Construction On Spaceship Factory Set To Begin In the Mojave 147
angry tapir writes "A production facility that would build the world's first fleet of commercial spaceships is set to begin construction on Tuesday at the Mojave Air and Space Port. The facility will be home to The Spaceship Co, or TSC — a joint venture owned by Mojave-based Scaled Composites and British billionaire Richard Branson's space tourism company, Virgin Galactic."
New Vegas... What about mutants? (Score:4, Funny)
My suggestion is to have tiny crates all around with scraps metal and drugs.
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I'd say Branson IS a new clear winner!
I must be dreaming (Score:4, Insightful)
Headlines like that give me goosebumps.
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These aren't the space ports you're looking for [waves hand]
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Mojave Air and Space Port
Almost an anagram of Mos Eisley. Any mesas nearby to shoot the obligatory vista scene?
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Actually, yes... well, mountains and high rocks, anyway, and very long views. Not sure if you can see the spaceport, tho, since Mojave is at the edge of where the north fragment of the Antelope Valley gives way to rough country.
[I live about half an hour away]
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One is indeed tempted to misdirect would-be spaceport visitors to the nearby aircraft boneyard. ;)
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No kidding. There's nothing to distinguish this headline from one a character might see in any scifi novel. The concept of a private company building a factory solely to build spaceships (albeit 60km ones) is staggering.
Yes, except (Score:2)
Last I heard, these are spaceships only in the very most technical sense. About the same way a Roomba is "a robot." You get what, a few minutes of free fall, and that's it. I don't know about you folks, but that's most emphatically not what I've been thinking of when I thought "space sh
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Methinks more waiting is called for
If I wait any longer I will run out of time. So what if Robert Heinlein didn't predict the exact future? Lets be thankful for what we get.
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Welcome to the year 2070! We hope you can adjust quickly to your environment. People are generally happier in this age, so I don't think you'll be lonely for long!
It'll never work (Score:2)
They can't be serious. Leading experts agree they must first build a SpaceshipFactoryProvider.
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I would prefer something like, say... "General Products".
I'm waiting for an unearthly voice... (Score:4, Funny)
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long term plans? (Score:4, Informative)
TFA mentions the factory will produce:
- three white-knight IIs
- five SpaceshipTwos
so, what will happen after these 8 builds? Any plans for spaceshipThree?
Cool stuff though, if branson can build some type of spaceshipthree which does orbital flight en masse, this might be the beginning of true private spaceflight
Re:long term plans? (Score:4, Interesting)
Orbital flight is still future talk for them. The WhiteKnight/SpaceShipTwo combos can only do sub-orbital flights (around 100 km, half of orbital flight). But they are also quite cheep at $200k. Maybe in a few years they'll offer leo/geo flights too, or maybe even further.
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100km suborbital is "half" of orbital flight? and this gets modded 'Informative'?
Presumably 'half' is a purely qualitative guess by someone who doesn't understand newtonian mechanics?
Hybrid rocket engines cannot give you the mass fraction to get into orbit. Those lightweight hulls cannot withstand the temperatures associated with re-entry from orbit. TSC isn't going to build an orbital spacecraft any time soon, sorry to burst your bubble.
Altitude is irrelevant. We need velocity! (Score:4, Informative)
Altitude is quite irrelevant. It's velocity we need!
The potential energy of 1 kg at 250 km is 2.5 MJ/kg.
The kinetic energy of 1 kg at 7000 m/s is 25 MJ (10x as much!).
The atmosperic drag adds less than 20% to the energy requirements.
The point I try to make? We need velocity! How fast does that Space Ship go? (No, I didn't RTFA - it may be in there...)
p.s. 100 km is half orbital only because low earth orbit is at about 200 km.
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Hmm... how about skip-(power)gliding to gain speed once you get all the way up there? Go suborbital, let gravity slam you back down into thicker air at an angle shallow enough to ensure you're going back out like a pebble on a pond, fire up your scramjet again to skip back up, only a little faster this time... rinse, repeat.
It's perhaps impractical to do this with humans on board.
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I don't have the maths with me, but I am fairly confident that won't work regardless of how many people on board.
Look at Skylon; a proposed design for an airbreathing rocket. The altitude at which it switches from atmospheric oxygen to on-board liquid oxygen is far lower than the altitude you could perform such a 'skip' maneouver at (which, by the way, decreases your velocity quite a bit. Most of the time, that is exactly why you do it)
There is a notion that if there is enough of a monetary prize out there,
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Skylon was supposed to have hybrid ramjet/rocket engines, no? As opposed to a scramjet, I mean. A ramjet ceases to be useful around 5 mach or so, whereas a scramjet is supposed to top off at 20-something.
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Skylon uses an air-breathing rocket engine. It isn't any kind of -jet at all. It doesn't work at as high speeds as a scramjet, but what it can do is switch to an internal oxygen supply at this speed, whereas with a scramjet you need a whole other engine, which is going to punish you quite severely in terms of mass fraction as you also require more plumbing and thrust structure.
In both cases, its pretty speculative technology.
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Skylon uses an air-breathing rocket engine.
And with current technology its easier to carry a tank of LOX.
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It's easier, but you can only burn for about 8 minutes before you run out of juice, and all the time you're lifting infrastructure that exists solely for holding oxygen (or oxygenated fuel). Using the atmospheric oxygen lets you burn fuel for, say, 45 minutes (as in Skylon's projections), and if you use a wing alongside, you get lift, too.
Trying to fight against air to lift oxygen through where there is plenty of oxygen seems pretty silly.
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Maybe for stage 2 we could put a massive orbital platform that could snag the spaceship with a tether and accelerate it the rest of the way? Then when they're ready to return then could use a big slingshot to slow it down for the drop.
Would need to work out the math for that...
Ech, low earth orbit doesn't really start until 200km. And even then it'd need to accelerate from roughly 0 to about 8km/s.
Living in a gravity well sucks
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LMAO Epic physics fail
Sure, you can pick a new coordinate system in space; but your velocity vector won't magically align with it. Nor will it suddenly acquire the far, far greater magnitude needed to orbit compared to that needed to pop above the Karman line for a few minutes.
The worst thing is your combination of snarky arrogance with a complete unawareness of how vectors work. Betrand Russell was right I guess.
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Yes, speed is the key, but I can see why someone could rationally simplify the statement to "100km is roughly half of a LEO altitude." He wasn't giving a definition, he was simply pointing out that 100km isn't orbital, and giving one way of looking at the difference.
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What makes you say that? There's nothing inherent in the design of a hybrid that precludes it. Obviously, they have a thrust to weight ratio sufficient to push SpaceShipOne to an orbital altitude. Getting to an orbital velocity is simply a matter of clusters and staging.
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LOx/H2 can do SSTO but its a seriously tight margin. More likely technology is something that is partially airbreathing (i.e. Skylon or something based on the US scramjet research)
You can only use airbreathing for the lower altitudes and speeds, but it gets you a big boost because oxygen is such a large portion of the LOx/H2 mix.
However, this is a very difficult technology to master. Its almost certainly not going to provide access to space any cheaper than the big old nasty space agencies do.
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No matter how much you scale up a hybrid, the mass fraction and specific impulse will always be too crappy for serious spaceflight. You haven't read much of 'the literature' if you don't know this.
You also show your lack of knowledge with the second question. Rockets accelerate to orbital velocity outside the Earths atmosphere and thus do not heat up in the process. Spacecraft have to heat up that much during re-entry because that is the amount of kinetic energy they need to dump in the atmosphere. If they
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Wikipedia says the plan for SpaceShipThree will be point-to-point sub-orbital flights rather than orbital as previously planned. But obviously that's contingent on their continuing success.
I'm truly amazed that they're this far along, I've previously written this stuff off as fantasy but it really is happening. There aren't hovercars but we're almost living in the future.
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There aren't hovercars but we're almost living in the future.
We're actually not that far away when it comes to hovercars either: DARPA's flying Humvee [goo.gl]
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never really thought about it before, but surely the war on terror has killed the hover car as anything but a plaything for the super rich. Can you honestly imagine our twitch-reaction governments allowing people to fly around in cars? I can't even board a plane that someone else is flying without letting them pat-down search me and look in my shoes.
Honest Q : has the FAA changed commercial flight rules since that lone deranged "lone nut" teabagger flew his $150,000 private plane into the regional IRS headquarters?
Here comes the troll : oh, that's right, we're only skeered of them foreign, brown terrerists.
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Well sure. Why, has there been a bunch of white or black terrorists attacking the US?
Also, I'm wondering why you haven't differentiated between men and women, or age.
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[quote]Wikipedia says the plan for SpaceShipThree will be point-to-point sub-orbital flights rather than orbital as previously planned. But obviously that's contingent on their continuing success.
I'm truly amazed that they're this far along, I've previously written this stuff off as fantasy but it really is happening. There aren't hovercars but we're almost living in the future.[/quote]
What's also nice is this approach seems more realistic, each stage of the process intended to generate a positive cashflow,
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yeah, i figured some kind of sub-orbital long distance travel would also be needed, but somehow i figured SS2 would be suited for that..
i would love for SSx to go for full orbital serial production
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Technically, we'll always live in the present
At my age, we live in the future. Today's tech is yesterday's science fiction. I never thought I'd see Star Trek's cell phones, flat screen monitors, self-opening doors, etc. I really never thought I'd see the day I could get my eye's lens replaced with a bionic implant and not have to wear glasses!
The present was a long time ago.
To quote a rock band whose name I can't remember, "today is only yesterday's tomorrow".
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I think you meant to say, "we all live in the past." The present just hasn't reached our consciousness yet. As for the future, well, that's another story.
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There aren't hovercars but we're almost living in the future.
I want to live in the future. Every night I go to sleep thinking, "tomorrow is the future, and so when I wake up I'll be living there!" But then I wake up and damned if it isn't just "today" again, and the future is yet again 1 day away :(
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Slightly early, but happy birthday Kurt, RIP.
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so, what will happen after these 8 builds? Any plans for spaceshipThree?
First hit on Google - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipThree [wikipedia.org]
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I imagine this:
1. More people pay up because then it's for real.
2. Price goes down.
3. Repeat.
That's all they really need to get an industry jump-started, and get capital flowing in. With six passengers on board, each flight is worth 1.2 million USD. It's not hard to iterate that to get a significant operating budget.
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All very excellent, but ... what's their destination?? They must have a private planet tucked away somewhere.
Renegotiate tax breaks and subsidies? (Score:2)
TFA mentions the factory will produce: - three white-knight IIs - five SpaceshipTwos
so, what will happen after these 8 builds?
My first guess is that they will then renegotiate tax breaks and subsidies with the state of California before deciding where to do additional production. California is a pretty hostile place to to production/manufacturing unless you are high profile enough to get a deal and or/waivers from the state.
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Any plans for spaceshipThree?
Virgin Galactic have some artists impressions on various web sites. They have a long term concept for a transatlantic semiballistic rocket. Maybe half an hour in transit. That kind of thing.
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Probably best to steer clear of any space ship named VSS "Ironman" or VSS "Capricorn" for that matter.
Fallout New Vegas?? (Score:3, Funny)
I'm almost done with the Nights Dawn trilogy... (Score:3, Interesting)
.. and P.F. Hamilton likes to include timelines, e.g.
2020 — Cavius base established. Mining of lunar subcrustal resources starts.
2037 — Beginning of large-scale geneering on humans; improvement to immunology system, eradication of appendix, organ efficiency increased.
2041 — First deuterium-fuelled fusion stations built; inefficient and expensive.
2044 — Christian reunification.
2047 — First asteroid capture mission. beginning of Earth’s O’Neill halo.
I'd love to see this story as one of those timeline points...
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protestant + catholic + other christians = new unified christian church
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Private Sector efficiency! (Score:2, Informative)
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Look up, you see the joke flying a mile over your head, with a contrail too!
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It was a poorly laid out joke.
Of course, had you tilde'd it, it would have been obvious what you were attempting to do.
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and doing so using demonstrably simpler and less powerful rocket technology
Since when is efficiency a bad thing?
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Its not efficiency, its dead-end technology. What the USAF (and by extension NASA) developed in the X-15 program directly fed into the development of future US spacecraft. The X-15 used a bipropellant liquid fueled engine, something that can potentially be upgraded to reach orbit. A hybrid rocket, as far as we can tell, can't practically be upgraded beyond what they are doing already (very low energy, sub-orbital millionaire hops).
Typical for a market fundamentalist, you misunderstand Occam's razor and assu
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Its not efficiency, its dead-end technology
Yep, that's why there's a huge waiting list of people who want to go up in these things. Because it's a dead end. Right.
Typical for a market fundamentalist, you misunderstand Occam's razor and assume the simplest (and thus cheapest) solution is *always* the best.
I do?
Look, I understand that you need to grasp at straws in order to justify your mindless dislike of private space industry, but this strawman / ad-hominem bullshit isn't helping your case.
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Re:Private Sector efficiency! (Score:4, Insightful)
the government did this first in the days when supercomputers were less powerful than iphones and droids. back then the engineers had to actually do the math by hand and test everything via trial and error
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Your an idiot.
No private sector on the planet can do what NASA does as effeciently as NASA does it.
10 years and they can get people 100km up. yeah, real whoop dee do.
G
Your doing it wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Civ V! (Score:2)
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In Civ V we would have won with Apollo.
The Mojave Spaceport.... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, for a very broad definition of "space" (Score:2)
It is a spaceship factory, if a few tens of Km over the surface of the Earth can be considered "space". But, let me not spoil it for the future "space tourists".
Transatlantic flight began like this... (Score:2)
"It is a spaceship factory, if a few tens of Km over the surface of the Earth can be considered "space". But, let me not spoil it for the future "space tourists"."
Transatlantic air tourism across the Pacific Ocean in Boeing 747s began with retired WW1 pilots charging passengers to sit in the back seat of shaky 2 seater military planes for bumpy flights a few metres off the sea over the English Channel in the early 1920s.... Let's see where this goes before sneering too quickly.
or even transpacific ;-) (Score:2)
haha, correcting myself! well if I am going to talk about "transatlantic" of course I should be referring to the Atlantic Ocean not the Pacific! doh! but you get what I mean about small steps leading to larger ones, I am sure...
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I noticed the error, but regardless, the main point came across already.
I am only venting frustration for the slow pace of development, in the face of "we were on the moon in the 60's, for chrissakes!".
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The factory that built the Apollo didn't start be building things that go to the moon.
So the initial craft are really just 'super high altitude' trips. If successful they will move on to the next step.
But you go ahead and rag on technology if that's how you get your dick hard.
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Thanks. I would think the story behind it is relatively well known. What I love the most about it, is the dual nature of the Japanese soul: on one hand, so solidly conservative (and patriarchal). On the other, quite nutty.
Wretched hive of scum and villany (Score:3, Funny)
Why not call it Mos Eisley?
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Because Lucas is a big cry baby and whiner.
Did their css file go missing or something? (Score:2)
Stop complaining (Score:2, Insightful)
NASA's manned program hasn't done much more than allow a select few to pedal circles around the planet since the end of Apollo. Sure, there were some amazing developments and innovations from that, but the act of getting to orbit? W
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It's cool, bit it's not space. I'm excited buy this, it's great.
For the Record, NASA never had the mission of finding out how to ferry tourists into space. It's a different goal. A goal that wouldn't even be possible without NASA.
Your statement about 'automated labs' is a clear indicator of how clueless you are on the real challenges of getting things into space.
I can tell you what it would have produced: 10-15 year of no space travel.
It's not the shuttles fault. Once built it is going to be use. It's congr
Northrop (Score:3, Informative)
Shouldn't it be called 'shipyard' ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Utility (Score:2)
Economic Stimulus (Score:2)
TSC expects to employ up to 170 people when production is in full swing. It has begun posting job openings on its website for engineers and technicians.
See that? 170 engineering and technician positions (that's folks that assemble and build things, no college degree required) necessary to operate a production line for three spacecraft. Give this company some money, cross your fingers for success, and next thing you know
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we could also spend 50 billion fixing the Katrina disaster, which would create 10's of thousands of jobs. It would have the side benefit of having that area look like cit's in a civilized country.
Of course, in a country where that part of the country complains the feds aren't helping, and ALSO complains the government is 'too big'* so they vote republican**. Maybe they deserve to live in squalor.
*what the hell does that even mean?
**which makes no sense because for 50 years spending has alway gone up signifi
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we could also spend 50 billion fixing the Katrina disaster
I haven't seen any recent figures, but I do know that federal funding for the cleanup has already cost at least four times that. Heck, here are some figures from 2006 [usatoday.com].
SB
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wow, talk about your deus ex machina "impervious to anything but light, antimater and gravity" that is like saying "always one more than you" in your classic playground match to see who gets the last word
Also, i wonder how you manage to feel safe in a car/bus/train, or if you never leave the house (because you dont feel safe in beforementioned modes of transportation) how you feel safe in a house. Given the possibility of huricanes, lightning strikes or meteorite impacts