361–370 of 504 posts
Can this sub-orbital model scale in such a way to have, say, 60 minutes of weightlessness? Or is the "straight up, straight down" model such that sub-orbital flight has a cap at 4?
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At the moment there are only infrequent rocket launches, if the numbers go up because of space tourism the damage becomes greater, especially if space tourism reaches the price level parent was talking about.
Airplanes are pretty common and don't account for much of the overall pollution. According to the EPA, transport accounts for 29% of total emissions, and of that, only 10% are airplanes. On the other hand 75% comes from cars and trucks. If rockets became commonplace, they would most like replace leisure travel on airplanes and would eliminate car traffic once you arrive at your destination. The CO2 emission of the cu…
Did I miss it or was there no in capsule cameras for this one? I thought the Branson space flight had a little more drama to it because of the scenes from the cockpit and passenger area.
Both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin offer you ~4 minutes of weightlessness. Can this sub-orbital model scale in such a way to have, say, 60 minutes of weightlessness? Or is the "straight up, straight down" model such that sub-orbital flight has a cap at 4?
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Not sure a tiny island that’s 6-7’ above sea level is such a genius investment these days.
Do you think the ocean is going to rise SEVEN FEET?
Just probably not in our lifetimes. The maximum sea level rise will be hundreds, even thousands of years from now. In the absolute worst case scenario where all the ice melted, sea level would rise 230 feet. If we did nothing at all about climate change and kept burning fossil fuels until we ran out, that's actually a likely outcome. It has happened in the past when the earth was much warmer. It won't happen to us, because we're taking action. The final sea level rise would depend how we do with actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere, as it will keep rising long after we stop using fossil fuels.
7 feet by the end of this century is not impossible, but not in the conservative estimate. So far we've been tracking the aggressive estimates, not conservative ones.
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Understanding the difference between orbital and suborbital space flight need not cause one to be cynical and negative about things. Especially since blue origin has a design that can scale up quickly, as SpaceX did with falcon 1 to 9
Falcon 9 was a direct extension of Falcon 1. New Glenn shares almost nothing in common with New Shepard. They don't even use the same fuel or engine.
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The thing that amuses me is that if SpaceX can make Starship and the Heavy booster work, they could actually come up with a tourism/joyride that would blow these piffling jumps by Branson and Bezos into irrelevance. If you can send 50-100 people on an actual orbiting jaunt, perhaps a night in 'space rocket hotel', rich folk would gladly pay millions, which makes the business case a lot more compelling. Then they'd ju…
Out of all of these space-faring corporations, SpaceX has orders of magnitude more aerospace infrastructure and assets to work with. Their entire ethos since inception was getting humanity to Mars, not sending a handful of wealthy people into suborbital trajectories. Elon/SpaceX have certainly participated in a lot of PR throughout, but it always seemed to be along an engineering axis, not some feel-good emotional ax…
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>For example, we'd have the capacity to eliminate hunger if it wasn't for the pesky problem of inequality, and billionaires aren't exactly lining up to help out with that. Hunger is basically a non-issue in all developed nations. See all the gray and purple nations on this map. In the US, for example, deaths from malnutrition are ~,1% of all deaths annually. Any money the billionaires might put into it would be bette…
So to paraphrase: doesn’t matter for developed nations, we don’t have an answer for undeveloped ones. …doesn’t that suggest it would be worth a billionaire trying to find an answer for the latter? A way to help local farmers feed their population? It seems like an interesting problem space to me. Certainly more interesting than replicating space flights NASA already did decades ago.
Comments in this thread complaining that the rich get to do whatever they want are forgetting that the wright brothers (and others) enabled flight for all of us even though most people during that time could only dream about it. It might not happen for you and I, but let's think about the bigger picture.
I want to be excited but I keep coming back to confusion over what the actual purpose of this will be. Flight has very clear benefits: getting you from A to B way faster than was ever possible before. With space flight there is no B to go to. You go up, you come down. If these companies were making breakthroughs in making space long term habitable I’d be excited. But I’m yet to see that.
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The Space Race is still happening, but it's happening on other planets and with government money (see: Mars and further afield exploration). All these initiatives have been possible by the heavy lifting of NASA and other international government agencies over the last 6 decades. Theses newcomers have drawn in attention and effort and are trying to reframe space as a business being funded by revenue - which has trade…
In my opinion, they are still doing incredible work. SpaceX and Blue Origin can both bring their rockets down - no government space agency can do this today (and govt space agencies had a 60 year lead) Privatization helps because NASA cannot afford failures today, but private companies can. And since space is a new and risky frontier, failures will happen. That's why I believe that privatization is a good thing overa…