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RocketPlane : http://www.rocketplane.com/

News Worthy : http://www.rocketplane.com/press/070329%20-%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20-%20RpK%20&%20MSFC%20Sign%20SAA%20070329.pdf

http://www.rocketplane.com/press/070213%20-%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20-%20RpK%20Meets%20NASA%20Milestone%20Ahead%20of%20Schedule%200207.pdf

And /. worthy : http://www.rocketplane.com/20070108_01.htm

RocketPlane : http://www.rocketplane.com/

News Worthy : http://www.rocketplane.com/press/070329%20-%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20-%20RpK%20&%20MSFC%20Sign%20SAA%20070329.pdf

http://www.rocketplane.com/press/070213%20-%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20-%20RpK%20Meets%20NASA%20Milestone%20Ahead%20of%20Schedule%200207.pdf

And /. worthy : http://www.rocketplane.com/20070108_01.htm

RocketPlane : http://www.rocketplane.com/

News Worthy : http://www.rocketplane.com/press/070329%20-%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20-%20RpK%20&%20MSFC%20Sign%20SAA%20070329.pdf

http://www.rocketplane.com/press/070213%20-%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20-%20RpK%20Meets%20NASA%20Milestone%20Ahead%20of%20Schedule%200207.pdf

And /. worthy : http://www.rocketplane.com/20070108_01.htm

RocketPlane : http://www.rocketplane.com/

News Worthy : http://www.rocketplane.com/press/070329%20-%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20-%20RpK%20&%20MSFC%20Sign%20SAA%20070329.pdf

http://www.rocketplane.com/press/070213%20-%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20-%20RpK%20Meets%20NASA%20Milestone%20Ahead%20of%20Schedule%200207.pdf

And /. worthy : http://www.rocketplane.com/20070108_01.htm

The American people will still have a vibrant space agency, that can focus on exploration, rather than on space launch, which is rapidly becoming a normal, commercial business.

NASA's COTS contract also includes Rocketplane, which also includes demonstrations for ISS support.

The COTS contract was a polite way for Congress to buy some insurance in case Lockheed's Space Shuttle Replacement spins out of cost control in terms of either dollars or time.

Which I think is a great move as a taxpayer, having watched ISS cost much more than planned and delivering much less than expected.

We just need the safest, soonest, and cheapest way to get people and stuff into space. I don't care who does it, so Lockheed and those people at NASA in bed with Lockheed, watch out, you've got competition.

They're working on that. :-)

A similar design (although suborbital) is that of Pioneer Rocketplane. In Pioneer's version, the rocketplane takes almost off empty of rocket fuel and flies to 30,000 feet on conventional jets. It is then fuelled up for rocket flight by an air tanker carrying liquid oxygen propellant. Nifty, eh?

If NASA had invested billions in refurbishing the Space Shuttle, rather than squandering billions on a "Space Plane" that does the same thing as the shuttle, we'd probaly have a cheaper, more effective and more efficient space shuttle today.

True, but you have to go back further. If NASA had developed out the Saturn series further, and had worked on getting truly low-cost access to space (like this, perhaps), we would have a good heavy-lift booster (and the capability to use it to get to and supply the Moon and Mars) and cheap manned access to space. The Shuttle is a disaster in every way except as a technology demonstrator.

Its good to see progress from some of the small launch vehicle companies, especially after the failure of Rotary Rocket.

The actual success here, though, is perhaps not as revolutionary as it first appears. The DC-X had a similarly reusable and relightable rocket even though it was in a more conventional vertical 'rocket ship' design.

Getting cheaper access to space is the key to broader space tourism and proper space industires. Other companies trying this include Pioneer Rocketplane, Armadillo Aerospace, JP Areospace and TGV Rockets to name but a few. There's even a UK outfit, Bristol Spaceplanes,
and the European Space Agency is beginning to think in this direction too, according to CNN.
All the companies are small and desperately in need of money if anyone wants to invest. Its probably less risky than Worldcom!

Another useful resource is the Space Access Society. Indeed they've argued that the whole X-33 mess was in fact Lockheed-Martin protecting their lucrative disposable launcher market by messing up the project. Sadly, NASA seems to have been complicit in this.

Some Links to DC-X:

• NASA's DC-X history page
• Video of DC-X flights
• The DC-X fuselage builder's page on DC-X

The really sad thing is, we'd likely almost be at the operational SSTO stage now, if we hadn't killed DC-X. . ..

Some Links to DC-X:

• NASA's DC-X history page
• Video of DC-X flights
• The DC-X fuselage builder's page on DC-X

The really sad thing is, we'd likely almost be at the operational SSTO stage now, if we hadn't killed DC-X. . ..

Why not just launch a second plane already full of liquid oxygen, the do an in-flight refueling job once they are both airborne? Seems much easier than carrying around all that extra gear to convert oxygen, and the extra fuel to fly around for 3 hours generating it.

Yup, that's the idea behind Mitchell Burnside Clapp's Black Horse rocket plane. It was published in the 1995 Analog. I guess it made too much sense for NASA to even give it a try.

Rather than use LOX, his original plan called for burning JP-5 and highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide. That was the densest combination of propellants he could find, so would take the smallest amount of tankage. And, because it didn't involve any cryogens, it could use lighter non-insulated tanks. Lighter spacecraft == a chance at single stage to orbit. Here's an excerpt from the Analog article:

Mission Profile

The Black Horse mission profile begins with a takeoff from a conventional runway using the two takeoff rocket engines for thrust. The aircraft is loaded with all the fuel it needs for the climb from the tanker to orbit. It also has fuel and oxidizer aboard sufficient for 15 minutes of atmospheric flight. The total weight of the vehicle at takeoff is about 50,000 pounds, but by the time it achieves tanker rendezvous at 43,000 feet and 0.85 Mach number its weight has dropped to about 38,000 pounds. When the aircraft meets the tanker it takes on about 147,000 pounds of hydrogen peroxide. It then disconnects from the tanker and climbs to space. As it inserts into orbit, its weight has dropped to about 16,500 pounds. After performing its orbital mission, the aircraft reenters and then glides to a normal landing at a runway.

Because off-the-shelf rocket engines that use H2O2 are few and far between, he later changed his plans to use LOX. This would mean more changes in the tanker, but would avoid using unproven engines.

Clapp eventually founded a company to develop the concept, Pioneer Rocketplane, but I haven't heard much from it lately. That's too bad. It was (is) a great concept.
--

Seriously, a former USAF captain proposed a hybrid air-breathing vehicle which would be fueled with LOX once in the air by a modified KC-135 at least 7 years ago.

The guy who came up with the idea has since left the USAF and founded a company solely for the purpose of commercializing the concept.

The primary difference between the Black Horse concept and the one proposed in this article is that it wouldn't take three hours for a Black Horse-type aircraft to collect the LOX necessary to fire its rocket motor(s). They'd take on the LOX from the KC-135 while airborne in presumably less than three hours.

In addition to the private ventures mentioned, here are some others:

CFFC
JP Aerospace
Microcosm
Pioneer Rocketplane

It's a good idea, but it has problems. You're severely restricted in the size you can make the spacecraft by all sorts of things. You've got to be able to support the fully-fuelled spacecraft on top of an aircraft not originally designed for that, which means extensive modifications. Look at how much trouble NASA had to go to with the Shuttle transporter aircraft, and the Shuttle rides empty. As well as structure, that impacts takeoff speeds and runway lengths. Note also that tthe maximum takeoff weight of aircraft such as the 747 is far more than the maximum landing weight -- if they have to abort early in the flight then they normally have to dump lots of fuel. That's tricky if the weight is in a spacecraft.

There are also operational problems. It takes time and special equipment to mount the spacecraft on top of the carrier aircraft, which means expense. You've also got to be careful not to land the spacecraft anywhere that the carrier can't fly out of.

If you possibly can fly SSTO -- even with a very small payload -- then you're probably better off to do that than to use a piggyback carrier aircraft. See however Len Cormier's Space Van concept, which looks quite interesting.

Other alternatives for a 0th stage include KellySpace's concept for using a 747 to tow a spacecraft (already tested by towing a jet fighter), and Pioneer Rocketplane's concept of the spacecraft and a tanker taking off seperately (possibly from different locations) and doing aerial refuelling.

Both these concepts have advantages over a piggyback arrangement, through reducing the loading on the 0th stage aircraft's structure. I think the Pioneer proposal is the best. It allows a lightly-loaded spacecraft to take off from almost any commercial runway where the payload is, while the tanker takes off from a longer strip possibly hundreds of miles away. The undercarriage of the spacecraft doesn't have to carry the fully fuelled weight (giving a weight saving) and the wings only have to be big enough to carry the fully-fuelled vehicle when travelling at 500+ mph, not when at a 100 - 150 mph takeoff speed, for a huge weight saving.

Pioneer have done detailed design of their intitial aircraft, right down to the point of getting fixed price quotes from the likes of Boeing to actually build it. What they haven't been able to organise is the funding. I don't think anyone seriously doubts that their idea will work, the question is whether an investor will make money in the current environment, especially with Iridium having gone bust and Teledesic cutting back their plans drastically.

One problem for NASA is the current demand for it to launch satellites. It's rocket science, which makes it a difficult and expensive mission. Currently NASA's manned vehicle program includes the Space Shuttle. For interplanetary space travel, NASA needs a new vehicle. Unfortunately this just isn't included in the current budgets. The demand for NASA to assist in sattelite launches and other earth bound tasks with the Space Shuttle is big. This costs NASA money, movey that could be spent elsewhere.

Hopefully some of the other companies that have been mentioned(Cerulean, Pioneer, Kistler) will help lift this burden. The other company mentioned, Kelly, is one that I think has the greatest chance for success. Their website demonstrates their towing concept. This has many great advantages over traditional launch methods. For one, the craft can carry a payload approximately 7 times greater than one carried in a rocket. The cost to get that same payload up in the air with the 747 isn't that expensive either. Kelly has realistic goals to be flying their first craft in a few years.(There are three crafts, each becoming progressivly larger.) I only glanced at the website, but I believe it fails to mention that this is a proven concept. They successfully modeled a test and then actually had several test flights. A C-141 towed an F-106. I was fortunate enough to see a video of this. It was pretty impressive.

Wigs
--Why do you press harder on a remote-control when you know the battery is dead?

Our space agency has become an outdated dinosaur, capable only of ponderous movement, when it isn't mired in the swamp of bureaucracy. A number of up and coming private companies (including, but not limited to Cerulean, Pioneer, Kistler, and Kelly) are working on inexpensive launch systems. One or more is certain to manage it in the next few years.

Once we have this cheap access to space, there are any number of Entrepeneurs waiting to exploit it. Most well known is Bigelow, but there are others.

Space, and our activities therein are popular with a lot of people. The growth of such private organizations as Permanent, The Mars Society, and Artemis is strong evidence of this.

NASA may not be prepared to go fetch some rocks from Mars anytime soon, but they may find others already there when they do.

Or Pioneer Rocketplane, Kistler, Kelly, and others, for that matter. But the key word here is equal capabilities: AFAIK, none of the aforementioned projects envision 25 tons to LEO with 7 people aboard...

Not that I would mind missions to be redesigned to use a smaller payload/crew capacity, maybe with multiple launches.

Linear Aerospike engines (what the X-33 will use). Basically they optimize rocket performance for any given altitude, making for a far more efficient launch, and enabling Single-Stage-To-Orbit (SSTO) vehicles that are lighter and smaller.

Aerial Rocket Refueling. Also known as "Black Horse"Technology which is far crazier than the aerospike and far less safe, but it'll probably be cheaper if it gets off the ground (pun not intended).

Alternative SSTOs like that rotor-rocket (the name of the company escapes me) and the McDonnel Douglas (I guess Boeing now) Delta Clipper.

ICBMs... didn't the Russians recently launched a LEO off a damn silo? ;-)....

Maglevs are cool, but IMHO rail-guns will be a lot more useful for what the Army *really* wants them for: high-speed anti-armor projectiles, as in tank canons... guess with those Lithium Polymer batteries, they might be able to pull that off ;-)...

He got as far as building prototypes before NASA announced the advent of the Space Transportation System, aka the space shuttle. It would make space flight so cheap and easy that all other launchers would be obsolete, they claimed. They told the giants of aerospace to stop building rockets that wouldn't be needed. The space shuttle would take care of all our launch needs.

Garys investors pulled out. His contracts disappeared. He learned the folly of trying to compete with the U S Gov't. They have the money, they control the industry.

As it turned out, the space shuttle was a huge failure. Instead of costing $100 per pound to orbit, it cost $10,000 per pound. Far from being the least expensive launcher, it was the most expensive ever. Once again, the STS proved that bureaucracy and efficiency do not mix. How often do you hear someone exclaim how clever and efficient a government agency is?

And, tragically, not the safest either. After Challenger, the shuttle was grounded, for a long, long time. The US launch industry was crippled. The Aerospace giants hurried to restart production of their more traditional launchers. The innovative start-ups had long since gone away.

Eventually, people started to think innovatively about cheap space flight again. Gary started a new company. Others, such as Mitchell Burnside Clapp and Walt Kistler did likewise. Lots of new companies started springing up, each determined to lower the cost of space launch; to make it cheaper, or safer, or both.

What would the world be like today if NASA hadn't crushed the entrepreneurs of yesteryear? Would one of them have succeeded? Might we have commercial launches at reasonable prices?

And now, NASA will do it again. Would you invest in a start-up company if you knew that it's competitor was subsidized by the government, or that it's closest competitor was a large government agency with a 10+ G$ budget?

I am not, as you see, a big believer in monopolies. Especially government monopolies. I believe that competition breeds innovation, and that people who work hard and take risks deserved the fruits of their labor.

I'm not knocking NASA. There are certain research areas that are so fundamental that they aren't commercializable in the near term. There are some areas too speculative for investor money. I don't think it's unreasonable for the government to spend my tax dollars persuing these areas, and NASA and the NSF serve these roles. Heck, even the once-and-current ARPA does the same.

But it is not the government's place to compete with industry! Again, how often do you hear someone exclaim how clever and efficient a government agency is?

Another story: A man named Rand Simberg also had a dream. If he couldn't bring spaceflight to the masses, well, he could simulate it for 30 seconds at a time. He bought a jet, outfitted it for zero-g flight, and started the only company in the US devoted to selling zero-g experiences. He called it Interglobal Space Lines, Inc.

When Ron Howard was making the film Apollo 13, Rand knew that this could be a big break. Howard wanted the film to be as realistic as possible, and planned to shoot many of the sequences in actual weightless conditions. This would be a big boost for Interglobal, since they were the only company poised to offer this service.

But before a deal was struck, NASA offered to let Howard use their KC-135 "Vomit Comet" gratis. Think about this a minute. Why? For what justification was my tax dollars (duly allocated for research by Congress) spent to subsidize Universal Pictures? Why was Simberg, who staked his whole life out trying to provide a unique service, shafted by his own government?

I'll tell you: because bureacracies like NASA are unthinking, inefficient and, well, bureaucratic! Far from fostering innovation, commercializing NASA will only serve to stifle it! Let NASA focus on research, on science, not on the operation of launch services.

I wonder if man will walk on the moon in my lifetime.

The Hilton space hotel proposal is unworkable with the current state NASA is in. They want to take space shuttle external tanks (which currently burn up on reentry right after launch) and give them an extra boost to orbit and then assemble the tanks into a space station. Problem is, shuttle tanks are not designed to, and will not, last in space for an extended period of time. People have been pointing out how NASA is resisting change, and this proposal will require NASA to radically change the way the tanks are built. The new tanks will most likely cost more and be heavier, which will mean the Shuttle will have its payload capacity reduced. Besides, the folks who originally proposed this idea had a statement up on their website for a while that said something to the effect of "We really don't know what we're talking about."

What we really should be doing is funding the innovative, low-cost launch vehicles being proposed by companies like , Bristol Spaceplanes, and Pioneer Rocketplane, among others. Many of these companies have workable designs if not actual prototypes and their designs are superior to existing launch vehicles. Bristol's "Spacebus" design launches an orbiter from a high-altitude supersonic aircraft, carrying 5 tons payload to space for $125,000. Sure beats a Shuttle per-mission cost of $500 million!

Expect delays. Unless NASA cuts off the funding, don't lose hope that they'll get X-33 off the ground eventually and learn something from it. But also don't forget there are other reusable launcher developments in the industry...

• Rotary Rocket Company
• Kelly Space & Technology
• Kistler Aerospace
• Pioneer Rocketplane

• CATS (Cheap Access to Space) Prize
• Experimental Rocket Propulsion Society (Silicon Valley)
• JP Aerospace (Sacramento)