X Cup Expo

Several thousand space enthusiasts swarmed to the city's airport for a glimpse of a future in which you might just as easily book a rocket to space as you would a plane to Las Vegas.

The final day of X Prize Cup Week in New Mexico on Sunday drew a throng of would-be astronauts, entrepreneurs and curiosity seekers. They milled about the wind-swept airport grounds transformed for the afternoon into a Tomorrowland-type theme park.

The organizers' goals were to show off what clever things entrepreneurs are doing to get into space, and to promote the X Prize Cup, a weeklong competition scheduled to begin in southern New Mexico next year. The contest will include a rocket race that backers pitch as a
NASCAR event in three dimensions.

Read more here, here, and here.

That's my old home town. I have some photos that a friend of mine back home sent me of Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace booth.

The friend in question is one I've known for years. He works in the Flight Safety group at White Sands Missile Range. He's critical of the small companies that are coming out with X Prize/Cup and such entries. He feels that all of them are pretty fscking clueless when it comes to safety. Don't get me wrong. He emphateically believes that commercial space that flies on airliner style operations is the future. The problem is that the companies assume that they are already at that level of knowledge for their rockets. Indeed, none of the existing rockets ever acquired that sort knowledge base from what I recall.

The fact of the matter is that they're not. Not even close. None of them go through what Boeing does to validate the safety of Boeing's aircraft. If they did, he'd feel a lot less worried about the safety of what they are doing. The small rocket companies are pointing back to the early years of flight in their discussions. "Back then they didn't have to..." The problem is that the country, esp around the test ranges, is a lot fuller when it comes to people. We're a country of 300 million now, not less than 100 million. The land area of the US hasn't exactly grown either three fold. The population surrounding the missile range in NM is close to 500k.

So some accomodations with safety are going to be have to be made, like it or not, until such time as their rocket makes it through the same standards are met as for aircraft. For teh time being, that does mean a 'Flight Termination Package'.

Yes, that means exactly what you'd expect.

The couple pictures sent to me are in the next post.