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Sapce Ship One
Jun. 22nd, 2004 07:36 amSo Space Ship 1 reached 100km... Sadly I have mixed feelings about this.
After 30+ years wanting this to actually happen, my time working in civil aviation lovers my expectations of what comes next. We have a civil Sub-Orbital vehicle, and through X-cor and others hopefully more. However, some of the glee at the prospect of SSTO's is misplaced. A decade could be optimistic, the engineering challenges alone are significant and we should not delude ourselves that Space Ship 1 is an evolution...
There will be a lot of "high fiving" in the libertarian space community that private money made this possible. $20million for a sub-orbital space craft is utterly incredible. But it won't get a passenger license, and it is not part of an evolution to an orbital one. It does not have an enviromental control system, nor thermal protection (it doesn't need them) - it spends minutes in space, and is only travelling at a fairly benign Mach 3.
There is a long road ahead and I'm not sure man will yet travel it.
Anyway, all that pesimism aside, today IS a day for rejoicing. A good thing happened, a significant one, and one that was seriously over due.
After 30+ years wanting this to actually happen, my time working in civil aviation lovers my expectations of what comes next. We have a civil Sub-Orbital vehicle, and through X-cor and others hopefully more. However, some of the glee at the prospect of SSTO's is misplaced. A decade could be optimistic, the engineering challenges alone are significant and we should not delude ourselves that Space Ship 1 is an evolution...
There will be a lot of "high fiving" in the libertarian space community that private money made this possible. $20million for a sub-orbital space craft is utterly incredible. But it won't get a passenger license, and it is not part of an evolution to an orbital one. It does not have an enviromental control system, nor thermal protection (it doesn't need them) - it spends minutes in space, and is only travelling at a fairly benign Mach 3.
There is a long road ahead and I'm not sure man will yet travel it.
Anyway, all that pesimism aside, today IS a day for rejoicing. A good thing happened, a significant one, and one that was seriously over due.
