Branson Passes The Kármán line

[Judge]

Billionaire Richard Branson finally made it into space today in his own spacecraft. Going some 50 miles just beyond the atmosphere into space itself over New Mexico and safely returning with five of his employees.

Appears to have been a purely private sector event. Space tourism for the rich may well be just around the corner. Funny to imagine Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum all on the same flight. Life imitating art?

"Put yer spurs to her, Sir Richard!"

Virgin Galactic's Branson soars to space aboard rocket plane

 

[Skittlebisquit]

A great day in history. Here is a short bit. Utube has some really long ones

 

[Au Naturel]

Billionaire Richard Branson finally made it into space today in his own spacecraft. Going some 50 miles just beyond the atmosphere into space itself over New Mexico and safely returning with five of his employees.

Appears to have been a purely private sector event. Space tourism for the rich may well be just around the corner. Funny to imagine Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum all on the same flight. Life imitating art?

"Put yer spurs to her, Sir Richard!"

Virgin Galactic's Branson soars to space aboard rocket plane

Maybe not so much for just the rich. The price right now is 250K but his long-term plan is to drop the price down to the middle-class range. 250K is about 40% of an average mortgage in LA. He's hoping to get it down to 40K which will be a nice new car. At that price, I'd be tempted. But I'd never live to take the flight. My wife would kill me first.

Musk wants to cut the cost to where Starship would be competitive as transportation, like a first-class ticket on a nice airline. Don't know if he can do it but it would be cool.

 

[SusanLR]

If we could put Jean Luc-Picard in there with Jeff Goldblum, that would be truly funny.
Throw in Baby Blue the Velociraptor and we'd really have some fun.
Heavenly chaos?

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

So, how many years did it take him to accomplish what was originally done by NASA in the 50s and 60s using slide rules and computers with the power of a Commodore 64? Funny that these bazillionaire parasites never think to turn their Dunning-Kruger minds to something important, like a sustainable fusion reactor.

 

[Tom]

I always wanted to go into space and fight space monsters.

 

[Au Naturel]

So, how many years did it take him to accomplish what was originally done by NASA in the 50s and 60s using slide rules and computers with the power of a Commodore 64? Funny that these bazillionaire parasites never think to turn their Dunning-Kruger minds to something important, like a sustainable fusion reactor.

There are plenty of brilliant minds working on controlled fusion. The balance sheet isn't there yet for private enterprises to really make a go of it but private money is starting to filter in. It has to be government-funded until there's some chance of at least breaking even.

We've been working on controlled fusion since the 50s. (The joke is that controlled fusion is only 30 years away - and has been since 1960.) The level of complexity involved trivializes almost any other big science project. The ITER project in France is costing 20 billion dollars and it will never make a penny on the investment. It is just a big proof of concept. There are many other projects scattered around the globe.

If all you wanted to do was throw someone up in the sky hard enough to be weightless or a few minutes, that's not much of an accomplishment. If you want to do that for a large crew who would stay in relative comfort, that's a bit more difficult. Now, imagine you want to send people up on a spaceship in safety comparable to a commercial airliner, with a similar turnaround time, and at a price low enough to get enough customers to be able to make a profit on it. That is a heck of an accomplishment. It is terrain that has never been crossed before.

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

There are plenty of brilliant minds working on controlled fusion. The balance sheet isn't there yet for private enterprises to really make a go of it but private money is starting to filter in. It has to be government-funded until there's some chance of at least breaking even.

We've been working on controlled fusion since the 50s. (The joke is that controlled fusion is only 30 years away - and has been since 1960.) The level of complexity involved trivializes almost any other big science project. The ITER project in France is costing 20 billion dollars and it will never make a penny on the investment. It is just a big proof of concept. There are many other projects scattered around the globe.

If all you wanted to do was throw someone up in the sky hard enough to be weightless or a few minutes, that's not much of an accomplishment. If you want to do that for a large crew who would stay in relative comfort, that's a bit more difficult. Now, imagine you want to send people up on a spaceship in safety comparable to a commercial airliner, with a similar turnaround time, and at a price low enough to get enough customers to be able to make a profit on it. That is a heck of an accomplishment. It is terrain that has never been crossed before.

I remain wholly unimpressed as all he did was throw money around to co-opt mature technology. It is the same way for building nuclear weapons . . . nobody who set out to build one has ever failed, even for fission boosted thermonuclear devices as N. Korea's "peanut" design demonstrated. The Swan design, with two-point initiation, has made timing for implosion that much easier.

 

[Raggamuffin]

Supposedly he didn't pass the Karman Line.

I'm not a fan of how polluting airlines are for holidays etc. Let alone for space travel for leisure purposes.

Probably a pessimistic mindset to take - but I think it's a vapid pursuit and a colossal waste of resources.

As soon as I heard his flight was due soon, I hoped it'd explode.

What a cheerful person I can be.

Ed

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

What a cheerful person I can be.

Well, one less Oligarch is an improvement for our society any way you look at it.

 

[Judge]

People in the private sector do what they want. Don't assume they're all potential altruists. They aren't.

Though in this case private sector participation in potentially sharing the cost, liability and risk with the public sector is fine with me as a taxpayer. It's far better to see them willing to split government expenses while routinely dodging taxes. At least this way they are then contributing something rather than usual sardonic promises of trickle-down economics.

As for allegations of waste of resources, those are cries that personalities like William Proxmire, Henry Waxman and Walter Mondale have uttered for decades. To date few voters or politicians were listening to them. Like it or not, space exploration remains popular with most taxpayers. If you're truly worried about real waste, you should start with every state and federal legislature which panders to pork barrel spending rather than focusing on NASA.

As for private sector entities, they're free to waste their capital and profits on whatever they and their shareholders deem fit. "No bucks, no Buck Rogers". However this is only the beginning. Where there's no promises that private sector entities might survive catastrophes as NASA has over the years. Time will tell on that. For now let's see what happens. We appear to be on the verge of a new era.

 

[Au Naturel]

These flights matter. It is the dawn of the democratization of space. There is a portion of the population who wants nothing more than to maximize personal safety and security. There's also a portion that wants to explore and expand into new domains. There's an arm-wrestling match between the two. It has been going on ever since the first proto-humans left East Africa to see what was going on in the rest of the world. Today the conflict also involves competition for resources, which makes it get nasty.

Branson, Musk, Bezos, et al, have revolutionized space by devising ways to do a lot more and with a lot less. We are looking at the long-term democratization of space.

Here’s why Richard Branson’s flight matters—and, yes, it really matters

If I compare it to computers, there was a time when only governments and large corporations could afford a computer. When I got into it back in the early 80s, it cost me $2500 just to buy the parts and assemble my first PC. That's about $7K in today's money. It had 640K of ram, two 5.25 inch floppy drives, and a green monochrome monitor. And look at what we get today for a few hundred bucks.

It would take the resources of a superpower to come up with a Saturn V and put men on the moon or run the space shuttle program. Several hundred billion dollars in current money for Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. Another two hundred billion for the shuttle. The latest big booster is the SLS system with is likely to run several billion dollars per launch even if it is using old space shuttle engines. Everything gets thrown away, no reusability. That's just what happens to government projects. Private enterprise offers us the chance to do it for just a few percent of that.

I saw an analysis that showed the Falcon Heavy - with booster recovery - could do everything the SLS could do, you just have to launch it 4 times for every SLS launch. It would still cost a tenth as much. If we waited just a bit for Starship to mature, it would cost even less. There's also the ULA Vulcan Centaur when it comes online and hopefully Blue Origin's New Glen. There's also a whole raft of smallsat launchers that wouldn't exist if SpaceX hadn't paved the way.

I am all in favor of letting private sector billionaires compete for the business and I don't mind if they become even bigger billionaires because of it.