Virgin Galactic tests laughing-gas powered rocket motor Sir Richard Branson's space-tourism operation, Virgin Galactic, has announced successful tests of the rocket motor it will use to launch fare-paying passengers out of the Earth's atmosphere. Unusually, the rocket runs on laughing gas and tyre rubber. The SpaceShipTwo hybrid rocket in ground testing. Credit: Virgin Galactic …
So if it uses quarter of the a round trip to New York from London, that is approx half the fuel of a trip to New York from London which must be in the order of 1700 miles worth of fuel. So I can go straight up 65 miles or out to the Azores from London?
Hard choice.
So many points it's like a porcupine at PMQs.
> The spaceship’s carbon footprint for each of its passengers and
> crew will be about a quarter of that for a return trip from London to New York,
>
As Spaceship One only flew ~40km (straight up, granted, but starting at it's 60,000 foot release height and ending around 100,000ft) that's not quite so impressive as it sounds.
It's hard to know how much /less/ polluting the SSMEs (the Shuttle's main engines) could be, what with burning hydrogen in oxygen; you can all guess what the waste product of that is.) Same goes for most other man-rated and otherwise launchers in the west. The SRBs burn aluminium perchlorate, which is no fun at all to breath in, but take a look around the low scrub and lagoons around Kennedy next time you're stuck watching NASA TV during an interminable T-40:00 hold...
The really nasty propellant is hydrazine, which is pretty damn toxic (that's why curious cowpokes across Texas were warned not to go poking around any smoking wreckage from the Columbia accident.) However the Shuttle, like the other spacecraft uses of hydrazine, reserves it for in-flight burns. For instance the course correction manoeuvres carried out by planetary probes are generally made with hydrazine thrusters.)
I actually don't really care about the environmental impact of the suborbital jolly business, but this green spin is laughable. Per passenger, the emissions are about 'a quarter of that for a return trip from London to New York'.
Using one of Virgin's rather lovely airliners to fly the Pond and back takes say 12 hours total. The burn time of SpaceShipOne's engine was - 83 SECONDS. Whatever way you look at it, space junkets are a profligate use of energy.
But that's not the biggest turn off, surely the thought of being trapped in a small cabin with the likes of Beardie and Paris is more than enough to keep me earthbound.
You might actually have a valid reason for flying from London to New York.
Nobody actually needs to go 65 miles straight up and then back down again.
The size of the eco-footprint of doing this is therefore utterly irrelevant as, whatever it is, it's always going to be infinitely larger than it needs to be (i.e. zero).
Dear Beardie. If you're that worried about the amount of nasty thingies that your new pointless luxury toy chucks out, try not fucking doing it. Otherwise STFU and enjoy the ride.
Yes, DiNitrous Oxide IS used as an anaetethic at some dentists offices, but you definitely won't start giggling if they use it on you!
If you get enough to start giggling, you're getting a dangerous amount of the stuff!
(Just ask your friendly neighbourhood dentist. )
Oh, and you'll still feel the pain, you just won't care or be able to concentrate on it for long enough for it to be a bother... ;-)
Is most comonly used as propellent in food stuff aerosols, ie squirty cream.
Oh and btw @Trygve Henriksen Nitrious Oxide does make you go very numb all over, shortly before you pass out.. been there done that.. (broken collar bone manipulation by paramedic with too much gas.)
@Sureo theres only one beardy brit who like to boast about his inexperience.. its not the rest of us.
Whether or not it is (and I doubt that's more than Beardie hype) is irrelevant to any claims made about the current joyride and how much greenwash has been slapped on it.
A gen-u-ine suborbital, transcontinental spaceplane, certified for commercial use and viable financially for such would bear about as much resemblance to what they have now as stilton cheese does to a herd of cows. (i.e. you can see there's a connection in there somewhere, but that's about it.)
TeeCee is superficially correct to say that: "A gen-u-ine suborbital, transcontinental spaceplane, certified for commercial use and viable financially for such"
Equally, one might say the same of the Blériot monoplane, or the early 'barnstormers' who provided joyriding trips to the wealthy (and somewhat foolhardy) in the days before commercial passenger transport began. They were, at best, an intermediate stage - and much of the engineering in them was misguided, and later discarded - but they weren't *quite* a dead end.
The phrase you're looking for is 'Proof-of-concept'; and all such projects 'prove' to the sceptics that the concept is ridiculous n the absence of a fully-developed technology, which will (of course!) never develop in the absence of a demonstrated market.
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