Slashdot Mirror
Canadian X-Prize Entry Gearing Up
lommer writes "The Globe and Mail has a piece up about the Canadian Da Vinci team which is making a bid for the X-prize. The team has finalized a launch location (Kindersley, Saskatchewan) and will announce a launch date this month. Meanwhile, Burt Rutan and Co. over at Scaled Composites appear to be back on track with a succesful test flight on March 11 after their December crash. One has to wonder, with launch dates being set, will some projects step up and attempt a flight without being fully ready for it?"
One has to wonder, with launch dates being set, will some projects step up and attempt a flight without being fully ready for it?
Will any of them really be ready for it?
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
True. His primary competition is from Armadillo. Armadillo could probably launch tomorrow, and maybe even be lucky enough to complete the flight. But they're taking the wise course, and getting the bugs worked out of their system first. :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Who picked Saskatchewan as a launch site??
Don't they understand that the closer to the equator they are, the greater the natural velocity of the vessel? By picking a trajectory so far North, they will have to burn more fuel to get the vehicle up to a speed which they would've gotten for free if they started somewhere closer to the equator.
This only applies if you're going for orbit. For an up-and-down suborbital flight, no place has a particular advantage over any other. (Slight exception: Launching from a mountaintop will reduce the height you need to reach by a bit)
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Not far at all really. The powered flight to 20km was flown with essentially the same hardware (engines, tanks, airframe, etc.) as they will take to 100km. It seems to me that the only major step remaining is to fill the tanks to the top an let 'er rip. Of course, they are easing into to it for safety's sake. My money is on Rutan's team.
-scsg
I believe that most of the 3 month delay was for the repair of the landing gear and airframe after the first powered flight. If anything is holding them up lately, it's probably the other projects they've got going (like the GlobalFlyer).
-- scsg
Canadians have put something in space. A guy called Gerald Bull used to routinely shoot things 100 km up. If he hadn't been murdered, probably by a spy, he probably would have put a satellite in orbit.
I'm suprised that no one has made a movie about him. The following link is definately worth a look:
www.astronautix.com/articles/abroject.htm
It seems to me that the only major step remaining is to fill the tanks to the top an let 'er rip.
You're making a key assumption here: That the tanks, engines, and airframe are all proven for an 80+ kilometer ascent and 100 km descent. So far these tests are trying to determine whether that assumption is correct or not. Applying Murphy's Law, they'll probably need to build a new version of the craft before they'll be able to fly the craft.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Being close to Saskatchewan, I'll go for the launch.
Using my Celestron 9.25" Telescope with video camera, I'll give Slashdot a good update at www.spacecanada.org
Don't believe everything you read. Paul Allen is a big sponsor of SpaceShipOne... Not Bill Gates so far as I know. Also, I'd hardly say that SpaceShipOne crashed. It has a successful flight and had an incident with the landing gear that was cabable of being repaired. And during that flight, SpaceShipOne became the first ever privately funded plane/spaceship to break the sound barrier. SO what, they had a landing gear issue. Earlier in flight they lit up a rocket engine after being dropped from a jet at 47,000 feet.
You're right, it was Paul Allen, not Bill Gates. And the "crash" was just a landing gear strut buckling on landing. No big deal. The part and the problem were fixed in a matter of days.
In my opinion, Burt Rutan is not that interested in the $10 million. I think he's taking his sweet time about it because he would like to start a space tourism company once the craft is fully qualified. After all, that's the other half of the X-Prize: not just to build the hardware, but to also build an infrastructure for the space tourism industry and make some money. Create a generation of barnstormers (spacestormers?) who will tweak and adjust their craft and slowly, evolutionarily, bring about cheap and reliable access to space. Not every vehicle has to be a revolutionary new multi-billion-dollar NASA design. It's the bottom-up approach to space.
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