Inexpensive Civilian Space Flights are Around the Corner

With the alignment of recent political and commercial interests, the near orbital space flights will significantly go down in price in the next few decades opening up doors for space tourism.

It's been several years since Space Adventures Inc. with Russia's RSA launched their first commercial customers in space for $20M each. However, the future promises much cheaper flights available to a wider range of civilians within a decade or so. After the breakup of USSR and the end of the Cold War NASA's funding has decreased. At this point most of their effort concentrated under the umbrella of exploration is targeting past-Moon missions, like Mars Exploration Rover, leaving the orbital space and the only Earth's satellite to the commercial sector.

The key to affordable space tourism is spacecrafts built with commercial purpose in mind. One great idea was to motivate a private sector with a large prize. After the launch of X Prize competition with $10M prize to the first company who builds a spacecraft able to take 3 people to near-orbital heights two times in a week, a number of designs made it to the finals with SpaceCraft1 winning the competition in October 2004.

Google announced its Lunar X Prize competition in September 2007 and has already 15 registered teams with deadline set to December 31, 2010 (2014 latest) to send a robot to the Moon, rover it for half a kilometer and transmit visual information back!

Space Adventures Inc., the same company that launched Denis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth to space, announced the plan to deliver up to 3 civilians to the far side of the Moon as early as 2010 for $100M per seat. Now, that's a bit pricey, but it's a first step for non-government sponsored Moon exploration!

I don't know what other superpowers are thinking about this topic, but if the governments would not allow their commercial sector to enter that business, they would miss out a lot of opportunities in innovation, publicity and financial areas. I think opening up part of the orbital space is a great idea that will inspire people of all ages around the world, motivate the creative minds and cruise us through the Space Age with larger benefits for humanity.

Links:
Holiday in Outer Space
SpaceCraft1
Google Lunar X Prize
Moon tourism
Picture of Martian sunset taken from Gusev's crater (Mars)

Cyber Camping

All of my technical related posts can be found at Cybercamping.blogspot.com. I separated them not to bore folks out, as most the information is specific to certain topics of my interest.

Nanotech: World's smallest book

Nanotech: New World record - SFU beats MIT's smallest book published in 2001
MIT: 5 x 5 mm
SFU: 0.07 x 0.1 mm

Cell phone hacking

http://www.break.com/index/cell_phone_hack.html

Home Fusion Reactor - I thought it was a joke

I just came back from the club, partying it up with a some friends from work. A few pages were still open on my laptop that I was planning to shut down for the night. Being all myself, I didn't want to just close it, and gave it a few more minutes of attention. Here is what I came across.

Home made fusion reactor by a 17 year old. "Pumps, deuterium source, neutron bubble dosimeter? Check." http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/03/high_school_stu.html
Full report: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/mar/radioactive-boy-scout


...and if you need to get some deuteruim gas for your next fusion experiement ; ), check out "deuterium oxide" following this link: http://unitednuclear.com/chem.htm, from which you'll be able to get "pure deuterium gas" for just $10!

Web 2.0 Articles

What is really a Web 2.0 that everyone is talking about? Here is the article by Tim O'Reilly: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Paul Graham's essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html