The MOST PEOPLE ON LINE AT THIS SITE EVER 12...

Hello everyone. I see you are alarmed by the general publics complete lack of interest in commercial space travel. I think the problem is not so bad as you imagine. In the UK many people are delighted that Starchaser are representing us in a race of this importance since we chocked out of the national space race in 1971. Also, people like me have been popping in to observe your conversations with interest for some time. Besides, Britain built the Concorde of which 6 are sitting around, any of our American brothers fancy sticking a rocket in the fuselage for a last hurrah? It must make life easier to launch from 60,000' already at mach 2!

Well if you bolted the nose cone in place (to save weight) and filled the fuselage with methane and lox tanks... and added three RL-10's.... just maybe...

na that would be a desecration I think.

A desecration! You should see the one I go past to get to work every day. It is left completely in the open at its home of Filton, Bristol. I have already seen the way being left outside all winter has almost destroyed all the work The Jet Age Museum put into their Gloster Meteor here. Back onto subject though, does anybody agree that NASA may have slowed spaced development by its all or nothing mentality? In the early days it was a sh1t or bust "shoot for the moon" program to beat the Reds. This got people killed in ways that could and should have been avoided. Since the end of Apollo, they have been painfully slow, inefficient, I would argue misguided and damn unlucky with the two shuttle accidents. Were the Russians perhaps heading in the right direction with a reliable launcher and the Mir project to gain long flight time experience? I know that they have suffered losses but I think we must expect to in order to push on with this.

Nasa diversified a lot. Once manned flight is privatised I think Nasa should go back to the abstract research, because nobody else can afford it and it really is a plus.

Throught the 60's Nasa had one program at a time. Now it has one program for every dollar.

The bitsy space station is a well known nonsense. We need the shuttle to build the space station and the shuttle needs the space station to have something to do.

Cargo flights and manned flights should never have been mixed this early in the game. That is finally being rectified.

18 people on!

is it just me or is this site getting busier?

Is it getting busier or are we simply dossing around at work? The universe is a mysterious place...

definitely feels like it's getting busier.

I can only speak for myself, I'm definately "dossing around at work." Though the only silver lining to the crap work I'm doing at the moment is that it's not important enough for my boss to check on my progress, and so I can spend lot's of time on the forum and theorising about the possibilities of space travel.

I have been to the x-prize website lots of times, but I only just noticed the messageboard button at the top of the page last night. So maybe thats why...

Does anyone know how many hits/month the main site gets? I cannot get my head around the lack of people on this board. I've run forums over the years, and even for small game mods I've easily exceeded the number of posts, users, and online users than this board in mere months. If these figures translate to the wider world, space tourism really is doomed.

I agree, It is quite scary how there are not that many people on the forum, certainly compared to many others. You do have to remember though that this is a very specific site. Many other forums are much less specific and are generally affiliated to well known organisations, ie ones that people are more likely to know than the Ansari X-prize foundation. Hopefully the site will take off when one of the teams reaches space (no pun intended ).

I guess I'm being a bit unfair. How many members of the public care about research in semiconductors or biotech? Multi-billion dollar industries, but nobody gives a damn until that translates into end products and services. The same is true for space travel, that even with an XPrize it's never going to be a grass roots movement. Investors need to have the insight into its potential on the public's behalf.

*chucles* something tells me many of the people at this forum would be interested in those things as well

but yes, most people don't care and shouldn't be expected to

I can give you the statistics of the xprize blog http://x-prize.blogspot.com/

http://www.nedstatbasic.net/s?tab=1&link=1&id=2896923

It's also lower than I expected to be on this moment... I hoped it would be a lot higher right now.. but it isn't.. (it's ranked on the first page of google etc.. if you search for "x prize".. and as first item if you search for "x prize news" + other sites link to it, even Alan Boyle from MSNBC often links to the blog http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4839716/

Maybe the general public.. just doesn't read this stuff.. so only already space fans.. are getting the news right now.

People aren't online b/c you don't have to be online in order to browse, only to post. There are more online than what appears. Duh!