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.

Comments

Re:In Secret?

[foolish]

Did you miss the fact these ARE full scale?

Essentially Rutan is going 'Look at what I built, we're going to launch this for the X-Prize and none of you can HOPE to catch up'

The only things they have left are flight tests with the rocket suite. The White Knight is working and has flown some test flights... It's the SS1 that need some flight time before the X-Prize attempt.

It'll be interesting to see what XCor does in response to this.

Capabilities of space craft...

[CommieLib]

Between the article and the qualifications of the X-Prize, we can cobble together what the minimum performance levels of this craft are:

From the XPrize site:

• able to carry three people to 100 kilometers (62.5 miles)
• Returns safely to Earth (duh)
• Repeats the launch with the same ship within 2 weeks

While the article notes a higher performance level:

a three-person single-stage fully reusable spaceship up to 112 miles (180 kilometers), giving those onboard some five minutes of microgravity. In addition, two-stage expendable boosters could be lobbed skyward from the aircraft, placing micro-satellite payloads of up to 80 pounds (36 kilograms) into low Earth orbit.

So we're talking about a total 700 pound payload including crew, capable of traveling to low earth orbit, where many satellites travel. I wonder if you exchanged a crewman and the microsattelite payload, you might have enough fuel to de-orbit with a satellite (though you'd have to have a bay large enough to take it).

If nothing else, I can see a satellite repair / refueling service come out of this in no time. Seems like the next step is to deploy a ferry to LEO that can truck the payload to GEO and beyond.

Re:Rocket nozzle is faked.

[RedWizzard]

Take a look at this picture and note the position of the shadow on the rocket nozzle and the shadow of the launch vehicle cockpit of the landing gear on the right. Now compare to the picture at the bottom of this page. Note that the shadow of the cockpit is identical to the first picture, as are other shadows cast by the vehicle. But in that picture the nozzle is completely in shadow. One of the pictures must be altered.

In fact the first picture seems to be an altered version of the second picture. What's different:

• The rocket nozzle.
• In the first pic SpaceShipOne is mated to the launcher, in the second pic SpaceShipOne is resting on it's own landing gear.
• In the second pic the launcher does not have it's jet engines installed (in fact those jet engines are not installed in any of the ground based pictures I've seen except the first pic).

What's the same:

• The shadows are in exactly the same positions (so the pictures where taken at the same time of day, to within a few minutes).
• The cracks in the ground are exactly the same so the vehicles have been places in the same position, despite major work having been performed (the jet engines, the mating superstructure).
• The backgrounds are identical, right down to another vehicle on the tarmac obscured in exactly the same way by the landing gear on the right. All the other planes in the background are also in the same locations.

IMO, the picture of the mated vehicles has been faked from the picture of the separate vehicles. SpaceShipOne's landing gear has been removed (suspiciously leaving no hatch for it to emerge from), the mating superstructure has been added, and the launcher's jet engines have been added. I can only imagine this has been done to make it appear that they are further advanced than they actually are.