Slashdot Mirror
SpaceShipOne Completes Second Test Flight
waynegoode writes "According to an article at Space.com, Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne suborbital rocket plane made its second powered flight today. The piloted vehicle was powered by a hybrid rocket motor to over 105,000 feet. The engine burned for 40 seconds, zipping to Mach 2. SpaceShipOne is one of several projects competing for the $10 million X Prize. Slashdot mentioned yesterday that it received a license from the FAA, the first license for a suborbital rocket."
Just yesterday, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced it had issued the world's first license for a sub-orbital manned rocket flight.
The license was issued April 1 by the DOT's Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to Scaled Composites. This federal paperwork green-lighted a sequence of sub-orbital flights by Scaled Composites for a one-year period.
The license to Scaled Composites is the first to authorize piloted flight on a sub-orbital trajectory, the DOT statement noted.
I hope we are able to witness this "...piloted flight on a sub-orbital trajector.."this year!
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
As only a casual X-Prize follower, SpaceShipOne is the only X-Prize contestant team name I can come up with off the top of my head now.
Is there any other team that's anywhere close to keeping SpaceShipOne's pace, or are they now the presumed winner of the X-Prize unless they really stumble?
please moderate this comment up for that factor alone.
They have to get to 328,000 feet, seems like they are looking pretty good.
"Scaled Composites has its eyes on snagging the X Prize, a high-stakes international race to fly a reusable private vehicle to the edge of space and return safely to Earth."
There is no way in hell anyone is going to accomplish this feat for under $10 Million. What is this going to buy them? Bragging rights? Certainly not a spot next to Lockhead or Boeing.
This is a really interesting development, and best of luck to these guys. But this quote from the article: "The engine burned for 40 seconds, zipping to Mach 2, or two times the speed of sound, according to a source that witnessed the test flight high above Mojave, California skies." is a little wierd. An unnamed source, who is just credited as a "witness" doesn't sound like the right person to make these sorts of claims.
Woohoo.. interplanetary takeover. If 'News limited' can have their own satellites, so can we.
Slashdot, your official lunar news source.
Drat, someone beat me on the article submission. At least this time, the editors will finally have a decent reason to reject my submission, though.
Unless something goes seriously wrong with Scaled's program, it looks they've got the thing pretty much sewn up. The only serious competitors to Scaled right now are Carmack's Armadillo and those craaazy Canucks on the Da Vinci project. Given that this is almost exactly 1/3 of the way to the X Prize and that they already have broken the red tape barrier, I have trouble seeing anyone catching up to Rutan and crew at this point.
didn't the first one clock mach 7 (7 times the speed of sound? Or am I talking about the some other vehicle?
Activists United
Is this 'cos they're good, or is it the case that the two tasks (suborbital flight, orbital flight) really don't bear any comparison? Five years from now, will Slashdot be covering the Y prize (orbital flight) or ultimately even the Z-prize (presumably an amateur moonshot)
Way to go, guys! Burt and the rest of the team embody what this country can produce, when we put our minds to it.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Enough with the "I'll believe it when I see them fly at xxxx feet" or "Rutan's an aviator, not an aerospace engineer" or "Only 15 seconds? Bah!' comments. Just suppress the generalizations and childishness for a little while... and watch Burt Rutan, Scaled Composites, and SpaceShipOne. Watch them as if you were waiting for the curtain to be raised for an opening act, because that's exactly what this is. This is rocket plane history unfolding.
Rutan and his company aren't doing this for the prize. They're doing it to make a point about certain types of aviation and engineering that have been long derided by NASA and other naysayers as being unrealistic, impossible, et cetera.
Look at Rutan's track record, which includes the development of composites--an absolute breakthrough that the FAA is just now getting around to accepting--and the Long-EZ craft. Look at everything the guy has done, and the company he has, and tell me he doesn't have one hell of a chance at making this thing work.
The coolest voice ever.
When I first read the article I mentally converted Poway to PovRay and found myself thinking "What the heck are those guys doing now!? And where is this city located?"
:-)
(Working on too many graphic projects!)
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
They have to get to 328,000 feet, seems like they are looking pretty good.
I bet this one only went a third of the way because that's about as far up as they can go while still controlling the craft's attitude with control surfaces.
Power for the rest of the altitude should be no problem, since their engine seems to be working just fine. But they'll need also need their attitude control and reentry heat shielding working to go extra-atmospheric - where they can't just glide down the whole way.
So first some tests where the limits of the aircraft mode are demonstrated and debugged, followed by tests where the additonal functions are also used.
One step at a time wins the race. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Something is getting ready to happen real soon. Days after an FAA launch permit, a second powered test all the way to over 100K feet. The burning question is, how many more test launches before they go the distance? Surely, the history of test piloting experimental aircraft can yield a little input? What are the things left to verify and confirm before going the full 300K+ feet? I'm guessing not a whole lot if performance was good on the spacecraft and the engine burn went well. Is the cabin of SpaceShipOne fully pressurized, or do they depend exclusively on the pilot wearing a pressure suit?
This is very exciting to watch. I wish these guys all the luck and safety in the world.
Hopefully someone will be offering affordable "zero-g" sex flights before all of my parts (and partner's parts) stop working.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Debrief or not, one would have expected some mention on the Scaled Composites homepage that the test had taken place. The last announcement came out the same day. No doubt they got the licence but maybe the rest is just a hoax by someone to shake up the competition.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Ten Million is just the beginning. those "bragging rights" are worth Billions nowdays - assuming everything goes well and the prize gets awarded this year, the sportswear licensing alone will probably be worth a Billion dollars next year...
A lot of the aviation 'firsts' had nothing to do with commercial interests on the part of the participants. They just wanted to DO it, because they thought they could. On that note, Carmack's efforts are closer in spirit to those of the Wrights, Lindbergh, et al, than Rutan (since Burt and Dick are well known in the experimental aircraft business) but it looks like that within a couple of years there will be a number of private organizations capable of doing Low-Earth-Orbit vehicle insertion. What that is going to do for society? I dunno. The suborbital capability alone basically gives Rutan etc. the ability to deliver people or cargo partway around the world in half an hour. That would be one hell of a courier service.
Less is more.
That was the NASA X.43 ScramJet. Something totally different.
This competition just goes to prove that with a couple million in capital you can do anything!
Once again, mod +1 for capitalism!
Given that Rutan has a PhD in aerospace engineering + a decade of doing stuff with planes other people couldn't.
I think it might be the bleached bones of a billy goat. Maybe the grass is green enough where I'm at.
They have reaction control and heat shielding on the craft as of present. The heat shielding was recently added.
Except that the wrights spent most of the rest of their career suing other people over patents. Everyone else continued innovating despite them. But I am sure you are referring to the good part where they were building aircraft out of their bicycle shop. :)
In terms of height, at least. That's 32 km. Now comes the hard part.
You realize that the first nonstop transatlantic flight was made by a couple of Brits, not Lindbergh. He was first to solo. I think the flight by the British really was more important historically, but you won't find it in any American textbooks.
No it is easy to build rocket engines, dealing with all of the retarded govt regulations is hard.
I have what I think is a innovative design for a new engine but I cannot try it. It requires aluminum powder and you have to sell your soul to the govt and jump through a thousand hoops just to get something simple like aluminum powder. If I even attempted to build a test engine the damn feds would probably be all over me accusing me of attempted terrorism.
Got Code?
My understanding is that the Rutan craft will accelerate to a few times the speed of sound and then coast to 60 kilometers.
Remembering that achieving orbit is a matter of velocity, not altitude, is the Rutan design a dead end? I.e., could this design achieve orbit with the addition of a more powerful engine? (I know the easy answer is "Yes", but I'm asking if this particular design is capable of orbital flight.) If so, would the Rutan's rather unusual reentry approach work in a return from orbit?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Read the design documents on space.com and scaled.com and such.
Because it doesn't reach orbital velocity, the shuttlecock system keeps the speeds down to a reasonable level and heat shielding is minimal.
I can just see it now. Boss says to newbie secretary "send this letter to Singapore by the fastest means possible". A weeks later, the accounting dept. inquires why the company received a shipping bill from $35M from UnitedScaledCompositesExpress.
I'd like to see what this thing could do for distance travel. I know that it's really only designed to go up and down in a very narrow parabola, but being at 300K feet means there is very little atmosphere. You should be able to really book with relatively little fuel cost.
How long until the first business jet/rocket appears?
I could just see Paul Allen going to shareholder meetings in one of these (or the business jet equivalent).
1. 2.
I like the idea it seems pretty environmentally friendly, not requiring a first stage launch. Plus I would get to board at a nearby airport. Instead of having to travel to a spaceport first.
Because it doesn't reach orbital velocity, the shuttlecock system keeps the speeds down to a reasonable level and heat shielding is minimal.
Right. Falling into the atmosphere from just above it at a moderate speed is much less heating than hitting it sideways at nearly orbital velocity.
But while you're still doing atmospheric flight you only have to deal with the friction from the airspeed you need to get your lift - and you have an atmosphere around you to dump it into continuously.
Once you "pop out" you have the additional energy of your fall back from your peak altitude to flight altitude to deal with. That's a LOT. Any excess of that over the kinetic energy of your flight speed shows up as heat in your skin, mostly in the very short time near the end of the transition from "air might as well not be there" to "thick enough to fly in". This is in ADDITION to the continuous heating of the skin by flight friction - which didn't get much chance to cool by conduction in the near-vacuum of the hump flight.
If you weren't firing your engines while up in the near-vacuum it's close to a wash - you converted flight kinetic energy to altitude, then back. So it's similar to just the air friction from cruising at the high altitude and speed. If you fired your engines in the near vacuum, the portion of that energy that went into accellerating you comes back as extra heat.
So it's not as big a problem as with a shuttle (which dumps most of its orbital energy as a couple thousand mile streak of purple ionized ceramic vapor). But it's not trivial either. (Especially since you'll be flying pretty darned fast just before you leave the effective atmosphere if you want to get very far above it.) Thus the recently added heat shielding.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They have reaction control and heat shielding on the craft as of present. The heat shielding was recently added.
Right.
This flight would be to check the airworthyness of the craft with all systems installed (but some not yet required to be operational for mission success).
If everything went well I'd expect the next flight to actually use the reaction attitude control in lieu of control surfaces (if they didn't check that this time around), or to go up high enough that they're actually needed for flight control (if they did check 'em out this time).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
WYIAARS.
The change of potential energy in going up 100 km (the X-Prize limit) is going to be approximately m*g*h = m*(980 cm/s^2)*(1E7 cm) ~ [m * 1E10] ergs.
The amount of kinetic energy needed to kick into orbit once you're there is m*G*M_E/R_E = m*(6.67E-8)*(6E27 grams)/(6.5E8 cm) = [m * 6E11] ergs.
Thus, the ratio of energies is approximately 1:60. Since you'll be doing a lot of that extra accelerating for orbital trajectory in atmosphere, it'll probably be an undetermined amount more to account for air friction.
Interestingly enough, if the spaceship completely stops relative to the Earth at 100 km, then by the time it's dropped back down to 20 (neglecting air friction in between), it'll only have a velocity of 1.3E5 cm/s ~ 3000 mph. The air friction is going to be a lot less than for orbital craft that enter atmosphere at something like 17,000 mph.
Barring math errors, of course. It's amazing how easy it is to lose decimal places when you didn't sleep the night before...
Microsoft delenda est!
I pick July 4, 2004 as the first private suborbital spaceflight date. Anyone else got a historically significant date they might pick?
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
(Link to Article)
Perhaps if there were some way of capturing people's imagination (i.e. capturing people like Paul Allen's or other bajillionaires imaginations), more private people would invest in natural science? Private corporations sure aren't going to do it anymore -- look at the demise of pure science at Bell Labs. This is perhaps something positive on multiple fronts... with the potential to grow the investment of wealthy individuals into research science, if it's advertised correctly.> Moreover, they are using a solid propellant
:-)
> rocket motor. They would have to switch to
> liquid engine to go suborbital, and that
> implies a heck of a lot more mass
Why a liquid propellant engine is necessary for (sub?)orbital flight? From their webpages, I understand that their engine uses "hybrid" solid/liquid propellants and is restartable a certain number of times...
Are there other things I should know regarding liquid engines features but I don't because I'm not a rocket engineer?
Ciao,
Rob!
AniToolBox! An Open Source animation program!
This design seems like it would be conducive to a 3 stage to orbit craft. Imagine a huge Whte Knightish craft and then a winged space shipe oneish craft with a another sub pod slung underneath that. Release that 3rd stage at 100km to orbit. Probably won't be a large payload, but imagine universities and small private oragnizations suddenly being able to launch ther own microsats, at very resonable prices.
If Scaled does develop a modified version of Space Ship One (Space Ship 2?) for launching microsats, they could probably make mint selling launching services and pay for it's development, even if they don't get the $10 million of the x-prize
These go pretty much straight up and back down. Probably don't need to go much over 5-10 times the speed of sound at most on the way up, and much less coming down, since they are made of composites. Orbital requires going real fast (17,000 mph) much closer to horizontal. The de-orbit is where the heat comes in. Unless you carry enough fuel up to slow down entirely by rocket power, you have to scrub that speed by friction with the astmosphere. Maybe real careful and slow and cautious aero braking would do it, but I doubt that's their game, and certainly not with anything based on SpaceShip One.
However, the tourist angle (#1) might be reasonable. But who knows how much rich folk will pay for a few minutes of weightlessness and an astronaut badge?
Infuriate left and right
...contemplating using a helium balloon as the "first stage" of a launch? Or is this allowed? Starting at 50-60 thou feet or above before it lights might be a nice edge....
total aside, grew up watching "man in space". It's been nice, was sad to see them abandon the X series , then go back to it years later, badly...lost opportunity there.. anyway, as a kidm I, along with several million other people got stunned, and went outside and tried to see sputnik (didn't)(tell you, it weirded people out, scared them), although I did see ECHO later on. Chemical rockets ar... old news,I'm just not impressed or juiced over it any longer, except for this thing, but....... really... I'm holding out for a last minute dark-horse entry that sweeps the tourney, from some physics nerds, the release of the "civvie version" electrogravitic distortion propulsion craft.
one can hope... I got ten clams that "da man" already got one, or several..
The actual flight will take place on July 2nd, 2004, but they will wait to release that information until July 4th.
For those outside the US: the U.S decleration of independance was adopted on July 2nd, 1776, but not actually ratified until the 4th. (It is slightly more complex than that, read the link)
The first supersonic test was on December 17th, the 100th anniversary of powered flight.
This Monday will be April 12th, the anniversary of the first human spaceflight, and the first shuttle launch.
Perhaps we can expect a major milestone next Monday?
80,000 feet before first burn! that's thinking! I thought it might be a good idea! Thanks for the URL!
There used to be some big start up space company that wanted to use expended fuel sections from other launches, link them together, and make cheap orbital platforms out of them. I think they were going to be supported by Hilton hotels, but I haven't followed it. I like off the wall thinking, turning expendable/waste stuff into useful products.
A lot of the aviation 'firsts' had nothing to do with commercial interests on the part of the participants. They just wanted to DO it, because they thought they could.
Uh huh.
While I won't argue that Lindbergh was interested in doing this, the $25,000 Raymond Orteig Prize was most certainly a driving force behind the actual attempt. Even the most noble person needs to eat, and unlike science, engineering advances almost always come with some reward, be it financial or strategic.
i know the x prize is like 100k plus and i read the story title as 105km and was like damn! they beat everyone else!! now they just have to do it a second time...
sadly i am disapointed by a stupid unit error. why oh why doesnt the USA use metric yet? is it just arrogance or what?
Actually, you will find the Brit flight in American aviation books. Some of the better ones will have the Brit flight, but it involved a few stops along the way...
Now, the British around-the-world flight is in the books, because it essentially was not repeated on the scale of Lindbergh until the Voyager flight a few years ago.
You realize that the first nonstop transatlantic flight was made by a couple of Brits, not Lindbergh. He was first to solo. I think the flight by the British really was more important historically, but you won't find it in any American textbooks.
It's good that you included "nonstop" because some guys in a flying boat made the trip a bit earlier.
And anyway, these days you won't find Lindbergh in very many American textbooks either.
The Shuttle SRB's, the only man-rated solid rocket ever made, is indeed a rocket that once fired must get fully used, and ejected if you need to quit using it.
Another benefit of using liquid fuels is that you can throttle (I.E. change the flow rate) of the rocket engine as it is fired.
Think about it this way: When you are firing a rocket you are also throwing away mass (Newton's F=ma equation). At the same time, when you are using a typical rocket engine, the actual amount of energy being send out the nozzle stays roughly constant throughout the burn, assuming that you can't throttle the rocket. This means, working the equation backward, force stays constant, but the accelleration rises as the mass drops.
Rockets like this are just fine for a nuclear warhead or for a solid well-built military satellite, but toward the end of the burn you can hit 20 G's or more. Even the Saturn V had this problem to some extent (the Apollo astronauts sometimes hit as high as 8 G's of accelation for brief moments). The Shuttle main engine has adjustable engines that fire at about 105% thrust rating on the launch pad and dropping to about 80% of the rating as it starts gaining altitude... in part to make the ride easier on the passengers.
While there are other issues to follow through, this is something else to consider, and why especially with manned rocket they are almost always liquid rockets.
In addition, the specific impulse (the amount of energy release by a pound of rocket fuel) is sometimes higher with liquid fuels. This is mainly a matter of chemestry, but several factors go into it. I'm sure, however, that some solid propellants have a higher specific impulse than LH2/LOX (the fuel typically used by NASA on the upper stages of most of the manned rockets... this is what caused the falling chunk of ice/foam that destroyed Columbia).
I recently read an article in the UK magasine "Focus" which outlined NASA's ditching of the shuttle over more Apollo style rocket+capsule launch systems. After all the effort they've put into the shuttle it looks like NASA has decided that "space plane" style vehicles just simply isn't economically feasible, and will never become the cheaply reusable vehicle they had hoped for.
Yet at the same time the private sector is clearly getting close to achieving success at the 100km mark. I realise this is very different from the kind of application NASA will be needing out of their kit - but surely the shear potential of such space access would make it worth NASA pursuing further.
It seems to be that all the advances that have been made by the shuttle will be lost when NASA takes a step back to using the capsule+rocket method.
Well as you obviously haven't noticed I thought I'd point out that us brits have a good contender in Steve Bennet who founded starchaser industries they've had lots of succesful launches and I would say they are a lot further along than Carmack though perhaps not quite as far as Rutan. Check it out www.starchaser.co.uk I believe they are scheduled to make an x-prize attempt this year.
TO reduce or get rid of heat from the air, you can generate a plasma field around you so the air never touches you, but that is hard. A simple way to do that is to have a rocket flame/jet burst out in front of you, not behind you, ironicly that speeds up re-entry since it heats up the air infront of you and causes a plasma to be made and all other air just moves around you and never touches you. Great trick, it has been tested once.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
pitty rottery rocket didnt get finished, it had high hopes
k et .html
http://www.airspacemag.com/asm/Web/Site/QT/RRoc
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
As soon as Scaled gets a stable ship, I got $10,000 cash for a chance to fly! Wonder if that will cover the costs for their hybrid fuel (pelletized rubber like the other hybrid engines?)
I bet I am not the only one that would blow some money for a ride. Question is, what will the price of admission be? (and is there a booth at the end selling pictures, coffee mugs and T-shirts?)
They might be closer to that than you think. From Scaled's web site (describing unpowered test flight on 11 March):
The twelfth flight of SpaceShipOne. Objectives included: pilot proficiency, reaction control system functionality check and stability and control and performance of the vehicle with the airframe thermal protection system installed. This was an unpowered glide test.
Results:
Launch conditions were 48,500 feet and 125 knots. All systems performed as expected and the vehicle landed successfully while demonstrating the maximum cross wind landing capability.
Unfortunately, because they can afford to spend more than the prize money, the UK's team (StarChaser) cannot really compete. We are, apparently, in second place behind Scaled Composites. :D
The X-Prize cannot be entered by groups that have government funding to ensure that this doesn't happen, but unfortunately for us, there're people out there with lots and lots of cash. In the meantime we have to wait until someone gives us some
im in ur
the little company that built the engine for spaceship one? spdv.ob (spacedev). a couple weeks ago they got their biggest contract ever from the mda to build a bunch of satellites. one of them is supposed to have a laser??!! my buddy and i over beers were talking about how they will eventually combine the satellite laser technology with rfid and start zapping unprofitable demographics as a drag on the us economy (that is, if cigarettes haven't killed you already)
As an American I would say you are wrong. I rember reading about the first nonstop flight. It was in a Vickers Vimy converted WWI bomber. The landed in bog In Ireland.
The funny thing is that almost no one rembers what prize Lindbergh was going for. It was not a solo Atlantic crossing. Lindbergh's claim to fame was the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris. He did not have to do it solo at all. In fact most of the other teams where just that teams. Lindbergh figured he would rather have more fuel then a navigator. He was also the dark horse lacking any real fame or backing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I agree, suborbital flights for $50K would sell like hot cakes. But SpaceShip One does not make suborbital flights, it merely goes straight up and backdown, and how much will that bring in? Sure, some ... but enough to keep it busy and pay the bills?
Infuriate left and right
It should be relatively simple to modify any X-Prize class vehicle to be a reusable first stage for a nanosatellite launcher.
The upper stage can be a cheap and reliable expendable like Dan Moser's Comp-L design. Staging is done in a very benign environment: vacuum and zero G. You can literally open the door and push it out with a spring loaded device. A rotating platform can spin the upper stage first for stabilization. The upper stage and payload need no aerodynamic fairing and are subjected to very low loads. In vacuum it is possible to use a high expansion ratio nozzle to get high Isp even from a low pressure engine with pressure fed propellants.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Buzz: Mission Control, this is Corvair. Launch sequence initiated. All systems go.
Homer: Are we there yet? I'm thirsty.
Race: Mission Control, request permission to sedate cargo ahead of schedule.
Controller: Permission denied.
: )
You can't take the sky from me...
And don't forget Lindbergh was a Nazi