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FAA Grants Sub-Orbital License to SpaceShipOne
abucior writes "The FAA announced today that Scaled Composites has been granted a launch licence for a series of sub-orbital flights over a one-year period for Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne. Is X Prize finally entering the end-game? Space.com has more information on the move."
While the highest criteria to issue a
license is public safety, applicants
must undergo an extensive pre-
application process, demonstrate
adequate financial responsibility to
cover any potential losses, and meet
strict environmental requirements.</I>
this might put a lot of people outta the runnings
At least the government isnt getting in the way. Im for one am glad to see the X-Prize might actually have a chance of revolutionizing the space industry!
what happens if i were to build a big rocket and launch myself into space without telling anyone? would i get shot down by the military when they pick me up on radar?
Corporate and private interest in space is always a good thing. The driving force behind alot of innovation in the last half of the 20th century has been, for better or worse, corporate greed. Innovation in space travel is A GOOD THING, and so this IS A GOOD THING.
Interesting difference in dates:
Press Release
Contact: Henry J. Price
Date Posted: April 7, 2004
But further down:
The license was issued April 1 by the
Federal Aviation Administration's
Office of Commercial Space
Transportation to Scaled Composites of
Mojave, Calif., headed by aviation
record-holder Burt Rutan, for a
sequence of sub-orbital flights
spanning a one-year period.
As fun as it is to slam "the government", somebody was very much on the ball to realize that it would be a bad idea to release this news on April Fool's Day!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I was kinda wondering; what are the requirements for a launch licence for a series of sub-orbital flights over a one-year period? Other than the obvious: being able to get it up that high, and promising not to mess with anything on the way there and back.
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
> what happens if i were to build a big rocket and launch myself into space without telling anyone? would i get shot down by the military when they pick me up on radar?
.
Yes. Having worked with a (unmanned) launch services firm, getting permission can be the most difficult part of the process. Building the rocket and payload is just rocket science. Getting permission is *legal-stuff*
Six years ago, we had estimated that launching a satellite required permits, lawyers and insurance in excess of twice the cost of the launch vehicle. The gov't is truly being kind to Mr. Rutan.
#include "humorous_pop_culture_reference.h"
Gee, i wonder if the FAA issues 'vanity plates'? I also wonder if the license plate will be made of low-drag material. Do they have to display inspection stickers on the windshield? So many questions come to mind. Ponderous.
The Department of Energy banned larger bowled toilets so frankly we need government approval for more than the skies.
In a practical sense, you don't need there stupid aircraft hitting another aircraft, so it really is best to check. Without governement regulation on the sky it might be a little more difficult to get from point A to point B, because idiot C has a hot air balloon, near an airport and causes plane D to be flameball E.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Available for free at http://netassetsbook.com/. I'd suggest the PDF version (1 MB), since some of the formatting in the HTML version is screwed up, and makes reading some parts difficult (mainly forgetting
would probably be the underwriter of choice, not Geico. They have insured almost anything. For instance, some examples .
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I heard this story on NPR driving home just a few hours ago. They headlined it as "bringing space flight into the reach of ordinary Americans". Come on... considering raw costs alone, it'll be decades before 'ordinary Americans' can afford this kind of luxury travel.
You might be surprised. One of the main points of the X-Prize is not that it is done by private companies instead of the government, but rather that the craft be highly reusable. You can only change 10% of the non fuel mass of the craft between the 2 launches required to claim the X-Prize, and those 2 launches have to have a quick turnaround time (matter of weeks).
Basically that means once you've built a winning X-Prize craft, the only real relaunch costs are fuel. Compare that to the massive cost of each shuttle launch (between 3 and 5 hundred million dollars per launch), and you're talking about reduing launch costs by a factor of 100 or more.
If they can pull that off, I suspect they can quickly get plenty of funding to push the technology further and make it more efficient. I really do believe basic space travel could be affordable by ordinary Americans (expensive, yes, but affordable) inside of a decade - 2 at the most.
Don't underestimate what a leap an efficiency the X-Prize represents.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Don't underestimate what a leap an efficiency the X-Prize represents.
Not that I disagree with you, just keep one foot in the part of reality that remembers that X-prize isn't going to LEO, and isn't even getting close to LEO. Unless you hit LEO, your reusable spacecraft is just a great ride. :)
Don't get me wrong, though. After they've hit the low target they've set with the reusable requirements they've got I expect the design to be pushed to LEO pretty quickly, pretty much as soon as it gets covered up with funding from both the X-prize itself and all the VCs and other investors that learn by virtue of the X-prize that you have a viable technology.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Bush doesn't want us on the moon. Why? Think of the evening news stories: "Today, Apollo 59 landed on the moon again, costing taxpayers $155 trillion dollars, drilled some tiny holes in rocks, took several pictures, discovered NO WEAPONS of mass distruction and found 6 more votes for Al Gore."
I first noticed Burt Rutan because of a homebuilt plane that he designed. It was composite construction (fiberglass and foam) and extremely strong. It was a canard (it had a lifting surface on the nose) and therefore very stable. Some time later he built the first plane to fly around the world without refueling.
O N/ rutan/GA15.htm
The guy is a genius and an innovator in a field that does its best to discourage innovation.
If I have understood correctly, lawsuits have basically killed innovation in general aviation. Check it out the next time you are airside: most of the designs of small aircraft are fifty years old. I wonder if we will be saying the same thing about software in fifty years.
www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/GENERAL_AVIATI
Not to mention the fact that the Shuttle launch costs you note covers more than fuel, it also covers all the maintenance, prepation, testing, etc. that a craft in service must have, while a vehicle that only has to fly twice can get away with far, far less infrastructure. (The key to reducing costs isn't reducing vehicle costs as many believe, but in flying the hell out of the vehicle and spreading the costs across many vehicles and flights. Ask the airlines.)
Don't overestimate it either. The X-Prize vehicles are highly specialized test and experimental vehicles, it's a long leap from there to vehicles capable of routine operations. (Not just in general concept, but in raw performance.) Consider the long step between the Wright Flyer and the Ford Tri-Motor or the DC-3. That's how far the X-prize vehicles are from useful and cheap space transports."Consider the long step between the Wright Flyer and the Ford Tri-Motor or the DC-3. That's how far the X-prize vehicles are from useful and cheap space transports."
That's what excites me. Look at how cheap and safe air travel is now. Wright brother's flight was in 1903, right? In less than 20 years you had airplanes EVERYWHERE. In less than 40 years there were jets. (July '42 for the first real jet fighter, yes yes I know there were actually jet engines in the 30's but come on).
Today, 100 years later, I can buy an airplane ticket for a couple day's worth of barely-better-than minimum wage barely-part-time college work.
If this is like the Wright brother's flight, then we're in for one hell of a century, and it's gonna be a good one.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
Of course, the American chimp-speakers will undoubtedly demand too high of a salary, so they'll probably just teach someone from an Indian call center how to speak chimp as well as they speak English and save a bundle.
No, Congress have them the authority late last year. If they are flying in US airspace, they can be regulated by the feds.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
Remember though that the X-Prize is for suborbital flight. The height isn't important-it is the speed. Spaceship 1 won't have to deal with reentry temperatures, making it MUCH simpler to build and fly. If X-Prize was for an orbital flight, or any Mach 25 flight, there wouldn't be any entries. Is it the first step to cheap flight or just a cheap flight? Only a real reentry system will tell.
The shuttle's 60,000 lb cargo capacity is wasteful and useless. It costs more per pound (even accounting for inflation) to launch on the shuttle than it did to launch on the Saturn V. It'd be fine if the shuttle provided an economical way to launch bulk cargo, but it doesn't. Better to stick with unmanned expendables for that kind of stuff - at least for the time being. As for the 9 passengers/crew, they cost so much per person to launch that only a small elite are permitted to fly. The 4 passengers on an X-Prize vehicle may only be going suborbital (for now), but at least they're going.
The key to reducing costs isn't reducing vehicle costs as many believe, but in flying the hell out of the vehicle and spreading the costs across many vehicles and flights.
True. But that's part of the point of the X-Prize. The shuttle design simply cannot support a flight rate sufficient to make its costs reasonable. Plus it requires a standing army of several thousand just to operate it. The shuttle is not capable of operating in an airline mode. The X-Prize is encouraging designs that are capable of rapid turn-around (and thus high flight rate), and require minimal infrastructure. The X-Prize designs will (hopefully) be capable of airline-like operations.
Consider the long step between the Wright Flyer and the Ford Tri-Motor or the DC-3. That's how far the X-prize vehicles are from useful and cheap space transports.
The first flight of the Wright Flyer involved a mere 12 seconds of flying time (the third and longest flight of the day attained a whopping 59 seconds). Only 10 years later the airplane was a major player in the Great War. Ok, the world had to wait another ~20 years for the DC-3. But commercial aviation was already well-established before the DC-3 came along. Useful and cheap are relative terms. The X-Prize vehicles may be closer to both of them than you think.
now THAT would be a good question.. since we have pretty much made the case that while a US craft would be "US territory" space is not owned by any country.. my guess is once you pass what nasa considers the threshhold of space.. your not under US authority
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Anyway, now you can't pick up a new single engine Cessna for less than 158K
And you can still pick up a decent used, older single-engine plane that has decades more life left in it for under $30K. A brand new GMC pickup truck costs more than I paid for my Piper Cherokee. Why people shell out over an eighth of a million dollars for a new C172, I don't understand. If I had ~$160K to spend on an airplane, I'd much rather buy an older, bigger, plane like a T210 or perhaps even a Skymaster 337 inline twin in that price range.
I'd be willing to debate both of those assertions. However, I do agree that it depends a lot on what you include in your launch cost roll-up (and what you define as "overhead" and "infrastructure cost")
The reality is that the marginal cost for a Shuttle flight is around 150 million a flight, but the overhead kills it when spread across so few flights.
The reality is that the shuttle cannot support a higher flight rate, so the marginal cost is somewhat meaningless (and is dominated by the fixed costs anyway).
The passengers on an X-Prize vehicle are no more going somewhere than are the riders of a roller coaster.
Cute analogy. But you are conveniently missing the point. The X-Prize passengers will be going into space, a realm that has, until now, been restricted to hand-picked astronauts, self-made multi-millionaires, and congressmen on junkets. So what if it's only sub-orbital for now. That at least puts them on a par with the early Mercury flights. The Wright Flyer flew only a few hundred feet to begin with. That doesn't detract from the fact that it flew.
Like every aviation prize before it, the X-prize is encouraging vehicles designed specifically to win the prize.
And the prize is specifically designed to encourage vehicles that support fast-turnaround with minimal infrastructure. Those two features are essentially what the launch vehicle community is referring to when they talk about "airline-like" operations (and relative to the way launch vehicles are currently operated they do represent something much more like the way an airline operates). Ok, so you won't be using an X-Prize competitor like an actual modern airliner. But as you say "It took the airlines and manufacturers decades to achieve those levels." They did it by trying lots of different stuff, discarding what failed, and keeping what worked. The beauty of the X-Prize is that we're finally getting away from NASA's stale "one true way" of doing manned launch, and experimenting with a variety of approaches. All of these approaches must, as a result of the competition rules, give at least some consideration to reusability and operability. Some will work. Some will fail. We'll learn from them all, and probably learn a lot more than we would from the endless paper studies that characterize NASA's attempts at manned launch. The current crop of X-Prize contenders may not be the equivalent of a space-going DC-3, but they sow the seeds from which such a craft can eventually emerge.
Actually, according to this week's Aviation Weke, Burt is lobbying the FAA to allow him to carry passengers. There would be a list of disclaimers a mile long, but if the passengers sign a waiver that "Yes, I fully expect this rocket to blow up and kill me", they'd be allowed to fly.
Apparently the FAA is looking favorably on this proposal, as a way to stimulate private space travel. It's amazing to see government working for innovation, for a change.
Burt Rutan, in some ways, has the same kind of reality distortion field that Steve Jobs is legendary for. The thing is, it's not a joke -- reality is different after these guys get done.
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
In my book we'd be looking at two distinct types of craft. Lets build something specifically for shifting stuff into orbit as cheaply as possible, and then lets build something else for shifting people.
I'd wondered about a massive rail gun that could fire small-ish canisters into orbit, where they could be caught by a space station somehow. This setup could potentially fire a canister every few minutes containing unbreakable commodities - oxygen, water, pies, that sort of thing - and do so very cheaply (once you've build the rail gun!). The bodies of the canisters would also be a source of raw material for orbital construction projects.
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