Spaceship Tourism War taking off

Burt Rutan, one of the world's most successful aeronautical engineers, of Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic, is quoted in [url=http://www.livescience.com/blogs/author/leonarddavid]this blog[/url] being critical of the European Union's new design.

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“Like other spaceship concepts that takeoff from a runway (XCOR and Rocketplane) or those that do rocket-powered vertical launches, the EADS vehicle will weigh more than twice as much (per passenger) as SpaceShipTwo and require more than twice the rocket impulse,” Rutan told me. “This relates to significant increases in operational costs,” he added, also noting that failure modes on ascent tend to be more risky at low altitudes.

“The non-recurring development cost of a suborbital spaceship that has rocket and jet engines — both of which leave the atmosphere and experience reentry — will be far more than our SpaceShipTwo program,” he said.

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[img]http://files.myopera.com/ux50/blog/105spaceship2air.jpg[/img]
Spaceship Two

The European Project:

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PARIS - Europe's biggest aerospace company, EADS, has concluded that carrying wealthy tourists to 100 kilometers in altitude for several minutes of weightlessness could be a multibillion-dollar industry in 20 years and is seeking co-investors to build a rocket plane it already has designed.

EADS's Astrium division, prime contractor for Ariane 5 rockets and for Europe's contribution to the international space station, said a group of its engineers has spent two years quietly designing a vehicle that looks like a business jet with exceptionally long wings and a rocket engine powered by liquid methane and liquid oxygen. The company unveiled the project here June 13.

Taking off from an as-yet undetermined spaceport using two conventional jet engines, the plane would climb to 12 kilometers in altitude before its rocket engine ignites, powering the vehicle through the atmosphere and into a coast phase whose 100-kilometer apogee would provide passengers with one and one-half minutes of near-zero-gravity experience.

The round trip would last about 90 minutes. The plane would carry four passengers and a pilot, with the passengers each paying about 200,000 euros ($267,000) for the experience.

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[url=http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/AstriumEadsweb_061307.html]http:...

[img]http://a52.g.akamaitech.net/f/52/827/1d/www.space.com/images/070613_astr...

[ 15 June 2007: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]