My Future Aerospace Company

[HSHARK]

My future goal after graduation is to start an aerospace company that focuses on cheap access to space. The emphasis of the company would be to develop a way to visit space easily for the common man.

This is my career plan.

1st stage(3-5 years)
This first stage would be the most high risk period of the venture. I focus to have a suborbital spaceplane developed during this phase. During the first two years, key technologies such as the air breathing RAM/SCRAM Jets would be built and tested. Meanwhile, another team would build the airframe of the craft. The aim is to have a working prototype by the middle of year 3. Testing would take the majority of the last two/three years. Once the product is finished, my company would start a spaceline under the brand to fly tourists on suborbital trips.

How will the first stage be funded?
It will mainly be funded by savings of me and friends, it would be viewed as an amateur project at first. Also, a few grants and loans can be acquired especially in the later years of this stage.

Second stage (around 10 years?)

Goal is to develop a reusable orbital spaceplane carrying 20+ passengers?

Once the suborbital space tourism program is a success, next round will begin. Since we will now have the experience to build spacecraft, the design process would be streamlined and it would go faster than the first stage. The actual testing phase of the SSTO space plane would only take 3 of 10 years at best. The rest of the time would spent on building additional infrastructure in orbit to host the increasing number of tourists.

3rd Stage

Goals: to build sustainable attractions in space?

Basically all things such as moon base, asteroid mining and space hotels...

[Username]

Doesn't sound very realistic.

[HSHARK]

Actually there are videos of many amateur rocket builders launching their own rockets on YouTube so I'll say it's realistic

[HSHARK]

(10-07-2016 01:36 AM)Username Wrote:  Doesn't sound very realistic.

Please read this web site

Space Tourism Outlook

So this is the outlook for space tourism in the future.

As you can see, around 50-60% of the people in developed countries would like to travel to space if price is reasonable. Thus, this project will have a big market if it succeeds in bringing down the costs.

[Username]

Why are all the sources from the nineties?

[brainiac3397]

Just so you know you'll be competing with government agencies and well-funded corporations that hire PhD scientists and engineers to plan things out.

You'd be better off picking a small piece of the tech to focus on, improve, then present to a bigger company and hope they like it enough to buy it from you(or give you money to open a fabrication plant so you can become a subcontractor). How small? Well there are companies that are subcontracted to make the hand grips for M16 rifles. That's it. Just the grips and nothing else.

The aerospace industry requires absolute precision and very accurate science. Such things also require a ton of money to create and guarantee. You're only option is to focus on improving a tiny part of the greater project or do stuff that'll give you experience that'll make you an attractive employee. Otherwise, amateur rocket building is pretty much a hobby. Building a small rocket is one thing, building an entire suborbital launch system is a whole other story.

[patrickk]

So basically tourism in space? Hurmm quite interesting. So maybe it could be hotel, shop, etc, just like in the Elysium movie

[HSHARK]

Patrickk: yes, in the long term. You can read the feasibility studies done by some other scientists at this website. spacefuture.com