Is commercial space flight all a "scram"

I watched the first space shuttle launch in 1981 (Columbia). I was old enough to understand it's significance and I was mesmerised by the promise it held for space flight. While I was a kid I had read up about the Apollo missions and wanted to become an astronaut when I grew up. The shuttle seemed to make this dream more of a reality.


In 1986 I was shocked by the pictures of the Challenger disaster in the newspapers while I cycled on my way to school (oops, just given my age away).
Then in 2003, just over 20 years after it's maiden voyage, Columbia disintegrated during re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.

The dream of easy and accessible space travel was shattered. Reality bites!

So when Space-Ship-One won the Ansari X-Prise in 2004 most of us got our hopes up again. However, I suspect we are being over ambitious and hopeful. A few things tell me that we are a long way off from any real commercial space travel for several decades to come. One is this article on scram-jet technology. It's a pretty big jump going from Mach 3 to Mach 25, especially considering E= 1/2 mv^2. So that's nearly 70 times more energy required - so your fuel tank needs to be nearly two orders of magnitude larger. It's a bit like jumping from driving a motorbike scooter up to a bus. Now we are five years down the line and still the second generation commercial space flight ship is not visible.

The other thing that makes me think we're a long way off is that NASA is dropping the flight wing concept for a rocket design replacement for their space shuttles (See Ares 1). There is some cool animation with rocking beats on this video clip of the Orion capsule. Nasa currently plans to go to the moon by 2020.

The third way is to defy gravity. Boeing reportedly threw some cash at this as a research concept a while ago, but other sources say they deny it. This hype is all based on work by a Russian called Podkletnov who documented an effect called "gravitational force shielding." In this last link I just love the statement that "once you start talking about UFOs and Nazi antigravity you're not far from hidden tunnels under the White House full of lizard-men disguised as Freemasons." Classic Sci-Fi humour stuff :). As it is anti-gravity seems to be a bit of an "X-file". This is perfect
for Sci-Fi - something that is just not possible now - makes for a great breakthrough story.

Am I a skeptic? No, I am a realist. It may only be a few hundred kilometers between us and that magical place in space - but face it, gravity sucks, man!

This doesn't mean we can't write about it. Writing liberates the mind - anything is possible. As someone once told me "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story."