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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 !
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
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....
...
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
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?
they're nowhere near completing assembly of their full-size rocket
On the contrary
IMO, they are quite far along, i'd expect a hover test in a week or two ( if not for the _damn_ holidays )
BTW, as you probably know, official X-Prize flight attempt has to be announced at least two months in advance, so everybody still has a chance, as Rutan hasnt made such announcement yet.
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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
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
Concorde was a state funded project, almost exclusively flown by state subsidised airlines bearing national badges (Air France and British Airways).
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
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
There's a semi-official definition of space. Anything below 100km is atmospheric, and the FAA takes jurisdiction. Above 100km, it's space, and nobody much does; until reentry.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"If the rocket didn't have to fly, you could just put loads of engineering margin into every part, and end up with something big and heavy but reliable. But you can't, because "big and heavy" won't get off the ground.
The sheer amount of power that has to converted from chemical to mechanical energy is staggering. In a liquid-fueled rocket engine, you have to push fuel into the chamber against the pressure of combustion. That turns out to be very hard, since you have to move a LOT of fuel and the pressure has to be HIGH for good efficiency. Just the pumping requires a major engineering effort to handle the power required to drive the pumps.
If you have cryogenic liquid propellants (the most efficient for tankage), you have all kinds of material-science problems from the temperature extremes. If you fly less exotic materials, like nitrous oxide, you have less mass margin because the tank is heavier.
Then there are all kinds of weird pitfalls like uneven distribution within the combustion chamber; uneven fuel/oxidiser mixing; choked fuel flow; accumulation of large volumes of fuel mix (which have an alarming tendency to explode later if they don't burn instantly); quenching of the burn by the amazing volume of stuff flowing into the chamber; eddies and cavitation in the turbulent flow out the throat of the engine; detonation (makes your car engine knock, makes your rocket explode); things shaking loose because of the engine's vibration; the nozzle itself starting to combust, ablate, or burn-through; and making a poorly designed nozzle that limits your thrust.
None of those things is unsurmountable -- it's having to get everything more or less right the first time that is the real kicker.
"ESTES"
They use D motors.
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.
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
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.