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The Billionaire Space Race Is Making Life Difficult for Airlines
On Feb. 6, Elon Musk's SpaceX launched its largest rocket into the blue Florida sky. Onboard was "Starman," a dummy strapped into the billionaire's cherry red Tesla roadster. Minutes later, fans cheered as Musk topped himself by nailing a simultaneous landing of the Falcon Heavy's boosters. It was arguably a turning point for the commercial space age.
Airlines were somewhat less thrilled. On that day, 563 flights were delayed and 62 extra miles added to flights in the southeast region of the U.S., according to Federal Aviation Administration data released Tuesday by the Air Line Pilots Association, or ALPA.
America's airspace is a finite resource, and the growth of commercial launches has U.S. airlines worried. Whenever Musk or one of his rivals sends up a spacecraft, the carriers which operate closer to the ground must avoid large swaths of territory and incur sizable expenses.
Most of the commercial activity to date has been focused on Cape Canaveral, the Air Force post on Florida's Atlantic coast, where Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin LLC base their stellar operations. It is one of 22 active U.S. launch sites, and a number of other locales—including Brownsville, Texas; Watkins, Colorado; and Camden County, Georgia—are pursuing new spaceport ventures to capitalize on commercial space activity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @06:50AM (6 children)
Back in the day, Americans weren't so risk-adverse. The closed airspace was likely much smaller.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @11:29AM (4 children)
Wrong. There was a ton of opposition: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moondoggle-the-forgotten-opposition-to-the-apollo-program/262254/ [theatlantic.com]
The space program was just another pork dispensary. No scientific or military gains were achieved during its pursuit or as a result from it. It was Keneddy's method to stop the Vietnam war while keeping the money flowing to Lockheed Martin and co. If you carefully go through every industrial or technological development associated with the space program, you'll be disappointed to discover they were all misattributed deliberately by the media and politicians to justify the pork.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @12:54PM (2 children)
What about Tang and Velcro (the products, not the rap group)?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:07PM
They close air corridors too? (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @09:55PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_(drink) [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook-and-loop_fastener [wikipedia.org]
Nothing means nothing. I shit you not, anything and everything you've been told was thanks to the space program is absolute and total bullshit. Look it up. Teflon... Lasers... Microwave... Not a god damn thing. Hell, even that idiotic space pen came from a third party that just had a random idea on creating a more resilient pen and figured it will work in space so they contacted NASA: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/ [scientificamerican.com]
And yes, the punch line still holds. The Russians did in did just ended up using pencils.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 01 2018, @10:14PM
380 kg of lunar rock was retrieved from those missions. I won't claim it's worth ~120-150 billion USD in today's dollars though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @03:11PM
I doubt it is currently an issue. Just people looking for something to complain about.