourism”

  1. It’s hard to take this guy seriously when he compares a $12 million satellite launch to a $250,000 Virgin Galactic ride. I not sure he grasps the difference between the two.

    1. “It’s hard to take this guy seriously when he compares a $12 million IBM System 360 to a $700 Apple II. I not sure he grasps the difference between the two.”

      Been there. Heard that.

      1. Rockets will be just like computers and the moon and Mars will be just like the American west. Magical mantras that never go out of fashion.

    2. Odd story. Years ago I was working at Neiman Marcus when they were going to sell their fabulously expensive IBM 3090 vector-processing aupercomputer. A few years earlier the University of Kentucky had bragged about their massive jump in engineering computing power after purchasing one, so I found it interesting that Neiman would even have such a machine. So they called a meeting with a bunch of companies, expecting to take big bids on it, and were astonished to find that the companies were just there to see how much they’d get paid to haul it off, saying the only part worth anything was the air-conditioning system.

      So I thought to myself, “Self, if you were to arrange to have that 3090 donated to UK, you could probably score free basketball tickets for life.” I didn’t though, because the contractors were right.

    3. I believe he got the number right but got the wording wrong. He said “satellite” but I think he was talking about suborbital sounding rockets. One sounding rocket launch is in the neighborhood of $12 million. This explains why atmospheric scientists (and others) have been so eager to see reusable suborbital vehicles become available for science payloads.

  2. Early adopters of technology tend to pay a high price for it. Most of the early automobiles were only affordable by wealthy people. Airline travel was very expensive before WWII and the prices didn’t really become affordable for average people until the 1960s or later (perhaps not until airline deregulation in the late 1970s). I remember in 1968 when 21″ color TVs cost over $800 (about $5400 adjusted for inflation) and the first VCRs and CD players cost $1000. Even the lowly calculator used to cost $200 back in 1972 which is over $1100 in today’s money. Sure, booking a space tourism flight is expensive so only wealthy people can afford them. VG claims that the price will come down to around $20K in a few years. That’s still a lot of money but affordable to many more people. A new Mercedes or BMW isn’t cheap either. Does that mean they shouldn’t be allowed to sell them?

  3. Reason 7: It will be fun to teach travel planners about rocket equations and orbital mechanics so they can plan our trips.

    “Um, we don’t have anything available in that particular orbital slot but I can get you a higher inclination orbit with a better view after next Thursday.”

    And as always, Captain Kirk will be able to find you a lower price. If you get his blonde ninja daughter instead, make sure she has her neighbors do the calculations.

  4. The ultimate irony is Neil Tyson, who says suborbital “joyrides” aren’t worthwhile because they don’t go far enough into space. But sitting in a dark room, under a dome, *looking* at pictures of space — totally worthwhile!

  5. Off topic, but what is the big white thing in this interesting Mars photo?

    Zoomed in, to me it looks perhaps like steam being ejected from a vent. In the extremely thin atmosphere there probably wouldn’t be much roiling, so it would look more like a rocket plume.

    1. Probably a cosmic ray hit, they occur a lot, but that one just happened to be particularly bright and aligned with scene features that made it plausibly a real object.

    2. More from at Foxnews

      “One possibility is that the light is the glint from a rock surface reflecting the sun,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) lead for the engineering cameras on Curiosity Justin Maki told FoxNews.com.

      Maki explained that the bright spots appear in single images taken by the Navigation Camera on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover’s right-eye but not its left. In the right-eye images, the spot is in different locations and is seen at the ground surface level in front of a crater rim on the horizon.

      “When these images were taken each day, the sun was in the same direction as the bright spot, west-northwest from the rover, and relatively low in the sky,” said Maki. “The rover science team is also looking at the possibility that the bright spots could be sunlight reaching the camera’s CCD directly through a vent hole in the camera housing, which has happened previously on other cameras on Curiosity and other Mars rovers when the geometry of the incoming sunlight relative to the camera is precisely aligned.”

      It does bear a good resemblance to coma, an optical aberration, and having two cameras see it in two different positions does point to a light leak. Still, it could be a glint off the canopy of an ancient Mars defense craft that was downed in a battle with a Venusian raiding party.

  6. The computer analogy is so tired and bad. The reason computers eventually came down in price is because they’re high power devices and low mass is a feature, not a necessity. High power devices are expensive and dangerous especially if they have to be low mass too. Even Elon Musk has acknowledged that he didn’t appreciate that difference when he got into the rocket business.

    There are other reasons rockets will always be expensive and there’s a good paper on the subject.

    “PHYSICAL LIMITS TO MODULARITY,” Daniel E Whitney

    “A distinction that separates systems with module freedom from those without seems to be the absolute level of power needed to operate the system.VLSI electronics exemplify the former while mechanical items like jet engines are examples of the latter. It has even been argued that the modularity of VLSI should be extended to mechanical systems. This paper argues that there are fundamental reasons, that is, reasons based on natural phenomena, that keep mechanical systems from approaching the ideal modularity of VLSI.”

    1. “There are other reasons rockets will always be expensive and there’s a good paper on the subject.”

      I’m sure you told Henry Ford that automobiles will always be expensive and for the rich, and that the rest of us will stay with horses.

      You must be a College Professor.

    2. Blah blah blah. Heard it before, it’s bullshit. The cost of launch is nowhere near it’s fundamental lower limits. Those limits are at least 1/100th of current costs and perhaps even lower (with extreme reusability and lower cost fuels).

      And it’s not an “analogy” it’s a long standing industrial pattern. It held for automobiles, electricity, air travel, home appliances, the telephone, pharmaceuticals, and yes, also computers, among others. It’s a basic process of amortization of early R&D costs.

      1. PS Also, in industrial terms there is no such thing as universally “expensive”, especially due to automation. None of the processes or inputs to rocket flight are fundamentally scarce. Which means that over the next, say, century when we’ve built completely automated factories (and fuel production systems) and we’ve also built factories that build other factories (also automated) the relative economic cost of rocket flight could become extremely low, and certainly within the range of being universally affordable the way automobile travel is today.

    3. Right, mechanical systems will always be expensive — someone wrote a paper that said so. I suppose that’s why airplanes, trains, ships, and automobiles never became affordable?

      The “if Elon can’t do it, no one can” argument is old, tired, and lame. There are many things in this world that were not done by Elon.

      There are other reasons rockets will always be expensive and there’s a good paper on the subject.”

      The paper you cite doesn’t even mention the subject of rocketry or space transportation. Did you think no one would bother to look it up, or did you not read it yourself?

      Max Hunter once said that anyone who doesn’t believes radical reductions in launch costs are possible to transportation either doesn’t understand the rocket equation or doesn’t know how much rocket propellant costs. And he actually wrote papers on rocketry (not to mention developing rockets).

    4. The huge gain in computing is due to the room at the bottom.
      Miniaturization not modularization (plus the ability to use the current generation of computers to design the next generation) explains the exponentially increasing computational power per unit cost of computers.

      But yes, there’s no such exponential process to take advantage of for rockets. They are fundamentally capped by consumables which are propellant for fully reusable vehicles or energy cost (plus possibly a light propellant cost) for space elevator.

      As I recall when I checked a few years ago, the propellant costs for rockets were around $100 per kg for kerosene/LOX and $300 per kg for liquid hydrogen and LOX. They also already operate near the thermodynamic limits for rocket engines. There’s not many orders of magnitude left with which to improve rockets from current costs.

      1. As I recall when I checked a few years ago, the propellant costs for rockets were around $100 per kg for kerosene/LOX

        Gee, Karl, gas stations must love you. 🙂

        You can buy kerosene for $4-5 per gallon. That’s about $1.30-1.60 per kg. LOX is about $0.20 per kg.

        See? I just improved the cost by two orders of magnitude right there. 🙂

        1. Sorry, Edward, I forgot I had put in a factor of three increase to estimate the real floor on launches. The actual costs were a third the amounts I claimed.

          1. The actual costs were a third the amounts I claimed.

            No, they’re more like 1/100.

            Gasoline and kerosene are roughly the same price. At $100/kg, it would cost $6000 to fill up your car. At a third of that, it would still be $2000.

            I think you need to shop for cheaper gas. 🙂

  7. I remember the hate directed at the first cellphones and their Yuppie owners. Now, I paid $160 for a new iPhone 4 and $35/month for service.

    Moore’s Law: it’s not just for breakfast. Or IC transistors.

  8. Darkstar: Ok, I can admit when I wrong, I omitted the word “not” after “they’re”, that must have confused you, however I would’ve thought you could’ve figured it out from context or from the paper quote “seems to be the absolute level of power…”

    “The reason computers eventually came down in price is because they’re not high power devices”

    1. Um, the Cray was a computer. You could cook on it, and it needed a liquid nitrogen bath to prevent it from burning itself up.

      Computers are now low power devices. They weren’t always low power devices.

      Therefore, the statement “The reason computers eventually came down in price is because they’re not high power devices” is proven false.

  9. If everyone has heard it all before, why keep citing examples of low power devices that eventually became affordable to the middle class (cars, cell phones, ICs, etc.). And if you come up with an example, make sure it’s light enough that the power it produces is sufficient to overcome its weight and then some (nuclear power plant? Nope, not even if it was affordable). How about a bomb, a gazillion Watts for a microsecond; of course I’m always told that reusability is a must so that’s a problem.

    1. Thank you.

      “Middle class.” An interesting choice of words. Most of us commenting here do not see items such as cars or cellphones limited to the middle or upper class.

      Where do passenger airliners fit in your spectrum of low-to-high power devices? (I admit I may be misunderstanding your point.)

    2. Chemical rockets are not nuclear power plants, or nuclear bombs.

      Toshiba is making great progress in developing lower cost reactors, which you say is impossible because they are high-power devices.

      But even if that were impossible to reduce the cost of nuclear power, that would prove nothing about chemical rockets *which do not require nuclear reactors*.

    3. The wheel – once only the rich could afford it’s use.

      The horse – once only the rich could afford it’s use.

      The automobile – once only the rich could afford it’s use.

      The airplane – once only the rich could afford it’s use.

      The cruise ship – once only the rich could afford it’s use.

      The jet airplane – once only the rich could afford it’s use.

      The rocket – only the rich will ever afford it’s use.

      That is a high bar to prove, given past evidence. Remember, in addition to costs coming down, individual disposable wealth is going up! The wheel didn’t get that much easier to make, specialization allow people to devote more time to making them.

        1. Are you accusing me of being intolerant? My complaint is that NASA is an acronym, not a word.
          I’ve lived in Europe, I have many European & UK friends & I live in the only officially bi-lingual state in the Union & I speak Spanish.

  10. “I do think that, that some people, and particularly Virgin, overhype point to point. And it’s not clear what Virgin’s path is to either that or orbit with their current vehicle design. It doesn’t scale well with velocity.”

    But is a 500 km distance better than up and down. And 500 km distance “scale well with velocity”.

    I think the point is not 5000+ km, but starting with 500 km.
    Let’s say there is a brick wall beyond 2000 km, that still something.

    So my point is I think people will pay more to go 500 km, than compared to up and down. Or there is market for going 500 km, but let’s start with up and down- 500 km will be next and people can still choose to just go up and down.

  11. 500 km routes are served nicely by 737s. Or even RJs.

    When you factor in all the futzing around at each end, cutting the actual runway-to-runway time over 500 km routes would be meaningless.

    1. “When you factor in all the futzing around at each end, cutting the actual runway-to-runway time over 500 km routes would be meaningless.”

      Right. But question is if you want to buy ticket for seat on suborbital flight, would going 500 km be
      better than going up and down.
      Or is 10 mins of weightless worth more than 5 mins?
      Is going 150 km high better than 100 km high?
      If your suborbital flight when 500 km and competitor didn’t, could you get more customers
      and/or charge a higher price?

  12. My view on space tourism is this; Air travel is the most apt model.

    In the early days of air travel, the cost of a ticket was something only the rich could afford. Everyone else used traditional transportation; rail or boats.

    There were wild claims that in the future, a million Americans would take to the skies each year, and equally preposterous claims that the cheapest way to get from one coast to the other would be to fly, and it’d take only ten hours.

    Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. Or actually, it did, just a lot faster than anyone thought. Those numbers were exceeded many decades ago, and today, there are over 700 million air tickets sold in the US each year.

    Space tourism, which at first will be a plaything of the rich, could open the door to affordable access to space, as well as affordable hypersonic travel. Could. On the other hand, doing nothing won’t get us anywhere. There’s no downside to taking the chance.

    For true hypersonic travel, I think ballistic is one way, and surely the fastest way, to go. Virgin’s space-plane doesn’t look scalable to me, and the “first stage” of a launching aircraft doesn’t seem viable for hypersonic travel, but it might lead there. So too might other company’s versions.

    One interesting issue with ballistic transport is that you need to achieve near orbital velocity for intercontinental distances. So, even if you have a space plane capable of 430 ISP (and currently, that means LOX/LH), and the dry mass of the vehicle is quite low, you’re going to need roughly 7 pounds of fuel for each pound of passenger or cargo. Assume 200lbs for passenger plus luggage and that’s 1400 pounds of fuel per.
    But… that’s LA to Sydney, 7500 miles. How much fuel would a seat on a 747 take? figures I’ve seen ballpark it about 100 passenger miles to the gallon, and a gallon of jet fuel weighs about 6.8 pounds. So, that’s about 510 pounds of fuel per passenger (plus luggage). So, only around 3 times as much fuel to go hypersonic/ballistic and be there in half an hour instead of 15. If tickets were three to four times the price of airline tickets, I think they’d have plenty of customers. I know I’d gladly pay the extra for that to avoid 15 hours of misery. But, it’s going to take some breakthroughs to get there, and my guess is, space tourism is the best chance of that happening.

  13. The problem of comparing space travel to personal computers is that there is no comparative phenomenon in aeronautics to Moore’s Law to drive performance up and costs down. The best engine technology we have today might as well have been designed in the 1970s. Materials have improved somewhat but gains in material technology are much slower. In the early days of rocket engines performance was usually improved by increasing temperature and chamber pressure. A lot of technologies were developed to make this possible like the Sanger-Bredt design i.e. regenerative cooling. What has been developed lately? Not a lot.

    Cost improvements can still be achieved by mass production or reusability. However reusability is dependent on materials technology in order to be cost effective.

    1. I think I know a few things about rocket propulsion reusability, and I have never asked for better materials. Manufacturing technology advancements are helping to bring costs down. On the vehicle side, a LOX compatible composite would be nice, but engines? Current materials are fine.

      1. Well, they do tend to use niobium and platinum in uncooled maneuvering thrusters. I wonder if it would be cheaper and more reliable to use a much more conventional material and double or triple the number of thrusters (with the small weight penalty) and then switch between them on a duty cycle so no individual thruster gets so hot.

        1. Regenerative cooling eliminates the need for high temp materials like platinum in this application.

  14. Sometimes it is the regulatory world that intentionally stifles innovation. Most of the time, it is done by governments or via the torts system. Occasionally, it is done by the industry itself. An example would be the use of turbines in vehicles. Andy Granatelli introduced a pair of 4-wheel drive race cars in the Indy 500 in 1967 & 1968. These were kick-a$$ machines that both led the race until dropping out late due to transmission or fuel pump failures. The racing association regulated this approach out of existence via restrictions on air intakes. Today, Otto and Diesel engines are all but bulletproof. Imagine half a century of high performance racing enforced evolution on small, powerful turbine engines and transmissions. Cheers –

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STP-Paxton_Turbocar

    1. Turbines use too much fuel. After the 1970s oil crisis they became nonviable. Even Wankel engines failed in the market because of this and turbines are even less efficient than that.

      In an aircraft the power to weight ratio you can get with turbines makes them a sensible choice. In a car not so much. Not to mention that cooling is easier.

      One good example is all new tank designs made after the 1980s. None use turbines for propulsion despite the M1 and T-80 using them when they came out. Modern diesel engines have the same hp and much less fuel consumption. Then again turbines for tanks and helicopters seem to be mostly based on obsolete designs so that could be different if they were redone using new tech.

    2. Turbines work pretty efficiently (30 – 35%) at design load, but off peak their efficiency plummets, so for something with a highly variable load like a car they’re horrible.

      I’ve thought of one way around this by having multiple small compressor sections on a common shaft, each with it’s own air intake (perpendicular to the shaft) with a valve to control air intake and then through a 90-degree bend to feed the compressor face. That would subdivide the power output into discrete ranges (0-25%, 25-50%, etc) so that you’re never that far off peak on the compressors as you go through a wide power range. The compressor sections that have their air cutoff would basically just establish a near vacuum and spin freely. Then you do something similar for the turbine section.

      It would be similar to having a multiplicity of discrete gas turbine engines, but without the problem of having them spin up and down constantly because they’re all running off the same shaft, and what’s varying is the flow through the different sections.

  15. As a side note, it appears Sir Richard Branson is now only 90% certain he will reach space in September of this year.

    http://newmexico.watchdog.org/21047/branson-spaceport-launch-90-percent-certain-in-september/
    Branson: Spaceport launch ’90 percent’ certain in September

    [[[“I’m pretty convinced that by this summer a large, new spacecraft will go into space,” the Virgin Galactic owner said in an interview with Fusion.net, adding, “and then I think by September, myself and my family will go into space. I’m 90 percent convinced that will happen.”]]]

    I guess this means the flight rate for SpaceShipTwo will be really ramping up soon 🙂

  16. Joy riders in early aircraft weren’t the super rich, but the average person buying a ride in a war surplus JN-4 or similar aircraft. Early commercial airliner designs were not driven by tourists, but by business travelers, air mail and other folks wanting to go from point A to B. Similarly most the of the examples used here weren’t “rich toys for rich folks” but tools that generated business and commercial advantage for the Early Adopters. So just what advantage is “SpaceShipTwo” creating for business or commerce?

    1. Joy riders in early aircraft weren’t the super rich, but the average person buying a ride in a war surplus JN-4 or similar aircraft

      That’s because we haven’t had a space war in which the surplus spacecraft were sold at low cost as surplus by the government. 😉

      1. By the same token, there were no surplus JN-4s before World War I. Nevertheless, aviation was quite well established before the war began (at least, compared to space travel today). The number of aeronauts in France alone exceeded 10,000.

        1. Yep, because it was a lot easier to do then rockets were and a lot less expensive. And planes were reusable from day one, unlike rockets. Again, its why aviation is a poor model for both regulating human space flight and for developing strategies to move it forward.

      2. Makes you wonder where aviation would be today without WWI, WWII and the Cold War. And why aviation is a poor model for human spaceflight.

          1. Rand,

            Why would I waste my time as your faith based belief that rockets and airplanes are the same would get in the way.

            But first ask yourself, are ocean travel and aviation based on the same models, because in the early days of aviation folks mistakenly believed they were…

    2. what advantage is…

      While I’m not a big fan of space tourism because I think most of what they may accomplish will be lost in the noise. From it could emerge businesses we aren’t imagining today as well as giving a start to workers that will be important to the next companies that hires them.

      1. Perhaps, or as with XCOR, space tourism is just a side show to their real markets. But this of course is the tragedy of the Ansari X-Prize, it distracted folks from the real market. Imagine there was no Ansari X-Prize and instead SpaceShipOne continued flying to explore other markets beside tourism.

        1. Without the Ansari X-Prize there would have been no SpaceShip One. Kinda pinches out your alternate history timeline loop I’d say.

          VIrgin Galactic’s troubles don’t derive from aiming at space tourism as a market. They are aiming at other launch markets as well. Their combined problem is that they are seeking to make WK2-SS2 the prime mover for all of them and the long-standing critical-path item that refuses to budge is the trouble-plagued hybrid rocket technology taken on, in its entirely, from SS1. So even if SS1 had had some kind of immaculate conception without reference to the Ansari X-Prize in some alternate universe, VG would still be where it is today because the root of SS2’s problems were planted when SS1 was built.

      2. If you were an alien observing earth, you would conclude that humans are friendly.

        The number one economic activity of all humanity is tourism. Humans love to visit new places and meet new people. It is pretty much a one constant for the species. Space tourism is nothing more than an extention of what is happening on terra firma and if space transportation would have been treated the same as every other form of transportation this discussion would not even be taking place.

        1. The rise of tourism started with the transportation revolution of the 19th Century, when drastic declines in the cost of travel, along with an increase in ease of travel resulted in the formation of the modern tourist industry, so it not as ancient as many believe, although I am sure Edward will chime in that King Richard’s Crusade was really a tourist trip by the rich and famous 🙂

          However there never was any ban on it, or anything to make it illegal. NASA merely didn’t see why it should fly paying customers on a government spacecraft. And the Russians only did it out of financial need and given the new tensions have probably dropped it for good. And in terms of space transportation, other than comsats, there were and still are no large commercial markets to move the technology forward. That has always been the killer in terms of reusable, lack of commercial market demand for it. So the fact that this discussion is taking place is simply because it has yet to become a viable activity and VG troubles are not helping the issue.

          1. Ancient wonders were all tourist attractions. From the Lighthouse to the Pyramids, ziggerauts, the hanging gardens. People have been traveling forever just to see and buy some local trinkets. The greeks were famous for it and many wrote it all down. The idea that humans just started visiting new places is silly. Every ancient sight was also a money maker… right up to the time it fell out of favor for the next big attraction.

            Of course there was no ban… I believe it was in 1960 that congress had the FAA create a launch regime and all the lic. requirements for Astronaut farmers to start launching ICBM’s from their backyard with humans on it… and of course it must have been in that same year that DOT, the department of Transportation created the regime for the laws and regulations for astronaut farmers to launch ICBM from their backyards with humans on them.. Of course it does follow that it was President Kennedy that signed all these laws and regulations allowing astronaut farmers to build rockets in their backyards with humans on top. The miltary of course would have just been estatic that anyone could build rockets in their backyards that could deliver a payload anywhere..

            Yes my mistake .. there was nothing stopping anyone .. but it sure begs the question.. if all of this has been in place from the very start… why is Branson STILL waiting for the FAA to lic? I mean come on .. according to you .. this has all already been in place for 50 years…

    3. Early commercial airliner designs were not driven by tourists, but by business travelers,

      We’ve been through this before, Tom, many times. Business travelers *are* tourists.

      “Tourist” is more or less synonymous with “traveler.” It is not a derogatory term for a certain class of people who Tom Matula finds unworthy of doing business.

      The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as “those traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes.”

      The airline business does not care whether customers are traveling for leisure, business, or other purposes, as long as they have the money to buy a ticket — *and it never has*. They don’t judge whether people are worthy of air travel. That is merely *your* idea of how the world should work.

      United Airlines was started by a timber magnate who went to the first air meet in Los Angeles and wanted to ride in an airplane, but no one would take him up. So, he went home and hired an engineer to build an airplane for his personal use.

      Yes, he was one of the “rich folk” who wanted a “rich toy” — as repugnant as you find that. Eventually, he started selling rides and airplanes to other people and became quite successful at it.

      No one really cares what you think about the worthiness of it. Nor will your constant complaining make people care.

      1. Edward,

        So please share with us what business those space tourists will be conducting in their few minutes of weightlessness… Who they will be making deals with 🙂

        As for the World Tourism Organization, I am sure they are looking to expand their importance by having a broad definition. But the Merriam-Webster definition is more main stream.

        http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tourist

        [[[a person who travels to a place for pleasure]]]

        And one that matches the VG customer base.

        Also I am not complaining, like you do, but simple pointing out folks shouldn’t be getting their hopes up for a golden age emerging from VG launch tourists into space, if they actually find an engine that will allow them to do so.

        1. So please share with us what business those space tourists will be conducting in their few minutes of weightlessness

          If you go to the NSRC website (http://nsrc.swri.org/), you will find dozens of abstracts. Assuming, of course, you have any genuine interest in learning.

          As for the World Tourism Organization, I am sure they are looking to expand their importance by having a broad definition. But the Merriam-Webster definition is more main stream.

          All you need to do is Google “business tourism,” and the results will show how absurd that claim is.

          The fact that you’ve never heard of business tourism doesn’t mean it isn’t mainstream. It simply shows how isolated and detached you are.

          1. Edward,

            So once again you twist words to mean things they don’t mean to support your weak arguments.

            As for those abstracts, there are for sub-orbital research, not joy rides by the super rich.

          2. Some of the researchers will be rich, others won’t.

            As for your usual rant about the “super rich,” you’ve obviously spent too much time hanging out with Occupy Elko. You have class warfare on the brain.

          3. And you as usual don’t get it. The rich are too fickle a market, and too few, to really drive technology except at the edges of commercial demand for it. Next you will be saying the national railroad system was built in the 19th Century just so the rich would have a way to move their private rail cars around.

            Also I guess you have no clue about the role Elko had in creating United Airlines instead giving folks a fantasy story instead about it.

      2. As I used to tell people on sci.space.*, which tended to upset them: “No matter how valuable you think your opinion about the space tourism market is, it is in fact is completely worthless, particularly if you don’t want to go yourself. All that matters is what the market thinks.”

        1. Rand,

          Yes, and that is how I make my living, teaching folks how to measure and understand markets. They are not as mysterious as lay people think. But then as a “rocket engine expert” you probably think that marketing is all black magic as with other complex research problems.

          But to summarize, so far Sub-Orbital Tourism seems to be following the same path as dirigible tourism. And as Doug Messier noted on his blog this will probably be the make it or break year for VG. The question is if VG breaks will it take the rest of suborbital tourism industry down with it.

          But then you still believe the Anasari X-Prize was a success rather than a failure by every measure used to hype it.

          1. The question is if VG breaks will it take the rest of suborbital tourism industry down with it.

            If that’s the question (it’s not, really), the answer is no. It’s a silly question.

          2. No, its silly to think it won’t have a major impact given there is only one other firm that has any prospects of serving the market. For the general public the high visibility of Sir Richard Branson makes him the face of the sub-orbital tourism industry. If he throws in the towel it will send a strong message to investors and others its not a viable industry.

            But I suspect that you, like many space advocates, have ridden the faith based belief sub-orbital tourism band wagon for so long (at least 20 years) you have lost any rational perspective on it. For the sub-orbital tourist advocates its always just “one more year” and the “Golden Age” will start…

          3. Jeff Bezos, like XCOR, is looking far beyond simply hauling a handful of sub-orbital tourists, but given his pace is even slower it’s anyone’s guess when Blue Origin will fly more than a few miles high.

            But then you basically admitted the X-Prize was a failure since Blue Origins never joined in that nonsense.

          4. But then you basically admitted the X-Prize was a failure since Blue Origins never joined in that nonsense.

            If you’ve ever had a course in logic you should demand your money back.

          5. So you are still on record as believing the Ansari X-Prize was a success even though a single tourist has yet to fly on a sub-orbital system resulting from the competition nearly a decade after it was won? After all, that was its objective…

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