Company makes bid for space travel

Astronauts and passengers can go to space by 2008 if the company making the spaceship gets the funding, company officials said.

Jim Benson, chief executive officer of SpaceDev, said all it needs is $20 million in funding to develop the Dream Chaser, a NASA concept designed in the 1980s but never built, New Scientist reports.

The funding would pay for suborbital flights and an additional $100 million would enable Dream Chaser to take six people to the International Space Station by 2010.

The Dream Chaser is billed as a safer alternative than today's space ships.

It doesn't carry heavy cargo and uses a different fuel than the cryogenic fuel used in Columbia and Discovery. Columbia was destroyed in 2003 because of a problem with the foam insulation needed to utilize the cryogenic fuel.

Dream Chaser will use a mixture of nitrous oxide and rubber as fuel.

SpaceDev has worked with NASA before in looking at different spaceship ideas.

Copyright 2005 by United Press International

Related stories:

Space age engineers to verify control software for future robotic interplanetary missions
An international team of engineers is to develop mission-critical control software for future European robotic space missions, it has been announced.
The M2-F1: 'Look Ma! No Wings!'
(PhysOrg.com) -- The planned retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2010 will bring to a close an era that opened in the Antelope Valley nearly a half century ago.
Research helps to unlock key to Australian plate movement
(PhysOrg.com) -- New UQ volcano research is helping to unlock the mystery surrounding one of the world's most important tectonic events.
Phoenix Mars Lander Confirms Martian Water
(PhysOrg.com) -- Laboratory tests aboard NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander's robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.
NSF awards grant to track 'space weather' in Earth's near-space environment
Global and real-time "space weather" observations of near-Earth space--and the solar storms that can knock out electric power grids--is about to happen for the first time, thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Balance problems? Step into the iShoe
(PhysOrg.com) -- Your grandmother might have little in common with an astronaut, but both could benefit from a new device an MIT graduate student is designing to test balancing ability.
Multithreaded supercomputer seeks software for data-intensive computing
The newest breed of supercomputers have hardware set up not just for speed, but also to better tackle large networks of seemingly random data. And now, a multi-institutional group of researchers has been awarded $4.0 million to develop software for these supercomputers. Applications include anywhere complex webs of information can be found: from internet security and power grid stability to complex biological networks.
Many processors make light work of calculations
Solving complicated calculations has never been easy, but a new European computing grid means researchers can number crunch their data faster than ever before.

News discussion:

Space & Earth science news