Pierce Nichols wrote: > > On Wed, 2003-10-22 at 00:44, Randall Clague wrote: > > > 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. > > It's much more than just that. Someone who is shelling out this kind of > money for an experience wants to feel like a participant and not a > passenger. Or so my friends in the high-end adventure travel business > tell me. But it makes a whole lot of sense to me.
Seems like that's the key to making the "tourism" thing work commercially - you need a reasonably safe, controlled situation, and at the same time you want to find ways to give the clients a certain sense of risk and participation... (Let them fly some simple orbital maneuvers, but don't actually give them enough control authority to put the vehicle on a trajectory from which you don't have the maneuvering impulse to recover, for example?) -dave w _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
