Gizmorama
October 27, 2010
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Good Morning,
In the third article, find out why and how NASA is mimicking
the power of the sun. Plus, companies are projecting the
price of space tourism to drop in 2011, making the trips more
accessible to those who are not hyper rich.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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Space tourism ticket prices could drop
HOUSTON - Two space tourism companies say the price for a
trip into space could drop from millions of dollars down to
hundreds of thousands by late 2011. A brief trip into space
featuring a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the
earth 62 miles below could be within reach of the merely
well-off and not just the mega-rich, the Houston Chronicle
reported Monday. "Now, the sky is no longer the limit," said
Richard Branson, whose Virgin Group is one the companies
planning to offer commercial suborbital missions late next
year. "We will begin the process of pushing beyond to the
final frontier of space itself." Space Adventures, the
Vienna, Va.-based company that brokered the flights of seven
space tourists to the International Space Station between
2001 and 2009, also plans to offer suborbital tourist
flights. Both companies are expected to offer tickets at
between $100,000 and $200,000, still a steep price for a
flight lasting a few minutes. "There's no magic wand out
there to wave and reduce the cost of space access by a
factor of 10 or 100," said Jeff Foust, a space industry ana-
lyst for the Futron Corp. The big hope in space tourism, he
said, is that once suborbital flights grow in demand ticket
prices will drop. "It's not going to be something where it's
a $99 deal with Southwest," Foust said. "Relative to commer-
cial air travel it will still be expensive. But people spend
tens of thousands of dollars to climb Everest, visit Antarc-
tica or go on African safaris. This price will attract
adventure tourists."
Fossils in amber give clue to India's past
NEW DELHI - A rich collection of insect fossils preserved in
amber in India shows a greater amount of prehistoric biodiv-
ersity than scientists say they expected. German and U.S.
researchers say the 52-million-year-old fossils of bees,
ants, gnats, flies, termites and other insects discovered
in amber deposits in western India reveal a wider range of
insects than India's geological history would suggest,
ScienceNews.org reported Monday. At the time the amber
formed, India was in a period of isolation. The tectonic
plate carrying it had separated from Madagascar about 40
million years earlier, and was just about to collide with
the Asian plate that would eventually give rise to the
Himalayas. Scientists had believed that 40-million-year iso-
lation could have choked off biological diversity in much the
same way Australia's isolation affected its array of wildlife.
But the wide range of species found in the newly discovered
amber suggest continental isolation does not necessarily lead
to limited diversity, they say.
NASA mimics the sun for spacecraft tests
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - NASA says it is replicating the power of
the sun here on Earth -- in Alabama -- to test how satellites
and other hardware will survive in space. Researchers at the
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville are using their
Solar Thermal Test Facility to simulate some of the harshest
conditions of space to find out what extreme temperatures
can do to flight hardware close to the sun, a NASA release
said. The researchers use a two-story tall curved mirror
that beams about 1 million watts per square meter of solar
energy intensity into a vacuum chamber at its focal point,
where units to be tested are placed. Researchers have in-
stalled a liquid nitrogen shroud on the inside of the vacuum
chamber that will allow engineers to chill the vacuum chamber
to freezing cold temperatures like those in deep space.
In the front, the mirrors expose the test object to the heat
of the sun while in the back the nitrogen exposes it to the
coldness of a vacuum. Together they accurately mimic the
conditions of space, allowing scientists to test how their
instruments will perform on actual missions close to the sun.
"It really gives you a good opportunity to understand how
your instrument will perform in the conditions of deep
space," says Jimmy Lee, mission manager for Strofio, a NASA
instrument set for a mission to Mercury. "We're trying to
understand on Earth how our tool will perform thousands of
miles away in radically different conditions," Lee says.
"That's critical for a mission like ours."
Spaceport for tourist flights dedicated
LAS CRUCES, N.M. - A private spaceship intended to carry
tourists into space has touched down at the New Mexico space-
port that will become its home base, company officials said.
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, carried by its mother ship
WhiteKnightTwo, landed on a runway in the southern New Mexico
desert Friday to celebrate the dedication of the runway at
Spaceport America, promoted as the world's first purpose-
built commercial spaceport, SPACE.com reported. A giant
hangar for the two ships and other facilities are under
construction. "I can't wait for our first day of commercial
operations here," British billionaire Sir Richard Branson,
Virgin Galactic's founder, said. "Today is very personal as
our dream becomes more real." While SpaceShipTwo is designed
for tourist flights to suborbital space, Virgin Galactic has
set its sights on orbital travel, too. "Obviously, we want
to move on to orbital after we've got suborbital under our
belts, and maybe even before that," Branson said. Branson
and his family will be the first passengers aboard Space-
ShipTwo when it begins official operations in nine to 18
months, he said.
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