SPACEFLIGHT REVOLUTION
by David Ashford (Bristol Spaceplanes Limited, UK)
David Ashford is the director of Bristol Spaceplanes Limited, a spaceplane and space tourism consultancy. He graduated from Imperial College, University of London, in aeronautical engineering and spent one year at Princeton, US doing post-graduate research on rocket motor combustion instability. His first job, starting in 1961, was with the Hawker Siddeley Aviation spaceplane design team. He has worked as an aerodynamicist, project engineer or project manager on various aerospace projects, including DC-8, DC-10, Concorde, the Skylark sounding rocket, and various naval missile systems. He co-authored with Patrick Collins the first serious book on space tourism “Your Spaceflight Manual — How You Could Be a Tourist in Space Within Twenty Years” (Headline, 1990).
A revolution in spaceflight is likely soon with the prospect of everyday access to orbit within fifteen years. Costly launch vehicles based on ballistic missiles will be replaced by ‘spaceplanes’, using technology that exists today. In five years' time, a prototype could be built, and with a further ten years of detailed development, the design could approach airliner maturity, reducing the cost of sending people into space some one thousand times to around US$20,000.
Spaceplane development has, in effect, been suppressed by entrenched thinking and short-term vested interests. But the present monopoly of large government space agencies is becoming unsupportable, and the market that understands the very real opportunities for space travel will be reaching critical mass in the near future.
This book examines these issues and shows why space tourism will one day become the single largest business in space, and how astronomy and environmental science will be transformed by low-cost access making possible instruments vastly larger than those of today.
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