Xcor Aerospace has announced that it will compete with at least two other companies that are trying to become the “first private company capable of launching paying customers into space.”
The mini-ship, built by Mojave-based Xcor Aerospace and designed to fly to the edge of space, is expected to be ready for test flights by 2010, around the time Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic hopes to send its much larger spaceship on its maiden voyage.
More than half a dozen other companies — most, unlike Xcor, bankrolled by wealthy businessmen, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal — are building rockets and spacecraft that they hope will capture the imagination of space travelers. Most plan to finish testing their rockets and rocket planes in the next few years, and the Federal Aviation Administration has estimated the market for space tourism to be more than $1 billion a year by 2021.
Why in God’s name is anyone wasting money on this sort of idiocy? What would be the point in taking a plane ride to the edge of space? Plane rides are among the most miserable of all experiences. Who, other than a few rich Sci-Fi nerds, will pay huge amounts of money to subject themselves to a plane ride that takes to takes them right back where they started?
Folks who want to innovate in aviation should try something truly challenging: building a plane that doesn’t suck quite as badly as current models.
A plane that could economically fly at 800 mph rather than the current 600 mph (on a good day) would be a far larger accomplishment than a plane that could ferry billionaire nerds to the moon.
Indeed, nearly any innovation that improved regular old air travel would do more to benefit mankind than the sum total of everthing invented for manned space exploration. Here are some things that would be nice:
- A jet with sea-level air pressure so that flying didn’t exhaust passengers
- A jet with several entries so that loading and unloading could be done in 5 minutes
- A jet with a germ killing air system so that flying didn’t make passengers so sick
- A jet that made 80 percent less noise
- A jet that eliminated the need for taxiing (and runways) by taking off vertically
Yes, I realize that Boeing’s new “Dream Liner” claims to offer better pressurization and air circulation, but it’s taken Boeing more than a decade (and counting) to bring to market a design that offers only mild improvements on the status quo.
I’d really like to see the problem addressed by some of the original thinkers who are currently wasting their talents on the moronic quest to bring Star Wars to life.
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