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European Space Shuttle Prototype Lands Safely In Sweden
This Nick Is Taken writes "Yahoo! News reports the successful test of a German designed prototype of the European space shuttle, Phoenix , taking place in the north of Sweden, moving the first all European mission into space one step closer."
This isn't the first European spaceplane, back in the 70's/80's/90's we had a project called Hermes running, but there were a lot of re-designs and eventually the project was closed down due to bloat and ever changing requirements.
Check out the Hermes space plane at Astronautix
"moving the first all European mission into space one step closer."
Should read as "All European manned mission".
The ESA's been doing space missions for what, over 10 years now? Satellites, probes, etc.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
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Totally offtopic, but when it comes to mythology I just can't help it.
The phoenix bird did not burst into flames. It was a bird which was considered immortal. As its end approached, it set fire to its nest, was consumed by the flames and was reborn from the ashes.
There are Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Egyptian, and Native American versions of the phoenix bird
The belief in a biblical god is an ignorant one
They cancelled the F22? Man, somebody needs to tell the people at the AFB near my house since they are eagerly awaiting the first shipment to replace some of their F-15's
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
My boss used to work on Lockheed's end of the X-33 development process. He told me that SSTO is pretty much a pipe dream at this point because of difficulties in maintaining such large fuel tanks for launch and reentry. Any fuel tank will have several hundred pounds of residual propellant that have to be dealt with. The propellant will cyclically boil and condense inside the tank during orbits, inducing thermal stresses on the tank as well as constantly varying its pressure; same with any residual heat from reentry. Maintaining control over such issues is difficult. Extra insulation, for example, creates a weight penalty that could be more usefully put toward payload.
I see a lot of people on here complaining that the shuttle is inefficient because it takes up extra equipment (in the form of flight control surfaces) that it doesn't need for the majority of the flight. The same logic follows with fuel tanks for a SSTO scheme. This is why anymore, most follow-on vehicle schemes require at least two stages to reach orbit.