Comments on: Space tourism history and skepticism in Boston

By: Jeff Foust

Jeff Foust — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 18:22:36 +0000

Red: good point on the science, although it may be more useful to have those discussions at meetings of more specific scientific groups (AAS, AGU, etc.) than at a more general meeting like AAAS.

Stellvia: One question to ask Lainé is how their efforts are going to raise funding to develop their vehicle. EADS could finance the vehicle internally, but have chosen to seek external investors; last I heard they were still looking, in part because of their very high estimated development cost (on the order of €1 billion).

By: Stellvia

Stellvia — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 18:13:36 +0000

“[T]he suborbital space tourism market, based on existing market studies, is probably too small to interest big aerospace companies.”

Robert Lainé, CTO of EADS Space is giving a public lecture in London on March 13 which suggests otherwise:-

http://www.rocketeers.co.uk/?q=node/151

By: red

red — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 16:31:40 +0000

“The number of vehicles needed to service the market is small, so you can’t set up a big production line and get economies of scale as you can with airliners.”

The plan isn’t to build hundreds or thousands of suborbital vehicles and get economies of scale through repeated builds, it’s to build a few suborbital vehicles and fly each of them hundreds or thousands of times … like you can with airliners.

Anyway, instead of the AAAS discussing why the space tourism industry is bound to fail, I’d rather have them spend their time figuring out what they can do in terms of science with these vehicles.