Richard Branson’s space flight

[Stephen Shomo]

I live in a country of 5 million people with 83000 employed on agricultural endeavors.

new zealand?

 

[Benjamin Olson]

This point, however, is where you lost me. Yes, this version doesn't reach orbit. But why the insistence that this style of launch never will? Isn't serious improvement in the technology the entire raison d'etre of Virgin Galactic? Is there anything fundamental to the design that means it will never be capable of these things? Does the smaller size make it physically impossible, or is it just something we haven't done yet? I don't grok the extrapolation.

The basic problem with scaling up is that the further you want to send a given mass up from Earth the amount of fuel you need increases exponentially because the fuel itself is so much of the weight of the craft and you need to propel the weight of all the additional fuel you need to propel the weight of all the additional fuel you need to propel the etc. A rocketplane launched off of another plane is limited in size by what airplanes are available. This method also involves the rocketplane spacecraft making a very high speed turn upwards while still in the atmosphere, which puts a lot of stress on it (and its contents, including people) and means it has to be a fairly hardy thing (especially if you want it to be reusable longterm).

I don't have any particular knowledge of the numbers, but I would guesstimate from the fact that it took Virgin Orbit a Boeing 747, one of the heavier lifting planes commercially available, to support a spacecraft of a scale capable of getting just a 440 pound payload into orbit, that it would take a hitherto unknown scale of aircraft to support, say, getting people into orbit from an air launch without some other radical advance in technology.

My earlier comment did trivialize the degree to which this method could be used for unmanned satellites, which are actually our main useful business in space these days. The Virgin Orbit satellite launching company may have a bright future. But in terms of the manned "space travel" of sister company Virgin Galactic, the method they have invested all their efforts into seems to be limited to silly "x-treme" experiences in low space, at least for the foreseeable future.

 

[Zardnaar]

new zealand?

Da.

 

[Umbran]

But part of the issue there is that if you're the type of billionaire dead set on becoming a space tourist

If you are of the mind that the actual goal for these people is the tourism, you are greatly mistaken.

 

[Umbran]

I never said you said "endless GDP growth is unsustainable."
I said if you think endless GDP is sustainable you haven't been paying attention.
Did you read my post?

When one replies to a post and uses the pronoun "you" it is ambiguous whether the intent is to refer to the poster, or to a generic "you". You (meaning Shomo) could have made it more clear which you meant.

 

[embee]

Don't forget the assumption that these are baby steps toward the eventual goal of colonizing space, a deeply dorky outcome that ignores all the inhospitable-but-unclaimed territories here on Earth, and that assumes we can somehow outrun climate collapse (something that billionaires could pour their money into averting, and get legitimately great attention for). But part of the issue there is that if you're the type of billionaire dead set on becoming a space tourist, you probably also just blithely assume the world is going to innovate itself out of catastrophe. A highly cool way to think, given that the climate disasters are already happening, and there's not a single solution in sight.

This!

Especially as far as Elongated Muskrat is concerned.

Muskrat likes to style himself as some great inventor on par with Nikola Tesla but history proves otherwise. He is, as many forget, the man who held a much-ballyhooed press conference to announce the Hyperloop, which basically amounted to him saying that there should be an underground high-speed rail line that goes from Los Angeles to San Francisco and that someone should actually design it, pay for it, and run through all of the legal hoops necessary and give Musk all of the credit for the idea.

That's not inventing; it's daydreaming.

We know how to put people into space. A billionaire space race is useless on that front. What we don't know how to do is establish long-term outposts past LEO.

Colonizing Mars and the Moon are wrongheaded goals right now. Instead of trying to figure out how to farm on other planets, we need to be figuring out how to continue being able to farm on the Earth.

Last week, a significant part of Washington State's agricultural economy cooked in its shells in Puget Sound. Down the coast, California, America's actual breadbasket, is having the second "century" drought in less than a decade.

How do we solve these problems?

Innovation and invention can only do so much. Right now, the inventor crowd thinks that we can just innovate our way out of environmental collapse. We can't. Desal plants are not the same as "Create Food & Water" spells.

Until people take a good hard honest look at the massive social changes that are needed, we, as a species, are going to die. Slowly and painfully.

And the billionaire space tourists would do well to remember that launching themselves into space is useless if Earth isn't habitable. Before we can terraform Mars, we should probably figure out how to terraform Earth.

 

[slobster]

This!

Especially as far as Elongated Muskrat is concerned.

<snip>

Colonizing Mars and the Moon are wrongheaded goals right now. Instead of trying to figure out how to farm on other planets, we need to be figuring out how to continue being able to farm on the Earth.

Even assuming that one doesn't see the value to Earth in doing things in space (which I covered a bunch in a longer comment upthread so I won't revisit that here), I've never understood why people who want to call out misspent money focus so vehemently on space research.

Last year, NASA's budget was about $23 billion. SpaceX (which has made massive advances in rocket reusability and lowering launch costs) doesn't cost taxpayers a dime, other than in space launch fees for space station missions which is included in the above NASA figure, and is in fact a cash positive enterprise as it operates a very profitable business selling services to customers. So it isn't a drain on the economy any more than any other profitable business.

For comparison, people around the world have spent approximately $23 billion JUST ON AVENGERS MOVIES (or I guess MCU movies). People spend about $20 billion on golf courses EVERY YEAR just in the United States. The United States spends $715 billion on defense every year, and the rest of the planet spends a combined $1200 billion on top of that. In 2020, countries exported around $80-100 billion in diamonds, a rough approximation of how much consumers spent on that. College football spends 18.8 billion every year in the United States, with $3.6 billion of that being spent on coach salaries alone!!

The whole point of that rant was just to point out that we as a planet spend money on a lot, A LOT of things with a dubious return on investment. Is space devlopment, which is arguably a positive for the economy even over the short term, and which is a massive boon for planetary science and climate science, really the place to raise moral objections?

Some food for thought!

 

[Deset Gled]

That's not inventing; it's daydreaming.
...
Colonizing Mars and the Moon are wrongheaded goals right now
...
Innovation and invention can only do so much.
...
Until people take a good hard honest look at the massive social changes that are needed, we, as a species, are going to die. Slowly and painfully.

If your vision of massive social change requires us to give up ambitions of science, innovation, and dreaming for a better future, I'd say you're promoting the distopia, not the utopia.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

If you are of the mind that the actual goal for these people is the tourism, you are greatly mistaken.

What then? The admiration of dorks?

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Colonizing Mars and the Moon are wrongheaded goals right now. Instead of trying to figure out how to farm on other planets, we need to be figuring out how to continue being able to farm on the Earth.

And the billionaire space tourists would do well to remember that launching themselves into space is useless if Earth isn't habitable. Before we can terraform Mars, we should probably figure out how to terraform Earth.

I agree with your premise 110%. The only thing I would add is that if we have to watch people do stupid stuff like try to live on Mars, we can only hope that they learn something about how much easier it would be to simply live on Earth. And if we can even come close to terraforming Mars, the techniques learned to do that will certainly work far better on Earth.

What I'm trying to get at is, we may be able to reap rewards from the foolish attempt, so it's not a total waste of time and money, even if the time and money would be better spent elsewhere.