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."

Comments

Webcast?

[Unoriginal Nick]

Any chance there'll be a webcast of the launch? I'd really like to see it.

Flight Controller

[Bruce Perens]

The flight controller display blanked out (blue-screened for all I know) during the last flight. It will be interesting to see what is in the cockpit for this attempt. I suspect at least a backup artificial horizon. There's already a commercial GPS there. What else would be necessary?

Bruce

Re:Flight Controller

[Long-EZ]

SpaceShipOne uses a custom developed avionics package and it is not based on Windows so it didn't "blue-screen" in that sense. The lift vehicle, White Knight uses an identical system. The design intent was to allow cross training, so time spent flying White Knight will train for SpaceShipOne flights.

The test pilot when the SS1 avionics required rebooting, Mike Melvill, is a VERY capable pilot. In short, he don't need no steenking avionics. All the Scaled team consists of interesting and capable people. They're the cream of the aviation crop.

I'm seriously thinking about flying my Long-EZ (another Rutan design) to Mojave to see the magic. This is going to be so cool.

First pre-announced flight?

[peacefinder]

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!

X Prize Claimed on July 4th, 2004?

[1ione1]

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.

Seems like we'll have a winner soon...

[WegianWarrior]

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 ;)

Re:Chutes?

[Bruce Perens]

It has not been clear to me that there is a bail-out capability. There is no pressure suit, and the deisgn is that there would not be a pressure suit. They are really bulky and need a lot of support - cooling, etc. The ship is double-hulled and a rather small pressure vessel. If it loses pressure, the pilot is probably dead for other reasons.

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

Are not!

[WegianWarrior]

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.

Yes, It's Impressive

[Paulrothrock]

But does putting the mass of 3 humans in suborbital flight really make a difference? This is akin to the Space Shuttle in the 1970s: It's designed to go somewhere, but there's nothing up there to go to. Are we going to continue launch satellites, or are we going storm heaven?

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.

Re:Yes, It's Impressive

[hypnagogue]

But does putting the mass of 3 humans in suborbital flight really make a difference?

Yes. Commericial engineering is only accomplished in small, achievable, individually profitable steps. Only governments can afford to waste money on decades-long boondoggles. Space tourism is seen as a potentially profitable industry... orbital heavy-lifting already has big market players (the governments) and entry into this market is not likely to be overwhelmingly profitable. That is, until you have technology that can significantly lower the price point.

Good Luck, But I Don't Think It Leads Anywhere

[reallocate]

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.