Latex and Laughing Gas

Commercial Spaceflight Becomes Feasable - Finally!

While most of the world saw the recent capture of the Ansari X Prize by Paul Allen's Mojave Aerospace Ventures as a thirty second report on CNN, there was a wild surge of excitement within the nerderies of the world, those secret, subterranean lairs where the hard-core space geeks congregate and plot not the overthrow of the world, but their escape from it. Why were these nerds all atwitter? It's as simple as rubber and laughing gas.

The biggest block to commercial spaceflight - to all spaceflight, really, commercial and government-sponsored - is the fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well. A tremendous amount of power has to be released and harnessed to push a rocket payload up that steep, steep hill, and that power, traditionally provided in the form of liquid oxygen (an oxidizer) and a hydrogen compound of some kind (the fuel), is expensive. But it is also relatively safe. The rocket won't explode - usually - unless the oxidizer and the fuel mix very quickly. You can also shut off the thrust of the rocket by stopping these gasses from mixing within the combustion chamber, something you cannot do with a solid fuel booster, such as the ones that flank the big tank on the Space Shuttle.

Various other propulsion methods have been tried, using a variety of fuels, oxidizers, and elegant technologies. Most have been rejected out of hand by NASA and ESA as too dangerous and untested. Let's face it: government agencies are by their nature conservative, and unless there is a tremendous amount of pressure from above, most won't take the time to develop new technologies unless they absolutely have to - say, when a shuttle blows up.