Sorry for not posting sooner, but my DSL connection’s been flaky all morning.

I’m concerned about that roll we saw during ascent. I was very concerned when it seemed to be accelerating, but it looks like he got it under control after engine shutdown. I wouldn’t fly again until I understood what caused that. I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t want to ride a vehicle that did that, though others’ mileage may vary.

It was a little irritating to listen to John Pike on Fox. On the one hand, he actually did seem to be cheering them on, but he’s out of date on current events. He told the Fox hosts that DaVinci was planning to fly in the next few days, when they’ve announced that they’re delayed several weeks. It would be nice if media people could get some other names in their space rolodexes than John’s.

Maybe more thoughts later.

[Update]

Bruce Hoult (in comments to this post thinks that it’s being caused by swirl in the oxidizer flow of the engine. I doubt that. Brett Buck has a different, and more plausible to me (and more disturbing, if correct) diagnosis over at sci.space.policy:

…the problem appeared to be a coupling from yaw
to roll – definitely had a significant yaw angle, and the effective dihedral
is extraordinarily high with this design – a lot like the lifting bodies
that had similar control issues. Maybe that resulted from a yaw thrust
vector misalignment, maybe just plain old roll/yaw coupling issues at high
speeds. But it seems very unlikely to be something that can easily be fixed.

If he’s right, it doesn’t mean that SS1 can’t win the X-Prize, since it’s had two successful flights with the problem. It may mean that they may have to go back to the drawing board for SS2, and that the technology’s not quite as in the bag as Mr. Branson thinks. As I said, safety issues aside, I think that the market for a rolling ascent is more limited than for one that’s smoother and more controlled.

[Another update, after further reflection on Mr. Pike]

He also blew it when being asked why people find this so exciting, whereas they don’t seem to care about NASA. He repeated the old cliche about how NASA has managed the seemingly impossible feat of making spaceflight boring, but his (mis)diagnosis was that this was exciting because we could identify with the pilot, whereas NASA had reduced emphasis on showcasing the astronauts since the 1960s.

No, John. People find this exciting, because it offers a promise that they can go themselves.

[Update at 12:45]

A commenter points out that Mike Melvill says that he screwed up. He doesn’t say exactly what he did wrong.

Anyway, that’s good news, because it means that they don’t have to do any analysis to figure it out, and pilot error is easily fixable, either by making the pilot smarter, or by using a different pilot. I was surprised to see Melvill fly this time–I had the impression that he’s gotten his ride in June, and was satisfied to let someone else do it. Now, will he be the pilot on the second flight?

[5 PM EDT update]

Derek Lyons asks if the space community has already lost interest in this.

I don’t think so. I’ll bet that a lot fewer people came up from LA, because they’d already done it once, and the entry price increased quite a bit over the last one. I do think that there’s a sense that it’s got enough momentum now, and they are content to watch on the web (combined with the fact that, truth be told, like sporting events, the view is much better from home). I’ll bet that once it becomes a real race, like the Ansari Cup, there will be big crowds, and it will be crowds of people who weren’t necessarily interested in space.

The most important gauge of public interest isn’t how many people physically show up to events like this, but how many marketing deals, and investment agreements get signed, and how much continuing buzz it gets in the major media.

Clark has a schedule of events for the flight, and a roundup of links, many of which indicate that the space tourism business is rapidly picking up steam.

Clark has a schedule of events for the flight, and a roundup of links, many of which indicate that the space tourism business is rapidly picking up steam.

Clark has a schedule of events for the flight, and a roundup of links, many of which indicate that the space tourism business is rapidly picking up steam.

On the morrow will occur the first flight to win the Ansari X-Prize. It will be live streamed on the web, and here’s a Free Republic thread that will follow it with great interest.

As an aside, and for what it’s worth, I doubt if there will be a similar one at Democratic Underground (perhaps the first time I’ve ever linked to anything there), though I have to admit that I don’t want to wade through the moral and intellectual swamp at that site to look for one.

On the morrow will occur the first flight to win the Ansari X-Prize. It will be live streamed on the web, and here’s a Free Republic thread that will follow it with great interest.

As an aside, and for what it’s worth, I doubt if there will be a similar one at Democratic Underground (perhaps the first time I’ve ever linked to anything there), though I have to admit that I don’t want to wade through the moral and intellectual swamp at that site to look for one.

On the morrow will occur the first flight to win the Ansari X-Prize. It will be live streamed on the web, and here’s a Free Republic thread that will follow it with great interest.

As an aside, and for what it’s worth, I doubt if there will be a similar one at Democratic Underground (perhaps the first time I’ve ever linked to anything there), though I have to admit that I don’t want to wade through the moral and intellectual swamp at that site to look for one.

Via email, Clark Lindsey points out a column by Philip Ball at Nature, citing (but not deigning to actually link) yours truly, that is both amusing and sad:

There is no point in being coy about the role of military incentives in the advancement of science and technology. After all, it has a history far older than that of aviation and space science. But this does not suit the narrative the X prize needs, and so the foundation has transformed the story into one of private (yet populist) enterprise battling public (yet elitist) prevarication.

As an example of where this reasoning leads, aerospace engineer Rand Simberg suggests in The New Atlantis that the commercial space age would be further accelerated if the United States were to withdraw from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, because it “bans declarations of national sovereignty off-planet, and makes the defense of private property rights in space problematic”.

How otherwise can McDonalds colonize the Moon (or should that be the Moon

I was told (by someone who should know) at the Return To The Moon Conference in Las Vegas in July, that Futron would soon be releasing their proprietary space tourism market research study (based on research by the Zogby polling organization), that they’d previously only been selling for twenty-five hundred bucks.

Well, the day before tomorrow’s initial Ansari X-Prize attempt, they’ve done it. I’ll try to read it in the next few days, and provide some thoughts.

[Via Clark Lindsey, who does a much better job that I possibly could in keeping up with this kind of thing]

As Clark Lindsey says, why oh why do the media think that just because someone is a scientist, even a space scientist, he would know anything about space transportation or space tourism? There are many people who do understand this subject, but it’s apparently too much work to go seek them out. Instead, they think that they can just go down to the local observatory, or university astrophysics department, and get the opinion of someone that’s worth printing. Instead, they often get nonsense, and they don’t even know it.

“The idea is great, I like the idea, but I am very aware that even people like NASA find it a challenge. Eventually it will come. Whether it will come in Richard Branson’s time, and in his way, remains to be seen,” he said.

“I take it as a declaration of intent, to look into it, rather than to take bookings straight away.”

What does this mean? If it’s a “declaration of intent” (which indeed it is, and a quite forthright one by my reading), then it’s more than “looking into it.” All of the pieces are in place, now that the technology has been demonstrated by SS1, and Branson is going to put up the money (or raise it from others, which he’s fully capable of doing). I suspect that he will be taking bookings, if not “straight away,” then certainly within the year, with all the concomitant marketing hoopla and tie-ins.

But it gets worse. He’s supposedly a scientist, but he can’t even get the science right:

The space tourists would not be completely weightless, he added.

“You can’t have an orbit at that altitude, so you could not be totally weightless. It would be probably fairly close to it, but it is not an orbit, it is still within the upper atmosphere.”

This is simply false, on two levels. You don’t have to get out of the atmosphere to be weightless (though these flights do leave the atmosphere, for all extents and purposes), nor do you have to be in orbit to be weightless. And in fact, as I’ve pointed out, a suborbit actually is an orbit–it’s just one that intersects the planet’s surface, so it can’t be sustained for long. The passengers will in fact be truly weightless, in free fall, for several minutes.

Of course, part of the problem, and reason that stories like this get published, is that Space Daily doesn’t have an editor. It just has a publisher who thinks that it’s more important to have quantity of content than quality.