Slashdot Mirror
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."
I loved the fact that the Scaled Composite site says that "especially kids" are welcome, they want to introduce the next generation to private space flight. I'm taking my 14 year old daughter and two of her friends.
We're currently planning on camping at the Tehachapi glider park Sunday night, then driving to Mojave at 4:00 Monday morning. We'll see if that works -- there is so much publicity here and at other sites that it may be insanely crowded.
I've been a fan of Rutan since the '79 Popular Science cover of the VariEze, and I've got a copy of the plans for his LongEZ (too big a job for me to complete, though...) I have been looking forward to this event for a long time, I can't wait!
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
The real import of this is that people are trying to get to space without the government getting in their way, and willing to risk failure. They're doing things themselves instead of sitting on their hands waiting for somebody else to do something. It's this pioneering attitude that will take us into space to stay, not the NASA mindset of "risk nothing, even if it means nothing gets done."
Good, inexpensive web hosting
It is great to see private individuals reach for achievements such as this. I hope it goes well for them. Personally, I find the private space race to be quite compelling and inspiring. It is a testament to ingenuity and individualism (i.e. we don't need a big collective or nebulous government agency to achieve somethign great. Rather, just the vision of an intelligent individual and his or her ability to organize and lead a talented team).
Dude - this is a pretty darn lame comment.
Do you ever watch the discovery channel? Ever heard of the X-Planes? There were what, 15+ of them, and none of them could carry 3 people nor carry out a useful 'mission'. It's called research.
The X-Prize is not about building a hypersonic airliner, nor about going to the moon. It's a prize that at this appropriate time in man-machine innovation encouraged some awesome engineers and pioneers to break the old mold of waiting for the government to 'do the big things'.
Don't know about you, but I think 3 minutes of weightlessness in a super-efficient aircraft making sub-orbital flight, done by private individuals is not dead-end. The first (few) that accomplish this feat will likely prove to NASA and the ESA that single gigantic booster rockets are neither efficient nor as re-usable as we were all lead to believe.
Rock on Scaled Composits!
As I understand it, this ship is so laden down with fuel that it can barely make it off the runway, and with only a single engine and single pilot, has no clear path to being able to carry passengers or transatlantic mail. It's designed to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize and nothing else. Not that it's not an important milestone, mind you, but it's just a dead-end.
Which is all well and good, but has very little to do with the manned spaceflight or launch issues that the parent post was concerned with. I'll note here that MER launched on a Delta II rocket, while Cassini launched on a Titan IV - neither of which, you will notice, is the much vaunted "reusable" shuttle.
Ok, YOU design a cheaper space vehicle. How dare you call it "criminally poor"? Are you aware of how difficult of a task developing a reusable man-capable orbital launch vehicle is? Name someone else who has done it better and cheaper.
Why make it reusable? The Russian Space Agency still uses expendable Soyuz capsules, and has a per-launch cost significantly below anything in the West. Reusability only makes sense if you have a high enough flight rate to make it cost-effective, and the sad fact is that right now we simply don't have anywhere near those kind of flight rates for manned launches.
How would YOU have predicted the specific problems that would occur in a spacecraft with millions of parts reentering the atmosphere? How would YOU decide which ones would be troublemakers?
Part of the problem is that NASA did predict the specific problems, but adopted a "well it's worked so far" policy, and did not bother to address what might happen if it didn't work. Given the cost of a shuttle (not to mention the lives of the crew) it seems silly to not have at least considered the possible failure scenarios, and what might be done about them (in contrast to the Apollo 13 mishap, in which the crew was saved due to recovery procedures that had been developed in the years preceding the actual lunar landings).
Want to look at other nation's space agencies?
Not really. The point is not to be "better than the other guy", the point is to do things right.
So, please keep your criticisms to yourself.
Criticism is part of good engineering. There's a reason that things like design reviews are held. If you can't objectively evaluate a system (be it a launch vehicle, or an organization), or take the time to consider alternative approaches, you will never improve. You will also be that much more likely to kill people.
No. Most of the work is getting to a velocity of 8 km/sec. That's 90% of the required total energy. Getting to altitude is 10%. So SpaceShipOne is 10% of the way to orbit (in terms of energy). The additional difficulty of going into orbit is considerably greater than twice the effort: you have to carry 10 times the fuel fraction, and you have to be capable of re-entry, on-orbit maneuvering, etc etc.. It's a lot harder than just going up in a big arc for 5 minutes.
SpaceShipOne is a lot closer to a Cessna than it is to a Space Shuttle. Seriously.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
I wonder how much this design will scale considering it has to piggyback on an airplane before it takes off. Sure getting to space will be a nice feat, but how far along really does this propel the goal of commercial access to space. Will this thing be able to carry large payloads in the future? Dozens of people?
I'm more interested in the teams that are going from the ground up utilizing new technologies and more innovative ideas.
SpaceShipOne just seems like a bit of a hack to me.
Oh, come on - that's not fair! The only vehicle capable of carrying more than 3 people into space is the Space Shuttle. No vehicle so far was ever capable of carrying more than 7. What did you expect? These people are designing and building a first-of-a kind vehicle by only using their own money (as in "not tax-payer's money"). If they succeed, the funding for a larger scale vehicle will come along. It'll take quite some time before you can buy a ticket on a "USS Voyager" class ship.
Give credit where credit is due, instead of whining.