Stuff about AA on twitter, facebook; is it quality info?

John Carmack hasn't made any mention lately about
his "fishbowl" spacecraft; info on it that I found on an (admittedly)
dated webpage elsewhere in cyberspace.
The link (I'll have to dig it up) was dated back to 2008,
claiming that AA would launch the thing by the end of 2010.
Did John Carmack scrap the concept?

There's so many sites nowadays: twitter, facebook, youtube, wiki, etc;
you can't keep track of it all, and much of the info is either dated,
hearsay, unreliable, contradictory, etc.

What's this thing I found on twitter about AA recently (the past two months)
that claims an agreement with a paying Russian client has been made to launch him upto & over 100 kilometers altitude sometime in 2012 using an Armadillo Aerospace spacecraft.
WHAT???.....John Carmack hasn't even announced who the test-pilot is going
to be for his first major high-altitude Armadillo spacecraft launches,
and now this?
It doesn't ring right.

It's not entirely unlikely though. The agreement with Space Adventures has been published on the AA web site, and their NASA high altitude work is also well known. I don't think it's that much of a stretch from the NASA stuff to 100km, and finding paying customers to shoot into space, well that's what Space Adventures do. There are likely to be quite a few ifs and buts of course, to do with reliability and safety, but press releases tend to be very optimistic, and tweets tend to be short, so you don't see those . And after all, Virgin Galactic have sold plenty of tickets, and as far as we currently know, they don't even have a working rocket motor...

Why would they say who the test pilot is going to be? Surely they need to send it up unmanned for quite a few flights to that height before any sort of manned launch takes place. What's the point of saying who the pilot would be a year (or more) in advance? It's not like they would need to be trained to fly the craft - the computers do that. All they need to be able to do is free fall parachute jump in case things go bad. And even that may not be necessary depending on the safety system employed by the launcher. In fact test pilot is the wrong name - anyone riding one of these things is just a passenger.

The fishbowl plan I believe has fallen by the wayside - shame because it looks pretty good!

Regarding the Russian, I suspect the beer company made a deal with Space Adventures to buy a ride in 2012 if they have a vehicle ready. If not, the contest winner will probably get a substitute prize.

Space Adventures had a similar deal in 2007: Gillette Canada's "Hitch a Ride to Space" sweepstakes. Gillette probably had some sort of Memorandum of Understanding with Space Adventures, but the contest rules said that if a rocket wasn't ready by July 2010, the winner would get an $80,000 cash prize instead, approximately the price of a suborbital flight.

When advertisers offer these round-the-world trips or fancy cars, the contest rules usually offer similar compensation for winners who can't accept the prize. The Gillette contest also offered a cash substitute for people who were medically disqualified from flying on a rocket.

http://web.archive.org/web/200707152215 ... /rules.php

I am http://twitter.com/wikkit and John is http://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack . We are the only two who post regularly to twitter, everything else should be taken with a grain of salt.

I'm going to make more of an effort to post website updates as well. John is too busy with his day job and no one else wants to do it.

There's also an official facebook group.

Beyond that, there are press releases we have no control over, as well as a lot of folks reappropriating text and images for their own purposes. We're not hard to get in touch with, so anything that isn't attributed well should be looked at with suspicion.