The next one hundred years

My big concern about space tourism is reliability. Will
the tourism market dry up the first time they lose a
launch vehicle? The failure rate historically is about 1%.

As experience with space grows, this SHOULD go down. Is
the Space Shuttle 99% reliable right now? That's a reasonable
interpretation of the statistics; but it's not impossible
that they have the big bugs out now and it is now, say, 99.75%
reliable.

Still, if the Shuttle has another failure (they came close
recently with some wiring issues), that would not bode well.

Still, there is historical precedent. Early aeroplanes were
quite unsafe; some of our grandparents would rather walk
than get in one of those 'deathtraps'. Also, by normal
aerospace standards, the Shuttle would not have been released
yet as it has not done enough envelope testing.

Look at the XCOR rocket plane; they will soon have done more
flights than the Space Shuttle has done. They will know if
there is a <1% failure rate. The aerospace model is probably
a much better way to proceed. Fully reusable liquid fueled SSTO
vehicles are safer; none of this SRB rubbish.

Lucio de Souza Coelho wrote:

> From:
> To:
> Sent: Friday, February 08, 2002 2:25 PM
> Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] The next one hundred years
>
>>Any prognostication should include some mention of space tourism. That
>>could be the ace in the hole.
>>
>>
>
> By the way, my "gut prognostic" for the period covering 2000-2010 is that
> ISS will never get finished and will finally be shut down or rented/sold as
> a space hotel. Also, the first space hotel - probably a complex of cheap
> inflatable modules - will be built. Space tourism will flourish - though it
> will be a market for millionaires only. But hey, that's how the car industry
> began, as a near-handicraft activity for the extremely wealthy only - until
> a couple of decades earlier the process was pipelined and made cheap enough
> for the common man.
>
> [snikt]
>
>>Ron
>>******
>>
> [snikt]
>
> Lucio
>

--
- Ian Woollard (ian.woollard@...)

"Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding
technological civilization?"
- Gerard O'Neill