In any case, since the federal Safe Explosives Act — which requires permits for rockets with more than 0.9 pounds of fuel — went into effect in late 2002, the rocketry industry has been battered.
John Wickman, president of CP Technologies, an amateur rocketry supplier, said his company’s sales have dropped by about 50 percent since the act passed.
“It was a major hit, because people just dropped out,” said Wickman. “They just dropped out of the hobby completely.”
Part of the problem, say people like Wickman, is that the ATF doesn’t even understand the hobby it is trying to regulate.
First, a little bit of Blue Origin Kremlinology: They are advertising for a crew systems engineer. There are rumors that they are working on a manned suborbital ship but then again there are also rumors that they are working on a transdimensional intergalactic warp drive. Either way, it looks like they want to put humans on it.
Clark Lindsey has an interesting item on the development of GPS, with lessons for RLV development.
…and Derek Lyons starts strong out of the gate with a piece on the business practicalities of space access.
Update a few hours later: Check out Dr. Day’s detailed comment on GPS, which is meatier than either my post or the one I linked to. Good Stuff.
I’ve been weeding the blogroll garden a little. I’ve divided my former space/science section into two separate ones, and I’ve added a new one to the space section–Spaceship Summer. Its author, Derek Lyons, says that it is “dedicated to information about space tourism, the X-Prize, and CATS (Cheap Acess to Space).”
Derek has been known on at least one occasion, in sci.space.policy, to disparage the blogosphere.
The Economist has a good article on SpaceShipOne. There’s only one problem with it:
…it is difficult for his competitors (as well as everybody else) to work out what a ticket might actually cost.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation gives some idea. Mr Rutan says his highest costs are staff for the pre- and post-flight check-ups. He has a few dozen staff and, at one point, had a plan to run SpaceShipOne once a week for five months. Assuming each of his staff cost $120 an hour to employ, it would cost a minimum of $60,000 per tourist for staff alone.
That assumes that his entire staff is dedicated to SpaceShipOne operations. He has many other projects to which they would charge, so a SpaceShipOne flight won’t bear the full burden of his standing…well, not army, but perhaps a large squad, or perhaps a platoon. So I think that these are overestimates of his overhead costs.
There’s an important story that’s not getting enough press, so I figured I’d blog it to try to raise the profile a bit. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy just accepted a report from the ABA on the dysfunction in the US penal system. The upshot is that we are pissing away huge amounts of taxpayer money incarcerating nonviolent drug offenders thanks to mandatory minimum sentences created by politicians trying to seem tough on crime. The same political dynamics lead to the idiocy of alcohol prohibition. The ABA commission website has the text of the report, summaries, and some other useful material on the subject.
The system is deeply flawed, even if you think drug laws are a good idea. It makes no sense whatsoever to sentence a street level dealer to twice the amount of time given to someone who commits assault, but that’s the way things are right now. We desperately need reform of the whole penal system – perhaps this report can begin the process.
I’ll explain why a little later, when I get a minute.
Actually, looking at what I just wrote, I realize that people are going to think, “Great. Now he’ll go off somewhere and get hit by the beer truck, and it will be like Fermat’s Last Theorem, and it will take centuries to figure it out.”
I’ll try to get to it later, honest. In the meantime, I can leave it as an exercise for the students in the comments section, and maybe I won’t have to.
I’m in the middle of helping figure out lunar/Mars transportation architectures for a client in response to NASA’s Broad Area Announcement, and have little time to post. Fortunately Andrew’s picking up some of the slack, and Clark Lindsey has an amazing number of interesting links this week (check out yesterday’s edition as well as today’s).
Also, Jay Manifold has been collecting media reactions here and here. As Andrew reports via Pat Bahn, the “giggle factor” is dissipating rapidly, if not gone completely.
I just got back from a pleasant evening hanging out with some of the local space geeks (Clark Lindsey, Jeff Foust, Phil Smith, and Pat Bahn). The main topic of conversation was obviously SpaceShipOne and the ramifications of the flight. Two noteworthy things came up. First of all, Pat confirms that the giggle factor is pretty much dead as far as investors are concerned. He can’t go into details for obvious reasons, but he speaks from direct experience. Everyone suspected this would happen, but it’s nice to have real data. The second point that came up which I thought I’d mention is this: In the SS1 development program so far there have been four incidents in which the pilot saved the plane. The landing problem on the December 17th test, the uncommanded nose rise on the August 27th test, the computer failure on the May 13th shot, and the roll problem on the most recent flight. In an unmanned system each one of those would most likely have lead to loss of vehicle. The lesson is clear – pilots are good. Again, no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to alt-space, but it’s nice to have further confirmation.