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SpaceShipOne to Try for Space on Monday
CommanderData writes "The first piloted private space flight will occur Monday at 9:30AM ET. SpaceShipOne is planning to ascend to the 62 mile (100 Km) mark and return to land at its takeoff point over the course of 90 minutes. With only a pilot (unnamed at this time) on board this does not qualify as a run for the Ansari X-Prize. If the flight is successful they will likely try for the prize soon afterward..." An anonymous reader adds: "Scaled Composites also has this page about the event."
they have room but this flight will be just the pilot. later thay will carry the 3 people needed for a prize attempt.
They are not even trying for an X-prize run this time around. They haven't notified the judges that they are going to make an attempt.
Which, given that they are in the lead, I iamgine that they are going to draw things out a little bit.
I mean, if they are confident in the design, they may fly it crewed and allow a few honored folks to ride passenger (Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, etc) for the actual prize flights.
Gentoo Sucks
Last time he hit 3.5Gs. I doubt that they will want it to go too much more than that operationally, because it's not good for the pilot.
Gentoo Sucks
The technology used in this launch is going to be reused by SpaceDev to put satellites up for only $5 million a piece. This illustrates the direct effect of the X-prize.
Currently, satellite launches can cost in the hundreds of millions.
Now if only their were more prizes.
...there is nothing radical or unusual about their engine. it is tried and tested technology. fwiw so is just about everything else about their vehicle. they're just the first to put it all together in one package and actually do it.
http://ast.faa.gov/aboutast/701complete.htm
more detailed PDFs also at
http://ast.faa.gov/lrra/stats_notices.htm
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
http://scaled.com/projects/tierone/info.htm
If you do intend to go, you might note that, while the cited 9:30 ET time is corect, the launch site is not on Eastern time. Might be easy to miss that :-(
and assume that the cited time is launch site local. If you arrive at 9:30 local time, it will be long over.
That's 6:30 AM Pacific (local) time.
Yes ...
Quick summary:
No!? So sure, are you?
Yes, actually. The physics of that calculation is trivial. Also, "work" has a well-defined meaning in physics, so strictly speaking that sentence is perfectly true.
Clue alert - he wasn't talking about energy. Try actually reading his post to discover he was talking about work to solve engineering problems, not how much fucking energy it takes to attain oribital velocity.
Clue alert - engineering difficulty is closely related to energy in situations like these. With orbital velocities comes a whole range of new problems related to hypersonic aerodynamics, heating, flight control, structural design, etc etc. Look, SpaceShipOne uses hydraulic-boosted (if even that)manual flight controls, and relies of passive stability to maintain the correct flight attittude. You couldn't get away with that for a Shuttle. It also doesn't have a heatshield the way the Shuttle does (it has some re--inforcement, but not even within an order of magnitude). The rocket on SpaceShipOne has a total impulse of maybe 1 km/sec, and the corresponding mass fraction of the vehicle devoted to fuel is maybe 20%. The rest can go to building a robust vehicle; on the Shuttle the mass fraction of fuel has to be closer to 90%. SpaceShipOne doesn't have cryogenic fuels, and the associated issues. I can go on and on, but hopefully by now you've grokked that these are two very different machines, and SpaceShipOne is as close to orbit as climbing Mt. Greylock is to climbing Mt. Everest.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?