nuclear-news

A plan to ‘economically’ send ‘ordinary citizens’ into space

• Will these rockets be powered by plutonium? And if so, what happens if there’s an accident, and one plunges into  a city?
• LANL engineer looks for partners for cheap space flight, LA Monitor, By Tris DeRoma, October 2, 2017

Joseph Archer wants to start a company to take ordinary citizens into space With all the millions of dollars spent on space tourism today, the Los Alamos National Laboratory radiological safety employee has a plan to do it more efficiently, and cheaper.

His first step is to get a group of investors together who are genuinely enthusiastic and interested in the idea…..The project will involve launching a one-ton payload into space within a year of the company’s formation. He estimates he could do it for an amount between $200,000-$600,000.

“As a group of  retired professional and technical types, there is little doubt that we can accomplish such a modest objective,” he said in his statement……..

In his argument, he talks a lot about how the Germans were able to accomplish much with little when they built the V-2 rocket in World War II.

One Los Alamos resident, Alan Hack, said in a letter to the Los Alamos Monitor that there was a huge difference between the wartime German program and what’s happening today in civilian space travel.

“Comparing costs to manufacture the V-1 ignores that it was built by slave labor from the captured countries as the Nazi regime did not have enough German labor to meet the huge demands for war production. Your manned rocket cannot be as cheap as you estimate,” Hack said…..http://www.lamonitor.com/content/lanl-engineer-looks-partners-cheap-space-flight

October 4, 2017 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, USA