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SpaceShipOne Rockets To 68,000 Feet
ehartwell writes "According to Space.com, Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne flew its first rocket-powered flight today, the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' 12-second first flight. SpaceShipOne's engine burned for 15 seconds, pushing it to Mach 1.2 (930 mph) and a peak altitude of 68,000 feet. To win the X-Prize they need to reach 330,000 feet twice within 2 weeks."
The headline should state that, according to XPrize website, this is the first manned supersonic flight onboard a plane designed by a small private company. That is really impressive and is a great achievement just 100 years after the Wright brothers first flight. Nice birthday present !
100 years ago manned flight was a hot technology, today everybody can jump on a plane (as long as you have the money but its cheaper and cheaper). Today supersonic flight is a hot technology for the masses so it will maybe become commonplace in the years to come...
The biggest point is not the altitude here because 68000 feet is quite 'easy' to reach (although its really impressive too) and going from 68000 to 330000 feet is gonna be way way way more difficult. But everything needs a beginning and that's a very nice one.
Congratulations to the Scaled Composite team for this astonishing result... This plane is a very cool piece of engineering.
This X-Prize is definitely becoming more and more interesting, I have to admit that I never though it was possible for a team to go so far !
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ok when do i get to go to the moon. seriously. what the max it could cost? two or three billion?
If you want NASA to do it, it'll cost well over $50 billion.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
The fact that people are willing to take a shot at this takes some serious huevos. When you think about the amount of cash, for one that goes into the design phase alone, sooner or later someone must scratch their head and ask if this is really worth it. Pair that with the need for such nontrivial things as ummm...say...cooking up rocket engines and rocket fuel. Then, last but not least, after you've designed something that seems like it ought to work, cooked up some engines, and a fuselage (not cheap either), you have to convince someone to get in it... Truely amazing. The absolute best of luck, and all my respect to all participating in the contest
Except that, sadly, Brian Binnie breaks the sound barrier in a home-built spacecraft prototype the same year that commercial supersonic flights were discontinued.
How about this for an impressive indicator of technological progress? In the earlier story about the 100 year anniversary of powered flight there were comments suggesting that progress in aerospace seemed slow lately. Maybe we're on the verge of another surge forward?
It wasn't that long ago that the sound barrier was really considered a barrier - people involved in breaking the sound barrier are still around. Back then, it was a major effort that was incredibly risky and took the resources of a government to achieve. At the time, plenty of people wondered if it was really even possible.
Now, however, we see a small private company break the sound barrier on their first major rocket powered test flight, as if it's no big deal. We've come a long way. Nice one, Scaled Composites!
I don't know the name of the first doctor to perform any number of amazingly useful surgeries. I don't think that makes me any less well-educated (particularly since I am totally confident I could find that data anytime I felt I needed it).
The information is readily available for anybody with an interest. School shouldn't be about filling your head with facts, but about encouraging you to study things that you're interested in.
For me, that's airplanes. For other people, maybe musical theater. It's all good.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I second that. Ultimately, school is worthless if it doesn't teach people how to learn. The ability to educate one's self should be the greatest lesson of a compulsary education.
Progess in aviation and space has been slow. Humans flew in 1903. They broke the sound barrier in a small rocket plane in 1947, 44 years later. They landed on the moon in 1969, 66 years later.
And....it's 2003, 31 years since the last lunar landing, people are getting excited about another small rocket plane that fired its engine for 15 seconds and coasted to 68,000 feet. What's different here is the funding mechanism, not the aviation technology.
Progress in aviation and space travel has been stuck in the muck and mire for 30 years.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
"Home-built" is quite a stretch. How about "not government funded" ? Their ship was built by professional aeronaughtical engineers who were working full time for a company who's mission is to do just this sort of thing. Scaled Composites is a far cry from a garage operation.
You need fuel. You need fuel to push the fuel. You need fuel to push the tank that holds the fuel. And chemical fuels only give so much push-per-quantity. For a given fuel, the ratio of fuel-mass to rocket-mass is a constant, and the vast majority of it is fuel.
That's why rockets drop pieces. Less tank to push. But dropped pieces are expensive and wasteful, meaning rockets are too expensive to be much use.
The best chemical fuel, liquid hydrogen and oxygen, just barely scrapes the threshold at which it can launch a sensibly sized single staged rocket into orbit, maybe. It's so close that the difference between "will" and "won't" is lost inside the calculation's margin of error.
That's the main reason rocket science is hard.
Concorde passengers were ordinary people in the sense that anybody could purchase a ticket; you didn't have to be in the military. Sure, the tickets were expensive, but they were not totally out of reach for the reasonably affluent if flying on Concorde was important to them, it's just that most people had other priorities. I'm sure there are plenty of geeks here that spend thousands on computers and fancy home theatre setups, and we think of those things as being purchased by 'ordinary people'.
This isn't about facts though. This is about heroes.
Look, Orville and Wilbur didn't do much out on those sand dunes. All they did was make a crappy little airplane not capable of flying in anything but a near direct headwind. It's a piece of crap as far as airplanes go and any kid today can make a better one with some balsa wood and a rubberband.
But the point is that they did it before anyone else thought they could. Chuck Yeager did his trick when people thought the sound barrier was a brick wall in the sky that would kill everyone that tried to get close to it. These names are attached to people that did something or discovered something that everyone else thought couldn't be done. You don't remember the name for the sake of the name, you remember the name as something to attach the courage to.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. That's the average person for you. But occasionally, someone sees one of those giants and says, "I can do that too." You see those heroes and you realize that you don't have to be trapped by the preconceptions that hold the rest of the world back.
Knowing the names Chuck Yeager, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Niel Armstrong, Einstein, Curie, Oppenheimer, Franklin, DaVinci, and so on gives you a sense of perspective. These things are done by people with a dream. And determination. A whole lot of determination.
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The Wrights contribution was controled flight, not flying before anyone said it couldn't be done. There were other dare-devils out there flying their homemade "airplanes" as much as 200 feet, before "crashing" to the ground, with no way to tell where they land, at best more or less a straight line. The Wright brothers not only flew, they were able to turn and perdict where they would go. Once that breakthrough was made other engineers could observe why their design worked, and make something better that also got around patents.