On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 22:23:57 -0500, Douglas Drummond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>The reason this is significant is that the first suborbital "tourism"
>operations will be structured very much the same way. The "Fly a MiG"
>operations in Russia are very similar since a new "student" requires
>quite a bit of instruction on basic life support as well as aircraft
>systems.
This is probably, long term, going to be the biggest item keeping
prices up. (After the first few hundred flights, someone's going to
take on Space Adventures, and compete on price. Not inside scoop -
wouldn't say it even if I knew any - just common sense. 1000 flights
at $98,000 each is not allergy money: it's nothing to sneeze at.)
Spaceflight participants - "passengers" is too general a term - will
absolutely have to be trained in how to use the survival equipment.
Even if it isn't required by the regulations (and that will be up to
the service provider), it'll be required by the business plan. Doing
in your customers, or even getting them bent, is bad for business.
>Burt Rutan has mentioned this sort of "suborbital flight training" in
>his presentations. "*Pilots* will be the first space tourists."
>Another good reason for the Flight Training business models is
>government regulation. Flight training can legally be done in
>experimental aircraft.
Someone asked Jay Garvin (AST-200, he who signs the launch license)
about this last Friday at Space Frontier. His answer was more or
less, "Yes, you can do that, though it's looked at rather closely, and
you won't get away with an end run; it has to be genuine training.
But with this hybrid vehicle interpretation, you don't need to resort
to games like that. You want to fly passengers on your hybrid
vehicle? You get a launch license. You'll already have lots of
flight test data from flying under your experimental certificate." A
hybrid vehicle, for anyone not up on the latest (see my post "AST/AVR
turf war is over" on sci.space.policy, which I'm told was picked up by
HobbySpace and TransTerrestrial Musings), is a vehicle that combines
attributes of an airplane and a launch vehicle. Like, oh, say, Xerus.
Or SpaceShipOne.
>On the other hand, charter passenger flights
>are very highly regulated.
And they require a certificated aircraft. Very expensive.
>The serious piloted spacecraft builders
>such as Rutan ("Space Ship One"), XCOR ("Xerus"), and others have
>been very careful to follow the experimental aircraft rules for flight
>testing.
For now. We're both going to be entering launch license territory
shortly, though the new interpretation lets us do quite a bit of our
early flight test under a pink slip (experimental certificate). We're
tickled pink.
-R
--
Every complex, difficult problem has a simple,
easy solution - which is wrong.
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