Depressing News: Commercial Spaceflight

Leonard David at SPACE on how the economic downturn is expected to affect prospects for commercial spaceflight:

But one big issue looms for NewSpace next year, said Jeff Foust, an aerospace analyst, journalist and publisher, as well as editor and publisher of the respected website, The Space Review. And that topic of trepidation is the state of the economy.

“This is going to affect companies in the industry in two ways.  One, it’s going to make it that much more difficult for companies to raise the money needed to develop their vehicles,” Foust told SPACE.com. ”It won’t directly affect companies that are already self-funded or otherwise fully-funded – like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, Armadillo Aerospace, Bigelow Aerospace, etc. – but those  companies trying to raise tens of millions of dollars or more  to carry out their business plans will find that steep path to funding  has become even steeper.

Foust also noted another impact tied to the rocky economy – a potential reduction in customer demand, particularly in space tourism. A whiplash from the continuation of a deep recession in 2009, he said, may well be people reconsidering tossing out $95,000 to $200,000 or more for suborbital jaunts, or putting the trip off a few years – to a time when, presumably, the economy recovers.

The silver lining:

“During 2009, entrepreneurial space companies will continue working on their propulsion systems, airframes, and all the other components necessary for successful access to space,” Greason explained. “So we will see engine tests, other subsystem tests, and progress on vehicle construction and system integration.”

But given all that activity, Greason added: “We’re unlikely to see any new systems enter service in 2009. People should not find this disappointing. This is the hard work that is necessary to make affordable spaceflight a reality, and it will lead to first flights in 2010.”

Spotlighting that next year will likely become the “tipping” point in the emerging personal space flight industry is Stuart Witt, general manager of Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Witt’s end of the year message is straightforward: The industry has an opportunity to expand to many locations across the nation if operators are successful at Mojave.

Here’s a bonus link for the space obsessed.

Future Food

Homaru Cantu on the next revolution in food:

We’ve been trying to incorporate food from the green world, and started growing microalgae. You can get 10,000 to 30,000 gallons of algae per acre. It can be grown in salt or fresh water, in a whole variety of temperatures. It increases the food supply rather than depleting it, and it’s a net energy gain. For $300 we built a photobioreactor that produced 15 gallons of food per month. The idea was to take algae, process it into sushi and fuel, and deliver it it in a truck running on algae biofuel. And we’re just a bunch of chefs. If we can figure this out, I don’t know why others can’t. Algae is the perfect food plant. It doubles cell mass every twelve hours, depending on the strain. The Japanese have a long lifespan in part because they eat different forms of algae.

 

Spouse as Big Brother

This article in WIRED tackles the way YouTube and other technologies fundamentally alter the way we think and create. It makes some interesting points:

What’s happening to video is like what happened to word processing. Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, publishing was a rarefied, expert job. Then Apple’s WYSIWYG interface made it drop-dead easy, enabling an explosion of weird new forms of micropublishing and zines. Laptop audio editing did the same thing, giving birth to the mashup and cut-and-paste subgenres of music. Then there’s photo manipulation, once a rarefied propaganda technique. Photoshop made it a folk art. Marshall McLuhan pointed out that whenever we get our hands on a new medium we tend to use it like older ones. Early TV broadcasts consisted of guys sitting around reading radio scripts because nobody had realized yet that TV could tell stories differently. It’s the same with much of today’s webcam video; most people still try to emulate TV and film. A bigger leap will occur when we get better tools for archiving and searching video. Then we’ll start using it the way we use paper or word processing: to take notes or mull over a problem, like Tom Cruise flipping through scenes at the beginning of Minority Report. 

All that is true and fascinating, but then there’s this: