Suborbital Spinoffs

[Swampcat]

<p>SDC article:</p><p><strong><font color="#990099">Spinoffs Expected From Suborbital Vehicle Work</font></strong></p> <p>The development of commercial suborbital space vehicles should lead eventually to businesses such as commercial hypersonic point-to-point air travel and low-cost launches to low Earth orbit, according to spaceship builders, venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs who gathered here October 22-23 to take part in the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight.</p> <p>The key to making those businesses profitable will be achieving safe, affordable and reliable access to space, Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., said at the conference, which was hosted by the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium. The private suborbital flight enterprise "builds up the infrastructure we need to go do the bigger and better things," he added.</p> <p>Space for decades has been so expensive, so unreliable, so unsafe, making it extremely difficult to do any reliable planning, Greason suggested. "And we've known for decades and decades and decades that the solution is you have to have vehicles that can get you up and down into space with, perhaps not with the reliability of current airplanes, but maybe more like the reliability of high-performance military aircraft."</p> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font size="3" color="#ff9900"><p><font size="1" color="#993300"><strong><em>------------------------------------------------------------------- </em></strong></font></p><p><font size="1" color="#993300"><strong><em>"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government."</em></strong></font></p><p><font size="1" color="#993300"><strong>Thomas Jefferson</strong></font></p></font> </div>