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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.
And other people using that backward metric system, that's about 100 kilometers in the title.
Slashdot....
'News' for nerds, stuff that matters (an hour or two late, and no guarantee of it not being duped later).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
So how long until the Discovery channel does a special on how they hoaxed it?
QAExpress: Solid bug tracking for you. Graphs and reports for your PHB.
The slashdot editors are too fucking lazy to actually do anything other than click the pretty "approve" button.
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I saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968 as a young kid. At that time the Space Race was making great progress toward a lunar landing. Many thought the technical parts of the movie to be very likely. It was extremely disappointing to watch the manned parts of the US and Russian space programs dwaddle along the next 35 years with mediocre accomplishments- like that 90 giga-buck lemon up there that can barely support two people at a time and do very little science. (Space science probes and robots doing reasonably well, however.)
There are reasonable explainations: The US practically bankrupted itself in an endless series of international military adventures: the Vietnam War, The Energy war, the Reagan Cold War. Not to mention the expensive socialist expansion of health, welfare, and retirement costs. Only in 1990s was there enough capital suspluses to seriously consider commercial space again.
Am I the only one who thinks that "SpaceShipOne" is a somewhat unimaginative name?
I mean for christ sake call it something like "Destroyer III" or "Killer MKII", show those aliens who's boss!
There IS a ten million dollar prize offered. But they've already spent twenty million. So what?
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Vote for your hopes, not for your fears - Vote Third Party
dumbass.
Sorry but your knowledge of basic high school physics (first semester) is appalling (leads me to believe that you're a little young ).
#1. YOu are simply incoprrect when you say that you do NOT have to reach 25,000 (or Mach 25 as you out it) to escape Earth's gravity because of the *engines* on a craft sigh). In point of fact you simply DO.
#2. You are incorrect when you say it's "trivially easy" to build up speed outside the atmosphere. Newton's laws still hold whether inside or outside the atmosphere...and you STILL have to carry the reaction mass up there somehow.
The rest of your post is (unfortunately) just a layperson's opinion about physics and I'm sorry but a rather poor opinion at that.
My karma's probably blown now for this post but I have a thing for truth....
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
He seems to 'crave' publicity with his projects.
.
Also I heard on Cnn interview of Rutan that he didn't develop this rocket with the X prize in mind
What ?
The big Corporate cash funding doesn't make me happy. Just another contest bought out by the richest guy.
I congratulate Mr. Melvill, but keep wondering about what qualifies a pilot to be an ASTROnaut.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Girls have no place in technology or science. You just proved it. Unless IHBT, you show ignorance of basic truths that is simply astounding for one so convinced of herself.
St00pid cunt.
Bottom line: Slashdot is a corporation. That's all that need be said.
--You can leave as slow as you want and pick up
...which means more weight.... ....which is why it takes CALCULUS to calculate the equations of such flights and how much fuel it's going to take.
-- the orbital velocity later, or just hover on
--your engines and never pick up any speed at
--all. Not that you'd want to.
Why not just increase power to the pattern buffers instead? Because that makes as much sense as what you just said.
You CAN'T just "go as slow as you want and then increase speed later". All these things take reaction mass and the AND REACTION MASS MEANS MORE WEIGHT...which means more reaction mass....which puts a VERY definite and basic limit on what you can achieve using a fuel with a given specific impulse in a single stage rocket.
You can NOT just "pour on more speed later" as many of the less informed posters here seem to think (including one self proclaimed "rocket scientist" (g) ). Speed takes fuel and fuel means weight...more speed means more weight which means more fuel which means lower accelerations which mean more fuel
"More power Mr. Scott!" just won't cur it I'm afraid. There are limits as to what a particular design ans a particular FUEL can achieve.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
By the time you factor in extended life support and the heat shielding needed to survive reentry, orbital flight becomes a much thornier problem that almost certainly won't be solved in a decade.
... one that was solved four decades ago. Remember the Apollo missions?
You're right, orbital flight is a thorny problem
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Of course it can be done, but should it be done? Must it be done? The key word here is "profit": It's not being done because there's any need; it's being done because somebody who has infinitely more than he needs wants even more than he's got.
"Weekend jaunts to the moon" sound like fun, and everybody on Earth is thrilled by Rutan's achievement. Nevertheless, I can't see the justification for this kind of thing while people starve right here on Earth. When you consider how much of the wealth of the West represents the profits of colonialism, when you consider that the US alone consumes 60% of the Earth's resources every year, it hardly seems unreasonable to suggest that the rights and desires of the rest of the human race might be considered. They paid for it, after all.
There's no social benefit to the private exploration of space. There's no food out there for the hungry, no housing for the homeless. Imagine if it were your relatives, or you yourself, haunted by drought and famine; would you have your eyes on the tropopause, or on your immediate needs? Those needs cannot be deferred.
We need to get our house in order before we get absorbed in checking out the neighborhood. Space will still be there in a hundred years. It can wait. When the people of Chad and Bangladesh can afford to join in a fair, international effort, then will be the time. And in a just world, that time will surely come.
This person took just enough physics to be dangerous.
To escape the gravity well of Earth, you must achive the velocity of about 25,000 mph. There is no getting around this simple fact.
Specifically, this statement "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." is wrong. You CANNOT escape the gravity well at any lower velocity.
If you had a way to provide a constant acceration over a long period, you can achive the needed velocities without a dramatic high G rocket, but you still need to reach these velocities.
There are plenty of variables in orbits, but not in escaping the Earth.
The author above doesn't seem to grasp the fundamental relationships of orbital mechanics, velocity and acceration.
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America's wealth represents the profits of hundreds of colonialisms, genocides, and famines. Everything we own is stolen, starting with our theft of an entire continent from its rightful owners.
"Charity"? No. For us to return "our" wealth is simple justice. The wealth belongs to the productive indigenous peoples of the world; they by rights are the wealthy ones. Americans, by rights, are worthless parasites whose only talent is for theft.
If we don't give it back, they'll take it back by force. The human race is fed up with our rogue behavior. They rightly see us as a deadly cancer, the direct cause of most of the poverty and violence in the world today. As we exterminate noxious insects, so will they exterminate us.
Face it, you don't know shit. You're still in high school pondering if you should go for the full gender re-assignment surgery, right? I've seen 'girls' like you before. It's the hormones that screw around with you. Come back in a few days and you'll see how you look to normal people. Pathetic.
Putting 'calculus' in all caps isn't too terribly intimidating, you know. Oh, and you can't spell.
I posted on this topic earlier (see history) but I'll reitterate: There is no real point in privitzation of deep space because there is no profit there.
This X-Prize contest is akin to GM offering a prize for a flying car. Sure you find find an inventive solution and a flying car that works well but I don't ever see it replacing the family SUV unless it can be made and sold for under $20k.
So here we have a contest where people think that privitization will solve all of the slowness in the sector. It isn't going to happen. Exactly what can you use this vehicle for? Hauling a small amount of weight really high? It hasn't even gotten into LEO yet and by my rough guessatments they need to figoure how to increase the thrust output 30 times more to do so.
Beyond this how is a craft that can take a couple people up to LEO supposed to bring forth a new age of discovery especially when there is nothing is up there? Companies are supposed to magically make money from doing this? I wouldn't hold my breath.