Slashdot Mirror
SpaceShipOne Back in Action
JoeSilva writes "After a 3 month wait,
Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne is
back in the skies above Mojave! Not only is it patched up from a failed landing gear, it's got a 'thermal protection system' installed.
Looks like high temp insulation on the leading edges. Also they have a picture of it with 'the rocket motor for the flight 13p'. This was the 12th SpaceShipOne flight."
So does that mean that SpaceShipOne will be making a run for the money soon?
so what happened to flights 9 through 11? The flight log jumps from flight 8 (first powered) to this latest one.
I've been following the X-Prize work at Armadillo for the last year or so. If nothing else than for the John Carmack factor. They seem to have stalled lately, always reengineering their rocket motors and such. I'm still cheering them on anyway though I can't see them surpassing Scaled Composites at this point.
One bad monkey spoils the whole barrel.
To say they're "being very quiet about this" is an understatement. They didn't even announce the project until well after it had gone through the design and prototype phases. Additionally, the test flights have usually been announced and discussed at least a week after their occurance. Also, we're still not even sure who all the investors in the project are. I would guess that the main reason they're keeping it so secretive is to prevent other teams from gaining the upperhand.
This is a sub-orbital flight. A parabolic up-down with "comparativly little" speed WRT the ground. A true orbital flight needs momentum to balance out gravity. This means a lot higher ground speed for an orbital flight.
As this is not an orbital flight there is no excessive velocity to burn off. Hence, the bathtub mode of recovery from altitude.
Neither of these guys are professional rocket builders. They're both private individuals spending their (ample) money to compete for the X-prize. Rutan has previous experience building aircraft and has worked more at putting together a team and securing infrastructure to help with the build, but it's not as if Rutan is leading a billion-dollar team of button-down 1950's engineers at Boeing or something while Carmack is competing out of his back yard shed.
Just because Carmack posts his day-to-day struggles on the web for us all to enjoy (and I *do* enjoy it, BTW) doesn't imply that the SpaceShipOne team isn't encountering the exact same sorts of technical hurdles, supply problems, permit bullshit and etc. In other words, whichever wins will be a victory for the little guy because they're *both* the little guy.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Give yer head a shake, lad. 2 or 3 orders of magnitude means 100 to 1000 times more (unspecified rocket fuel goodness).
Improvements usually come a few percent at a time.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
i doubt microsoft has a whole lot to do with it, i think its just probably him trying to get some fame by getting them into space.
Or maybe he's just unbelievably rich, thinks that this is a cool project and wants to support it? Lets go easy on the cynicism folks!
On the other hand, civilian access to space finally becoming a reality is an incredible thing. It gives me hope, as a nearly lifelong enthusiast, that I may see space firsthand before I die, not via Celestis. This should be laid bare for the public, but it is not... we only find out about any progress weeks or months later when I'd rather the info go up within hours, which is certainly possible these days.
There is no longer any need to keep secret the fact that people and objects can get to space - Wernher von Braun wanted to try it way back in 1945, but his A-9/A-10 project got killed and it took him almost 20 more years before he accomplished that goal. If there was ever any time for secrecy, it was way back then when all this was still a surprise to spring on the bad guys. Not when there's about to be a change as big as the one we went through when Gagarin and Shepard went up.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Nuclear reactions yield about a million times more energy per unit mass than do chemical reactions, so it's natural to try to get the energy that way.
NERVA got OK Isp (about a factor of 2 better than chemical rockets, something like 1000 seconds), but its thrust-to-weight ratio was pretty low, about 4 if I remember right. That's because it included a critical, operating nuclear reactor with an actively controlled chain reaction, and them thar things are heavy.
Thrust-to-weight is just as important as Isp to a rocket: higher thrust-to-weight means you can tote more fuel, payload, and structure for the same Isp, since you always have to have the mass of the engine itself around. By contrast to the NERVA's thrust-to-weight of about 4, the Space Shuttle main engines have a thrust-to-weight ratio of around 75. Since solid rockets are technically made out of their own fuel, their effective weight is much lower for this calculation (pretty much just the bell nozzle) and you might see numbers in the several-hundreds range.
Of course, one could always work on making the NERVA more lightweight -- but do you really want to optimize a nuclear reactor for mass, rather than safety? I didn't think so.
Now, for use in space, thrust-to-weight isn't so important. The rocket doesn't have to support itself against gravity, so low-mass engines that also produce low thrust are perfectly OK.
Of course, international treaty bans the use of critical nuclear reactors in space, but that alone wouldn't slow down our current administration very much.
[Nuclear reactors get flown into space all the time, but they always have much less than critical mass, relying on spontaneous decay to keep the chain reaction limping along at a constant rate. NERVA would require controlled reaction rates, hence a critical-mass reactor.]
If you don't believe me, look at the x-15 x-15 in full ablative coatings. The pilots wouldn't fly it unless they put a painted on top of it...