Another rare treat this week:
Commercial spaceflights are rolling out, and theyāre being spearheaded byā¦Virgin Airlines?
Iām surprised. I thought Bezos or Musk would get there first.
Well, you would have thought correct. The articles are all misleading. Virgin is not the first fully commercial space tourism provider. Both SpaceX (Technically Axiom Space using SpaceX as launch provider) and BlueOrigin have launched private ātourismā missions to space. And SpaceXās were actual orbital flights.
Virginās SpaceShipOne was the first private crewed vehicle to reach space but that was almost 20 years ago now and had nothing to do with paid passengers.
The Virgin Galactic concept baffles me. I can only think itās rich people with a passing interest in space and no interest in rockets, who want clout with those who know nothing that would spend a half-million dollars for a 3 hour flight in which you manage to spend 6 minutes in zero G. Very cool and Iām not saying I wouldnāt go on a SpaceShipTwo flight if given the opportunity, but certainly not the classic astronaut experience and certainly not worth the money that theyād be charging for a tourist.
At least with Blue Originās equally paltry 5-ish minutes in space, the whole ride only lasts 11 minutes from liftoff to touchdown and you get to say you were on a launch pad and landed under canopy.
But ultimately longer duration flights are going to be what people want I think. If youāre not spending at least a good hour up there, itās hard to justify the resources to get there.
To put it in perspective Yuri Gagarinās Vostok-1 flight spent over 100 minutes in space before returning to Earth. Blue Origin basically recreates the very first US space missions which were suborbital.
Earlier in this thread I did a comparison between the two and concluded that the Virgin Galactic flight seems like a way better tourist experience:
So my conclusion is clear. As a suborbital space flight tourist, I donāt want a watered down version of what the first part of a rocket launch into space might feel like. Instead, I want a similar experience to some of the coolest space plane missions of the 60ās, but now packaged in a safe and accessible way, with extra bonuses like zero-G flippy time and cool views.
Sign me up for SpaceShipTwo!
I dunno, thereās definitely something cool about doing the X-15 type experience. But itās really not about whether you go to space at that point. It would just be āyou get to go really goddamn fast really high up, like an X-15ā but itās all polished, and sold as a āyou get to go to spaceā experience more like the PanAm star liner from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Except unfortunately nothing about SpaceShipTwo makes me think āthis is what Kubrick was imaginingā because youāre doing the space part for about as long as someone might ride Space Mountain.
If it was more rough and raw and you felt like part of a cool mission where you were gonna fly really fast like the Dark Star from Top Gun, then Iād be into it. But right now it seems like diet space. You go up to space on a technicality. Thereās no real hope of it being more than what it is.
Now, maybe Iām wrong about that. Maybe if SpaceShipThree can do orbital flights and you can go up for a few hours before re-entry THEN theyād have something. Then the form factor makes sense and is cool. Now itās a serious space plane.
So if a couple people are willing to take these bunny hops for a quarter-mil each, in order to make an orbital class work, then cool. But if the goal is just to do bunny hops in a fancy jet, I think people will get tired of it pretty quick when for a little more operations like Axiom will let you eat, shit, and sleep in orbit. And if Iām gonna pay a few million either way, then I wanna shit in a vacuum toilet.
Yeah, thatās why I was comparing the two suborbital tourist flight experiences, as those are of a similar height/expense/availability/duration. If I could pick between the two, Iād go for SpaceShipTwo over New Shephard, but of course they are suboptimal in every way compared to an actual orbital adventure.
Good video showing how Space Ship 2 is basically the coolest plane you can fly/ride (while ,in my opinion, New Shepherd is the lamest rocket you can ride).
All that sounds cool, but I feel like if Iām riding on it, I donāt want the pilot cowboying around up there with direct mechanical linkages etc. Give me the computer in control please.
If itās a traditional space capsule, yeah, have the computers doing the precise burns to put the thing on the exact path back down.
For a spaceplane, even if thereās a powerful autopilot that can run a hands-off flight all the way to touchdown, good to have an actual pilot at the controls for now. Especially with modern synthetic vision and avionics.
I think seeing the footage from this recent flight and such, yes: SpaceShip2 is a really awesome plane. Flying on it to the upper atmosphere would be really awesome.
But I would take that ride for the idea of taking a cool airplane ride to the edge of space (maybe even to it depending on definitions) in the same way taking one of those MiG flights to the edge of space, or just any fighter jet ride where you do some zoom climbs, would be awesome.
But if Iām strictly paying to go to space for the point being āIām going to space and want to do space thingsā I want to do it on something that will get me meaningfully into full space and StarShip2 just cannot do that. And New Shepard canāt really do that either. So in that respect yeah, itās kindof the lamest rocket vs the coolest airplane. The Virgin ship is not a cool ENOUGH airplane to be worth it for the space content: And its space content is basically equal to the lamest rocket, so thereās that.
So what that means is either StarShip3 needs to have significantly greater space content so that it can be both the coolest airplane experience and also a really good space experience, or it will be quickly beat out when the next Blue Origin generation of commercial rocket becomes an āaverageā rocket instead of a lame single stage one.
Itāll be really hard to push StarShip3 to be a really good space vehicle. Itāll be a complete redesign of everything IMO to give it the capability to do something like spend even 20-30 min above 100km. OTOH Itās trivial to imagine how New Shepard could be replaced with something like a āNew Grissomā that could go higher, further, maybe even to orbit.
Iām more interested in us learning about the cosmos before we try too hard to get humans too far into it.
But on even a thousand-year timescale? Weāre too curious and weird and expansionist to not set foot on Mars. Weāre better off going for it than restraining that impulse at least that far. 
Big fat rocket got a bit further this time:
The Starship engines and fire looked really good.
I think theyll make a full successful ascent burn on the next launch, but probably 2 more before the booster return is working as intended. And itāll take at least 2 re-entry attempts to figure that out. So my guess is by flight 5 should be seeing a situation where the shop and/or booster could survive getting to where they could attempt to land, and by full system launch 10 a successful landing of both booster and ship.
Of course thats assuming they get that far before some combination of internal/external factors skuppers the whole lot.
Probable northern lights tonight in northern to mid US. Whether you can see them mostly depends on the clouds. You might be able to see them if youāre flying too! Iāve never seen them before, and this looks like pretty big storm 
100% cloud in NYC. Just my luck.
Bummer. Might still be going tomorrow night, it is a pretty big set of flares.
These were taken during my larp in Maine. We legit paused game for 15 minutes to just look in awe and take photos.
We also got a perfect view of the ISS passing overhead at the same time.