On a $200k flight, will a bag of peanuts be complimentary or extra charge??

{If it's anything like the current airline climate, I'm guessing it's going to be answer 2. =)

*******

By the way: PBS has been airing an excellent series on the history of commercial aviation called "Chasing the Sun":

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/chasingthesun/

SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo may indeed become - like the Graf Zeppelin, DC-3, Comet, Pan Am Clipper flying boats, X-1 and the 747 before it - one of the legendary icons of the sky...

We've flown a long way, baby.

Totally bitchin'.

That is all.

This is something that NASA should have come up with 35 years ago. You go, Sir Richard!

>This is something that NASA should have come up with 35 years ago. You go, Sir Richard!

Actually, I believe they did. I was very much into NASA anything throughout the 70s, being just old enough to have seen & grok'ed what the moon landing Really Meant (tm), minus the cold war stuff.

All throughout the 70s I saw a number of designs for reusable craft, including a jet lift of a shuttle to where it took off on it's own. I still have the old Estes model rocket of one idea & the later rather disappointing actual shuttle.

Why didn't we go this way? I don't know precisely, but it's probably for lots of reasons. A gearing down & cutting back of NASA year after year, cost overruns, NASA's own internal problems, fallout from legitimate manned versus unmanned discussions - and probably more.

There's a *huge* difference between what this thing is doing and actually getting to orbit: speed.

SpaceShipTwo is basically starting its re-entry at zero mph, then accelerating as it descends. An orbital craft beginning re-entry, on the other hand, is going about 16 thousand mph to start with, and must deal with the incredible air friction as it slows down. It's much harder to build a craft that will withstand that.

The space shuttle launching from a pad instead of being lifted first by an airplane is not a significant source of any of its problems. The biggest problem is in its incoherence of design. Its main purposes are: to carry people into/out of orbit, to serve as a fully-functioning short-term space station, and to serve as as a heavyweight cargo lifter. Given the still-infant stage of current space technology, extreme complexity -- and therefore delicateness -- are inevitable in such a craft, along with the high costs to match.

The goal of reusability only adds to the problems, since this is such a new technology that must undergo such extreme stress: you spend so much effort checking and making sure that cracks aren't forming etc. that you could almost just build another one. (Ok, given the very high complexity of the Shuttle, reusability is probably the cheaper alternative, but it shouldn't have been so expensive to begin with.)

Given that we still have so much to learn about putting people into space, keeping them alive there, and getting them back safely, a much more broken-up approach would be far superior, in terms of cost, reliability, and sustainability:

--> A craft that carries people between the Earth and Earch orbit should do *only* that -- it should not be designed for comfort, nor even to sustain people in orbit for very long (say, 24 hrs max). The only thing such a craft should do once in orbit is to dock with a space station.

--> Use a separate cargo-only lifter to take supplies/components into orbit (you can do this much cheaper when you don't have to worry about limiting the G-forces to within human tolerance)

--> The space station itself should be composed of multiple standard modules, which would be upgraded and replaced over time: habitation modules, connector modules, supply modules, and other miscellaneous ones such as science bays and even an ion-engine module (initially to prevent orbit decay, later to shift orbits and even ferry between Earth and Moon orbits).

The idea here is that no one component -- and therefore no one project -- is excessively complex or expensive; human transport to/from space is a product of the system as a whole. And this system can be incrementally extended to support Moon and eventually Mars & near-Earth asteroid manned exploration/colonization.

Propose taking space shuttle round trip to Mars,

144 days ! - 67,000,000 miles/hr !

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14705

Now that's Traveling !!!!