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SpaceShipOne 100 km Attempt Slated for June 21
apsmith writes "Scaled Composites has just announced their first attempt at breaking 100 km, scheduled for June 21. This would make it the first commercial manned vehicle to officially enter space. This is not quite an Ansari X prize attempt since it will carry only one person without the extra mass corresponding to the 3-person prize requirement; they have to give at least 30 days' notice for that. Past flight history is available from their site; the Discovery Channel is producing a documentary on the whole project, 'Rutan's Race For Space.'" Roger_Explosion adds "If successful, the craft - named Space Ship One - will become the world's first commercial manned space vehicle. Space Ship One will temporarily leave the earth's atmosphere, and the pilot (yet to be announced) will experience about three minutes of weightlessness."
Any chance there'll be a webcast of the launch? I'd really like to see it.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
... as we watched the 1st launch since the Challenger disaster...
"GO baby, GO!"
I'll be counting down. Heck I might even break out the model rockets and find a big park to go 'celebrate' (course the biggest park is next to a gorge, we don't like strong winds...)
I think this is the first Space Ship One flight that Scaled has announced in advance. I'm more than a bit surprised. I thought that they would do their first X-Prize-class flight quietly, then announce the next day that they were going for the prize officially.
Good luck to them in any case... I'm sure it'll be a heck of a ride!
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
To win the X Prize requires that two sub-orbital flights be completed within two weeks. The June 21st first attempt is just less than two weeks before the Fourth of July, America's Independence Day. While I don't expect to hear a public commitment (or even comment) from the Spaceship One team, it looks suspiciously like they're hoping to wrap it up on Independence Day.
I think they'll manage to get over 100 km in their vessel. Then I assume we'll see them attemt the quick turnaround needed to win the prize and a new launch within two weeks. Then first, having proven their system, will they announce their officall attempt for the prize.
At least that makes sence to me - test that it work first, before they go for the big one. Just the same as NASA did with their first spacecapsules; unmanned ballistic flights first, then a ballistic flight with a monkey, then an unmanned orbital flight and a monkeyed orbital flight - and once they knew their craft would behave as expected under all phases of the mission, they did a couple of manned suborbital flights to prove that humans would behave as expected (they did better than expected AFAIK) before they launced a man into orbit. In fact, it's just the same these guys do; prove that the spacecraft can handle all aspects of the mission before they put three people into it and light the fuse ;)
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
One person has done balloon jumps from 110K feet in preparation for early manned space flight. A famous astronaut commented that he would not have wanted to try this. From the SS1 this would be worse than bailing out from a jet under power - which generally only is accomplished with powered ejection systems. All of these things add the weight that SS1 is designed to avoid.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
One of the sweetest things is that the SpaceShipOne looks like rocketships were supposed to look like many years ago. Curvacious.
The game of Go (Igo, Weiqi, Baduk) has the simplest concept and the deepest play.
It's important to remember that going into space and being weightless are separate things. Weightlessness is the effect of free fall; not some magic thing that happens once you reach space. You're only weightless in orbit because orbit, by definition, means that you're in a continuous free fall. Since this flight won't go into orbit (or anywhere close to far enough from Earth to ignore it's gravity), the weightlessness effect is simply a result of the flight trajectory including free-fall on re-entry
Actually, weightlessness is simply the result of your velocity being the same as that of your surroundings. If you and your surroundings (i.e. Space Ship) are traveling at approximately the same velocity (speed & direction), you experience weightlessness. Free fall is an example of this effect, not the rule. This is precisely how the NASA Vomit Comet works.
If your comment were correct, the Apollo astronauts would not have experienced weightlessness on their way to / from the moon.
The pilot (to be announced at a later date) of the up-coming June sub-orbital space flight will become the first person to earn astronaut wings in a non-government sponsored vehicle, and the first private civilian to fly a spaceship out of the atmosphere. SpaceShipOne then coasts up to its goal height of 100 km (62 miles) before falling back to earth.
Seeing as a) most people in the aerospace industry defines space as 'anything above 100km over SL (sealevel), and b) they havn't gotten any money from the big, evil goverment to build their vessel, this is correct. Off course, he won't be completly out of out atmosphere, but then the edge of that isn't a sharply defined line.
The pilot experiences a weightless environment for more than three minutes and, like orbital space travelers, sees the black sky and the thin blue atmospheric line on the horizon.
According to This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury (freely avilable from NASA's website), this is a very good description of what Alan Shepard experienced on his suborbital flight on the 5th of May 1961 (see chapter 11-4 of the aforementioned bood, or see what Wikipedia has to say on that flight).
Interestingly enought, when I first heard of the X-prize, I assumed it would be won by a reusable capsule modeled on the early american designs (Mercury, Gemeni or Apollo) launced by reusable solidfueled rockets. I'm happy a more inovative, less 'brute force' approach seems to be winning.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
This would make an excellent crew transfer vehicle, but a poor 'space truck'. What's needed is a commercially produced heavy lift launch vehicle. 100 tons to LEO would provide the ability to send modular lab or manufacturing stations into orbit, with crews sent up by craft like SpaceShip One. It doesn't have to be totally reusable, just cheap enough that it won't cost ~$1 billion plus the cost of the material being launched. Lower this by half, and maybe large companies could use it as research or manufacturing stations, with the benefit of NASA being able to use them to mount high-quality manned missions to the Moon and Mars, and unmanned missions to deep space, powered by nuclear reactors that would increase the amount of data by increasing both bandwidth and mission length.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
This is essentially an airplane. It ain't no capsule on top of a big rocket that just follows its course and goes up. This thing needs to be flown up into space.
With that said, it's also a lot safer than sitting on top of a giant uncontrollable bomb. If I were a test pilot then this really wouldn't be that much more dangerous than what I would be doing anyway.
Perhaps you used the words "whoa-hai" or "glayven". That's usually a dead giveaway.
..."
No, I only got as far as "I'm calling to see if you have any rooms available for
I did not inject any Monty Python references (even though the situation clearly called for it[1]), rant about SCO vs. All Right Thinking People, talk trash about Emacs, brag about my fat pipe (even though the situation clearly called for it[2]), or anything else remotely geeky.
The only conclusion is that I must have an accent other than my native SoCal facility with the word "dude".
----
[1] Monty Python references are always called for, so it's redundant to mention it.
[2] No one will know if you have a fat pipe unless you either tell them about it or show it to them, so you just have to work it into a conversation wherever you can.
On the other hand, taking the first real steps into space will pay long term benefits to all humanity. And by "real", I mean economically viable, commercial ventures. Not some "what's the most dangerous and expensive path to space" government pork project. I intend to offense to NASA engineers or their Russian counterparts, but governments just aren't very good at this sort of thing.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
...if this project makes the 2-week turnaround for re-launch required by the X-prize rules. Their launches to date have not been even close to the required frequency.
This launch, as I understand it, is just the first try. If it goes well they will prepare to do the 2 launches in 2 weeks. Still, the first manned commercial space flight is a momentous event. Go Scaled go!
Rutan is doing it for less than 5 million (that's including vehicle development)...
:-)
I'm curious. Where did this number come from? I looked up and down their web site but couldn't find any numbers as to the cost.
To be honest, I have some trouble believing that this can be done for $5M. Why? Because it seems to me that the manpower cost alone should be more than that. However, I am very willing to be proven wrong
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Thought project! If I were to build a vaccum sealed tube and wrap it around the earth in a perfect sphere (obviously that would be hard to do with mountains and whatnot so you'd have to build it a bit off the ground to accomidate, or maybe someone can find a path... srhrugs). Could you orbit the earth inside it, and would there be any practical uses for such a thing.
Were all dead too
How exactly does that fit into the topic of discussion? We are all going to die anyway. The amount we spend globally on space exploration is not even 1% of what we spend on medical research.
I agree with you that we definitely should be spending more, but please don't dredge up that old argument that we should never leave the planet to help more starving people. People were starving before we had a space program, and they continue to starve and die from disease. I agree that we should be trying to get to places, but orbit is also just a forst step. My point is that you have a better chance of living or vacationing at a lagrange point with commercial development than you do with a government program. Consumer demand drives commercial endeavors. If I have to spend 20K to keep it running and then spend another 200K 20 years from now to retire on the L5 colony, I'll do that. If you wait around for them to get you where you want to go, they might never get there. You have to be committed now, and later. Spend the 20K as soon as you can, and then put the 180K in a muni find. You'll have your 20K back and more by the time they build L5 Hilton or Moonbase Hilton.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Yes. And No. :)
"Who the hell is Nietzche? It's a question stupid people are asking." -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
Very interesting thought there :) I can't really think of a practical use for it... Maybe a really quick light-mail delivery service, for important hard-copies of documents? Hmm.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Actually, if you asked NASA to get you into a sub-orbital launch, they would point you to the National Scientific Balloon Facility located at Wallops Island. $500K will get you a two day flight above 120,000 feet - close enough for most science. If you need weightlessness, a sounding rocket can also get you there, but not for as long, of course. Not everything NASA does is an overpriced iron pig.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
All good luck to the crew. I certainly hope this leads to something, but let's don't forget that it is a very long way from coasting up to 100k to entering orbit.
First of all, this craft is at least 6 times to slow to achieve orbit. You can coast as high as you want, but without achieving orbital velocity, you'll fall right back.
Second, the craft's unorthodox reentry technique isn't amenable for use coming back from orbit. That means that this particular design probably doesn't lead anyplace useful.
Third,leaving the atmosphere isn't strictly necessary to achieve orbit. It's just a whole lot less messy. You could achieve orbit at one kilometer if you dealt with atmosphereic heating.
We should also remember that the private sector has had the capability of achieving orbit for decades. They built/build/launch the rockets that have been enterng orbit for more than 40 years. Two things have kept them from actually doing it: 1) A clear business case: Can you really make a profit selling tickets to orbit? 2) The fact that any rocket capable of putting a person in orbit is also quite capable of carrying a warhead to the next hemisphere. Governments tend to worry about, and regulate, those sorts of things.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Since Rutan and Co called the Space Ship One project Tier One, it makes sense that they are planning a tier two. Probably an orbital flight.
Knowing Rutan he's probably already got the design figured out for an orbital vehicle and has been running simulations of it.
Who knows, maybe there is even a tier three... the moon.
Bryan
CT
If there is ANYONE that could build the world's first privately funded reusable spacecraft that can achieve low Earth orbit (LEO), it's Burt Rutan's company.
Scaled Composites could work with Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works division and come up with a low cost vehicle that could be launched on top of a modified 747-200 to carry up to six astronauts and/or its equivalent in cargo to LEO. Unlike the unfortunate X-33 project, this project is probably going to be much cheaper to pull off since the vehicle that actually flies into space will not need to carry so much fuel during its boost phase.
To be even more pedantic-
If you were to orbit the earth at ground level, you could go a little bit slower than orbiting at 100km (ignoring problems like friction and the fact the the earth is not a perfect sphere). Orbital physics are a little counter-intuitive, but you must expend energy - and speed up - to rise into a higher orbit. Yet your angular velocity (the rate at which you circle the center point of orbit) decreases.
Time for my standard response that makes people hate me for getting them hooked:
First off, the reason we fly straight up and then sideways is that it's a lot easier to accelerate sideways at 70km than it is at 0km altitude, because of the thinner atmosphere. Since the only significant delta-V in an orbital launch is the tangential component, you can tune your ascent to minimize fuel requirements and save up for the big sideways burn.
Now, for the fun part: Orbiter is a free (as in beer + SDK for making your own ships) space-flight simulator that is both mathematically accurate and visually stunning. It includes the space shuttle Atlantis (don't even bother starting out with that one, as it takes practice to get to orbit) and some fictitious spacecraft capable of getting you to Mars or even beyond.
You can even look around online and find add-ons such as my latest favorite, an Apollo mission including a pretty realistic cockpit complete with the Apollo computer system. You even have to do your own LEM extraction and so forth.
and that says a hell of a lot of interesting things about what Allen thinks is the risk vs. reward ratio in this investment, doesn't it
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.