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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.
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.
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.
I believe you are thinking of the X-43A Scramjet test vehicle.
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.
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. :)
Bah the prudes can rate me into oblivion, but I'm telling ya the average joe going into space is what will change everything.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
There are some images on RLV News . And there is also a story on space.com. Everybody in mojave must have seen and heard this.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
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"
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
WYIAARS.
Serves them right for not buying a fax machine like the rest of the world.
If you need powered aluminum, I can get you plenty. All my neighbors drink pop from cans (I'm the strange one on the block who can't stand soda) and most throw them away. Cans are about as pure aluminum as you can get, so I'll just powder them, and then sell to you.
Okay, so I'll burn the paint off too, and if you like I will use electrolysis to get rid of the Al oxide.
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
are any of the teams 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....
c hn icalMain.html
Yup, the Da Vinci Project is. They are also supposedly good to go within a year. But no launch date has been set yet. And since they launch from Canada, I guess they don't need any license from the USA?
http://www.davinciproject.com/beta/Technical/Te
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.
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.