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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."
They have a "falling bathtub mode".
Wonder how much they could make selling rides on that thing.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
WOOHOO!!!
Check out the test updates here.
AFAIK, these guys are the closest to winning the X-Prize- go team!!!
Any generalization is a stupid one.
A great set of photos (hopefully soon to be mirrored) is available here.
While you are there check out the Global Flyer It is just as cool in my book. The similarity in the designs of the craft are interesting. The idea of flying around the world on one tank of gas is pretty wild.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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.
Also, IMHO the ship looks like some high-school science project with way to much duct-tape with the leading edges done the way they have it.
Any team wanting to make an attempt must notify the X-Prize officials at least a month in advance with the launch date and location. I would assume that this information would be released with some fanfare. Since no notification has been made yet, no official flight.
That's not to say they couldn't go to space unofficially, before going for the big money; in fact they probably will, as part of their test series.
--riney
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.
Apparently, Scaled Composites is one of two teams to have applied for a permit from the FAA to launch a spaceflight. The other is Armadillo Aerospace, run by John Carmack of Doom fame. It's interesting to compare and contrast the two companies. Rutan has a sleek ship with lots of cool round windows that launches from a funky big plane, and they have some good solid live testing. The Armadillo team's site really shows you the nitty-gritty of building something that flies in your spare time, with pictures of them welding engines together, making a crew capsule out of whatever they could find, and building a landing gear with some thick cable springs. I'm guessing that Rutan will win, but I'll hold out hope that the garage engineer can pull off at least some type of flight to give courage to that old entrepreneurial spirit....
I'm waiting for Carmack to respond to the space race. I'm also waiting for a release date for DooM3! :)
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
They better not have any more delays like that last one, if they want to win the X-Prize. The $10 million dollar prize expires at the end of this year, and a lot of other groups are competing for it.
I think we'll see some exciting new developments in space technology over the next few years. I'm confident someone will win the X-Prize,(which is more a PR bonus for starting a space tourism company than anything else) the Bush Admin wants to send folks to the moon or Mars (probably using nuclear propulsion), and it's all but a foregone conclusion that someone will try to build a Space Elevator soon.
The kinetic energy required to accelerate a gallon of gasoline to orbital speed is more than the chemical energy contained in the gasoline.
By contrast, "merely" lifting something up 100km doesn't require much energy at all.
So, er, no, leading-edge heat shields ought to be just fine. Fiberglass or carbon-fiber composites might even survive a flight or two without any shielding at all.
Most likely they'll hit space with a lone pilot a couple of times first. Ever flight so far only has 2 in the WK and 1 in the SSO. To win the X-Prize they would need 3 people in the SSO. So far they have been playing it safe by only having just as many people as needed(as they should), I don't see any reason they'll change the play. All the test runs they are making is showing the strength of their system, if this were NASA the runs would be 6 months apart. Besides, it's not like there is any other group so close to winning the prize. Maybe some other team might just pop outta nowhere and grab that brass ring, but they would have to be awefully sneaky to do that.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Where do you get that information from? I'm not a physical chemist, but the rocketry books I've read say that chemical fuels aren't going to get much past 450 to 500 seconds Isp. The SSMEs get about 450, I think. Isp (specific impulse) is directly proportional to exhaust temperature, which is always going to be an issue in practical rocket design.
The 1970's NERVA nuclear rocket program managed to get about twice the Isp of our best chemical rockets with a decent amount of thrust. Ion drives might give you an order of magnitude improvement over chemical rockets, but they don't have the thrust to be used in launch vehicles.
The only propulsion system I've seen proposed that could realistically produce 2 to 3 orders of magnitude increase in efficiency is the Orion drive. The government doesn't like the idea of building hundreds of small, clean nukes, though. Greenpeace gets a bit riled up about it, too.
Of course, if I had my way, they'd be welcome to protest right at the launch site.
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!
The energy content of gasoline is about 42e6 J/kg.
Orbital velocity (at the surface of the earth) is about 8000 m/s. Kinetic energy of 1 kg at 8000 m/s is 32e6 J. (That is, you need about 32 MJ/kg)
However for those who want the whole story, the parent to this is correct: to get all that energy out of the kg of gasoline, you *also* need about 2.8 kg oxygen. Gasoline-oxygen gets you about 11 MJ/kg, which is about a third of what you need to hit orbital velocity.
To get to 100 km altitude, you need only 0.96 MJ/kg, which is no problem for gasoline-oxygen.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Yeah, no kidding. Bert Rutan has not one, but 3 aircraft designs displayed at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. These are the around-the-world Voyager,, and the experimental homebuilts VariEze, and Quickie.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
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.]
The ship only has to have accomodations for three people. The rules allow for substituting ballast for the passenger's weight and letting the single pilot go up alone. The relevant rule is