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SpaceShipOne Flight Completed Successfully
knothead99 writes "CNN is reporting the successful liftoff of SpaceShipOne from a runway in the Mojave desert. Around 10:30 EDT the craft will reach an altitude of 50,000 feet and they'll separate from White Knight and ignite the rocket for space entry. More information can also be found at the Mojave Airport website" Update: 06/21 15:36 GMT by S : An MSNBC story confirms that SpaceShipOne 'glided safely back to Earth, landing back at the Mojave Airport' around 8.15AM PST.
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it's not a matter of height, it's a matter of speed.
Here is a nice orbital velocity calculator.
Getting up to that speed is not the only problem, you have to loose all that kinetic energy before you land, unless you fancy spreading yourself thinly across a continent.
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Generally somewhere between 250-300 km (where air drag starts to become important) and 1000 km (where the inner van allen radiation belt starts to get serious). Low earth orbit usually implies a modest inclination to the equator, (i.e., the lowest achievable from the launch site). The Space Shuttle flies in low Earth orbit.
For more information see this article from ScienceWorld
Basically at first, they said the engine cut out early on their own (they were supposed to be switched off by the pilot instead). They don't know why the engine cut out early.
As a result, they weren't sure if they reached the 100km mark at first, but were told they did afterward.
On the glide back to the landing strip, some loud pops were heard coming from the back of the rocket. Chaser planes inspected, and reported everything looked ok.
Hooray for private spaceflight!
Low Earth Orbit is 350 km (217 mi). Obits lower than this are not stable.
In addition, they would have to be going about 8 times faster to reach orbit.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
If they hit the 100 km mark, as planned, it was obviously not premature, although it might have been shut down earlier than planned due to any of many reasons (better conditions aloft, etc.) If it was earlier than planned, and they made the target altitude, then that shows they have planned well and the systems worked. Everything I would expect from these people.
Nothing here...move along.
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I was listening to the radio relay on the bbc.co.uk live video feed.
On the way back (I think after completing the 'feather'), Mike reported a 'loud bang' and his chase plane, the Alpha-Jet reported that an aft fairing had buckled.
When they got back down they were saying that they suspect the loud bang was caused by that same panel.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Your post is kind of misleading. May I remind you that escape velocity is defined as the initial velocity necessary to leave the Earth's gravity well provided that there is no additional acceleration. As long as your acceleration away from Earth is greater than than the Earth's gravitational acceleration at your distance from it, you will eventually escape Earth's gravity well, and at a speed of much less than Mach 25 to boot. Think of a balloon: they certainly never travel very quickly, but they get very far towards escaping on very small velocity.
A spaceship is not launched like a cannon, but rather, it has engines on it that provide thrust. In this way it is possible to escape Earth's gravity with continual acceleration and never actually experiencing speeds of Mach 25. You are right, to get into a low-Earth orbit one would need to be travelling at Mach 25, but that is simply a result of the Newtonian mechanics of an orbit plotted at that arbitrary altitude. Any number of different orbits - such as a parabolic orbit arcing away from the Earth - could have any number of different (higher or lower) necessary velocities.
And besides, once you are in space, without having to worry about air resistance, it's trivially easy to build up that extra velocity. Your post makes it sound like getting to Mach 3 is trivial and they need to put in eight times the work to reach LEO. This is simply not true. Getting to 100km through most of the atmosphere has already accomplished most of the work. The rest is easy. It's not as simple as looking at the difference between the numbers 3 and 25 and saying, "Oh, they have eight times more speed they need to get!"
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cbc.ca has video clips in realvideo and quicktime.
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I think that goes for OS's too
Not true. It is not trivially easy to build up that extra velocity, because you have to lug all of the extra propellant through the atmosphere. The amount of propellant doesn't rise linearly, either: it rises exponentially. If they want to keep their current launch design, they're going to need the world's largest carrier plane to take them to altitude.
It gets worse: currently they're hardly addressing *the* most difficult concept for cheap reusable spacecraft: reentry. This single problem has contributed to the majority of the space shuttle's turnaround cost. Standing on the shoulders of giants (as the vast majority of their work thusfar has been), they can at least avoid the ceramic tile mistake; however, they still need to solve the problem somehow.
They're not 3/25ths done - they're *less* than that.
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
The folks at JP Aerospace are using baloons for assist--in fact they are taking this even further and claim they can take a lighter than air craft to orbit using ion drives or something similar.
I disagree that it's easy. Although accelerating at a height of 100km isn't too hard, you need to get the fuel and oxidizer up to that height and keep burning it. Carrying enough propellants up through the atmosphere in order to burn your way up to about 7,500 m/s velocity is pretty difficult.
Another way to look at it is to use the equation for kinetic energy (1/2*m*v^2). Since it's proportional to v-squared, if you need 8 times more velocity, that's 64 times more energy. As you say, "The rest is easy." :)
This is not a sig
--I'm sure somebody else has come up with the idea, but is anybody pursuing it?
Yes the Canadian Team called The da Vinci project
"The da Vinci Project, led by Brian Feeney of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, registered as a contender for the X PRIZE on June 2, 2000. A reusable helium balloon will lift our spacecraft, "Wild Fire" to an altitude of 80,000 feet. This is where Wild Fire's rocket engines will fire and propel the crew to the 100 km altitude goal -- space."
They developed the project in a kind of "open process" way; every people who wants to contribute is invited to join the project and can even open a local club in is university. They accept help from people of all fields: engineering, public relations, marketing etc...
"The all-volunteer da Vinci project is the largest volunteer technology project in Canadian history with upwards of 100,000 man-hours having been spent on the project thus far."
They amased a huge amount of sponsers and are well advanced in the project.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
To get to 100km height, you need m * g * h in energy. per unit of mass you get: g * h = 9.8 * 100 *10^3 ~=~ 1 MJ /kg.
In orbit, you'll circle the earth every 1.5 hours. That means a speed of about 7.4km/sec. This requires (again per unit of mass) 1/2 * v^2 = 0.5*7400^2= 27 MJ/kg.
So, reaching (low earth-) orbit requires about 27 times more energy than what was demonstrated now.
Now there are a few things to keep in mind. You'll have to lug along the fuel to accelrate the last part of your ascent. That means that just taking 27 times more fuel won't cut it.
We're at least two orders of magnitude away from commercial manned spaceflight. (where spaceflight is defined as "in orbit"). Sure: Big step, but not quite there yet....
Just got back home from the Mojave airport and let me tell you the experience of watching this amazing aircraft reach the edge of space was awesome. Six friends and I drove from Los Angeles to Mojave and when we arrived there around 3 am and the place was already full of people. For the next few hours we explored around the field, bought some very reasonably priced breakfast burritos and ran around the tarmac. All the vendors seemed to be local groups and didn't rip you off (except for coffee and krispie cremes which were a somewhat large dollar a piece).
Mojave airport is really cool in itself, no fences around and you can wander all over if you want. We got some good spots as near to the takeoff and landing as possible ( they did restrict where you could watch the event, and the ships wheels actually left the ground about 50 yards north of us) and camped out. Everybody around was really excited. Many had come from really far away, like this pair of guys we met from Seattle. I'm sure that there were many who were from much further than that. There was a big mix of people. Lots of old timer aviation types, college age kids, and families. I'm sure much of the town of Mojave were there. We talked to this one guy who was bringing a group of kids from the local high school who were in their special engineering program(something I didn't have at my HS).
When they announced that the ship was actually going to take off on time I was pretty surprised. I just had a feeling it was going to be delayed. At about 6:40 the low altitude chase plane took off, it was a bright red little single engine plane which according to the announcer was flown by the spaceshipone pilot the night before in order to pull 6G's so that he could go to sleep! Next (I think) came the medium altitude chase plane, which was this really cool and modern looking craft with propellers in the back and a little wing on the nose. Then came White Knight, carring SpaceShipOne which look completely unorthodox and bizarre in person, even if you've already seen pictures of them. It taxied along the tarmac that ran past the crowd did a U turn then sped up and soared off of the runway to a cheering crowd. As everybody watched the ship gain altitude, the high altitude chase taxied and lifted off. This jet was pretty interesting, It sort of looked like a fighter jet that had been squashed to make it all squat lookin, sort of a caricature of a fighter jet. The ship climbed really slowly, about an hour of circling around the airfield getting smaller and smaller. Then we got the word that the rocked was going to take off . The ship was about 2/3 of the way almost directly between the horizon and the sun (the sun being fairly low since this is about 7:45 am). Then all of a sudden this huge contrail appeared and traveled straight up just to the right of the sun traveling at an amazing speed. The crowd loved it , after watching the ship climb slowly for an hour this was really dramatic. The trail kept moving up until it seemed to be about 70degrees above the horizon when the engine cut off. After a few minutes with everybody searching the sky for the craft *boom*, a little sonic boom let loose and the ship then appeared. It circled around a few times on its way down and met up with the chase planes. They all flew in a pretty tight formation and the ship finally made an amazingly smooth landing considering it was an unpowered odd looking bulbous craft. Everybody was ecstatic as SpaceShipOne rolled by, this odd looking craft had reached the edge of space and had made it back in one piece. After that, the low altitude chase plane made a flyby, which was pretty cool but then the topper was when White Night flew towards the crowd then pulled up proudly displaying it's bizarre silouette.
I'm really really happy that I got to have this experience. This amazing flight was the first time in my 19 years that I felt that I was actually witnessing history being made with my own eyes.