Moonage Spacedream

Touring space?

Sir Richard Branson is doing everything he can to develop and promote his Virgin space tours.  Great concept I think.  I’d be all over that idea if it weren’t for one pesky problem:

That is just man-made junk circling around the Earth.  Now, NASA has a good billion dollar system for mitigating where those things are and where not to send the Shuttle.  I’m not sure Sir Richard has the capitol to pull it off.  I just don’t see how NASA can even assure me that one of those things floating around might not be where it’s supposed to be.  ( Things do bump into each other and go out of orbit ya know. )

Something needs to be done about this, and it needs to be done every soon.

Virgin Galactic Two: The Motion Picture

Saw a reference to this on MSNBC via Bad Astronomer.  It works a lot better via Youtube.  This is also the FULL length feature.

I imagine the ride itself will be even more exciting!  BA beat me to the idea of the 100-Mile-High Club.  I can’t wait to see the video teaser for that!

Who’s flying and who’s not

• December 15, 2005 – On Monday, December 19 at 11 a.m. PST (7 p.m. GMT), the Falcon 1 rocket will begin its journey to orbit, accelerating to 17,000 mph (25 times the speed of sound) in less than ten minutes. Designed from the ground up by SpaceX, Falcon 1 is a two stage rocket powered by liquid oxygen and purified, rocket grade kerosene. On launch day, Falcon 1 will launch into the history books for several notable reasons:
• It will be the first privately developed, liquid fueled rocket to reach orbit and the world’s first all new orbital rocket in over a decade.
• The main engine of Falcon 1 (Merlin) will be the first all new American hydrocarbon engine for an orbital booster to be flown in forty years and only the second new American booster engine of any kind in twenty-five years.
• The Falcon 1 is the only rocket flying 21st century avionics, which require a small fraction of the power and mass of other systems.
• It will be the world’s only semi-reusable orbital rocket apart from the Shuttle.
• Most importantly, Falcon 1, priced at $6.7 million, will provide the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any launch vehicle in the world, despite receiving a design reliability rating equivalent to that of the best launch vehicles currently flying in the United States.

Launch day is TODAY ( that’s 2pm for us on Eastern time ).  I can’t find where it’s being televised.  But it should be.  MEANWHILE……..

Cape Canaveral – Nasa plans to change the space shuttle’s external fuel tank again, this time removing a troublesome section of protective foam that broke off during the launch of Discovery last July, the space agency said on Thursday.

The removal of more foam from the tank and further testing to find the root cause of cracks in the foam could lead to a longer delay until the next shuttle flight, tentatively set for May.

But Nasa official Bill Gerstenmaier, who is leading the investigation into the foam loss, said that’s not necessarily the case.

The targeted foam section protects a cable tray that runs along the tank. “We think that’s the best thing to do, just take it off,” Gerstenmaier said.

Nasa had redesigned the fuel tank after a large piece of insulating foam hit the wing of the shuttle Columbia in 2003, sparking the disaster that killed seven astronauts.

The shuttle fleet was grounded after that and again after Discovery’s launch last July when a smaller piece of foam broke off that shuttle’s tank despite the redesign.

Now I understand the difference in complexity of simply trying to orbit and safely sending a Shuttle into space.  But, it’s taken about a decade for NASA to figure out that foam may not even be neceesary.  That just seems kinda slow to me.  Plus, we don’t need a Shuttle for EVERYTHING.  What we need is a reliable means of hauling stuff into space more often than not.  If NASA doesn’t want to do the simple stuff, let SpaceX and Virgin do it for them.

UPDATE

Almost immediately after I posted this, SpaceX scrubbed their launch due to technical problems.