Orbital camera as tourism

[holmec]

NASA put up the ISS video feed. And I enjoy seeing the outside view watching the Earth go by. Also the other day I noticed that Genesis II went by ISS pretty close. I'm kind of surprised nobody took a picture from the ISS of it.

So perhaps there's money to be made with an orbital camera or two outside a commercial space station. One static one people can pay to access the feed, and another that people can pay to move the camera in the direction they want.

I hope someone tries it in the future.

 

[oldAtlas_Eguy]

Another item I have thought about was the buying of time using a Lunar rover with camera and simple driving commands to personnally explore the Lunar surface. For very small rovers that connect to a comm tower on the Lunar surface would be an interesting revenue sorce.

 

[defiant101]

yeah these ideas are pretty good, though i think the lunar rover idea would be a little harder, but still very good ideas, if i ever have enough money count me in lol .

 

[access]

The lunar rover would work better if it had a slightly more scientific payload and you could offer it to universities and other scientific bodies so they could do research. They would be willing to pay more than the average joe and wouldn't be as interested in strictly camera operation.

 

[oldAtlas_Eguy]

My thoughts were more along the line of two items: the purchase of a straight active view of all of the available cameras and secondly once the average Joe or researcher qualified for operation they could purchase for a small fee the time to operate a robot performing it’s scheduled tasks. This is a method to lower the standing staff needed to operate/monitor the working robots plus derive additional revenue. If a particular driver becomes adept at robot operation they could be offered a full time job to drive and manage robot operations. A recruiting method to find the talented and weed out the want-a-be’s.

The robots would be categorized by major functions: explorer, shovel, truck, construction/maintenance, and comm tower. The comm tower is where most of the still views of the surface would come from as well as a way of watching the other robots at their tasks.

 

[stevekk]

NASA put up the ISS video feed. And I enjoy seeing the outside view watching the Earth go by. Also the other day I noticed that Genesis II went by ISS pretty close. I'm kind of surprised nobody took a picture from the ISS of it.

So perhaps there's money to be made with an orbital camera or two outside a commercial space station. One static one people can pay to access the feed, and another that people can pay to move the camera in the direction they want.

I hope someone tries it in the future.

I know I have a channel on Dish Network that I assume is a view from one of their Sats. Of course, since their SATs are GEO, the view isn't quite as dynamic as an ISS camera would be.