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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.
Anybody with more details on this? Is this an Issue Of Significance, or is it no big deal?
Note to editors: It's not like you didn't have advance notice of this. It's not like this isn't a huge story. SpacesShipOne successfully lifted off over an hour before this previewed on the front page. Step lively!
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I saw the take off and the landing live on BBC News24 and it looked very smooth.
Apparently there may have been some slight damage to the nose, but Mike Melvill declared it a 'mind-blowing experience'.
Burt Rutan seems quite moved too.
...an Englishman in London.
I am happily, gratefully, wrong. I hope with all my heart that Rutan and his contemporaries continue the privately funded drive to the stars.
Best part, Rutan has admitted that SS1 is scalable, meaning it could become an orbital launch vehicle. Sweet.
Maybe there's something in all the naming - the project's called Tier One, the spacecraft module is called SpaceShipTwo...
What's Tier Two going to be?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I watched it land on Fox News. They made altitude and landed safely. Bigtime congratulations to the entire Scaled Composits team.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
This is truly an historic day.
IMO the most historic event since 9/11.
No, it's not the beginning of commercially available space flight, but it is an important proof of concept. I think it's analagous to the Wright brothers flight. Obvioulsy a lot more time and money will have to be spent to achieve widespread space travel, but today's flight accomplishes two things:
1. It gets spcae travel into the private sector. Yes, government programs are responsible for creating many of the technologies we use today, but there's nothing like a little privateization to get things moving.
2. It shows that is can be done. This is more of a psychological thing, but important nonetheless.
Congratulations to the SpaceShipOne team, Godspeed and Thank You!
Does anyone have the numbers for how much they actually spent to get to this point? I have heard ~$20 million...but I don't know a real number.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
I was watching for this on BBC News 24 and they continued to show the leader of the opposition haranging Mr Blair about the EU Constitution. They did show a little "Breaking News" banner but I can't believe they didn't just cut away. I can't imaging this behaviour happening in the days of Project Mercury....
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
The quality of the anchors was a notch above filming cottage cheese. They clearly did not understand what was going on, why it was important, and they thought they made $10 million when they touched down and that it was all about science. They treated it like a NASA launch, expecting it to be months until the next one, and there to be a bunch of ill-explained science as a rationale for the launch.
I'd like to say it again:
The United States now has a certified and *operational* civilian space port. Holy frick.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
This is the best "news", I believe that I have experienced in my lifetime since the launch of the 1st space shuttle. No, I do not consider wars and killings as news. My life is not really affected by them. Sorry.
My life has been affected by explorers that came to this country (USA), and by those who have gone into space. Both war/killing and exploration provide an idiology for rustling up resources to get a common goal accomplished, but I kinda prefer the latter.
One thing to note is that the X Prize will be awarded to "the first privately funded group to send three people on a suborbital flight 62.5miles (100.6 kilometers) high and repeat the feat within two weeks using the same vehicle."
That is a pretty high goal, because I do not know of any space vehicle that has accomplished this (am I wrong?).
Now we're into the realm of engineering. They can get above the atmosphere with the composite craft, all they have to do is keep going.
I agree with you that this is the easiest and best way to do the job. I loath the "blast-off" mentality, where 99% of your craft is thrown away just getting up there. Waste!
However, "just keep going" is easy to say and hard to do. It will require substantially more fuel to be carried, which itself requires far more fuel to be consumed accelerating the greater mass. The return flight also must be considered, heat shielding means more mass too.
Will Rutan's formula of nitrous oxide and tire rubber lend itself to this task? In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "Nyaaaaa, (munch munch munch) Could be."
It will happen. It may be Armadillo Aerospace, it may be Scaled Composites, it may be someone none of us have heard of yet, but someone will do it and private people who care about their investment won't do it by throwing 99% of their property away.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
http://vesuvius.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/quotes.html
Some good ones:
The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. - Dennis Gabor, 1963
It is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind. - Space Act of 1958
Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible. - Simon Newcomb, 1902
(eighteen months before Kitty Hawk.)
HIGH FLIGHT
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
- John Gillespie Magee, Jr., (killed in the Battle of Britain, age 19)
The live video fee which the BBC presented online was - er - interesting.
:)
Apparently it was provided by a US media company. Unfortunately the Camera crews could be heard talking over the commentary although it did provide insight into the 'blank shots' of the sky; none of the camera crews could locate the aircraft!
The only good shots were WhiteKnight takeoff, the con-trail on 'light' and SpaceShipOne landing. Most of the rest of the flight was obscured by them being 'in the sun'.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Maybe a silly question, but what is the function of chase planes? Do they look for external damage/problems? Do they try to help in case of an emergency (what could they do)? I was trying to explain it to my 5 year old and then realized I had no idea what I was talking about (kids are fun that way ;-)).
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I would like to point out here that Mach speed changes as a function of Altitude. Mach 25 at ground level is not the same speed as Mach 25 at 100,000 feet. So it's not a good measure of how fast one has to go to escape gravitational pull.
10 years: Private enterprises are making regular orbital flights, including docking at the ISS and doing crew transfers for various governments. Medium lift (~10 ton to LEO) launch vehicles in test phases. Private probes to Moon, Mars to search for raw materials for harvest or colony support; Cost for suborbital flight: $15K; to LEO: $1 million
25 years: First private space station, specializing in $20,000/night hotel rooms and microgravity research. ISS abandoned, parts sold to private industry. NASA has a probe orbiting Pluto; Lunar colonies in planning stations, private rovers on Mars. Deliveries using suborbital craft are now regular (for when it absolutely, postively has to be there yesterday). Many people confused about time zones.
50 years: I move off the mudball to Mars for retirement. Private citizens now moving into Lunar and Mars colonies. Private industry exploring asteroid belt. Suborbital flight as common as airline flight; Cost to LEO: $15K. Space tether under construction at several points around the globe; Nairobi is a major spaceport.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
It's amazing what a small private company can do with just 20 million dollars. Hopefully this will open up the market for suborbital flights in the future, at the very least it's an example of how to go about getting your permits and really start doing private space business.
:)
But what it really goes to show is that what we need is more of these innovative competitions and less half-billion dollar shuttle launches. Image if the government and private sector came together to offer the prize of, say, 200 million for the "X2" prize to the first private orbital fligt. And then later on a cool billion dollars to the first private moon mission. It would still be a bargain! A 747 plane costs around 200 million, and even a billion won't get NASA far these days (*cough, x33, chough*). A billion will get you a single B2 bomber, how many more of those do we need? Imagine all that money fueled into milestone driven private development.
But the best part is, if you're a teen now or in your early twenties, you could one day be working in the space industry! Maybe not as an astronaut, but as a mission planer, technician, sysadmin or accountant
It's like deja vu all over again.
The live video fee which the BBC presented online was - er - interesting.
:-)
Do they have camera tripods the other side of the Atlantic?
You'd briefly catch a glimpse of the spacecraft, then the camera would lurch and you'd have another couple of minutes of funky lens-flares from the sun.
I hope the final footage is better.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I think your wrong. All source I've read about SS1 say that is will burn the engines for 63 to 70 seconds - which is a burn of only about a minute. It even says this in the articule.
Do you have any references to the two minutes burn or that engines shut out early?
M0571y H@rml355.
They did manage to catch the landing. And then we had a mix of announcer and radio feeds, you could barely hear the announcer so I turned up my audio to hear and then the radio feeds came back and almost blew out my speakers!!
All in all a horrible webcast!
Hmm, that does bring up an interesting question. Has anyone considered using balloons to get up past most of the atmosphere? Strapping a couple of balloons onto the ship and letting them do most of the lifting, then let them go and continue upward using regular rockets. The balloons would then deflate and fall to Earth where they could be retrieved and reused.
It would add a lot of time to the flight, but you would save all the fuel needed to get up through the first 50K or so, without having to piggyback off a 747.
I'm sure somebody else has come up with the idea, but is anybody pursuing it?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Clearly this is a great success in the commercial space movement.
Let me begin by saying that SpaceShipOne is a development on clearly establablished NASA research, as NASA have demostrated a prototype which displays the same functionality.
NASA have always maintained that their research is for the benefit of all mankind. Here is where we see the benefits of their tax funded research, in commercial endeavors.
The question to ask is about NASA's place in the future. As the first (of hopefully many) endeavors against a governmental monopoly on space, one must wonder if this is the beginning of a trend. If so, how long before commercial interests take over NASA in R&D, budget and achievements?
To wit; could the first man on Mars be a private individual?
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
...commercial, for-profit ventures going into space, the sooner it will become accessible to the common man. Just not in any of our lifetimes.
While I don't expect it to happen in our lifetimes either, it's worth noting that the time elapsed between the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, and the flight of the first Jet aircraft was only 40 years. 20 years after that saw the birth of the SR-71 Blackbird, which is still one of the most amazing aircraft ever produced by man.
I'm not betting on it, but it's possible I'll be around another 60 years. Sometimes things just take off (no pun intended.) I hope this is one of those times.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
The second problem is that as you ascend, the pressure drops, and the less boost you get. Sure, for the first few thousand feet you rise like a bat out of hell. But from there on out it's slow, slow, slow, and all the while you are going to be shot off target by the jet stream.
Finally, once you are up in the air, your velocity is still zero. Most of the fuel you are expending is to build up speed. (At least for orbital flight. For the x-prize this isn't so important.)
My back of the envelope (pun not intended) calculations showed that the mass that would have been used for a ballon would be better spent on a bigger booster.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
For me, the big problem isn't getting into space (though there's no way the current setup can handle the much larger rocket required to get into orbit), but rather reentering the Earth's atmosphere. The craft has to dissipate a considerable quantity of energy coming from orbit (though not quite 11 km/s worth). In theory, one could do it with the current Spaceship One, if they had rockets that could kill off enough of the velocity (ie, most of the energy must be dissipated this way) so that the craft could reenter the Earth's atmosphere slowly enough that it wouldn't burn up.
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.
Arguably, the Space Shuttle's design is so poor because the Air Force wanted a relatively low altitude fly-by over Russian soil. Had the Space Shuttle been designed to Aero-brake much slower, it could have forgone the disposable heat shields. However, there is some question as to the difficulty in obtaining a proper flight envelope when entering the atmosphere at that shallow of an AOA.
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Ignorant Aardvark (632408) sez: "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."
Your numbers are correct, but there's a difference between factual and practical. In order to lift a craft at constant thrust at say, Mach 3, out of Earth's gravity well would require so much fuel that it would weigh too much to get off the ground. And the well stretches out quite far. The Apollo shots were 200,000 miles out before the moon's gravity well became stronger than Earth's for them, which means Earth's hadn't really disappeared yet. The 25 kmph escape velocity represents the minimum energy escape.
The same thing applies to the "trivally easy" comment with respect to getting from Mach 3 to mach 25/orbit. There may be no air and so no max Q to overcome, but the fuel needed has to be carried up there in order to be used there, and that increases the takeoff weight, and that requires more takeoff fuel, and that means a bigger craft with more drag and so even more takeoff fuel and weight....
Besides, SS1 had little concern with aerodynamic drag. It launched from 50,000 feet. That's how it could be so small.
A French paper in 1913, reprinted in a 1958 book by Andrew Halley, the then president of the International Aeronautic Federation, calculated the minimum energy needed for a constant thrust trip to the moon (and Mars and Venus). The moon is 48 hours and 59 minutes away, the last 28 minutes of that being retro-thrust. Unfortunately the then greatest conceivable energy source, hydrogen/oxygen burning, such as the Saturn or the shuttle, has less than one percent of the energy needed to do the job (actually, 116 times too weak).
Until we get a light weight zero point energy source or some other exotic widget for energy without weight, punching holes in the sky is the only reasonable way to get past it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
A .1G acceleration is pretty light on fuel (relatively speaking - right now we do the cheapest method no matter what), and it gets us there pretty quickly.
I may be off by a neat order of magnitude one way or another, as I'm pulling remembered figures, but I think they are right.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Ablatives aren't reusable. :) They require just the same reapplication/inspection turnaround effort that the shuttle's tiles do. Of course, the materials can be quite cheap - in fact, the chinese investigating wood as an ablative, and some US rocket engines and payload shrouds actually use cork. The main cost, however, is the man-hours.
Neither NASP or X33 ever fully overcame the reentry problem, despite a lot of research.
There are a number of other interesting proposals out there that may cut the turnaround time for reusables - for example, a Russian/German joint venture developed an inflatable reentry system, which seems an interesting idea (do your breaking in the thinner atmosphere first with a giant surface area to radiate off the heat).
Another idea is the use of a plasma torch in front of the reentry vehicle to create a hollow cavity that the hypersonic craft moves through. As the shockwave created by a leading edge can create a cavity which the rest of the surface can pass through without touching the superheated air (hence the reason why they only need the carbon-carbon panelling on the leading edges of the shuttle), so can, in theory, a plasma torch - eliminating the need for contact all together.
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
The big deal about the 100k altitude goal of the Ansari X-Prize is the space tourism potential. Space tourism is a great business to pursue for advancing the state of the art of rocketry because there are an increasing number of wealthy people who can afford this sort of luxury. The problem is that the real ultimate value of increasing the state of the art of rocketry is access to space, and while SC's and XCor's aerodynamic vehicle approach is a tremendous accomplishment -- it doesn't really give "access" to space without substantial redesign.
Carmack's vehicle does.
That's one reason I chose 200km rather than 100km for my amateur rocketry prize . I'm pretty sure SC's and XCor's aerodynamically-limited approach would both lose in a race to 200km because they aren't really "space" vehicles.
Carmack's vehicle is.
I'm tempted to change my prize award to be private rather than amateur so that I can give it to Carmack's team. The problem is that my goal was, and is, to make space accessible to much lower levels of capital than even Carmack's group has expended -- which is already phenomenally low by aerospace standards.
Carmack's accomplishment, with his simplified fuel and system, is more profound than anything that has come along from the aerospace business since the hybrid rocket motor back in the 60s. Sadly -- compared to the golden age of aviation -- that's still not saying much. Carmack is, howeer, bound to inspire teams capable of running a modern day "Wright's bike shop" -- and that is saying much.
Seastead this.
of course, to build it requires some brand spankin new materials so that it could support it's own weight.
I'm claiming no other knowlege than what I read in This article, but it appeared to cover everything I had questions aboot.
--
Stealing the stars from our future does not feed the world. But it does starve countless worlds.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
The spray on can be applied by machine. The Space shuttle's tiles have to be maintained by hand. You can just peel off the old abblative before applying new. Tiles you alway wonder if there is some problem underneath that is not visible through the grout. Abblative's have no seams, can be re-applied in orbit, and cool the vehicle during re-entry.
The plasma torch concept is interesting, except of course that it you had that much spare energy on-board you would be better off using it to brake the spacecraft so it wouldn't be contacting the atmosphere at such terrific speeds.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Does this link help? NASA is surprisingly honest on what went right and what went wrong with the program. The one thing they don't cover is that it was Nixon's decision to scale back the space program and merge it with the Air Force. After we reached the moon, Nixon decided that having a low cost "token" space program would be enough.
The truly amazing part is the work that the engineers did. They were given a set of impossible requirements that were all at odds with one another, and the engineers still managed to develop a craft that met the specs. In almost all ways, the Shuttle problems were political, not technical.
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The X15 project was said to have cost an estimated $300 Million in 1969 dollars... Rutan and Scaled have done the same thing for probably a LOT less than that... at least 20 million (of Allen's money) for sure, but thats still a long way off from the corrected '69 price. Chalk one up for advances in technology and private efficiency!
Mouse, Mice. Goose, Geese. Moose... Moose?
Once in free space, it all boils down to energy. If you want to escape the earth, you need a net positive energy. Take the derivative of the 2-body energy wrt velocity, and you can see that the best place to add energy is close to the planet. So, if you;re going to escape, escape quickly.
Nothing in propulsion is easy. Some folks can make it look easy; the way Barry Sanders made evading a pro linebacker look easy. However, you wouldn't be likely to succeed yourself.
Helium balloons want to be free.
But they can't re-use the fuel! So, declare the hydrogen filling of the ballon as the fuel and presto :)
The hydrogen filling of the balloon is fuel. Well, I can't particularly speak to the plan used by this particular team, but here's how I'd do it. I'd have my hydrogen balloon double as initial lift through the atmosphere and fuel tank. Once you get to an altitude at which the balloon really isn't helping very much, you start sucking the hydrogen into your engine, mix it with oxygen, and use it as a fuel source for your conventional thrusters to get the rest of the way out of the atmosphere.
Yes, I know some of you are going to say there isn't a lot of oxygen high up in the atmosphere; I was thinking more along the lines of bringing it in the traditional way that the space shuttle does, i.e. in liquid form in tanks.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Applied by a machine that gets a deep, even, and well secured coating over the entire surface of an irregularly craft? The same argument could have been made about the space shuttle tiles ;) But really, that's cutting corners. You need *inspection* of the whole surface to make sure that it actually is adhering evenly and securely. If you can just "peel off" the ablative, it's a lousy material to use in such a high stress environment.
For example, look at the case of the X15 A-2, which used spray-on ablatives. They found that it took 20 days to fully refurbish the surface, and that there *still* were ablator-to-skin bonding problems. While the tech has gotten better sicne then, it's still not great. Ablatives have other problems - you have to be gentle with the material once applied (just like tiles), you can't walk on it or anything for inspection, you can't remove panels without leaving cracks very easily, they're more chemical-succeptible than tiles (spill some liquid oxygen on it, and you've lost your protection), etc. They're really not the answer for reusability; they work well for a "single time" on a "ready to launch craft", but beyond that....
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
Thanks for your corrections.
AoA doesn't really come into it much. Once you enter the atmosphere, you're losing huge amounts of velocity. At hypersonic velocities, L/D ratios are awful, pretty much no matter what your AoA is.
It depends. Obviously, the atmosphere is much thinner the higher up you go. The sooner you can obtain a flight envelope (rather than the "falling refrigerator" configuration of the shuttle), the longer you can take in your descent. Keep in mind that the Space Shuttle intentionally bleeds off a lot of speed by doing a supersonic slalom on the way down. This is such a difficult flight path, that only one human has ever flown reentry on manual. All other flights were handled by the computer. There's a nice description of reentry here.
At least two designs other than the shuttle's current one were considered:
On faster descent:
Despite these arguments that eventually prevailed, at least one straight-wing design was prominent for a time, in part because of its designer. Max Faget, the chief engineer at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed the Johnson Space Center), drew up plans for two straight-winged vehicles--one an orbiter and the other a booster stage--that rode piggyback and were both piloted and fully reusable. [snip] Faget argued that his design would enable the orbiter to return to Earth at a sharp angle that would significantly heat only the orbiter's lower surfaces (Faget, pp. 52-54)
On slower descent:
If it weren't for the payload bay requirement, a lifting body configuration might have worked well. Lifting bodies could have been a good compromise between ballistic capsules and delta- or straight-winged vehicles. They are lighter, have simpler structures, and encounter fewer reentry heating problems than winged vehicles. Lifting bodies have better lift-to-drag ratios than ballistic capsules, which enables them to be piloted more accurately (Peebles, December 1979, p. 487). Lifting bodies had even been considered for the Apollo command modules (Peebles, November 1979, p. 439). Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA and the Air Force had conducted significant research on various lifting body programs such as the X-23A and the X-24A, demonstrating, among other characteristics, the maneuverability of wingless vehicles (Reed, pp. 129--131, 140).
Source
I don't have a link at the moment, but descent was a big problem in the early rocket plane experiments. If they descended too slowly, they'd lose their flight envelope and become difficult to control. But if they descended too quickly, the craft would heat up at an incredible rate.
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" Other than that you can "orbit" at any speed (v) you want as long as your altitude (r) makes the above equations balance."
No. Your equations are correct of course but they assume no air drag. You have to both leave the athmosphere AND reach the appropriate speed for the altitude.
An important border case example of this is the ISS. It is at 300-400 km but because of the (very very thin) athmosphere it slowly slows down and falls towards lower and lower orbits. For that reason the supply ships need to bring fuel so that it can bolster its orbit before it is too late.
Tor
Sending this out to my friends, to celebrate today, June 21'st, a milestone in aviation history.
Anyone that knows me knows that aviation is my thing. So it should be no surprise to anyone that I am following this.
I was sitting here contemplating what happened today, and for only the 1 millionth time since I learned of this venture I was struck by how purely good this news is. I mean, you turn on CNN or Fox, you pick up the newspapers or whatever and they are filled with this negative crap. So much more these last few months, and for no better reason then 2004 can be divided evenly by 4.
But this, I am hard pressed to see how anyone can put a negative spin on this.
In the fall of the year 1903 The Brothers Wright made a flight of just a few hundered feet in a wooden and canvas contraption that would change the world. They would have been hard pressed to have imagined what there hard work would lead to. These Brothers did this thing of there own accord, they had no help, no government hand outs, no proclamations from the president that a thing will be done because it is hard, just two brothers that owned a bycicle shop and had a thought about how to make this thing work.
A mere 60 years later that creation had blossomed into the likes of which the Wright Brothers would never have imagined. People that had picked up the newspapers in 1903 to read about this marvelous flying machine were now turning on the TV sets and tunning in the radio to learn of Sputnik and rocket ships. Space travel was hard, but our society had marked it as a necessity. As a society we knew we could achieve the impossible, setting foot on the moon, photographing continents and solving communication problems that had plagued mankind since the dark ages. But getting there would not be cheap, and it was decided that only a government could afford to solve this problem.
In the 70's humans would set there feet on the moon. A place that has for the entirety of humanity, been nothing but a backdrop in an inkjet sky turned into a land of wonders. Armstrong said his famous words, left his footprints, astronauts would play a bit of golf, mirrors would be left, flags planted and after about a decade we would leave that place as we found it, inaccessable - a land where we only talk of going.
And now today. Burt Rutan designs airplanes. Up until today his most famous creation is displayed in the Smithsonian. It is called 'Voyager' and it traveled around the globe non-stop without refuleing. You may not be impressed, but consider how much money you will spend in gas just to get to work this week, it was quite an achievment.
Burt Rutan has built a spacecraft that he has called 'Spaceship One'. It is a small, quaint thing that CNN describes as shaped like a 'shuttlecock'. As accurate a description as any I have heard. Today Mike Melvill piloted Spaceship One, with the help of it's mate 'White Knight' and slipped the surly bonds of Earth, and returned again. What it did, admittedly, by the standards of shuttle flights that until last year seemed to be monthly occurances, doesn't seem that spectacular. It leapt a mere 100 kilometers (62 miles) and came down again. Landing at the same Mohave airstrip it took off from. But when Mike came back had the distinction of being the only person ever to earn his astronaut wings without any government help whatsoever.
Take a few minutes today and Google 'Gemini Series'. This is what Burt Rutans craft is compareable to. The early Gemini rockets did not achieve orbit. The went up, and came back down again. Then go to http://www.scaledcomposites.com or google 'Spaceship One' and compare the crafts. What you are looking at isn't just what 50+ years of technology advances will get you. But you are also looking at is a clear illustration of how the private sector (Wright Brothers) can often shatter paradigms that the government has put in place.
Congratulations Burt and Mike. Today is your day.
Those of us at Johnson Space Center are cheering as loud as anyone.
Good job, Burt and Mike!
Are you seriously arguing that the Shuttle "met the specs"?? :-)
It met the engineering specs. X amount of cargo, hypersonic cross range ability, variable passenger load, horizontal landing, etc. Is it the engineers' fault that the cargo for a shuttle flight per week just didn't exist?
Then we have the way that NASA threw their weight around (DC-X, etc) to kill potential competition to the Shuttle. It has maimed the US space program for decades, but lots of jobs depends upon the shuttle...
The DC-X blew up. So did the X-33. Given that you should never attribute malice where stupidity would do, I'd say that the real problem was a lack of focus by NASA. As an example, the X-33 was almost entirely composed of untested technology (hydrogen slush, composite tanks, lifting body design, etc.). Was that really wise?
Besides, NASA's stumbling around comes very much from the constant scaling back of their programs. Regean and Bush gave the go ahead for Space Station Freedom, a real layover point for trips to the moon and Mars. Clinton scaled back the program and forced NASA into the whole "International Space Station" concept. Now the Space Station is as useless as the Space Shuttle. How is anything supposed to get done if all the projects keep getting killed?
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You mean supercavitation? Supercavitation is quite real and is used in some already proven cases. Kursk, however, despite initial speculation, seems to have been sunk from a poorly maintained torpedo's peroxide leak (ironically, the nuclear reactor of the sub almost *saved* the crew members on the rear half of the ship - take *that* environmentalists!)
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
My back of the envelope (pun not intended) calculations showed that the mass that would have been used for a ballon would be better spent on a bigger booster.
I'm sure it would be cheaper and much less dangerous though. I doubt the Xprise people would care.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The DC-X (as explained in the book, "Lost In Space", about the debacle that IS NASA management) did not explode due to inherent problems with the design.
My point is not that it exploded due to an inherent problem, but that both the DC-X and that X-33 were destroyed, and NASA simply didn't have a budget to build another one. If they had a *focused* project with real funding, a crash would have been nothing more than a setback. (After all, you have to expect that some things will go wrong.)
DC-X was then 'purchased' (taken over) by NASA and away from the engineers that had designed and built it, put in the hands of people with no experience base with the technology / platform, and then run through a set of "tests" that of course failed due to improper manual ground procedures followed by the improperly trained NASA 'ground staff'.
As I said before, never attribute to malice when stupidity will do. In fact, one of NASA's biggest problems was the "brain drain" they experienced in the 90's. Since Clinton pretty much guaranteed that the space program was going to go nowhere, and NASA engineering salaries were slowly dropping, all the smart people moved on to the private sector.
It's even more frustrating when you realize that we have the technology today to cheaply lift thousands of tons per launch, and build craft that could cruise around the Solar System at high speeds. Of course, Nixon's administration didn't WANT heavy lift vehicles. They wanted a token space program that wouldn't drain anything from the US Budget. In doing so, he stomped on the hopes and dreams of millions of people. Instead of Space Stations, Moon Bases, and Mars Flights, we got the Space Shuttle. An amazingly engineered turkey that couldn't decide if it was built for Cargo, Human Transport, or Military Spy Missions. And since it tried to shortcut economic development, the craft failed at ALL of its purposes. Special, isn't it?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The use of a plasma torch as you described is called supercavitation. It works in water, too: the Soviets developed a rocket powered torpedo which vented some of its exhaust out the nose to create a bubble in the water which the torpedo flew through. THe supercavitating torpedo had severe manuverability problems: none of its control surfaces were touching the water, and if it tried to turn too much, the rocket exhaust bubble would collapse. Would the plasma torch reentry system have similar problems?
I'm not much of a photographer, but I did happen to get into the VIP section, right in front of the actual takeoff. If you'd like to see some of my picts check out:h tml
http://www.lyle.org/~jwick/spaceshipone_jw/index.
The launch was quite exciting! I've been working for NASA on MER but I feel very strongly that it is important to have a commercial/private interest in space (indeed, I intend to be a space tourist one day, if I get the chance).
One of the Scaled Composites guys gave myself and my friends a piece of the material they made part of the ship out of... it's incredibly light and strong.
Congrats to the team, and to all of those there to witness this history making event. We still have a long way to go before we can drive to a spaceport and pick up a ticket, but at least private spaceflight is now a very real thing.
Cheers,
Justin
> I was thinking more along the lines of bringing it in the traditional way that the space shuttle does, i.e. in liquid form in tanks.
If you have to bring along the oxygen anyway, then this wouldn't be too helpful: 1 kg of oxygen can burn no more than 300g of kerosin, so more than 3/4 of the fuel would have to be LOX, anyway.
Also, the hydrogen would have to be compressed, befor it can be burned by conventional rocket engines. Also, a rocket is only effective if it accellerates at several g's, as the portion of thrust used to merely balance earth's gravity doesn't add to the kinetic energy of the vehicle and is basically lost; the drag of the balloon's hull would make this an impossibilty.
So you would have to deflate the balloon and compress the hydrogen into a compact tank befor you can fire the engines, all of this in a matter of seconds, as you are getting into free fall once you start the deflation.
Where was that? I was right on the taxiway as close as possible to the hangar. The northern-most corner. I think that was the best spot (except for the VIP area...)
At about 6:40 the low altitude chase plane took off, it was a bright red little single engine plane
An Extra (German-manufactured airobatics plane).
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.
The StarShip, a canard plane (the canard is the little wing at the front), a design which was made popular by Rutan.
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.
Standard thing: taxi on the taxiway towards the end, then turn on the runway (parallel to the taxiway.)
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
If I remember right, it was an Alpha Jet.
After that, the low altitude chase plane made a flyby
And that even though they said at the start that this is not an airshow...
You do realize that privately built and financed rockets depart the Cape on a fairly regular basis? Boeing is every bit as private a company as Scaled, as is one of Boeing's primary customers... AT&T.
Before you bring up the old saw about their launchers being developed with goverment money... Consider this; No major US launch vehicle today (excepting the Shuttle and the Titan) was developed with goverment money, none. The current Atlas and Delta variants are as far removed from their goverment heritage as the current VW Beetle is removed from it's WWII roots. The name remains the same, but the craft underneath has been redesigned and updated so often that virtually no trace of the original remains. (And the redesigns and updates were/are to provide boosters that have the capabilities desired by their commercial (private) customers, (mainly heavy lift to GTO).)
The goverment (when it uses them) buys 'em off the shelf the same as they do automobiles or pencils. (Actually, the goverment rarely buys the booster, but rather buys a launch in the same way they buy an airline ticket for a goverment employee to fly across country.)
(Parenthetically, it always amazes me how very little so many soi-disant 'space fans' actually know about the space industry.)
would a rigid balloon filled with *nothing* provide some mass saving or would the materials req'd be too heavy?