Spaceship Two
Jan. 25th, 2008 02:16 pmCommercial spaceflight is doing everything right. First it gets massive investment from Beardy Branson - a flyboy with a pot of cash and business acumen, which is more credible than the pots of cash from Doom co-authors and the like. Then Beardy goes and calls his spaceflight company Virgin Galactic, which you can just imagine seeing in a 2000AD parody poster from the early 90s. And then the first ship - the production, passenger-carrying sub-orbital Spaceship Two - is named VSS Enterprise.
You'll get little vital-signs monitors and cameras in your suits. You can trade in Frequent Flyer miles for a ticket (2 million for the hop, taken up by Alan Watts, a brit engineer who must do quite a bit of flying). Tickets will be given as prizes for the general public. Branson himself is breathless about the whole venture. Burt Rutan's machines are deliciously unorthodox and they work (the White Knight has trumped the Vulcan in my heart, and the shuttlecock configuration of the spacecraft is brilliant). There's nose art.
This isn't a nerdgasm, it's geekkake.
I predict rock videos in space by 2010. Probably Radiohead or 50-cent.
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ravenbait said a while ago that NASA's photos of the Earth from space made a change to people - that they saw the whole Earth for the first time, and they got that "its rather small, and rather fragile, and the only one we've got" awe. And that that seemed to be fading. I've been vaguely hoping that Google Earth would have a similar effect, but it doesn't because we're too used to marvels on screen. It would be nice to hope that once enough people have taken the trip on the Enterprise that they'd seed a return to that whole-Earth vibe. We could certainly do with it.
You'll get little vital-signs monitors and cameras in your suits. You can trade in Frequent Flyer miles for a ticket (2 million for the hop, taken up by Alan Watts, a brit engineer who must do quite a bit of flying). Tickets will be given as prizes for the general public. Branson himself is breathless about the whole venture. Burt Rutan's machines are deliciously unorthodox and they work (the White Knight has trumped the Vulcan in my heart, and the shuttlecock configuration of the spacecraft is brilliant). There's nose art.
This isn't a nerdgasm, it's geekkake.
I predict rock videos in space by 2010. Probably Radiohead or 50-cent.
ravenbait said a while ago that NASA's photos of the Earth from space made a change to people - that they saw the whole Earth for the first time, and they got that "its rather small, and rather fragile, and the only one we've got" awe. And that that seemed to be fading. I've been vaguely hoping that Google Earth would have a similar effect, but it doesn't because we're too used to marvels on screen. It would be nice to hope that once enough people have taken the trip on the Enterprise that they'd seed a return to that whole-Earth vibe. We could certainly do with it.
