Private spaceship almost in space

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3713119.stm


I want one....NOW!!

Yeah maybe I should send him a mail and ask if he can do one for me too... :P

The prize money is $10m.....I wonder how much it costs to design and build on of those ?
*checks stock portfolio*

yeah the guy is nuts - check out www.scaled.com - that's his site

I wish I was one of those guys

Hooray for the private sector! NASA is a useless program..

Nos.

NASA has been the bad boy since they dumped the Saturn5 rockets. Those were the absolute most powerful machines ever built by the human race....and the stupid little sh|ts discontinued the program.... They singlehandedly put a stop to all further development of a space program worth the name...
They said it's about money. There's no public interest in the space program and the money might be better used elsewhere... The reality is they actually throw away money with every stupid launch. They received thousands of projects that would allow them (really) to retain use of the intermediate launch steps - the big ovoid filled with fuel. That's an 11 story building, already partitioned, airtight and it makes about 80% of the payload. They throw a new one away everytime they launch. That's like making an 11 story buliding and demolishing it every time....suuure - they have no money. It would only suffice to jettison the stage a few seconds later to put it into a non decaying orbit and avoid all that waste...not to mention the fact that it would help not having traces of fuel in the atmosphere....Later they could collect those, weld them together and out of only 4 or 5 they'd have twice the room the new stupid international space station will ever have.....for only 1% of the costs. But that'd be efficiency...we can't have that. Any half brain would inquire as to the fact that although JPL proposed viable projects for putting human communities in the asteroid belt in the '70s (with the materials and knowledge and electronics support available back then) we still frolick around in space shuttles designed ages ago that put a few kilos of payload in orbit at astronomical prices. What would be the bad thing in moving the heavy industry in the belt? Why it would mean Earth could really become a garden - no more stripminning, no more atomic experiments on the surface.... no more greenhouse effect.... you could just pluck an asteroid made of any rare element you can name that takes toxic processes to obtain here...and just slingshot it in the backyard of the factory that needs it...

I hope the private sector puts them out of business soon!