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New SpaceShip One Photos Online

Posted by timothy on from the with-a-fisheye-lens-I'm-in-space-now dept.

Alex Edwards writes "Scaled now have the latest photos from their last 200,000-ft. trip online. The earth curvature on this one shows just how close they got to space."

11 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Wonderful! by NetRanger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's really sad to see such great news as this smothered beneath the noise that the mainstream press calls "news".

    THIS is news, this will be written in history books under our accomplishments. How little perspective we have at any given time...

    Anyway, congrats to the Scaled team.

    --
    -- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
  2. Don't forget to say the Shepard's prayer. by Picass0 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Alan Shepard - before the flight of Freedom 7:

    "Oh Lord, Please don't let me fuck up."

  3. Earth curvature my ass by zakalwe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The earth curvature on this one shows just how close they got to space.

    Right, so I guess they were just really really close to the ground on this one, as it curves the other way!

    http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/New_Index /p hotos/images/video/for_dave.jpg

    Of course what you are really seeing is just wide/narrow angle lenses on the cameras being used, unless the earth shrank a lot while I wasn't looking.

    1. Re:Earth curvature my ass by NearlyHeadless · · Score: 5, Informative
      I think the earth curvature is still there, albeit exaggerated by the fisheye lens...
      The distance to the horizon is 549 miles =sqrt(2*r*h+h*h). Or, approximately 546 miles along the surface of the Eath =r*acos(r/(r+h)).

      If I do the math correctly, the distance of the airplane from the (geometric) plane containing the cirle of the horizon is 75.4 miles, and the radius of the circle in the plane is 544 miles. So you would get a roughly equivalent view of circle on the ground that has a radius that is 7.2 times the distance of your eyes above the ground (7.2 = 544/75.4). This works out to about 39 feet for me (12 meters). So, yes, I think you could see the curvature.

  4. 200000 feet = 38 miles up by Picass0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Mt. Everest = 6 miles
    Edge of Space = 75 miles.
    Space Shuttle orbit ~200 miles (typical)
    International Space Station = 228 miles

    1. Re:200000 feet = 38 miles up by PurpleFloyd · · Score: 5, Informative
      Another few figures of interest:
      • MiG-25 (high speed, high altitude interceptor): ~90,000 feet, and the highest most civilians can go. A few entrepreneurs bought these interceptors from ex-Soviet republics hard up for money. If you've got the money, they'll take you up to about 17 miles and Mach 3.
      • U-2 (spy plane): The US military won't say anything but 'greater than 90,000 feet.' I've personally heard from fairly reliable sources that the real figure is between 90,000 and 95,000 feet.
      • North American X-15 (research/rocket plane): 354,200 ft. Same mission as the X-2. Still holds the altitude record for a piloted aircraft (although I have a feeling that will be broken soon). This plane actually broke the US Air Force's 50-mile definition of space 12 times and the international FAI (Federation Aeronautique Internationale) definition of 100 km twice. It is the closest thing the Space Shuttle has to a direct ancestor.
      I don't know where you got your definition of 75 miles for the edge of space. The USAF awards astronaut wings to any pilot who goes past 50 miles, and the FAA, the FAI, and most importantly the X-Prize backers consider space to start at 100 km, or roughly 62 miles. While Spaceship One does have a good long ways to go, it's not quite as long as you describe it.
      --

      That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
  5. Visions from Space by TALlama · · Score: 5, Funny

    Their success has driven them mad; here's the pilot afterwards explaining that "I saw a woman up there with huge breasts!"

    --

    - The Amazina Llama

    1. Re:Visions from Space by GOD_ALMIGHTY · · Score: 4, Funny

      No No No! He was talking about her huuuge tracks of land.

      Later, he told the two guards to make sure Space Ship One doesn't leave. Unfortunately, the White Knight later showed up and slaughtered the reporters and attempted a rescue, in it's own.... oh... oh... uhm... idiom.

      --
      Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
  6. Random Thoughts by at_kernel_99 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    First, I'm rather amused by the 'N' number on the side of spaceshipone's fuselage. It somehow feels odd that some FAA inspector has to come out to scaled & inspect & signoff on a spacecraft. I'd love to see a pic of the required word EXPERIMENTAL in the cockpit.

    Regarding the rather unconventional 'feathering' control surfaces on spaceshipone, I recall coverage some years ago of Burt examining a project called 'freewing'. I wonder how much influence that project had on the resulting design of ss1?

  7. Check out the shuttle-cocking of the wings by xmas2003 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    In addition to the curvature of the earth (yes, magnified by the wide-angle lens), check out the shuttle-cocking of the wings in mentioned picture. You can read more about how they are using this high drag approach for their re-entry in their FAQ.

    GREAT job Scaled Folks - next stop is 100 Kilometers up! ;-)

    P.S. While they are up there, can you take some more some pictures of my house! ;-)

    --
    Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
  8. Wing feathering the coolest part by Latent+Heat · · Score: 4, Informative
    THe wing feathering is the coolest part. Until now, there have been two approaches to reentry. One is a high drag, high G-force blunt body, although you can mitigate the G's and give some steering control by putting the weight off-center to give it some life. The other is a winged vehicle flown at a very high angle of attack during the reentry.

    A third way had been proposed by Max Faget for the "DC-3" straight-wing Shuttle proposal. The idea was to fly such a high angle of attack on reentry that one pretty much "pancaked" into the atmosphere. The straight wing approach was criticized for being unstable at hypersonic speeds, but my understanding of the idea was that by coming in belly first, the Faget orbiter was pretty much a blunt body with a cookie-cutter shape (the orbiter bottom and wings were like taking a cookier cutter to a blunt-body heat shield), and as such, it would be as stable and as controllable as an Apollo CM. The scary part of the Faget DC-3 was that having reentered the atmosphere, one had to do some kind of transition maneuver from the "full stall" reentry to start flying subsonicaly on those wings.

    What is so innovative about the feathering is that they make a pancake reentry in the fashion of the "DC-3", but they have a workable way of making the transition to normal flight.