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A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me :
I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun.
I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats.
I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality,
and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm
an idealist? I did, OK.)
I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with
practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand
with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
The Year of Private Space Flight
The BBC is reporting that the X-Prize will be won this year; in fact, an X-Prize organizer says it will be won within five months from now, probably by Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne.
This is really good news, but don't go reserving your ticket to orbit just yet. It's only the first step. The X-Prize is only for getting a 3-person vehicle up to 100 km altitude. Getting a vehicle up to 100 km altitude is definitely hard, but the next part is even harder. That's the part about reaching orbital velocity (roughly 27,000 km/hr), and then being able to shed that velocity and come back safely to Earth. When one or more private companies are able to do that, and I'm sure they will sooner or later, it'll truly be the beginning of a new era in space flight.
0 comments
The BBC is reporting that the X-Prize will be won this year; in fact, an X-Prize organizer says it will be won within five months from now, probably by Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne.
This is really good news, but don't go reserving your ticket to orbit just yet. It's only the first step. The X-Prize is only for getting a 3-person vehicle up to 100 km altitude. Getting a vehicle up to 100 km altitude is definitely hard, but the next part is even harder. That's the part about reaching orbital velocity (roughly 27,000 km/hr), and then being able to shed that velocity and come back safely to Earth. When one or more private companies are able to do that, and I'm sure they will sooner or later, it'll truly be the beginning of a new era in space flight.