Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

My blog is many things because I have so many varying interest.  One minute you'll hear me rant against politicians, the next you'll hear me discussing science and technology.  This is a discovery/invention blog where my excitement for space exploration can be partly shown.  The big news is that Virgin Galactic has unveiled SpaceShipTwo, which is the much anticipated more or less first ever publicly available ship for space tourism.

I'm not sure about the practicality of what they intend though.  Currently, the design only allows for 4 minutes of weightlessness in space.  Considering the price tag of $200k/flight one way, this prevents ordinary people from partaking in this journey and only the elite of society can live a partial dream of moving to space, but it seems only novel.  I mean, I don't think it's going to be like a cruise ship and the size is too small to really be able to do much. 

Part of me believes that this situation is similar to the old, first Creative MP3 player when it came out.  Clunky, fat, and limited in terms of portability and battery life, the Creative player lost quickly to the iPod, which had a far better interface and more practicality.  In other words, SpaceShipTwo and Virgin Galactic might be the first to pioneer the concepts of space tourism in practice, but someone else is certainly going to do better. 

We need to think of practical application for this such as moving from destination to destination.  At the moment, there aren't obviously a lot of "space ports" around.  So are people expected just to take flight and come back to the same landing spot?  I mean, I would imagine a great application for this would've been to figure out how to cross the Pacific/Atlantic faster.  But again you need those space ports placed around the world to make that application practical.

Also, the 4 minute mark of weightlessness seems like a low standard.  While you can say that it's an achievement, I consider $200k/4 minutes to be quite the ripoff for nothing more than an expensive thrill.  If I were these guys, I'd also be thinking of building commercial space stations that you can refuel.  Not that clunker ISS, but I'm talking something elegant, allowing people to travel and conduct business or get away from earthbound life. 

At any rate, I congratulate them on their move towards getting us off the planet.  But also, I just hope that these people start setting the bar higher.