SpaceShipOne Flight Test

Soft writes "Scaled Composites' entry for the X-Prize, the SpaceShipOne, has had a successful first (unpowered) flight test. The spacecraft was dropped from the White Knight carrier aircraft at 47,000 ft (14 km) and 105 kt (194 km/h, 120 mph) and touched down after a 1.1-hour glide at Mojave airport. Photos are available."

Comments

Re:Flight Time?

[FreeLinux]

Indeed the sink rate has far more to do with aerodynamics than weight, which was what I was trying to say. The glide time seems far greater on the SpaceshipOne than on the shuttle meaning that its aerodynamics are better thus a lower sink rate. However, I anticipated that someone would argue that the compariosn is invalid due the far greater weight of the shuttle so, I was just trying to head off ill informed comments.

Re:Flight Time?

[caferace]

It has a pretty unique design in that the entire tail section flips up and acts as a sort of air brake, then flips down when G's are reduced and the atmosphere is dense enough to sustain controlled flight. Remember, this isn't expected to head quite out into the deepest darkest depths of space but to meet the X-Prize guidelines/rules.

If I remember coeectly, the SS1 was designed to handle an expected 5.5 G's or so upon "re-entry".

Besides Burt Rutan is a genius, so it has to work. ;)

Not so short

[poptones]

In the older press release they mentioned the entire flight would be very short - something like 30-45 minutes. But with this sort of glide rate (avg sink less than 12fps when moving 150fps?) the possibilities for "space" (subspace? suborbital?) tourism seem much more clear. A 30 minute trip doesn't sound like much fun at all, but if you're in a ship that can glide back to earth over 4 or 5 hours, that opens all sorts of new doors - like transatlantic flight, to name one. Not as many passengers as the Concorde, but an infinitely cooler trip.

Re:Not so short

[photonic]

In the older press release they mentioned the entire flight would be very short - something like 30-45 minutes. But with this sort of glide rate (avg sink less than 12fps when moving 150fps?) the possibilities for "space" (subspace? suborbital?) tourism seem much more clear. A 30 minute trip doesn't sound like much fun at all, but if you're in a ship that can glide back to earth over 4 or 5 hours, that opens all sorts of new doors - like transatlantic flight, to name one. Not as many passengers as the Concorde, but an infinitely cooler trip.

I don't know how you get to 4 or 5 hours, but i assume you think that it can glide all the way down from 100 km up. Remember however that at that height there is hardly any air to glide in. You thus fall back like a brick, slow down when you hit the upper atmosphere (+- 20 km) and glide for the last part. This will get you more in the 30-45 min range.

Re:Can it handle re-entry?

[Jafafa Hots]

Maybe this is a stupid question, but could you reduce the amount of heating during rentry by slowing the craft down much much more before it reenters?
Obviously there would be a huge weight penalty because you would need to carry all that fuel into orbit in the first place...

But, since slowing down invariably means a lower orbit, is it physically possible to decelerate enough to just kind of "drop down" into the atmosphere at a cozy suborbital speed, or would the g-forces required to slow rapidly enough before your orbit lowers too much be too high?

Am I making any sense?
I've always wondered about this.

Now things are heating up...

[WegianWarrior]

The competitors for the X-price are one after the other dropping their capsules / spaceships out of the sky to test at least part of their re-entry profile, and Burt Rutans entry at least flies like a dream (big surprice - he designs flyingmachiens for a living, don't he?). The X-price is running until January 1, 2005 (qoute; The X PRIZE is fully funded through January 1, 2005, through private donations and backed by an insurance policy to guarantee that the $10 million is in place on the day that the prize is won), giving the teams a little more than one year to launch, overhaul their machines and launch again.

I'm getting all excited over the prosects ahead of us. Never mind if the X-price succeds in jumpstarting the space-tourism or not - we're getting a taste of what the spacerace was like when the USA and the USSR were competing about getting the first man up into space, allthought this time all the teams are playing with open cards.

I'm willing to bet all my karma that we'll have the first launch before next summer; anyone willing to bet against it?

The cool thing about all of this

[chadamir]

is that it's sort of like living in the 1950s and experiencing all of this new space stuff for the first time. We are lucky to be living in interesting times.