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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.
...nobody can hear your webserver scream.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Same thing :)
And to all those folks who say it's an "ugly aircraft", they need to remember that it's a *spacecraft*. And it's actually *two* craft.
Although I think the paintjob is ugly. Paint a red maple leaf on it or something, it would look way better.
Aha! Finally, it is revealed that the rutan landing at Fang Rock, from Dr Who, was in fact real event! The truth can come out.
Only one measly picture, but better than nothing for the impatient..
0 5
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=8
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.
Burning rubber to orbit, laughing all the way? (Yeah yeah, it's sub-orbital -- for now.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
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
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.