Slashdot Mirror
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 !
Iraq: war to save the U
Sounds like someone needs to stop spending so much time tweaking the Doom3 Engine and get on the stick. Sundays and Tuesdays aren't going to be enough to beat a fulltime effort.
Privately Funded SpaceShipOne Breaks Sound Barrier
A privately financed passenger-carrying sub-orbital rocket plane screamed its way through the sound barrier today, the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers historic 12-second flight over Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Privately built by Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, the SpaceShipOne cranked up its hybrid rocket motor after being released from the White Knight carrier plane high over Mojave, California.
"This successful and historic flight is important because we are showing that the private sector can perform human space flight faster, safer and cheaper," said Jim Benson, founding chairman and chief executive of SpaceDev, the Poway, California-based company that built SpaceShipOne's engine.
Test pilot Brian Binnie then put SpaceShipOne into a steep climb. Nine seconds later, SpaceShipOne broke the sound barrier and continued its steep powered ascent.
At motor shutdown, 15 seconds after ignition, SpaceShipOne was climbing at a 60-degree angle and flying near 1.2 Mach (930 mph).
Binnie continued the maneuver to a vertical climb, achieving zero speed at an altitude of 68,000 feet. He then configured the ship in its high-drag "feathered" shape to simulate the condition it will experience when it enters the atmosphere after a sub-orbital space flight.
At apogee, SpaceShipOne was in near-weightless conditions, emulating the characteristics it will later encounter during the planned space flights in which it will be at zero-g for more than three minutes.
After descending in feathered flight for about a minute, Binnie reconfigured the ship to its conventional glider shape and flew a 12-minute glide to landing at a landing strip in the Mojave.
The landing was not without incident.
On touchdown, the left landing gear retracted causing the rocket ship to veer to the left and leave the runway with its left wing down. Damage from the landing incident was minor and will easily be repaired. There were no injuries, according to a press release issued by Scaled Composites.
The milestone flight of SpaceShipOne involved development of a new propulsion system, the first rocket motor fabricated for piloted space flight in several decades.
The new hybrid motor was developed in-house at Scaled Composites. The motor uses an ablative nozzle supplied by AAE and operating components supplied by SpaceDev.
This was the 8th flight of the SpaceShipOne completed this year -- the first done under powered flight.
How long before commercial spaceflight tickets are offered by competing commercial organizations and WE get to pick the craft?
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
I wish the other X-prize hopefuls would take after Carmack's blogs, though -- reading about the little engineering challenges is the highlight of my Monday/Tuesday mornings.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
When industry gets on the ball and starts developing space programs, we'll start seeing some real progress. Of course NASA's work is extremely valuable, but we need commercial support to really get things done. Satellites have been a huge success; now all we need is a very attractive financial reason to develop space commerce.
It might start off slow, though; in the end it will probably require starting an entirely new economic sector. Why do we need to mine asteroids and build huge solar collectors? To supply energy and materials for other space structures, of course. A self-perpetuating system like that is going to take time to build up. Satellites plug in very well to Earth's existing economy, but where does manned space exploration fit in....
...
What, did it have the president on board? Please tell me it broke up upon re-entry...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I did a quick Google on the first time humans passed the "sound barrier" in 1947. 50 years later, every school kid knows^W should know Chuck Yeager's name.
50 years from now, will the class of 2060 recognize the name "Brian Binnie"? If this works out, they darn well should... especially if he's the one who gets to fly the craft "for real", twice in two weeks.
* 1903: Orville & Wilbur Wright achieve controlled, manned flight (but birds fly on a regular basis)
* 1947: Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in a military aircraft (but ordinary people fly on a regular basis)
* 2003: Brian Binnie breaks the sound barrier in a home-built spacecraft prototype (but ordinary people fly faster than sound on a regular basis)
* 2050: What's the next big advance when ordinary people fly to space on a regular basis?
I was sure rooting for the local boys (& girl), but I don't see how they can catch up to Scaled Composites' entry.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
The Duke Nukem: Forever team has been working on a fusion reactor in their spare time. We can all see what that did to that project's timeline.
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
This is big breakthrough for this team. As soon as I heard Rutan was in the mix, I figured these folks were the ones to watch. Even if they do win the X prize, however, what will the impact on manned space flight be? imho, manned space flight is never going to get anywhere until private companies discover a way to make a profit by putting people into space. Sattelites were pretty much a scientific curiousity, or for research, until the profit making possibilities with communications sat's became known. Once there was a way to make a profit, you started seeing all kinds of stuff going up, and a variety of launch systems to get it there. What will be the big money maker that will make human space flight profitable? Is space tourism a sufficient driving force? I think the cost will have to come down to well below 20 million a ticket before that's the case.
And in this case, kilometers makes extra sense, since the informal "edge of space" definition is 100km. (Otherwise, 330,000 feet seems like a totally arbitrary number)
km is also good for the circumference of the earth... it's 40,000km because an original definition of a km was that 10,000 of them was the average distance from the earth's pole to the equator.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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!
Here's another one.
With any luck we'll see regular manned access to space within the next ten years without a government involved. The X Prize and its follow-ons will be the equivalent of the barnstorming acts of yesteryear.
With any luck at least...
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
It's great that we're gonna finally be able eventually travel to the moon and all... but all of my frequent flyer miles are now freakin' useless... It took me forever save up these thousands of miles with Delta too. I'm still 230,000 miles sort. Dang.
First, I really want to cheer these guys on, this is a great achievement, and I hope the champagne corks are popping all over Scaled Composite's.
On the other hand, I visited their site from a server running 800x600, and I really hope they hire a web-site designer someday. Ack! There's a huge static graphic in the top frame, and a tiny window for THE REST OF THE SITE. I mean, I can read like 3 lines of text! This graphic may be fine for a splash screen, but it makes it impossible to read the content! The only thing they could do to improve it is jam it full of flash and add a few blink tags, then it would be PERFECT!
This dude is the M-A-N.
He's the one that built the Voyager - the round-the-world-on-one-tank-of-gas turboprop plane. He used an Apple IIe to help make the plane as efficient as possible.
Not only is he working on this, but his building a plane to try a round-the-world-on-one-tank-of-gas solo jet plane.
This guy will get it done.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Hmmmm... Iraq war $87 billion or going to the moon 50 billion..... Hmmmmm.... Tough choice.....
I'm keeping track of press coverage here.
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"
SpaceShipOne did more than break the sound barrier, it aimed toward altitudes and conditions unseen by private aviation. With those altitudes and conditions come possible markets, such as small-scale microgavity research on the cheap and even the mother of all roller-coaster rides. Here's hoping that it marks a realization that there are some things which don't work, and some things which do.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Bede Jet Corp.BD-10 may have been the first manned supersonic flight onboard a plane designed by a small private company It was a deadly, short lived, supersonic HOMEBUILT. Go supersonic, from your garage.& cid=3)
a fan's page
Results so far
The first one crashed, and the second one crashed as well. Each crash killed the then-president of the company developing the BD-10 for the market. Rights to the design were bounced around for a while, and I believe it's pretty much in limbo, now. At one point, a Canadian outfit was trying to develop it as a low-cost military trainer, but nothing came of it. I think there were four originally built... the Bede prototype, two crashed as noted above, and one constructed by a customer. There are two listed in the 2001 registration database. The prototype is still listed as being owned by Bede Jet Corporation, and the other one is registered to a man in California.(text from http://www.ipilot.com/learn/expert-view.asp?cur=0
The Artemis Society figured that it could do a minimal but sustainable lunar base mission for $1.42 billion. $800 million of that being launch costs.
So: why is it so hard to make rockets work?
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
Found a source for my claim.
It refers to the meter as 1/10,000,000 the distance from the pole to the equator through Paris, which is the same definition I had. Not a flame though, I'm glad we weren't sure, and I was able to find a (semi-) definitive answer!
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
In this case they are - Spaceship One is a glider with a rocket engine. I was fortunate enough to personally see Mike Melville pilot the Spaceship One back in November during a test of the feathering feature - I saw him dive the aircraft and then pull it up until it stalled (planned) and then effortlessly recover and glide into a perfect landing in Mojave - Spacehip One is one heck of an "aircraft" but its also tight and strong enough to survive the vacuum of space.
Congratulations Scaled Composite's and Burt Rutan you guy's are truly making history !!
Its great that this plane managed 920mph. It certainly possible that the spaceshipone team will win the X-Prize by achieveing 330,000 feet.
But is this goal really a stepping stone to space?
Altitude alone is not especially useful since the pull of gravity will still exert its force upon the craft. The hard part about space travel is achieving orbit, a state where the craft has effectively escaped the earth's gravity well.
Escape velocity is 25,000 miles per hour. Geosynchronous orbit, the distance an object must reach to be in a stationary orbit above the ground is 117,427,200 feet.
These numbers are better than order of magnitude higher than the X-prize requirements.
So I wonder if the X-prize is really meaningful in the scale of realistic space flight?
It appears that White Knight had a landing gear problem on the previous flight as well. Knowing that most systems on the two craft are identical, this could mean that there is a (serious?) problem with the landing gear design. So they're probably in for a very thorough re-examination of the relevant systems. But they're probably on top of things and it's hard to say anything sensible about it without inside-information.
"Some people have got a mental horizon of radius zero and call it their point of view." - David Hilbert
Just to be snarky, I wonder if there's a ceiling to how high you can go for the round-the-world attempt. If you've got a working suborbital spaceship, it would be amusing to make an orbital spaceship* and say, "Yeah, we went around ten or fifteen times on one tank of gas. It was a big tank, tho."
-Zipwow
* I know, I know, orbit is waaay different than straight up, straight back. Its just an amusing thought...
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Concorde was a state funded project, almost exclusively flown by state subsidised airlines bearing national badges (Air France and British Airways).
"They just needed 5 times more the altitude to reach the goal."
People seem to be forgetting that this is just one of many test flights. The fact that this didn't come close to the goal isn't really a problem.
These test flights are very important because they build faith in the aircraft and anticipation for the "real" flights to come. Of course they also point to problems that need to be solved like the aparrent landing gear issues.
TW
I think Rutan's experience with the Predator, the Global Hawk and the aeroshell of the DC-X are far more indicative of his talents than Voyager; a very slow unpressurized aircraft is not much experience for a space-skimming vehicle which has to endure substantial heat loads on return to earth, but the others are much closer.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Am I the only one that had Magic Carpet Ride going through my head while reading this article? :D
I kept reading "hybrid rocket motor" as "hyperspace motor"... ack... too much Asimov :)
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
It won't be long before Scaled Composites is flying to 100km and the X-Prize is theirs.
Meanwhile, NASA/Boeing have just announced that the X-37, part of the Orbital Space Plane program, will "deemphasize" actual space operations. Story at www.aviationnow.com. Great timing! Really highlights the differences between the good ol' government contractor way of doing things. Get the billions of dollars, build something that looks good for propaganda purposes, forget about flying into space.
I hope civilian space efforts wake everyone up to the pathetic reality of NASA before they have a chance to kill another batch of astronauts.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
what they're doing in terms of ground-tracking, telemetry, airspace and frequency reservation, etc.
This is a not insignificant portion of costs conventional spacelaunch - for the Russians, and the Americans. - you can't just light a fuse, stand back and cheer. Not safely, anyway. And at some point, it's not just the pilot's life and property at stake. Public infrastructure, or even private property (in the case of the crashes on 9/11) can be a significant liability as well.
I mean, sure, it's probably a trivial thing to file a flight path with the FAA to reserve airspace and sit on a radio frequency below 50,000 feet.
But what happens when they get into space? How are they going to tie in with existing safety and space infrastructure? Will their cost savings be the same with that integration? And if they don't how are they going to avoid collisions with existing satellites, etc once regular commercial access is established?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Nitpicks: Reaching orbit does not mean escaping the gravity well, nor does it require escape velocity. Many useful orbits exist well below geosynchronous; note that the space shuttle never gets above a couple hundred kilometers. Now that's out of the way, to your point:
The X-prize is not about reaching space, so much as it is about spurring development. The prize for a solo nonstop flight over the Atlantic drove development of methods to reach the rather artificial goal, and those methods were useful in achieving other goals later. Some may have been useful directly, and some as examples of methods to be avoided. The same should hold true of developments for the X-prize... that's the point.
I am not a rocket scientist, and I have no idea if the Scaled, Armadillo, or other teams' efforts will really scale up to true orbital capability. Probably not, I think. But with each entry achieving its own innovations, it is likely that some combination of the lessons learned will contribute to the success of the next goal... whatever that is. It's all progress, and pretty darn cool besides. We can worry about scaling up later.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
That's probably not true. Check out Space X for example. Or Armadillo. The illusion needs shattering.
There's nothing inherently expensive about space (the fuel costs for putting something into space are under $50 per kg of payload for example)- it's just that right now there are so few launches that it's cheapest to throw the whole rocket away after each launch. Because it's so expensive, practically nobody goes. Catch 22.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"It's true that rockets predate the airplane by at least several hundred years. But early rockets were just a bunch of gun powder in a tube with a fuse. Yes, there was a lot of experimentation to figure out how to make a rocket fly and to predict where it went. But frankly early rockets never had much control or accuracy. It wasn't until the field of aerodynamics that we really started to understand how the internals of a chemical rocket worked. While rocket's my use a "brute force" method to accomplish their goals, the design of the rockets themselves relies heavily upon aerodynamics.
Electronic Systems Technology. It is an "Esteem" Wireless Modem.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
"ESTES"
They use D motors.
This craft doesn't really fly 'downrange' very far as an orbital flight would, the only 'downrange' stages are when It's attached to their carrier plane and when It's pulling up.
:)
If the worst was to happen (Im not sure if their rocket gimballs) and the craft went off course, the chances are that the out-of-envelope stresses would do a better job of self-destruction than any range safety officer.
Question: Does anyone know (I've searched scaled.com) whether the rocket nozzle is gimballed or whether they use dynamic control followed by 'balance'?
The only info on the motor control states the 2 button operation 1) Arm 2) Fire
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
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.
Time to put Doom III on the back burner.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 17, 2003
PAUL G. ALLEN CONFIRMED AS LONG-RUMORED SPONSOR OF SPACESHIPONE
Allen Sponsors Scaled Composites' Cutting-Edge X-Prize Entry, Attends Today's Successful Test Flight of the First Manned Privately Funded Supersonic Aircraft
MOJAVE, CA and SEATTLE - Dec. 17, 2003 - Investor Paul G. Allen today confirmed international speculation that he is the long-rumored sponsor behind the innovative SpaceShipOne project, which broke the sound barrier today during its first manned test flight. SpaceShipOne and its White Knight turbojet launch aircraft represent the first private non-government effort to demonstrate a low-cost manned space effort. SpaceShipOne is a contender for the coveted X-prize.
"Being able to watch today's successful test flight in person was really an overwhelming and awe-inspiring experience. I'm so proud to be able to support the work of Burt Rutan and his pioneering team at Scaled Composites," said Paul G. Allen, who has funded the effort since he and Rutan joined forces in March of 2001. "As we celebrate the centennial of flight, it's wonderful to be able to capture the spirit of innovation and exploration in aviation. SpaceShipOne is a tangible example of continuing humankind's efforts to travel into space, and effectively demonstrating that private, non-government resources can make a big difference in this field of discovery and invention."
"Today's milestone and the SpaceShipOne project would never have been possible without Paul's tremendous support," said Burt Rutan, the acclaimed inventor and aerospace engineer who leads the project along with his research and development team at Scaled Composites, which Rutan founded. "Paul shares our energy and passion for not only supporting one-of-a-kind research, but also a vision of how this kind of space program can shape the future and inspire people around the world."
For details about today's test flight, including specifications on speed, altitude, etc., visit www.scaled.com
For details about the X-prize visit www.xprize.com.
ABOUT PAUL G. ALLEN
Paul G. Allen owns and invests in a suite of companies exploring the potential of digital communications. Allen's business strategy includes encouraging communication and synergy between his portfolio companies for mutual benefit in the areas of technology, new media, biotechnology, entertainment, telecommunications and entertainment. His primary companies include Vulcan Inc. of Seattle and Charter Communications of St. Louis, the nation's fourth-largest cable provider. Allen is owner of the Portland Trail Blazers NBA team and the Seattle Seahawks NFL franchise, and a partner in the entertainment studio DreamWorks SKG. Allen co-founded Microsoft Corporation with Bill Gates in 1975 and served as the company's executive vice president of research and new product development, the company's senior technology post, until 1983. Allen gives back to the community through the six Paul G. Allen Charitable Foundations, which support arts, health and human services, medical research, and forest protection in the Pacific Northwest. He is also the founder of Experience Music Project, Seattle's critically-acclaimed interactive music museum, the forthcoming Experience Science Fiction Museum and Vulcan Productions, the independent film production company. For more information about Paul G. Allen visit www.vulcan.com
So I wonder if the X-prize is really meaningful in the scale of realistic space flight?
Well, what about other applications, like suborbital rocket courier from the West Coast to Japan?
USPS Rocket Priority: When it absolutely, positively, has to be there in an hour. Only $100/lb.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Building a vehicle that's guaranteed to come back to Earth is a good first goal. Carmack's team is basically building a huge rocket to go up, and a parachute to make the coming down part survivable. Consider the extra math, physics, and computer processing that would have to go into getting back to Earth once you are in orbit. Sure it can be done, but wouldn't you want to test the other parts of the process first?
As far as I can understand, this contests involves building larger than commercially available rocket engines, managing small-scale life support, dealing with simple launch paths, and surviving re-entry stress that doesn't involve serious heat. (I might be wrong on some of these, and I might not have realized other essential things involved) You can see how all of those pieces are simpler aspects of a full-blown orbital launch.
Actually, if you look at the development process, you'll see why the link. Early spacecraft were totally unrelated to aircraft. Capsules designed specifically to support life in the vaccuum of space. The only aerodymanics involved were those required for re-entry. A 3 dimensional shape profile was developed that met 2 requirements. The vehicle would have high drag on re-entry, required for deceleration, and the vehicle would fly stable, thru a stable trajectory, required to make the whole process surviveable.
As technology develped (and is still developing) it was determined, that transition thru the atmosphere is actually a major phase of flight for any spacegoing vehicle, so, the process of merging spacecraft and aircraft began. The space shuttle was the first such hybrid. A space mission profile was developed, and a craft for that profile was designed. The whole craft was then wrapped inside an aerodymanic package that turned it into a flyable aircraft. Finally, a boost system was strapped on that could actually boost the whole package into orbit. This was basically an engineering approach of 'take a spacecraft and wrap it up to be an airplane'.
The Spaceship one project took the other tack on the problem. Start with an airplane, and harden it up enough to withstand exposure to space. That brought along some interesting aerodymanic problems on the re-entry phase, where the fluids are so thin, that 'normal' aerodymanics dont really apply till it gets considerably lower. Propulsion is also different in this case, the aircraft propulsion system cannot rely on parasitic oxidizers enroute, since it's not in the part of the atmosphere where O2 is a readily available commodity in the quantities required. Typical engines (piston and jet) rely on being able to use oxidizers parasitically from local atmosphere where they are travelling.
There was a time we had an aeronautical industry, and we had a space industry. There is convergence happening, and thats why today, it's referred to as simply the aerospace industry. Aerodymanics is all about efficiency, and there is no more efficient medium for an 'airplane' to operate in than the zero drag realms of inner space. The problem so far is, the cost of propulsion to reach that realm is prohibitive, so building jets that fly in the 35 to 50 thousand foot altitude range is the best compromise economically. The drag is reduced, thereby reducing the cost of propulsion, yet there's still enough O2 available to run those jets, so the vehicle doesn't have to carry oxidizer, just fuel.
Everyone seems to think the race is about 'get to space', and the X-prize is the goal. Its not. X-prize sets a performance point that is an arbitrary milestone on the development path, and is some inspiration, but not a lot, to this type of development. The cost of achieving the altitude in question twice, in two weeks, far exceeds the value of the prize. This is why the Rutan project is going to win, and there is no way it can be stopped. Even if they dont win the X-Prize itself, they are on the right track, and here's the math as to why.
Transportation costs are measured in terms of fixed cost, and consumeables cost. To buy an airplane costs xx dollars, and it's amortized over the life of the plane. Using a medium sized commercial jet, you further amortize that over the cost per seat, per trip, and that number really does become insignificant. The other major cost (ignoring for the moment things like infrastructure for ticketing etc, cuz that'll be in the equation in all cases) is the per mile operating cost of the vehicle, divided by the number of seats, to achieve the cost per seat mile. Therein becomes the ticket price. The single largest factor in cost per seat mile on a commercial jet is fuel. A typical aircraft in commercial service today burns more than it's own value in fuel annually.
Fuel costs break down further into
Although it was state-owned at the time of Concorde's development, British Airways isn't State-funded now, and hasn't been since it was privatised in 1983. At the time of privitisation, the government sold Concorde to BA for 1, writing off all the development costs. This meant that Concorde has always operated as a profit for BA.
Now, Air France is a different matter!
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
At apogee, SpaceShipOne was in near-weightless conditions, emulating the characteristics it will later encounter during the planned space flights in which it will be at zero-g for more than three minutes
I can get the same effect by jumping in the air, can't I?. Just for a shorter time?
Well, I'm off to emulate the characteristics I will later encounter during the planned space flights now.
Boing
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
Actually, I believe when the grandparent post was referring to LH2/LOX as being "best", "best" was defined as "having the highest specific impulse of any chemical fuel currently used". It is the specific impulse of the fuel which determines the fuel mass to rocket mass ratio. In this case, JM is right, as LH2/LOX has the highest specific impulse of any chemical fuel (550 seconds IIRC). However, you are correct that LOX/Kerosene is a much, much easier fuel to work with, which still has a decent specific impulse (350 seconds IIRC). Of course, the choice of fuel only puts a limit on how high your specific impulse can be - no engine is 100% efficient, and engine efficiency will reduce those numbers below their ideal values. Frankly, I agree with you - I'd rather work with Kerosene than LH2 any day.
BTW, for those readers who don't know what specific impulse is (or why it is measured in seconds of all things): specific impulse is a measure of the amount of impulse (=force * time) which a specific amount of fuel produces. A pound of fuel will produce a pound of thrust for X seconds, where X is the specific impulse. Ion and plasma engines can have specific impulses in the 1000's of seconds, but have a very low thrust.
BTW, Burt Rutan was a childhood hero of mine. I've heard of him crashing, but I've never heard of him failing. I've always thought that his team will be the one to win the X prize.