Got home from class this morning and saw that Spaceshipone was flying.
It hit something like 340,000 ft.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/10/04/spaceshipone.attempt.cnn/index.html
If you get the chance, look for the videos of it flying, the launch was pretty cool.

Yah, I watched the webcast while I was supposed to be doing a physics lab... it was pretty neat, but the server was overloaded and the picture froze quite often.

Anyways, I've said it once, and I'll say it again. This is the future of space travel.

Future of space travel (IMO) is a space elevator, then a spacecraft from orbit. It's not economical enough to have to break the earth's gravitational field everytime.

It'll be awhile before we develope the ability to produce the nanotechnology on such a massive scale to make an elevator though.

I saw the take-off on tv earlier... looked pretty smooth if you ask me... but still... 6 million for every take off - and that's not including the ship price from the beginning.

Maybe if we re-shape the earth we can make some sort of hill to scale with some counter balance systems...?

If it ever goes commercial, the riders will be paying for that $6 million per trip.

Where do you people get the $6 million figure? I think you're thinking of government-funded space missions. Chair of Virgin Atlantic claims a flight through Virgin Galactic would be as little as $200,000US per passenger, on a craft of the same model as SpaceShipOne, which would hold two passengers at most. That would imply that a single flight would have to be less than $400,000US, else they'd not be making any profit (any corporations don't do anything without the incentive of potential profit)

[edit]Oh, and the "Virgin Galactic" venture would start with a $25million investment, which would include at least one ship, possibly two. That would also imply a much lower cost than you state.[/edit]

Maybe I should have added that I think the space elevator will be in the FAR future of space travel.

I watched a cool documentary last night on the Discovery Channel about the history of this project. They showed all the flight tests and they talked about what they were testing for each time. One time the dude fubard the landing and busted up the plane, and another time, the computer readout that allows them to see what's happening to the plane blanked out of existence (and came back AFTER the vertical burn). The guy was freaked out about that.

So did they win?

Yep, they get $10,000,000 to fund their project now.

In response to Elana's sig...

Yes, someone is out there.

Research and development only costed $20-30 million (I forget where I found that figure.. but I'm pretty sure it has good accuracy) for SpaceshipOne. Now axe the R&D of a working model, that is a considerably cheap aircraft that can go into "space." While it's not a true spacecraft, all I give a darn about is zero g.

And as mentioned, 400k to make profit of a flight isn't bad at all.

From what I've heard, the project cost $30 million, with 20 million being generously provided by Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft). So now they have recouped the entire cost of the project, and they can start making a profit from it. Although, my understanding is that they are licensing the technology to others (like Virgin Galactic) and aren't planning on running their own flights.

As for space elevators, they aren't the only cheap way into space... I've seen a proposal for a long underground linear accelerator that would accelerate a spaceship to escape velocity (or orbital velocity, depending on where you are going) and then shoot you up a ramp and into space. This has advantages and disadvantages compared to a space elevator.

Advantages:
-Cheaper initial investment
-Easier to build
-Technology already exists

Disadvantages:
-More energy required per launch
-Much larger acceleration (the acceleration on a space elevator can be quite low, like 1.01 g)
-Lack of suitable sites to build such a huge device

Anyways, it will definitely be interesting to see what the future (both near and far) has in store.

The wife of the guy who made the engine (Pickens) is a science teacher I know in the school.

My physics teacher said he talked to him at length about it. Pretty cool.

Fact 1) It took 30 mill to build, and all of it was donated by Microsoft Co-Founder

Fact 2) 200k per launch per private person

Fact 3) It IS a true space ship--it saw the blackness of space, and the curvature of the earth. By all technical terms, it was in space.

This is cool and all, but unless they can figure out a way to make it more practical than a jetliner it'll probably go the way of the Concord.

They won the Ansari X Prize! Yahoo!!! *dances wildly*

Already 100 people are lined up to fly.

Yeah, but I'm thinking long-term here. Look at what happened to the Concord: the technology is stunning, but once people realize that the only advantage to flying on the Concord is the novelty of actually flying on the Concord, it languishes. Eventually, interest in the project totally dries up and it gets scrapped.

This is my point. I'd love for this to succeed, but I don't think that pseudo-space travel is going to replace or even integrate well with regular commercial flight because the costs versus the benefits are just too high.

It'll only be purely for recreation, though. I mean, there's no PRACTICAL use for it, obviously, but rich people pay out the yin-yang to go into space (See guy paying 10 mil to go with russians into space)

Tracer, exactly when does it become space flight? 100km (~62miles) above the Earth's surface is considered the internationally agreed boundary of space. The contest required that the spacecraft fly higher than that, and it did. They reached orbit, and were experiencing weightlessness.

As for the marketability of it, space travel has remained popular even now that it is fairly commonplace to know about it. Today, for a few thousand dollars, you can fly on a specialized jet plane, that, during a single dive, will give passengers complete weightlessness for over a minute. For those who can afford the trip, it's very popular; each such plane can hold between 10 and 20 people, and they fly several times a day, with a full load (that's over $100,000 a day). If that's still popular (decades after it was first offered), then space travel, I presume, will also be at least as popular. People have been willing to pay millions of dollars to get a lift into space, even if they knew they would do virtually nothing. For $200,000, I do think that many people (who could afford to, that is) would be very willing to fly like that; seeing Earth from so far up, along with complete weightlessness for at least five minutes (I suspect comercial flights might actually orbit the Earth, giving times as long as 90 minutes), would be very attractive to those with the money for it.

As for the cost of it, the project took somewhere arround $30million to fully develop. I would presume individual craft would be much cheaper to build, perhaps a "mere" $10-15 million or so.

The ship had to hit 100km to win the prize. I think thats around 340,000 feet. The spaceshipone went to ~368,000 feet.
100km= "Boundary" to space.
so yes, they did reach space.

To clarify, it reached space, but it didn't get high enough to achieve orbit. Does anyone know if it's capable of getting into orbit?

Not even close. It's about mach 25 to hit orbit, they went mach 3.

Also--it's 2500 to go on the "Vomit Comet" which is what nottheking was talking about.

er... Machs are speeds, not heigts.

Yes, you need to go Mach 25 to achieve the speed where you fall at the same curvature of the earth...thus...going into orbit.

Ah okay, I read your sentence wrong.

The reason the concord failed is because you can do the same thing cheaper with conventional aircraft. There's no other way to get into space. I think you're wrong on this one, Tracer.

I flew the thing, I just got back home. Space is one crazy place......shortage of chairs......yeaahh......

Wait wait wait. I assumed the point of commecial space travel (besides the novelty value to rich people) was to get from New York to Toyko in 30 minutes...I mean, once you get to space theres nowhere to go...

This isn't space travel, it's a trip into space, for the experience.

Yeah, this sure as hell isn't for transportation, and never will be in our lifetimes. (Probably) Think about it.. Are you really going to shell out 200k for a trip to Tokyo when you could do it for less than a grand?

Well, no, but I thought the whole point of the contest was to promote commercial space travel...

A lot of people dont realize that the first Astronauts made it into space aboard the X-15, a plane that was not unlike SpaceShipOne in many ways. According to the definition of altitude at which space begins, Robert White was the first astronaut, not Yuri Gagarin. Research done with the X-15 was vitally important to the development of the Space Shuttle. So maybe SpaceShipOne isnt all that impressive, but I think that the technology that will be gained from it will be sure to have impacts on transportation in the future.

Starchaser would have won it if they had a bit more cash

Did anyone see the Google logo yesterday? hehehehe

Well, you could say that about pretty much all of the teams... I was personally rooting for Canadian Arrow.

Boldly go where no one has gone before!


...and meet the Klingons that arrived years before you!

I watched it land live on fox news.

Was up late that night.

I hate time zones.