Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Shuttle has Successful Test Flight
spacecomputer writes "First test flight of scaled-down version of Hope-X is a success! They have additional test flights in the coming week, but have no funding to proceed beyond the test stage."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
It's nice to see that somebody's doing better than the russians.
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
Are they crazy?!? Everyone knows wings don't work in a vacuum.
They want to build a tall, manly, rocket; like the Saturn V. That works in space, I know, I've seen that film what has got Tom Hanks in it.
It's just of matter of time before low cost, high quality shuttles with great fuel economy become available. This is just the kick in the pants that the American shuttle industry needs to start being innovative.
Yet Another Web Site
Okey, when are they going to make the one for Dr. Evil, as evidently they can make one for Mini Me?
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
I just hope this doesn't somehow involve space tentacles.
I seem to recall hearing that Russia was having big financial problems with their space program, and that if they didn't scrape up funding in some form, that it may adversely impact the long term construction plans for the ISS over the next few years.
Would the full size final version of this thinger be able to ferry big structural pieces or modules, in place of the Russian rockets? I get the impression that the it would be too small, which would suck.
The angel in the oatmeal.
Most of the manned mission to space has just resulted into exploring curiosity without any real scientific research (certainly not worth the cost).
It was ego that resulted in mission to moon. It was miscalculation of cost that resulted into US space shuttle (they thought that the reusability of space shuttle boosters will make it cheaper than traditional rockets). No wonder, during the time, space shuttle was developed, Europians overtook US in launching commercial satellites. Russian space shuttle Buran is a failure but their traditional rocket business is successful. ISS hasn't produced anything scientifically or technologically to justify the cost. The only scientific advantage of US shuttle program could be successful launch and subsequent repair/upgrade of Hubble space telescope. Excluding this, the manned space mission have been mostly wastage of public money.
With development costs likely to be astronomical, however, Japanese space officials are hoping to develop the vehicle in conjunction with their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere.
Japan previously worked on developing a space shuttle dubbed the Hope, but the project was frozen due to a lack of funds and other difficulties.
Japan has been trying 'government by construction' for years trying to revitalize their economy and have achieved the industrialized world's biggest national debt. So where are they getting the money for a space program?
Seriously, Japan just built an 11 mile long tunnel under Tokyo Bay in '97 that cost almost 11 billion dollars (1.44 trillion yen), yet no one uses it. Why? The toll is about $50. Does Japan really need a space program?
I'm not from Japan and I don't pretend to be infallible - these are my thoughts on the subject. If you live in Japan, what do you think? Also, there was a good article on Tokyo in last month's National Geographic, check it out in print if you can.
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
I seem to remember a series of documentaries from the 1950's or so, detailing Japan's experiments with rocketry. As I recall, the rockets inevitably crashed and caused a beast that had slept for centuries to awaken and wreak havoc on the poor locals, who were often so distrought that they failed to make their mouths sync up with their screams of terror. Must we repeat this tragedy? I think we've all had just about enough Raymond Burr.
So this thing basically looks like Space Shuttle. If they were merely trying to copy the design, why not buy the good ole' US shuttle? Or a Russian model?
Shouldn't they be trying something different?
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
Creativity killed the cat? That's curious.
My deviantArt site
The reason these things all wind up looking the same is simple: Math.
In doing similar tasks, the same engineering problems present themselves. You have similar speeds, loads, thermal ranges, etc., that the device has to deal with. The delta wing shape is necessary for the ultra-high speeds during re-entry. The black and white color scheme is necessary for removing heat. The skin has to be ceramic because it deals with heat the best. You need big doors that open to get cargo in & out. The engine goes at the back, the people at the front, and pretty soon it looks quite similar to the Russian and American shuttles.
Unrelated animals who have similar environments look similar. Unrelated plants evolve to have similar features when they exist in similar niches.
The situation dictates the result.
The space shuttle has been a terrible disappointment in that its capacity is far lower than had been initially planned while its cost per pound of payload is far higher than had been predicted. Part of that is due to the fact that, regardless of its payload, it must be manned. Building a craft to support humans in space with adequate safety margins and backup equipment is incredibly expensive both in weight and cost. If we had to rely on the space shuttle to launch communications satellites into orbit, we would still be running trans-Atlantic cables for our communications needs.
I read, a long time ago, that the US shuttle's design incorporates features to serve the USAF, or reasonable equivalent. The story, as I read it, was that NASA didn't think it could get the funding to build the shuttle if it didn't have allies inside the Beltway. Elements in the Defense department agreed to endorse the shuttle, provided they got input into its design. The large size of the shuttle was given as one of those compromises. The suggestion was that if NASA had been allowed to build a shuttle without design compromises, it would have been more successful.
I'd welcome knowledgeable comments on this story. Sorry, I can't remember where I read it.
As it turned out, the US military doesn't use the shuttle, do they? Don't they use the old one-shot rockets?
Why does the shuttle have to be so big? Okay, Hubble, and the various ISS modules more or less fill the shuttle bay. But there have been something like 100 shuttle missions so far, how many of those missions had payloads that fully filled the cargo bay? They could all have been launched with big one-shot rockets, couldn't they? The 197?s Skylab was launched by a surplus Saturn V wasn't it?
The Hubble repair missions could have been mounted from a more modestly sized shuttle, couldn't they?
I read, something interesting back during the first years of Hubble's deployment, back before its optics were corrected, and everything was out of focus. NASA cut corners. They tested all the pieces separately, on the ground. But they didn't test the fully assembled telescope on the ground. I read that they considered doing so, but it required the construstion of a test jig. The test jig would have been expensive, and the decision was made to gamble.
The story was that the US already possessed a test jig suitable for testing large space telescopes. But NASA couldn't use it, because it was top secret, because it was used to test the large telescopes of top secret spy satellites, which were focussed on the Earth.
Can anyone debunk this story? If true, those satellites must have been launched by one-shot rockets.
Yeah. The ISS has a Soyuz docked to it, to serve as a lifeboat, if the ISS suffers a disastrous failure. The Soyuz can fit three spacesuits, so when the shuttle leaves they only leave three scientists aboard the shuttle at any one time.
Well, the Soyuz isn't left there permanently. They loft a new one every six months or so. So, if the Russians pack up their Space program either the ISS inhabitants have to get left there with no lifeboat, or a substitute has to be designed.
How difficult would designing a return module be? It wouldn't have to be as robust or sophisticated as a Soyuz, Apollo or Gemini, if its sole purpose was to serve as a lifeboat. It could be brought to the ISS by a shuttle, so it wouldn't need to control the one shot rocket that launched it. And, it wouldn't require the endurance of an Apollo or Soyuz. Its mission would last less than an hour or two. It would only have to endure long enough to bring the ISS researchers back to Earth.
unfortunatly, Nixon got ahold of NASA and started gutting it due to his hatred of anything dealing with Kennedy. The current shuttle is Nixon's on going legacy. The X-34 should be replacing it, but Bush killed it off. I suspect though that it was not really killed, but diverted to the new space command. The truley sad part is the X-34 had the promise to truely lower the cost of getting to space.
Max Faget was the early and leading proponent of a blunt "capsule" instead of a winged reentry vehicle as a cost-effective solution to the reentry problem. His unique contribution was to have the "capsule" (Tom Wolfe tells us that astronauts hated that word -- they preferred "spacecraft", although capsule distinguishes the thing from lifting-body or winged-reentry vehicle) reenter ass-backwards -- the Air Force Corona/Discoverer capsule reentered face forward.
An axi-symmetric capsule is zero lift, meaning you have little control over where it lands once you fire the retro rockets, and the G-forces can get quite high. You can give a capule a small amount of lift by shifting its center of gravity by rearranging stuff inside, reducing the G's a little bit and giving some control over where you land by doing a roll in the direction you want to head, all without sacrificing the minimal heat shielding requirement compared to a winged reentry vehicle. Gemini, Apollo, and Soyuz use this trick.
The Faget straight-wing Shuttle was supposed to reenter belly first. His critics complained that straight-wing hypersonic vehicles aren't the most stable: Chuck Yeager's famous recovery of the X-1B going end or end and Mike Adam's fatal reentry in the X-15. What Faget explains is that by reentering belly first (think of it as angle of attack of 90 degrees -- in a full stall if you weren't going hypersonic), his straight winged shuttle works just like a capsule -- the belly of the Shuttle and the underside of the wing are like a cookie cutter applied to the underside of a traditional capsule. He argues that it is perfectly stable and works just like proven capsules.
The trick is that as you come out of reentry, you have to do this kind of stall recovery maneuver descending from 80,000 to 60,000 feet and start flying like a conventional glider or airplane. This stomach-dropping transition maneuver, the higher G-load of a capsule style reentry, the limited choice of a landing spot compared to a delta wing Shuttle (the Defense department did not want to make emergency landings in Communist China), all conspired to shelve the straight-wing shuttle. The consequence of going with the delta wing, however, was much higher heat shielding requirements for which the infamous tiles were the answer, and now you know THE REST OF THE STORY.
1. it's not a shuttle
2. it can't go even remotely near space
At best, it can be described as a test plane, but calling it a space shuttle is a little much. Okay, it's ridiculous.
Anyone else notice that this is a JET POWERED vehicle? Laddy da, the Japanese have built an unmanned plane. Whoopee!
Maybe they could put a camera on it and have it join our other unmanned recon planes above Afghanistan and Iraq.
Sorry, mod me down but I am throuroughly unimpressed.