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Mojave spaceport...never will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.
I'm not sure off the top of my head who the other competitors are in this, but I remember reading that there were several groups with ships that were nearly ready, should SpaceShipOne fail.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I know John Carmack (the guy who created Doom and Quake) is working on stuff and his project is going pretty well.
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I haven't been able to figure out if this was actually a qualifying flight for the X Prize. I thought it was, but then somebody mentioned something on the news yesterday that made me think maybe they were going to attempt the actual X Prize flights later.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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Nope, this wasn't an X-Prize qualifying flight--has to have two people on board for that (or possibly one person and the weight equivalent of another person--what I've read has been a bit ambiguous about that). Also, a ship has to make two trips in...what, two weeks? in order to win the prize.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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It has to be three people, or the equivalent weight of (with at least one live person), Noemon, according to the official Xprize rules on their home site.
Attitude control? What exactly is that? I have heard of altitude control, but not the attitude control they mention twice in that article. But I know nothing about flight.
Farmgirl
at Noemon for pulling stuff directly off Slashdot!
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"How do they keep it from burning up without all of the cool heat shield thingys that the space shuttle has?"
It was a sub-orbital flight. Consequently, re-entry temperatures were a LOT lower.
While this flight's a major triumph, we need to keep it in perspective; what NASA does is considerably harder.
Some of this technology simply won't scale up to NASA-sized efforts; it's unlikely that SpaceShipOne can be turned into an orbiter, for example. It's a good example of targeted technology, but it's still only a step.
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I just got back from Slashdot, actually--I was over there checking to see why you'd said that. I figured it was something like that.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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It looks like they've successfully made a second flight last night, though they had the same problem with reentering the atmosphere. They'll have to work out little kinks like that before they'll find any customers. My only question is, what's in space that people will pay to go there? As of right now, there's not much there. I guess you could sort on a sight-seeing adventure, and to experience null-g's, but it's not like airplanes where you can go visit other people. Anyway, here's the article on the most recent flight. Private Rocket Unofficially Reaches Space.Posts: 349 | Registered: May 2003
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I think people want to go into space just because.....it's not Earth.
Louis L'Amour (yes, the author) once said in a speech at a local university, that I went to hear, that he considered Space truly the next "frontier". That people -- just as they felt driven to explore the world, to explore west through America, to explore the poles, to explore deep in the ocean... to always push to go to areas we hadn't been before -- that drive would keep us always "wanting" to go to space...
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I'd personally like to go into space to experience zero gravity, and just generally to experience being out there. I'd like to leap across the surface of the moon. I'd like to gaze back at Earth. I'd like to fly past the rings of Saturn. I want to experience these things for the same reason I want to see the Grand Canyon, or the Black Hills, or Angor Wat, or Easter Island.
I expect that there will end up being practical reasons for getting out there as well, once the cost falls enough, and the resources available out there become scarce enough down here.
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