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The Rutan SpaceShipOne Revealed
smartalix writes "Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, announced that they have been developing a commercial manned space program in secret for the past two years. The system consists of a carrier vehicle called the White Knight and a piggyback (actually underslung) orbital spaceplane called SpaceShipOne. My money is on this effort capturing the X Prize." Well, it's pretty, whatever it is. Space.com has a story with pictures for those of you who weren't quick enough to hit scaled.com before it melted.
Only one measly picture, but better than nothing for the impatient..
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http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=8
You are also confused. Escape velocity is the velocity at which an object with no attached propulsion needs to be launched from the surface of Earth in order that the object will never fall back down to the surface due to Earth's gravity. Often explained as the velocity need for an object to reach infinite distance from another object.
It is true that you won't be orbitting at 1mph. However, if you consider the the velocity vector that is perpendicular to the Earth's surface, it is most certainly possible to reach orbit with a vertical velocity of only 1mph. Not fuel-efficient, of course.
We have obviously been eagerly waiting for this unveiling. Nobody has denied that Rutan is the odds-on favorite for the X-Prize, but I take a positive thing away from this unveiling -- I have always contended that being an "airplane guy" is going to hurt Rutan in the X-Prize, and this is definitely a "winged thing". I would have been more concerned if it was just a purely ballistic capsule being air launched. I have little doubt that they will fairly rapidly have successful zoom climbs to somewhat above 100,000', but it is far from the simplest design to go to 350,000'. It is certainly true that complex designs can be made to work with enough talent, experience, testing, and money, which Rutan has all of, but there is plenty of room for things to screw up.
I don't expect that they will make any flights to 100km this year, but I can certainly be proven wrong...
I am quite happy with our current design, and we are committed to following through irrespective of what Rutan does. Even if he makes it, we have a different ecological niche in terms of vehicle capabilities -- our entire launch infrastructure can be towed by a light truck, and launched from anywhere. If he does win the X-Prize before us, we will ditch the monopropellant propulsion system and move to something more cost effective (at the expense of more development time) for the long term. We may be forced to do that anyway, if our peroxide situation doesn't resolve itself.
John Carmack