The following is a guest post from Rob Myles, member of the Matsunami Board of Education and a contributor at Cracked.com

 

A long time ago, as these stories often begin, man cut his moorings with the earth and travelled the skies. Some time later, those fortunate few were chosen to pioneer the vastness that lay outside our small world, to plumb the depths of space as only science fiction novelists had done before. Now, the final frontier is opening up to the wider world, and civilian corporations are taking an interest in “space tourism”.

Of these, perhaps the best publicized is Virgin Galactic. To the potential consumer the buzz surrounding this project, the X-Prize and SpaceShipOne leading to the suitably futuristic looking SpaceShipTwo project, has turned a lot of heads, filling them with hope of a childhood dream come true in the process.

This is an easy project to believe in the feasibility of. It’s a combination of mediums, granted, but both are suitably large departures from the ancestral heritage to make them the logical next step in technological development, enabling us to take that one step further.

Richard Branson is also keen to point the environmental impact of his civilian space project will be drastically reduced from the rockets of the soviet days or the shuttle launches we’re all familiar with, a small craft strapped to a titanic fuel tank some twice the length of the craft itself. A lightweight craft, using a shorter rocket burn, with far less volatile fuels, it seems consumerism has forced human creativity to overcome the obstacles government institutions overcame with simple force.

Which is why it is disappointing to see some of the competition have been somewhat less inspired in their attempts to reach space. EADS Astrium has entered the new space race with a design that doesn’t quite inspire the same confidence.

In case this looks familiar, it’s probably because at a visit to the airport or while watching a Hollywood film, you’ve seen a Learjet 45 in your lifetime.

The only apparent addition EADS Astrium intends to use to make this spaceworthy is a giant rocket exhaust on the hind quarter. It’s almost as if EADS Astrium have taken a page from L. Ron Hubbards book, or at least South Park’s interpretation of it, in which alien spacecraft are described as “DC3’s with rockets attached to them”. Forgive our scepticism here, but it seems almost like a backward step from the smooth, artful optimisation and creativity of the X-Prize winning design to simply make a Jetsons-esque photoshop of an existing craft that will suffer from all the difficulties of the original space launches- launching from the ground, heated re-entry, mass/fuel distribution, and so on. It also proposes to carry only four passengers to the SS2’s six, doubtless increasing the price-per-person on each flight.

With the SS2 ticket prices being ballparked at around $200,000, creating a less efficient, more expensive version seems fruitless, both for EADS Astrium and the corporate competition that forces these ventures to excel. While EADS Astrium claims it will match the $200,000 ticket, it’s scheduled to debut in 2012, 3 years later than the SS2 begins doing business, by which time it will have recouped most of its losses. While an exciting new prospect, it is important to urge caution in cases such as this. Perhaps the most compelling evidence we can provide is the difference between promotional videos. Advertising is how the company sells its product to the consumer…

We like Pixar Animation as much as the next, but when it comes to believing in the feasibility of civilian space tourism, EADS Astrium has left us with nothing but a lacklustre arched eyebrow, and a Learjet with a rocket attached:

  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DFx0O9AtyY&hl=en]

$200,000 then, is the price for your flight into space. If Green Living is important to you, ride a bike to work and forego buying yourself and the wife the $100,000 Tesla Roadsters you were planning on, and celebrate your next anniversary with a trip into space.

Of course, there are other alternatives. For instance, Unicef claims, “$1 protects a child from measles for life. Measles is lethally infectious. It is still responsible for 750,000 child deaths annually.” Four SS2 passengers could wipe out measles related deaths worldwide for a year. And so, we ask again. Civilian Space Travel- But At What Price?

Links: http://www.astrium.eads.net/families/space-tourism and http://www.virgingalactic.com