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/
"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.
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)
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.
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.
www.armadilloaerospace.com
Are the X-Prize rules specific enough about the resulting health of the 3 people upon returning to the ground?
By 'safely return to earth', I would assume they mean more or less in excellent health. Another thing to note is that the same craft has to repeat the journey within two weeks. I would say getting the ship to 100K feet is closer to 1/10 of the way there than to 1/3 of the way. But then again, what do I know?
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.
The real trick to the X prize, if you read the whole article, is that everyone has to get the FAA approval. So if there are any thoughts to other teams forgoing safety to try and beat the clock, think again. Indeed as a long time fan of Rutan, he's been the only real contender in my mind, due to his ability to solve any challenge presented because he thinks completely out of the box. That tail fin which flips up to control descent is a mark of true genius.
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." -- Albert Einstein
Getting SpaceShipOne up to LEO just requires a larger carrier arcraft and more powerful, higher Isp boosters. (About 12 times bigger but at least that's something that can be attacked with standard aerospace engineering) The reentry is where the problem is at. 17,000 mph is a lot of speed to bleed off. The current SpaceShipOne design isn't capable of mounting the heat shielding necessary to survive those kinds of thermal loads.
It will coast to 100km, which is the official edge of space. And the design is not a dead end. It does exactly what it is designed to do: fly to 100km.
The overall concept which rutan is using is staging at high altitude and low speed with a more or less conventional aircraft as a first stage.
This is most definitely not a dead end. There are existing launchers such as pegasus that do it that way, and there are also some very serious proposals for orbital two stage space transports with a large, rocket assisted transport aircraft as a first stage.
Give rutan a price of 100 million $ and he will come up with a concept for an orbital two stage space transport. It will probably look completely different (no two rutan aircraft look alike), but I would bet that it will use subsonic staging at high altitude.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
Fortunately US pilots have a tradition of experimental planes, and a regulation to place them under. Not everything needed to get into space, but you can work under those rules to do a lot of test flights before you have to get into untested regulatory waters.
Mind you would be a fool to start with an experimental plane classification and give no hints that you intend to reach farther. Regulators do not like it when you surprise them. However you can work with them in well understood areas, while making it clear you intend to go farther.
Still if you are in the US and interested you should write your congressmen. (all 3, house and senate) Nothing greases the wheels for those doing better than congress leaning on the regulators to make it easy.
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.