Thread: How long until space travel is feasible for the average person?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe...ace/index.html

The gist of the article is, by 2008, Virgin plans to have a commercial space flight service. $200K will get you 3 days of flight training and a 2-3 hour flight into space, featuring a few minutes of actual weightlessness.

Sounds cool, but the price tag is obviously out of the range of 99% of the people out there. My question is, how long until we see this being an almost commonplace thing? Flying from earth to the Space Mall to pick up the latest CD by the Venusians? Maybe not even that advanced; how long do you think it'll be until people can fly commercial spacecraft for less than the price of a house? Is this a step in the right direction?

Also, let's talk about the space elevator, because that's awesome.

You don't think the price'll ever come down?

Branson is toting a price of around £100,000 for a sub orbital hop. That is well within the budget of a great many wealthy people, and I expect, assuming there are no disasters along the way, that there will be good business to be had there.

Rob Bigelow is launching the "son of" the X-Prize shortly, for the private development of orbital vehicles with on orbit docking facilities. His inflatable modules could be used to build orbiting hotels. There may not be anywhere to go now, but there will be, and I'd go tomorrow if I could aford it just for the view.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=979

The space elevator is conceptually okay, but the materials and techniques required to build such a structure have pipe dream status at the moment.

$200K

lol, read that as 200$ first. wtf, 200$ too much for a trip into (outto?) space?

One packet, or one apiece? Because I'm not licking taffy some dirty Russian might have touched.

Just thought I'd put this here.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/0...cnn/index.html

One more flight and they've got the X-Prize!

I tried to watch it but Ansari's servers were totally swamped. Just the odd snippets coming through.

Certiainly not an "as planned" ascent, but probably good enough. Still some work to do there. It certainly didn't roll like that on the last flight.

Both the aerodynamic changes and increased engine size could have accounted for that. I'm sure Rutan's smart enough to figure that out by the tiem they make the second flight.

Is it true that he's never lost a test pilot?

You'd have thought that the uprated engine would have made the ship pitch rather then roll, but still, I'm sure he'll fix it. As it was, the report I read said Mike shut down the engine well early anyway, and they still got the height. I wonder if the mods they made were really necessary? It certainly didn't roll like that on the last flight, with the older engine - still made it, but I don't know how much ballast they were carrying that time.