The final frontier?
 

Hello,

I don't know how many of you are following this, but a couple weeks ago the first non-government spaceship flew above what NASA recognizes as space. It's somewhat hard to define where you enter space, apparently, but they consider anyone an astronaut who reaches 100 km.

My question. Does anyone care? I know I do, I think it's exciting. And do you think this is something that will progress rapidly? How soon will I be able to book a flight to the stars? When will we reach Mars?

Have fun :)

I seem to recall hearing something on Channel One(a nation-wide school broadcast station) approximately three years about commercial space flights being available. It just costs a lot of money.

Are you talking about those two old guys who went on Leno? If so, then it seems pretty cool, sure it cost the maker a hella lot of dough, but its still way cheaper than Nasa. And it worked on the first run, they had clips of him releasing M&M's in zero grvity and everything.

In Current Science (a nationwide school science magazine) they had an article about a kid (18 I think) who will be going up in a rocket. But not any rocket by any government program. He'll be going up in a rocket launched from the water by a company trying to win a prize as the first non-government group to go to space. I think the prize from the US government is lik 2 million dollars or something.

Ever heard of the 'Aurora' program? Well it's a program by ESA and it aims in to getting to mars by 2038 or something close to that. Read more in here: http://www.esrin.esa.it/export/esaCP/index.html Try finding Aurora if you are interested.

They guy that built that Rocket was Bert Rutan and is called SpaceShipOne. Here is an article about that flight. The prize he is going for is the X-Prize and it requires two flights of three passengers within about a month if I remember right.

That's rights. It's called the X-Prize (recently renamed Ansari X-Prize because some rich person named Ansari generated much of the award money.) It will be $10 million to the first group who can put a private ship in space twice in two weeks but it expires in January (It was made in 1995.) So the question is, how much would you pay for a ticket in to space, then? I think it's cool. We'll have to wait and see what develops.

I've also heard just a brief bit about this, though I must throw in...

Otaku: Channel One = shit. I'm sure you know that though. :)

Hmmm... to the bank!

I think it would be good to get some fresh ideas in the space industry. The ESA probably bought most of their original plans from NASA, the Chinese did from Russia, and...yeah, we've been using most of the same equipment since before most of us were born, let alone designs.

Well the space-ship creator on Leno used an airplane to get a tad high, then launched a jet lookin thing containing a 60+ pilot guy into space (where the guy released the M&Ms in zero-grav), then had the jet thingy land on an airstrip.

Am I talking about a different guy?