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Why isn't anyone adopting Astra's simple, no thrills approach and applying it to suborbital tourist flights? Blue Origin are only using New Shepard to please ha
by tjpnz 3y ago
Why isn't anyone adopting Astra's simple, no thrills approach and applying it to suborbital tourist flights? Blue Origin are only using New Shepard to please hand-picked celebrities while testing their capsule for mating to New Glenn (hence the current phallic appearance), and Virgin Galactic are doing.. well god knows what. Build something small and simple for 2-4 people and launch it around the clock from multiple sites across the world. If it could be offered as a 20-50k carnival ride there would be no shortage of willing customers.
- panick21_ 3y agoBecause building a human capable machine is expensive and its hard to sell tickets to rich people if you kill like 50% of them. Astra approach literally resulted in them not having a reliable rocket ever. Ever rocket they ever build had issues. Simply put, human suborbital is barley a real market at all. Its unlikely anybody will make a profit of it. And given the Blue Origin has infinity money and no need for revenue. And VO has scammed the stock market out of 100 of million of $. Entering in that market would be crazy, you are not Jeff Bezos and you can't scam the stock market again. And anybody smart isn't gone invest in this terrible market.
- danw1979 3y agoCould we have a decade or two of expensive civilian spaceflight to work out the kinks before Ryanair get involved ?
- nine_k 3y agoSmall, simple, and 2-4 people combine poorly. I think the closest is the venerable Soyuz-2 rocket that has been built and flown in hundreds, without drastic changes. It was used for space tourism.a few times, but it's still too expensive, even at $30M per launch (without an orbital vehicle though).
- tjpnz 3y agoSoyuz isn't reusable and doesn't take advantage of recent advances in manufacturing. I recently saw a capsule flown three years ago and could see the hand beaten panels and ruler marks from the people who were cutting the metal and welding it together by hand. Building them like that will be expensive.
- doesnt_know 3y ago> But then, rockets started failing. Only two of the seven launches of the company's "Rocket 3" vehicle were successful. I would personally rather not have some no frills, go fast and break things startup destroy space tourism before it has even started.
- bee_rider 3y agoIt feels odd to gatekeep a term that is already quite dismissive, but… is it even really tourism? You don’t stay in the place really, the entire thing is spent on transit. I think carnival ride is the right phrase, and… I dunno, I’m poor, but a $20k carnival ride sounds nuts to me.
- tjpnz 3y agoIs it that different to people who'll fly to New Zealand to go bungy jumping?
- bee_rider 3y agoI think so, they get out of the plane when they get to New Zealand, right? This is more like flying over New Zealand.
- danparsonson 3y ago"Tour" doesn't necessarily imply staying at a place - if you tour a factory for example then you don't usually spend the night there.
- bee_rider 3y agoTourism usually involves visiting a location, though, not just flying through it.