Hacker News Reader

Comment by yellowbkpk | Hacker News Reader

It sure would be nice to have something to get our younger people excited about science. When my parents were kids it was the Apollo mission and astronauts, when I was a kid it was computers and the Internet. My younger sister doesn't get excited about either of those things anymore: why would she? She's been able to sit in front of a computer and video-chat with people across the country and world since she was able to walk.

Obama's plan seems to say "Your newborns might have the space program to be excited about ... when they're 18 years old."

View on HN

There's a new space race going on right now. It's being done by private enterprise on budgets from $1M to $100M. Check out:

Armadillo Aerospace

XCOR Aerospace

Masten Space Systems

Unreasonable Rocket

Scaled Composites

SpaceX

Blue Origin

If you want to talk to rocketeers who are actually building hardware, today, check out the arocket mailing list.

We don't need another space race to a destination. We need to build space infrastructure.

It's the difference between trying to get from the east coast of the US to the west with one wagon train, versus building railways and towns. That first wagon might just make it, but it doesn't help the next wagon.

This new space race might as well be a soap box derby in comparison to our military's space budget. While 100M might seem like a lot of space bucks, our Air Force has a roughly $12 billion dollar space budget which dwarfs what we spend on NASA or any of these private space ventures.

I wouldn't worry about space spending, or space infrastructure when our AF is spending oodles to put weapons and craft into space.

After seeing how some Gov't contracts play out, I can see a private space project getting much further on far less money.

I'm not so interested in the funding. I'm interested in results.

There are too many people in the space industry who can write a nice paper showing what they could do if only you gave them a billion dollars.

Obviously private space (beyond GEO) is going to be huge at some point. The problem is bootstrapping.

When you have a chicken and egg problem, the solution is to build some small cheap thing that works to demonstrate your competence and attract larger opportunities.

John Carmack's started his own space program on about $5M of his own money and 10 years of effort. How many people in the US buy homes for more than $5M? How many shitty web apps get more funding than that?

While I admire what Carmack is doing on a "that's cool" level, what real results have been produced?

He has a device that can lift off the ground, move a couple hundred meters to the side, and land.

That's a long way from a space program.

Actually, that's all you need to do all kinds of interesting sub-orbital work. They've been flying to much higher altitudes, recently.

There are a lot of subtleties in liquid-fuel rocket engines.

Simply getting them to ignite reliably and to re-start were seen as a Big Deal, only a few years ago.

It's reusable - something the government hasn't been able to produce. There are a lot of applications - vertical takeoff and landing testbed, acceleration of Technology Readiness Levels, microgravity research, upper atmospheric research, heliophysic observation, etc. It's not a "space program," but vehicles like ours and John's have a very real market.

I work for Masten Space Systems. What we've done on $2M could not be done for less than $50-100M by the government. It's unfortunate but they have ridiculous amounts of overhead that companies our size just don't have.

Do you know any concise resource comparing current private space transportation businesses? I'd prefer reading one run-down article over investigating each company individually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_com...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com