Texans In Space!
Well, sort of. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Yahoo, is planning a spaceport for West Texas. This week, the environmental plan for the spaceport will be the subject of a public meeting in Van Horn, Texas. Plans include a vertical launch/vertical land experimental spacecraft.
The craft would hit an altitude of about 325,000 feet — or almost 62 miles — before descending and restarting its engine for a "precision vertical powered landing on the landing pad" in sparsely populated Culberson County, about 125 miles east of El Paso.
Those were among the plans detailed in a 229-page draft of an environmental review filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA would issue permits and licenses for Blue Origin to go ahead with launch plans.
The report was assembled by Blue Origin and Tetra Tech Inc., an engineering and technical consulting firm based in Pasadena, Calif.
According to Blue Origin's Web site, the company is "developing vehicles and technologies that, over time, will help enable an enduring presence in space."
"We are currently working to develop a crewed, suborbital launch system that emphasizes safety and low cost of operations," the Web site says.
A public hearing on the environmental review was scheduled Tuesday in Van Horn, a town of 3,000 and the closest center of population to the space base. Bezos, the 42-year-old billionaire who built Amazon into an Internet sales giant, won't attend the hearing, Blue Origin spokesman Bruce Hicks said.
The environmental assessment process is "only one of the steps prior to obtaining an experimental permit for a launch operator's license," FAA spokesman Hank Price said. "We have received permit applications from Blue Origin and are evaluating them for safety and other considerations, as well."
As many as 10 flight tests lasting as long as a minute and reaching an altitude of about 2,000 feet could occur this year at the site, north of Van Horn on the 165,000-acre Corn Ranch purchased by Bezos. Over the following three years, as many as 25 launches would be made annually, growing in altitude to 325,000 feet and in duration to more than 10 minutes.
Commercial flights, a goal of the project, could begin in 2010, according to the timetable in the document, with as many as 52 a year.
There is a lot of commercial activity on space. It's about time private industry took over. Let's face it, government in this country has been underfunding NASA for years. The fact that American manned missions are confined to low earth orbit is a disgrace for a country that once sent men to the moon. Let's see if commercial space travel can make the difference.
By crosspatch, Monday, 24 July , 2006 @ 10:32 am
I am concerned that we are getting too many of these “spaceports” and I am also concerned about the location of them. There is a reason why we launch from the coast of Florida for equatorial orbits and California/Alaska for polar orbits. If a vehicle must be destroyed a minute into launch from Florida, it falls into the ocean. If a vehicle has to be destroyed a minute into launch from California it falls into Albuquerque.
By Quilly Mammoth, Monday, 24 July , 2006 @ 11:59 am
Bezos is anticipating a launch profile that is essentially straight up rather than the angled one seen on orbital insertions. West Texas has plenty of room. Oklahoma’s is courting those who will be launching small vehicles or are intent on finding commercial spaceflight’s Holy Grail…the SSTO. I think the fears of monsterous chunks of rocket plummeting through Aunt Mabel’s parlor to be a bit much; one could have the same fears outside of LaGuardia.
By crosspatch, Monday, 24 July , 2006 @ 12:52 pm
Trouble is that initial launches of test vehicles are rarely successful. It took years to get the first Atlas rocket into the air successfully. It is very difficult to get into orbit going straight up because you need the lateral velocity to maintain orbit … else you just come right back down.
Launches for equatorial orbit are shot East because you get a boost from the rotation speed of the earth. It gives you an extra 1000mph or so of orbital velocity. The closer to the equator you are, the more velocity if gives you and so saves fuel to orbit (which is why France launches theirs where they do). Trying to get to orbit by going straight up would be, uhm, interesting.
By Quilly Mammoth, Monday, 24 July , 2006 @ 1:52 pm
Indeed. But you are missing the point.
Which is a good thing since that is exactly the aim of Bezos, Virgin and the Canadian Arrow…to launch straight up and come back down near to the launch site. If any of them had any near term intentions of orbital insertion your point _might_ have merit. However, should one actually bother to read the proposals one would see that they currently have no such intention.
I also see no proposals for BDBs (Big Dumb Boosters) to be tested at these facilities. Rather, the few who actually claim to be looking at orbital insertion launch profiles are either chasing the SSTO dream or are launching from locations near water for the very reasons you note.
Frankly, your sorts of fears are exactly the reason that government keeps its thumb on private space enterprise. Freedom, and free market capitalism, requires personal responsibility. This means that if someone is launching near population (and they aren’t) they need to take the proper precautions or pay the consequences. I can see government requiring a certain level of liabilty coverage. Like you must have to drive a car. But that’s it.
I trust people with millions invested in a private launch vehicle far more than I do the retired dentist with a bad heart who regularly flies his Piper with only a cursory walk around and preflight into weather he isn’t experianced in, or often licensed for. In fact, either he, or someone just like him is probably flying over your house right now. Yet we wouldn’t campaign to ban private planes despite the fact that we regularly read of them falling into someone’s yard.
Or onto someone’s house
And so on.