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.

Comments

Question

[PrvtBurrito]

So they made it. Congrats. Now how high would they have to go to enter orbit?

Re:Question

[Dr. GeneMachine]

It's more a question of speed than of height - with the current design, Spaceship One won't be capable of reaching orbital speeds, which far exceed Mach 3.

Re:Question

[Paulrothrock]

38 miles higher, and 18,000 mph downrange velocity. Roughly. Baby steps, man, baby steps.

Best part, Rutan has admitted that SS1 is scalable, meaning it could become an orbital launch vehicle. Sweet.

Re:Question

[Yarn]

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.

Re:Question

[StupidHelpDeskGuy]

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

Re:Question

[AKAImBatman]

Yes, but couldn't they just go higher and fall into orbit?

Attaining orbit is not a matter of height. It's a matter of going so fast that you continuously miss the Earth. The only reason why a space craft has to fly so high is that the thick atmosphere will slow it down.

Re:Question

[Ford Prefect]

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?

Re:Question

[pyrrhonist]

So they made it. Congrats. Now how high would they have to go to enter orbit?

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.

Re:Question

[0123456]

"it's not a matter of height, it's a matter of speed."

It's both: you won't stay in orbit long at 100km, there's too much drag when you're travelling at 7+ km/s.

Re:Question

[Ignorant Aardvark]

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!"

Re:Question

[JabberWokky]

Considering he has a reputation for breaking aeronautical records, and now aerospace records, it's plausable. I'd seen loads of pictures, but I never realized how *small* Spaceship One is... roughly (very roughly) comparable to the large white passenger van parked near the two ships during the taxi to the runway. This is certainly his "proof of concept", possibly simply aimed at getting investors toward a much more practical (read: Profit!!!) craft.

If NASA has been putting out steam rail engines, this is the first car, a precursor to the Model T of space. When the design is a couple iterations down the line, it will be ready for mass production.

Freeways in the sky and weekend jaunts to the Moon are a matter of time, technology and will. The simple act of just *showing* that it can be done provides the critical and hard to get last part of that triad.

--
Evan

Re:Question

[Xilman]

Couldn't you orbit the earth at any altitude greater than the highest peak? Say 29,029 feet?

Sure you can. You can orbit below that altitude too, as long as you choose an orbit which never intersects anything too hard. A near equatorial orbit lets you go round at a height just a bit higher than Kilimanjaro (you gotta have a safety margin, after all).

The big problem is that the air is rather thick down there. This has two consequences. First the drag means you slow down so fast that you either hit something pretty hard pretty quickly unless your engines are working hard enough to counteract the drag. Second, the drag dissipates so much energy in such a small volume that it gets pretty damned hot very close to your vehicle. The shuttle was much higher when it burned up, and travelling significantly slower than orbital speed at 10km to boot.

Paul

Re:Question

[An Onerous Coward]

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?

Re:Question

[robbymet]

It's actually a combination of speed and height, kinetic and potential energy - you can trade the two against each other. The Space Shuttle has everyone caught up in this idea that the vehicle itself has to make it to LEO, but why? If LEO is the target because that's the orbit you want for your satellite, then you only have to worry about getting the small weight (relative to the launch vehicle) of the satellite up to LEO.
If you can carry a rocket up to the edge of space with a craft like SpaceShipOne, and launch it from there, it's a lot easier to get your satellite up to LEO. There's no reason to accelerate the whole plane up to that altitude/velocity! By taking advantage of this, the reusable part of the launch vehicle doesn't experience ridiculous temperatures on re-entry like the Shuttle and the vehicle has a significantly higher chance of repeated survival.

I'm proud of Scaled! I've worked on designs like this and I didn't think the primes/politicians would ever let something like this be built! Good luck with Tier Two!

Re:Question

[Rei]

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.

Re:Question

[hedgehogbrains]

Check these out:

• Rocket Equation Calculator
• Specific Impulse

For a 400 s specific impulse, getting to mach 3 requires a 1.276 takeoff to payload ration. On the other, making Mach 25 requires 7.66 takeoff to payload ration. That's why Spaceship One is self contained, whilst the Shuttle requires vast external fuel tanks and external boosters. It's hardly trivially easy.

Re:Question

[randall_burns]

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.

Re:Question

[cosmo7]

Sorry but your knowledge of basic high school physics (first semester) is appalling (leads me to believe that you're a little young ).

Also space rockets only work inside the atmosphere, where there is air to push against. There was a special on Fox all about it.

Re:Question

[Smidge204]

It's about both height and speed. Speed required for a stable orbit is inversely proportional to altitude. All you have to do is balance the centripetal (F = (m*v^2)/r) with the gravitational force (F = G*m1*m2/(r^2)). The only special case is geo-synchronous orbit, in which case you must be at a specific altitude in order for the period of your orbit to match that of the earth's rotation. Other than that you can "orbit" at any speed (v) you want as long as your altitude (r) makes the above equations balance.

So as long as the ship has the guts to get far enough from the earth, it can certainly go fast enough to be in orbit.
=Smidge=

Re:Question

[Greyfox]

Takes 3 days to get to the moon IIRC. Besides, there's nothing worth seeing there except the theme park.

Re:Question

[KDan]

It's not a matter of speed, it's a matter of velocity! If your speed is directed towards the earth, it won't help you much.

Daniel

Re:Question

[delibes]

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.

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." :)

Re:Question

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I was working out the napkin notes on this idea and concluded that the mass "savings" are eaten up by the mass of the gass required to pull it off. You have to displace the same "weight" of air as that you are trying to lift. Sure, hydrogen has a fraction of the mass of air at STP, but you are still talking about tons of it. The rules of the contest stated that something like 90% of the craft (by mass) must be re-used. The ballon would be a significant mass.

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.

Re:Question

[corngrower]

, 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.

No grandparent is probably closer to being correct.
At the top of the flight, SSO was about 100km above the earth with no radial velocity and essentially no tangential velocity. The escape velocity needed from this state is still more than the orbital velocty at 100 km. That is the additional energy needed to escape the gravitaional pull of the earth is still more than the additional energy to needed to get it into a circular orbit. Now maybe you could start from the top of that orbit, with an amout of fuel 4 to 8 times the amount required for this flight and get enough speed for orbiting. But wait a minuite, you've increased the mass that needs to be lofted to this heght by a factor of say 3 -6. That means you'ld need to have initially double that amount when you lauch from White Knight to get SS one up to that 100km height. In other words you're talking at least 7 or 8 times the fuel to begin with. The amount of fuel required to reach a given velocity grows exponentially (not linearly) with the velocity. (kind of sucks, doesn't it).

Re:Question

[khallow]

Escape velocity from the surface of Earth is roughly 11 km/s. I figure that achieving a height of 100 km takes less than 1.4 km/s (assuming constant gravity). Counting that the craft was in motion at that altitude (though probably not Mach 3 which would make a ceiling of another 1km/s), then I think we have more than 1.4 km/s and less than 2.4 km/s of effectively velocity.

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.

Re:Question

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Question

[tony_gardner]

And you can calculate the extra energy that spaceshipone would have to expend to get to that orbit, as opposed to an altitude of 100km with no sidewards movement. It's 62 times the energy. So LEO is still a few stepa away.

Re:Question

[pclminion]

Sorry but your knowledge of basic high school physics (first semester) is appalling (leads me to believe that you're a little young ).

You MUST be trolling.

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.

Out and out wrong. The escape velocity is merely the speed at which the craft would be traveling if it had fallen toward the Earth from infinity. You do not have to travel at the escape velocity to move away from the Earth. If you have a source of thrust, you may move at whatever velocity you please.

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.

And you're what, a professional physicist? Certainly not, since your error is a grievous one.

At any rate, your post should be marked "troll," not "informative."

Re:Question

[EvilTwinSkippy]

The re-entry problem is pretty easy: a spray on heat shield that evaporates off during re-entry. It's cheap. It's reasonably light weight. It's a proven design.

Spacecraft before the space shuttle used that to great effect. The space shuttle has more or less become a prime example of how NOT to do it. The ceramic shields were expensive, brittle, and (as it seems) prone to failure at the worst possible time.

I think they were trying too too hard on the space shuttle to make it re-usable. Certainly the avionics computers and the seats were prime candidates to be re-used between flights. But I think if they had to do it again they'd make the engines and the heat shields disposable. Those two systems were responsible for more groundings, failures, and overall expense than anything else.

Re:Question

[delibes]

The "rockets won't work outside the atmosphere" arguement was used as a critcism as Goddard in 1920. See this wiki.

Re:Question

[myc_lykaon]

Why, oh why isn't there a Moderate: Missed the Point -1 available?

Re:Question

[grahamlee]

My karma's probably blown now for this post but I have a thing for truth....

The truth has a tendency to be true, unlike your post. Let me just give my background for disclosure - I'm a rocket scientist.

#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.

No, you don't. If you were blasted off from the surface of the Earth at Mach 25 and the atmosphere didn't exist, then (to use the kind of lax definition of infinity that us physicists are proud of) you'd come to rest at infinity and wouldn't fall back into the Earth. However, if you provide a continual thrust that everywhere is greater than the local acceleration due to Earth's gravity, you will never fall back down. You could achieve this at a constant velocity of 1m/s if you liked, by suitable modification of the thrust.

#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.

To go forward in space, throw something backward. To go forward in the atmosphere, throw enough stuff backward to push enough air out of the way. It's easier in space - as you don't have to overcome resistive drag (unless the solar wind is non-negligible) then the same acceleration can be had for less driving force - the net force is the same yes. This means you can take it easy, and do something like throwing photons or ions out of the back of your spaceship.

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.

As opinions go, it was just as valid as anyone else's. As statements of physical understanding go, it was superior to yours.

Re:Question

[Charvak]

He is right you know. The escape velocity is calculated as

Energy at t=0 = energy at infinite distnce from earth

1/2mv^2 - GMm/R = 0
where M = mass of the planet m = mass of the rocket R = distance from the rocket to center of the planet
ie v = sqrt(2GM/R)

Re:Question

[CrimsonAvenger]

One of the teams competing for the X-Prize is planning on balloon lift for that purpose. The da Vinci Project, as I recall.

Re:Question

[HeghmoH]

Escape velocity has nothing to do with orbit. Escape velocity is what you need to attain to leave Earth completely, for example if you wanted to go into Solar orbit. Balloons never do anything remotely approaching "escape" in this context.

Getting into orbit is way, way, way harder than getting to 100km. It takes 24 times the energy to get to orbit, and you therefore need massively larger fuel tanks and engines to do so. You are correct that "eight times more speed" is misleading, but you got it backwards; since kinetic energy goes up as the square of the speed, you need more than eight times the energy to reach orbit.

Re:Question

[DynaSoar]

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.

Re:Question

[raygundan]

Your #1 is misleading again, which is what the original poster was trying to point out. Escape velocity is the speed you'd have to be going at the earth's surface if you were going to reach orbit if you weren't going to be accelerating en route. This is akin to throwing a baseball into orbit-- it has to be going as fast as it needs to when it leaves your hand if it's going to reach orbit.

It is also true that escape velocity must be reached at some point or the object will fall back to earth *if it is not being acted on by another force*. It would be possible to operate under thrust for the entire duration of your trip-- and as long as your thrust is just a hair above g, you'll gradually rise. You could thrust your way into space at 1mph, if you had the fuel for it. This isn't practical currently, and of course, you fall right back when you turn your engine off.

All I'm (and the original poster) are trying to point out is that telling "laypeople" that you have to reach escape velocity to leave earth is not the whole truth. You can leave as slow as you want and pick up the orbital velocity later, or just hover on your engines and never pick up any speed at all. Not that you'd want to.

Re:Question

[JabberWokky]

Off the top of my head I seem to recall that at a .1G acceleration, it's seven hours. It's 3 days if you don't have any fuel and basically drift the entire way (a la Apollo). A real presence in space means gas stations, something the Apollo project didn't have. They basically drove real fast to the base of the hill, threw it into neutral, shut off the engine and coasted up, over the top and down the hill and then started the engine and did reverse to slow down.

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

Re:Question

[seafortn]

More Sorries:

While your point #2 may be correct, #1 is (to quote you) "simply incorrect" - what physical explanation can you give to justify it? The poster is correct - "escape velocity" is just the velocity required for an object to escape Earth's gravitational field (in actuality, probably to arrive at a point where Earth's gravitational field is counterbalanced by other influences).

There is no physical reason that a spacecraft (given an engine which can generate the required thrust) could NOT leave Earth at any velocity - from .1 m/s to 3X10^8-1 m/s - instead of criticising the parent poster, why don't you stop and think about what you're writing, or did you stop learning physics at the college freshman level?

(disclaimer - if someone with a physics or aeronautical engineering degree beyond my B.S. can correct me, I welcome a better understanding of classical mechanics)

Re:Question

[Rei]

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.

Re:Question

[Gregb05]

That, my friend, is the entire point behind a space elevator...

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.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to step in and support Mr. Rocket Scientist, as I also share that distinction.

What he stated about "leaving the surface at ~25k mph will result in zero velocity at infinite distance" is true. It is a statement of initial vs. final energy. 25k mph is the required escape velocity at the surface of the earth, or just outside the atmosphere, since it's pretty thin when compared to the earth's diameter.

Actually reaching 25k mph is NOT required. You could make the trip to some intermediate point at a lower velocity (forget about acceleration, it's not important in this discussion) as long as your velocity at burn-out is greater than or equal to the local escape velocity. So yes, if you had LOTS of time and LOTS of fuel, you could make the trip to infinite distance at 1 m/s.

Nowhere in Mr. R.S.'s post did he confuse acceleration and velocity. As long as your spacecraft provides enough thrust to overcome the local gravity and drag, then you will not fall back down. If your thrust is more than enough to overcome gravity and drag, then you will accelerate.

Next time you want to discredit someone who knows what they're talking about, I suggest you make sure that you know what you're talking about too.

Re:Question

[AKAImBatman]

There's some info on the Air Force's desires for the Shuttle on NASA's History Site. From the article:

One Air Force requirement that had a critical effect on the Shuttle design was cross range capability. The military wanted to be able to send a Shuttle on an orbit around the Earth's poles because a significant portion of the Soviet Union was at high latitudes near the Arctic Circle. The idea was to be able to deploy a reconnaissance satellite, retrieve an errant spacecraft, or even capture an enemy satellite, and then have the Shuttle return to its launch site after only one orbit to escape Soviet detection. Because the Earth rotates on its axis, by the time the Shuttle would return to its base, the base would have "moved" approximately 1,100 miles to the east. Thus the Shuttle needed to be able to maneuver that distance "sideways" upon reentering the atmosphere.

Given a choice between straight and delta wings, the latter perform much better in terms of cross range capability. Delta wings produce more lift at hypersonic speeds, enabling more maneuverability (Heppenheimer, p. 220). Given the requirement for cross range capability, a delta-winged vehicle became the clear choice. Additionally, delta-winged vehicles do not heat up as much as straight-winged vehicles during atmospheric reentry (Draper et al., p. 26), thus decreasing the need for expensive and potentially heavy thermal protection systems, although the thermodynamics are too complex to cover fully in this paper. Moreover, some aerodynamicists argued that delta-winged vehicles were a proven technology that provided good balance, stability, and aerodynamic control (Draper et al., pp. 29, 35).

Now you know why the Space Shuttle has stubby delta-wings for hypersonic flight. I'll see if I can dig up some other links.

Re:Question

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it a lot cheaper to inspect and re-apply a spray on material than it would be to remove, inspect, and re-attach 60,000 individual tiles.

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.

Re:Question

[mlyle]

That isn't it.

The air force wanted "large cross range capability", in other words, the ability to glide in large distances. The Air Force's desire for 1100 miles of cross-range doesn't put the shuttle anywhere near the capability of doing a low altitude flyover of Soviet airspace-- Florida is a LONG glide from Russia for something that effectively drops like a brick.

The nefarious use of cross range capability would be for the Shuttle to be able to enter a polar orbit, grab a spy satellite, and come back around and land in the same field. The problem is, in the hour and a half that orbit would take, the Earth would rotate about 22 degrees. So for the Shuttle to land at the same field, it would need to glide about 1000 miles (depending on how far from the equator it was).

This has pretty obviously not been used. But the versatility that the high cross range capability provided has greatly eased shuttle operations and also makes the vehicle safer by adding additional abort capabilities.

Another point: cross range capability has nothing to do with the heat shields. The Shuttle has a huge amount of kinetic energy that has to be dissipated one way or another; and really, you don't have a lot of choice in how quickly you aerobrake. The high cross range capability required more wing area and wing mass; and if you had a lower surface area to mass ratio, you'd actually aerobrake more quickly and require additional shielding.

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.

Re:Question

[Ignorant Aardvark]

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.

Re:Question

[NineteenSixtyNine]

Yeah, but thier main spacecraft is pedal-powered.

Re:Question

[Rei]

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....

Re:Question

[Rubyflame]

Um, that last "9" in your sig should be a "6".

Re:Question

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Question

[f97tosc]

" 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

Re:Question

[Ethidium]

James Van Allen did this back in 1953. Not carrying humans, but his "rockoons" got instruments relatively high up in the atmosphere for not much money.

By the way, contrary to popular assumption Dr. Van Allen is still alive and still working at the University of Iowa as a professor emeritus. His autobiography is here

Re:Question

[CrowScape]

Except the twit is saying you must reach 25,000mph in order to escape the Earth's pull, not simply "reach escape velocity". If I travel at a constant 1m/s up from the Earth's surface, I will eventually put enough distance between myself and the Earth that a mere 1m/s is enough to escape Earth's gravity well, as gravity's strength decreases exponentially the further away you get.

Re:Question

[Smidge204]

G is the gravitational constant. 6.673e-11 m^3/kg-sec^2. Small g is generally used for near-earth gravity acceleration 9.82 m/s^2

=Smidge=

Re:Question

[ISPpfy]

One word: Vandenberg. That's where the Polar Orbital flights were supposed to originate. It was built before the Challenger accident - and mothballed immediately thereafter.

Re:Question

[TheGavster]

The insulating coating on the large fuel tank is a spray-on system; note how that really didn't work out so well, what with the large air cavities causing big chunks to flake off.

Re:Question

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Florida is a LONG glide from Russia for something that effectively drops like a brick.

Which reminds me of something I heard once about the Shuttle Atlantis.

"How would you like," the pithy quote goes, "to try to land a dead-stick glider on a tiny strip of land in the middle of the ocean when the vehicle you're riding in was named after something that disappeared beneath the ocean without a trace?"

Re:Question

[Ignatius]

> 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.

Re:Question

[HeghmoH]

Yes, I'm fully aware, that's the whole point of the sig. You're only the second person to find it, though, so congratulations. :-)

Re:Question

[Basehart]

How about a really big trampoline - has anybody ever thought of that?

Re:Question

[Dr. Evil]

No you won't, you'll just reach a slightly eccentric orbit. That's no more escaping earth's gravity than me sitting here on my chair.

But for you to escape the earth's gravity, you need to have enough gravitational potential energy such that if, instead of being theoretically outside the earth's gravitational influence, you were at sea level, you'd be moving at Mach 32.

Whether you build that energy up in drips and drabs doesn't matter. The absurd speed isn't a jibberish figure, it's just being taken out of context. It's much more accurate to say that you'd need to be moving at that speed at sea level to escape the earth's gravity than it is to say that pushing away from a geosynchronous orbit will fling you hoplessly into space.

Re:Question

[grahamlee]

"However, if you provide a continual thrust that everywhere is greater than the local acceleration due to Earth's gravity, you will never fall back down." *cough* If you're providing continual thrust to counteract the acceleration due to earth's gravity YOU HAVEN'T ESCAPED GRAVITY!

You have when you get out of the potential well, which under the above situation you will eventually do. You will eventually reach a point where the upward velocity is greater than the local escape velocity, and it's bye-bye blue world. At no point have you had to attain a speed equal to the escape velocity at the surface, which is the claim you and TG are erroneously making.

By your logic, a helicopter has escaped the earth's gravity. It produces a constant thrust which keeps it in "orbit" or as it accelerates vertically away from the earth, it's "escaped".

A helicopter does nothing of the sort, and nowhere have I claimed explicitly or otherwise that it would. For a start, a helicopter is usually not in a single orbit. Of course, any motion could be described as a sum over many orbits. The helicopter has not escaped the potential well due to the Earth, so it has not escaped the Earth's gravity. The difference between the helicopter situation and that of a rocket is this: what happens when you switch the engine off? A helicopter goes smack back into the planet, a successfully launched rocket will carry on at some constant velocity away from the planet (or would do, if some git hadn't put the Sun there. In fact it starts orbiting that).

Somehow you must attain that velocity relative to the earth which dictates the energy required to escape the earth's gravity.

That is not necessary at all. The only situation in which your argument is even in appropriate scope is that not of a continually thrusting body such as a rocket, but that of a body that has gained momentum through an initial impulse. That is, a projectile. I'm afraid to say that Verne's "De la terre a la lune" is inaccurate in supposing that this is how astronauts are launched into space (though it is a riveting read). You are making the assumption that the body is essentially (resistive forces notwithstanding) moving in a single orbit from the beginning, and trying to derive the condition for which this orbit is unbounded. That isn't how we throw rockets into space.

sucking away the Earth's atmosphere[...](prior to sucking away the atmosphere)

We merely assume that atmospheric resistive forces may be neglected to arrive at an appropriate order-of-magnitude estimate for certain properties, because it simplifies the equation of motion. No-one's suggesting that the atmosphere needs to be removed ;-). You can calm back down now.

And More importantly...

[Gudlyf]

...the successful landing!

Early shutdown?

[American AC in Paris]

According to most reports, everything went swimmingly, but the Globe and Mail are reporting that SpaceShipOne's engine shut itself down prematurely (according to CNN reports.)

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!

Re:Early shutdown?

[nonameisgood]

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.

Re:Early shutdown?

[thentil]

I read that too, and was frustrated that I couldn't figure out where they were coming up with that. According to this story:

"For a few minutes after SpaceShipOne began its descent, it was unclear whether Melvill had reached his goal. But the mission announcer finally said the mission had been successful as the craft prepared to land at Mojave Airport, accompanied by three chase planes. "

Looks like Globe and Mail just jumped the gun. thpt.

Re:Early shutdown?

[Kong99]

I was watching/listening to it on MSNBC (who's coverage was abysmal) and based on the radio comm's it sounded like they shut it down prematurely... I cannot recall for sure what words Mike said exactly so I will not try and quote but the gist of the message was the ride was rougher than expected.

Re:Early shutdown?

[amabbi]

According to the mission status page on SpaceFlightNow, Melvill heard three large bangs in flight (see 11:11am update)... if there was a premature shutdown, perhaps this was the reason?

Re:Early shutdown?

[khallow]

Actually, they may have planned to hit the 108 km mark. I believe that's the highest altitude (actually 107.8 km) achieved by the X-15 and the world record for a "plane". So when the engine cut out early (which it apparently did), they might have achieved the main goal of 100 km, but not break the world record on that sort of thing.

Re:Early shutdown?

[evenprime]

Probably nothing major. I expect that it was just burning a little hotter than normal, and that it ate up enough of the exhaust nozzle to destroy the fiber optics. (That automatically shuts the engine down.) This was discussed a few months back in AW&ST, but I can't find the link. This will have to do: http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/RLV/2003/ RLVNews2003-08.html

Scaled itself makes the case-throat-nozzle structure, which consists of an "inner layer of silica phenolic insulator and an outer graphite epoxy structural case." Burn-throughs of the insulator occurred in five firings but did not reach the sensor layer of fiber-optic cable between the insulator and case. They want to do a test in which they fire the engine until a burn-through reaches the sensor layer and it triggers a shutdown.

Re:Early shutdown?

[goates]

"..three loud bangs..."

Mojave, we have a problem...

Re:Early shutdown?

[Void_of_light]

wernt there three sonic booms before the delorean went back in time? Maybe thats why it took so long for this story to hit the slashdot frontpage.

Re:Early shutdown?

[YU Nicks NE Way]

No -- it's good engineering. If you know that something can fail in ordinary usage, you drive it to collapse during testing to determine whether you can recover, and, if so, how to do that. It's like randomly triggering out of memory situations in your code -- no, you don't ever want to run out of memory, but it's always possible that you will. Best to find out what's going to happen when you're testing instead of when you're live.

Re:Early shutdown?

[Andy_R]

A sonic boom is heard onboard a supersonic craft when it catches up with and overtakes the noise it has recently produced.

There is no sonic boom associated with travelling at multiples of the speed of sound, since at multiples of the speed of sound it just leaves it's noise further and further behind.

Re:Early shutdown?

[gnunick]

Quoting the BBC here:

Mr Melvill said he had heard a loud bang during Monday's record-breaking flight. On the ground, he pointed out a section towards the back of the craft where a part of the structure covering the nozzle had buckled, suggesting it may have caused the odd noise. After the flight he said: "I think I'll back off a little bit now and ride my bike."

(emphasis mine) It sounds to me like it might be something more serious than the news I've seen is making it out to be, though I have no doubt they'll iron out the problem before the next flight. I'm just glad he made it back safely this time.

Private craft flies into space

[Lord Zerrr]

MOJAVE, California (CNN) -- Rocket plane SpaceShipOne reached an altitude above 62.5 miles (100 km) during its brief flight Monday morning, making it the first privately built craft to fly in space, controllers said.

Space.com
Updates

11:08 a.m. ET: Mike Melvill and his SpaceShipOne have made it into space. Everything looks good, mission official said, and the craft is now gliding back toward a landing at the Mojave Airport, where it took off earlier this morning. "I got goose bumps when I saw contrails," Greg Klerkx, author of Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age. "I never thought I'd see this moment, but here it is."

It has already landed

[Omega1045]

The posting is a bit late, check out this story. The ship has already set the record and landed.

Touchdown!

[Jibber]

SpaceShip One has successfully landed and it is being reported that they broke the 100 km limit needed to be officially certified as entering space.

Note that this is a sub-orbital flight but Burt has said that he eventually wants to go full orbital.

Jib

blow by blow

[Pharmboy]

get the blow by blow here.

Just refresh your page to get the newest news.

Re:blow by blow

[meringuoid]

Just refresh your page to get the newest news.

So... you're telling Slashdot to go to some page and keep hitting refresh?

Reckless, don't you think?

Re:blow by blow

[Pharmboy]

So... you're telling Slashdot to go to some page and keep hitting refresh?

lol, after careful thought and consideration (or lack thereof...) that might not have been the best idea, but its a popular site, almost all text, and it has been reasonably fast all morning. (some delays toward appex). I am assuming they can handle the load. There is, of course, no mirror.

Actually, the site says to "hit refresh" to get the latest news. Its mainly just single or two sentence updates.

Re:blow by blow

[RobertB-DC]

My favorite update so far is this one:

1250 GMT (8:50 a.m. EDT)

The International Space Station will be flying high above Mojave at approximately the time SpaceShipOne is scheduled to launch. The Expedition 9 resident crew will attempt to photograph the launch and contrail.

The ISS crew, likely to be remembered as caretakers of NASA's failed scheme, will be witness to the future of space exploration. Poetic, isn't it?

It also occurs to me that if something bad happens to the Russian space program, the ISS crew may have to wait for Rutan's future orbital project, if they hope to get home at all...

Re:blow by blow

[HeghmoH]

It also occurs to me that if something bad happens to the Russian space program, the ISS crew may have to wait for Rutan's future orbital project, if they hope to get home at all...

The ISS has lifeboats with enough capacity to get everyone down without help from Earth. That's one reason why they never had more than three people on it at a time, because there is currently no vehicle capable of acting as a lifeboat for more than three people. Even if all spacecraft on Earth disappeared tomorrow, they'd be able to get back fine.

Re:blow by blow

[Rxke]

My favorite:
Melvill: ""Man!" Melvill said, shaking his fists together as he climbed from SpaceShipOne. "I went pretty high, though. When I got to the top, I released a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit. It was absolutely amazing. M&Ms were going all around. It was so cool! We have got to have video of that because I did it in front of one of the video cameras. I haven't ate them. They are in the cockpit."

Imagine a NASA astronaut doing that on a maiden flight...

Re:blow by blow

[Galvatron]

Well, Alan Shepard was sitting in a spacesuit full of urine, does that count?

Re:blow by blow

[Waab]

Well, Alan Shepard was sitting in a spacesuit full of urine, does that count?

According to Chuck Yeager, all of the Mercury astronauts were sitting in monkey [expletive deleted].

Re:blow by blow

[Rxke]

I thought so... At least, I read about it in several places... It was to be a short hop, so there was no need to worry about this, so it was thought, but the countdown got interrupted several times, and time dragged on... So after a while Shep felt the pressure in his bladder mount... He asked permission to urinate in his suit, but ground control was initially afraid it (the liquid, heh) could short-circuit several sensors in his suit, so they said 'no.'

But the countdown kept getting interrupted, and he again contacted ground, almost begging them to give the green light... Eventually they did.

Sweet

[cmaxx]

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.

Quick FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Is this a major accomplishment?
A: Yes. Private spaceflight is huge.
2. Does this win them the X-Prize
A: No. They've got to do it twice, in quick succession.

Re:Quick FAQ

[dustinbarbour]

They've got to do it twice with two passengers on board, no? There were no passengers on this flight, right? Hence, they have yet to begin actual runs for the X Prize.

Re:Quick FAQ

[mahdi13]

This international competition can be won by the first team to create a reusable aircraft that can launch three passengers into sub-orbital space, return them safely home, then repeat the launch within two weeks with the same vehicle.

That's what is needed to get the X-Prize, and this was one very large step to making that goal!

I never thought

[tmork]

I never thought that my generation (I'm 26) would see commerical space flight in our life time. I thought that the world was too caught up in war and and greed for the next great step to the stars. NASA's stalled and caught in buracrecy, GovCo's got a poltical agenda for the Mars mission.

I am happily, gratefully, wrong. I hope with all my heart that Rutan and his contemporaries continue the privately funded drive to the stars.

Re:I never thought

[petepac]

I'm 53 and saw the start of the space race in the begining of the Sixties. When those missions started, we stopped everything at my school to watch them. I hope the schools follow this just as as mush as they did back then.

Re:I never thought

[john82]

NASA's stalled and caught in buracrecy, GovCo's got a poltical agenda for the Mars mission.

You're too young to remember that we've been here before. Kennedy went to space for political reasons too. Americans were trying to one-up the Russians. Check this and this out. For those who don't like to RTFA:

Contrary to the popular view of John Kennedy as a space visionary, the president had little interest in space and strove to put humans on the moon only for its political importance. "I'm not that interested in space," he told NASA chief James Webb late in 1962.

Re:I never thought

[whovian]

Just to expound on that 18,000 mph figure ... NASA's calculator says the minimal stable orbit is around 185 km, or about 110 miles.

Congrats to SpaceShipOne et al. that they made it half way!

Re:I never thought

[Art Tatum]

I was 8 years old when Challenger flew her last mission. The whole elementary school was watching the thing on a big screen TV. I don't know if they still do that stuff or not. I'd wager that they don't. I think they're spending most of their time (trying to) keep kids from raping and killing each other now.

Re:I never thought

[rilister]

and all thanks to the Microsoft tax you paid with that PC...

Re:I never thought

[dAzED1]

are you taking into consideration that "HORIZONTAL velocities" are easier to acheieve than vertical? Yes, he went straight up, then right back down. If he had gone straight up, leveled off, and applied the same amount of thrust...he'd have started going much faster. Also note that at that distance the getting-faster part is much easier to accomplish (less atmosphere and gravity to fight against, and all). Note that he even used enviro-friendl[y|ier] fuel....

ALSO note that per the article itself, they said they're hoping on doing the *same flight* commercially within 10-15 years "affordably." I can freaking guarrantee you that my father in law, for example, would sell the shelby he has in his garage that he babies, and remortgage his house, even if it meant only 3 minutes of weightlessness - just to have broken the Space Barrier. Do NOT underestimate the lingering determination of the original Trekkies. It is NOT hype that this is big.

If you compare the computing power of 20, or even just 10, years ago with that of today - its an amazing difference. If there are semi-regular trips to the space barrier on a commercial level, we will learn a TREMENDOUS amount. As humans (esp us Americans), we learn far more by doing than we do by theorizing. Just as we have chips in computers now that break theories of 20 years ago as far as what would be possible, the actual commoditization...of sorts...of space travel will also make it cheaper, faster, better, etc blah.

Re:I never thought

[GileadGreene]

What's he's done is little different from shooting a man out of a slick looking cannon that can happen to blow him 60 miles high.

And little different from what Alan Shepard did in the original Mercury/Redstone launch. But it's a start. And it does count as "space flight".

And don't forget...to go that fast you need special materials to withstand the heat effects (>1000 degrees F) that occur at such velocities when back in atmosphere.

That's not necessarily true. There have been designs for aluminum-based thermal protection systems. Of course, most of them make use of complex transpiration-cooling systems to stop the aluminum from melting :-) Personally, I would wager that Rutan and Co. will go with some form of ablative shielding (like the old Mercury/Gemini/Apollo capsules), probably a spray-on ablator that can be reasonably quickly replaced. That kind of approach seems in line with the general philosophy of the SpaceShipOne design (for example, their use of a hybrid rocket engine).

but he's NO WHERE NEAR achieving a true suborbital flight

Actually, they just achieved suborbital flight. It's orbital flight that they are still a ways from achieving.

Re:I never thought

[Flamerule]

As other replies to your post have pointed out, you are laboring under some misconceptions. Allow me to clear them up for you.

I never thought that my generation (I'm 26) would see commerical space flight in our life time.

You still haven't I'm afraid. Rutan has built a vehicle that can attain a 60 mile altitude...AND COMES IMMIDIATELY DOWN again.

You are incorrect. As Wikipedia's article on space notes, "The altitude of 100 kilometers or 62 miles established by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale is the most widely used definition as the boundary between atmosphere and space." Because SpaceShipOne can attain this 100 km altitude, Burt Rutan has, indeed, achieved commercial space flight.

To actually ORBIT a craft must reach about 18,000 mph give or take....rutan's craft can only go about 1,500 mph....not even 10% of what's needed to achieve orbit.

This is all well and good, but SpaceShipOne wasn't intended to reach orbit. Orbit isn't required to achieve space flight. Orbit isn't required to win the X Prize.

[Rutan]'s built a BIG cannon that can launch someone 60 miles high nd come back down again...but he's NO WHERE NEAR achieving a true suborbital flight which needs HORIZONTAL velocities AT LEAST 5 to 10 times what he could possibly hope to achieve now with his current design.

Again, you're incorrect. Wikipedia's article on suborbital space flight gives a definition: "A sub-orbital spaceflight (or sub-orbital flight) is a spaceflight that does not involve putting a vehicle into orbit." Thus, because SpaceShipOne enters space, and does not achieve orbit, it is a suborbital spaceflight.

Awesome

[Primotech]

I cannot describe how truly happy I am to hear this news. It's a major accomplishment that many don't fully understand the significance of. This just about made my week.

From live coverage on CNN

[icejai]

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!

Re:From live coverage on CNN

[DynaSoar]

CNN also repeatedly said Mike Melvill was the first civilian astronaut. I'm sure this came as a surprise to Neil Armstrong, who apparently spent his entire military career unaware he was in the military.

Old News?

[thedillybar]

Posted by Hemos on Monday June 21, @11:31AM [EDT]

Around 10:30 EDT the craft will reach an altitude of 50,000 feet...

What's wrong with this picture?

Hoorah for the human species

[Ignorant Aardvark]

This is a great day for man. I firmly believe that our future lies in some day getting off this Earth and spreading throughout space. As such, the accomplishment we have witnessed today was great. This heralds a new era of spaceflight, not one in which governments spend billions, but one in which small companies pay millions, to get into orbit. At this rate, in ten years, commercial space flight might be a reality - and space exploitation (and as a side-effect, human colonization of space) would occur. See any number of novels by Stephen Baxter for more details.

More on space.com

[Neurotoxic666]

More information should be available today at http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/SS1_touchdown _040621.html

Everybody Is Covering It

[Trogdorsey]

This is great publicity for the X-Prize and what they are trying to accomplish. Just about every news site is covering this flight. CNN and FOXNews have it on their main page.

Next stop: Kessel run

[patmandu]

Let's see 'em try to do the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs!

Re:Next stop: Kessel run

[GileadGreene]

Er, the Kessel run is fictional.

The parent post was correctly quoting Han Solo from Star Wars: A New Hope. So if you want to nitpick on units you probably need to contact George Lucas directly.

Aside: I can't believe that I'm actually having to explain this to anyone who reads Slashdot :-p

Re:Next stop: Kessel run

[nharmon]

Yeah but if Kessel run is 13 parsecs wide, doing it in less than 12 would be a feat. Would require a wormhole or something.

Wonderful!

[MachineShedFred]

Next time please provide a link to the actual story so that when CNN takes it off their front page due to the next Clowns Fighting for the White House story breaking, we can still see "stuff that matters" mmkay?

Mojave NOT America's first inland spaceport!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in an inland spaceport at the oxford valley mall over 20 years ago.

Excellent! Now, the sooner we see real, ...

[Dagny Taggert]

...commercial, for-profit ventures going into space, the sooner it will become accessible to the common man. Just not in any of our lifetimes.

Success

[BCW2]

I watched it land on Fox News. They made altitude and landed safely. Bigtime congratulations to the entire Scaled Composits team.

clarification?

[ed.han]

isn't this dependent upon which type of orbit one wishes to establish?

ed

A Truly Historic Day

[yohaas]

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!

My (late) submission

[Kulic]

CNN is reporting in a developing story that SpaceShipOne attained an altitude of over 62.5 miles (100 km) in its historic flight earlier today, making it the first privately built craft to fly in space. More information can be found courtesy of Scaled Composites here and Space.com also has a story.

"Space flight is not only for governments to do," Rutan said. "Clearly, there's an enormous pent-up hunger to fly into space and not just dream about it." "We are heading to orbit sooner than you think," he said. "We do not intend to stay in low-earth orbit for decades. The next 25 years will be a wild ride. ... One that history will note was done for the benefit of everyone."

Soundtrack?

[dr_dank]

Did Mike crank "Magic Carpet Ride" on his way up?

Re:Soundtrack?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Given the number of chase craft "Convoy" might be a better tune...

Cost?

[razmaspaz]

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.

How times have changed

[GreatDrok]

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....

Panel was buckled aft.

[reality-bytes]

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.

Re:Panel was buckled aft.

[Anonymous Coward]

No! It was on the wing, tearing at it! I swear it was there!

Re:wings?

[JabberWokky]

The FAA is presenting them to him on Wednesday... it's a certificate, according to the (semi-knowledgable) MSNBC on-site guy.

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

Real news for a change

[hackstraw]

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?).

Re:Real news for a change

[MrBlackBand]

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.

You do realize, I hope, that the European explorers who came to the "New World" did more than their fair share of killing?

Kurt Vonnegut said it best in "Breakfast of Champions":

"For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on the blackboard again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:

1492

The teachers told the children that this was when the continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them."

"Just Keep Going"

[Bob_Robertson]

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-

Re:"Just Keep Going"

[j-pimp]

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.
Eventually it will happen in a manner that does not throw away 99% of the craft. However, throwing away 99% of the craft is how we've been getting into space for a while. Remember the universal law, Good chepa fast, pick two. Well the X-Prize has a 10 million dollar reward, and plenty of its contestant aren't doing it for the money.

Also, their throwing away 99% of the craft, and then picking it up again. A better way will be found, but seperating rockets are the big block carboreator fed technology of space travel. Sure their are smarter ways of doing it, but sometimes a sledge hammer tool for the job.

Re:Sweet - Luckily they're in California...

[jpellino]

"5. ... The flight vehicle must return from both flights substantially intact, as defined by and in the sole judgment of the ANSARI X PRIZE Review Board, such that the vehicle is reusable."

"Uh, son? Seem's like y'all got a taillight t'aint workin'."
"Really officer? Which one?"
*BLAM!*
"That one, son. Y'all gonna hafta get this vee-hickle offa this heah runway. Heh heh heh..."

Definitions and achieving orbit

[gevmage]

100 km is the official "edge of space", which is presumably matched to some definition of the "thin-ness" of the atmosphere. It may be the height at which 99% of the atmosphere (by mass) is below you.

Achieving orbits is a 2-step process. You need to get high enough that the atmospheric drag is small enough that it's possible to acheive orbital velocity. Then you have a vehicle with enough thrust to kick you into orbit. Height/velocity isn't the only issue. If you accelerated a vehicle to escape velocity at the earth's surface, it would have the energy to leave the earths gravity well completely; however, the energy would turned into heat by friction with the atmosphere, and the craft would be vaporized.

Re:Definitions and achieving orbit

[PhuCknuT]

however, the energy would turned into heat by friction with the atmosphere, and the craft would be vaporized

Actually, that's a misconception. The atmosphere is heated by the compression of the air in front of the object, not by friction.

Re:Definitions and achieving orbit

[jjjefff]

According to the X-Prize organization...

"We chose 100km altitude because it is beyond the official 50-miles that the US Air Force recognizes as "worthy of astronaut wings" but not so high that the re-entry speed requires exotic heat shielding."

Re:Definitions and achieving orbit

[DerekLyons]

100 km is the official "edge of space", which is presumably matched to some definition of the "thin-ness" of the atmosphere. It may be the height at which 99% of the atmosphere (by mass) is below you.

Actually the 100 km figure doesn't match up to any physical or chemical property of the atmosphere. It's nothing more and nothing less than a nice round number agreed upon some decades ago because it was higher than aircraft flew or were likely to fly.

It's important to note that it's only half-way to the minimum altitude of a stable orbit.

Still below the X-15 flight of 1963

[Animats]

Lest we forget, back in 1963, the USAF's X-15 made a similar flight. Lifted under the wing of a B-52, the X-15 reached an altitude of 107960 meters.

The X-15 could do everything required to win the X-prize except carry three people. It reached 100km, and it was flown repeatedly, for a total of 199 X-15 flights of three aircraft.

Re:Still below the X-15 flight of 1963

[arikol]

Ahh, yes, but could it be flown twice in 2 weeks??
Without replacing more than 10% of the crafts zero fuel weight???
I dont think so.

also, the X-15 wasnt very stable, especially at high altitude (inertia coupling was a very real danger) and made the approach for landing at just around 300 knots (thats 555km/h or around 350 mph)(for comparison a LARGE passenger jet makes an approach at around 140kts)

Finally the x-15 was bigger and heavier than SS1 needed a bigger drop-vehicle, and had a highly explosive and complex liquid fuel engine producing 57.000lbs of thrust (dont know what SS1 pruduces, but substantially less than that!)

X-15 weighed in at 32.000 lbs
SS1 is around 6000lbs

I reckon these craft cant easily be compared, theyre just designed for such vastly different purposes, although one feature coincides (going high)

Re:Still below the X-15 flight of 1963

[Chris_Jefferson]

Except of course the whole point of the X-prize is for a private group to do it, not the US Air Force. Of course the government can get into space, it's been doing it for years by using billions of tax dollars , as only it can.

Re:Still below the X-15 flight of 1963

[Kiryat Malachi]

Ahh, yes, but could it be flown twice in 2 weeks??
Without replacing more than 10% of the crafts zero fuel weight???
I dont think so.

I do.

Flights 167 and 170 of the X-15-A2 craft occurred 18 days apart, in August of 1966. These weren't altitude runs, though, they were speed runs as the A2 was modified to have longer engine burn times in order to support higher speed flights.

87, 90 and 91 were each spaced around a month apart, and the latter two were over 100km in the X-15A (3rd vehicle). The first was 86km. June 27, July 19, August 22 were the dates. In 1963.

Refurb % between flights for X15 is not an easily available number, but it's likely it was less than 10%; there was no ablative structure and the engines were reusable. This wasn't a bloat-era NASA program; it was originally a joint USAF/NACA project, which means that the ground crew wasn't huge and major overhauls between short flights were pretty much impossible.

The stability problem was mostly overcome with adaptive control systems; these days it wouldn't even be an issue, controls have gone so far along with easy access to DSP and computation. As to landing, the high speed was a result of a relatively low subsonic L/D ratio; X-15 was optimized for hypersonic flight, while a jet is optimized for subsonic flight. As a result, X-15 had a much harder time staying in the air at low speeds, and stalled at a higher speed, meaning it had to land at a higher speed. SS1, not being designed for maneuverability at hypersonic speeds, could be more optimized for subsonic landing, which is why it lands at a relatively paltry

X15 weighed around 30000 kg, not pounds. It produced 26762 kgf of thrust. By comparison, SS1 is 3600kg and produces 7500 kgf. X15 did nearly as much as this initial flight, despite a significantly worse thrust-to-weight ratio.

And let's not forget, the X-15 flew in the mid 60s. 40 years ago.

I give Rutan a lot of credit, but the X-15 remains one of the most amazing accomplishments in aerospace history, and was capable of most things the X-Prize asks for (obviously, the 3 man requirement not so much).

Great Idea

[slasher999]

I think it's a great idea to use references to three different time zones (EDT, GMT, PST) in the headline. That's not confusing at all. (I'm acutally not confused by it in the least, but come on people!)

Space Quotes

[JoshMKiV]

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)

Re:America's first inland spaceport?

[foolish]

Neither of them is a civilian spaceport. The site has to get a HUGE amount of paperwork. EPA, etc. Also, the military ranges tend to want termination devices on spacecraft (the missle model of recovery)

M&M's

[Sporkinum]

I liked the comment the pilot made about opening a Package of M&M's in the cockpit while weightless. He said he enjoyed seeing them float around and that they are all over the place inside. Thought it was neat he had a little time to mess around with fun stuff.

Sounded like the Simpson's bit when Homer opened a bag of chips. I think Burt Rutan used alot of inanimate carbon rods in the construction oF the ship too.

Re:wings?

[reality-bytes]

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'.

Flash Gordon

[CompWerks]

This might be a little too old for most /. 'ers but the first thing I thought when I saw SpaceShipOne is that it looks alot like Flash Gordon's Ship

Except they didn't.

[Einer2]

Get into orbit, that is. If you crunch the numbers, you find that you need approximately 30 times as much kinetic energy to achieve orbit as you just need to go up 100 km. This requires a far more powerful launcher than for suborbital flights.

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.

Re:Except they didn't.

[maxpublic]

orbital flight becomes a much thornier problem that almost certainly won't be solved in a decade.

Funny, just a couple of years back quite a few self-proclaimed pundits said the exact same thing about privately-funded ventures trying to do just what SpaceShip One accomplished today...along with a few officials at NASA, as well.

Looks like they didn't have a clue what they were talking about, either.

Max

Re:Except they didn't.

[Einer2]

...

At this point, I think it's pretty safe to assume that anybody who reads Slashdot knows at least the basic history of the Apollo program. As such, there's really no reason for anyone to continually add footnotes about it, and so it's equally safe to assume anyone who harps on the lack of said footnotes is only doing so to try to score cheap debate points.

Also, I disagree with the assumption that future orbital flights will be substantially cheaper just because launches with Spaceship One were cheaper. No major space program has ever had a reason to compete in this niche (manned reuseable suborbital vehicles), so the field was still wide open for someone to come in with a good idea. By contrast, there have been a lot of people exploring options for cheap reuseable orbital flight with no results, so someone coming into the field from private industry will need either an equal investment of sweat equity or an extremely unconventional bright idea that all the experts would have missed.

Re:Except they didn't.

[Einer2]

It's a bit harder to accelerate to 17000 MPH than to 3000 MPH (the peak velocity of Spaceship One, according to CNN). You also have to liberally coat the thing with heat insulation, though I could probably be convinced that they're solving that problem with new composite materials.

Of course, it'd be nice if someone actually demonstrated that these composites existed. All I ask is for one chemist who works in that general field to give a rough estimate of the percentage weight savings we're likely to see with new materials over, say, the Space Shuttle's insulation system.

Oh, and the reason I invoked decade is because the parent post specifically said "in ten years", not from any particular knowledge or assumed knowledge on my part. I'm just trying to get across to people, with limited success, that orbital spaceflight is hard and all the suborbital teams don't appear to have even started dealing with the issues that make it hard.

Chase planes?

[hawkfish]

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 ;-)).

Re:Chase planes?

[Watcher]

You were right on the first guess. They usually look for damage or other external problems (like the landing gear not actually being down). There really isn't anything they can do to help, except warn the pilot that something has gone wrong.

Re:Chase planes?

[Banner]

From the cockpit of the plane you cannot see any of your own airplane. Chase planes provide you with an outside set of eyes that can look for problems and issues, like bent parts, missing parts, non moving parts, and leaking fluids.

Chase planes also supply you with a moral boost. Even though they can't get out and help you, it's still kind of nice to know that there is another human being who is close enough that you can see him when you're locked in a small metal box miles above the ground all by yourself. (I've flown chase before when a squadron member's jet developed problems on a routine training flight).

And last of all, the people in the Chase planes usually know as much about your plane as you do. And can provide advice when you really, really, need it. Especially as they're right there looking at the situation.

Re:Chase planes?

[iabervon]

Now that would be embarassing... "June 21: Went up to 100km. Saw black sky during day. First civilian to pilot in space. Would have gone higher, but accidentally turned off engine (nobody looking, still high enough). Heard loud noise on way back. Forgot to put down landing gear (11,000 people watching).

"June 22: Biked into tree (nobody looking). Space is easier; nothing to run into."

Re:Chase planes?

[Darth_brooks]

There really isn't anything they can do to help, except warn the pilot that something has gone wrong.

They can also do handy things like make sure the pilot isn't incapacitated, make better judgement calls on an aircraft's condition, etc..Chuck Yeager detailed several stories of just how valuable a chase plane is.

On one occasion his windshield defroster failed, leaving him flying exceptionally blind. His chase plane helped talk him down by flying parallel to him and directing the plane in. (I know, he had instruments, but think about a frost covered windshield on a bright sunny day. You're pretty much flying with your eyes closed)

In another case a pilot yeager was flying chase for neglected to turn his oxygen up. Yeager conned the pilot into returning to a safe altitude.

Free video link

[caffeine_monkey]

cbc.ca has video clips in realvideo and quicktime.

FYI: Mach Speed.

[Banner]

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.

Re:FYI: Mach Speed.

[Rei]

Not as much as you'd think. Barring changes in atmospheric content with altitude, the only change you'll be getting is due to temperature changes. Due to lower temperatures at high altitudes, the speed of sound will be somewhat lower. This is partly compensated for when you factor in the atmospheric content changes, which speed up the speed of sound. In an ideal gas (yes, air isn't an ideal gas, but it's close enough), pressure (the most altitude-dependant variable) isn't relevant to the speed of sound.

Predictions?

[Paulrothrock]

How about some predictions for the next 10, 25, and 50 years?

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.

Re:Predictions?

[Auton]

From 1927 (Lindbergh's first flight across the Atlantic) to 1937, air transportation developed from tiny cottage industries to a major niche, including regular transatlantic service. I would say regular orbital flights by 2014 is not impossible. In fact, I think it'll happen sooner.

Cars took all of 15 years to gain widespread popularity. Henry Ford would tell you that. The Ford T appeared in 1908, some 12 years after the very first real cars appeared (1896). It was a cultural phenomenon by 1910. Similarly, aircraft, the first controllable type appearing in 1903, were in use for a whole slew of purposes by 1920 - not the least of which having been as weapons in WWI.

Mars has a value as, at least, a forward base for mining the asteroid belt. A single asteroid can contain enough paladium, platinum, silver and gold to make the entire return trip worthwhile several times over. Also, there will be a market for off-world colonization, just as there was a market for transatlantic colonization (an area most US-located readers should be familiar with), for much the same reasons.

As to Mars, I think living inside a bubble is far better than you make it out to be. Mars has pressure, which reduces the need for bulky space suits to move about, and allows aircraft, gravity which allows vehicles to move effectively around, and most importantly: Lots of room. It apparently has water, also, if you're willing to work for it A geodesic dome can be built almost arbitrarily big, also, allowing for breathable atmosphere covering a whole city, as well as a controlled climate. Terraforming (for which the ideas are already appearing; so much for 500 years...) is not by a long stretch a necessity for comfortable habitation on another world.

I think the prospects for the future are far better than the naysayers would have them be. Looking back at previous pioneering works, I'd say this one will likely follow a similar pattern. That makes this century a very interesting one to live in.

can't resist

[fliptout]

Tier Two: ???

Tier Three: Profit!!!

Joking aside, I hope the design scales well.

Amazing

[Sunspire]

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 :)

Re:wings?

[Ford Prefect]

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. :-)

Re:Engines shut out early

[BLAG-blast]

So the engines on SS1 shut off pre-maturely, after a burn of only about a minute, which was half of the predicted two minute burn.

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?

Do not count on CNN's techincal expertise..

[Banner]

Remember, these are the people who said Columbia was traveling at 25 times the speed of light when it disintegrated.

Again, Mach speed changes as a function of altitude! Mach is dependent on airpressure, the speed of sound changes with it.

And CNN does not seem to employ anyone who understands science in the least.

mental picture

[greysky]

Why is it when I read articles about this all I can picture is an episode of monster garage where jesse james comes out and tells the contestents "okay this week you're going to turn a '91 honda civic into a sub-orbital spacecraft, and you have to make is safe 'cus I'm gonna fly it."

MSNBC Webcast was HORRIBLE!

[Kong99]

Obviously there was no plan for their coverage. They basically missed the takeoff since the camera was unable to track the plane fast enough. We had sporadic interviews right after launch (voice only), in between interviews was silence, then at some point they played a Janet Jackson song while the video was still feeding, and the video feed was just an unmoving shot of the tower, crowd, runway. Then about 30 or so minutes after launch they cut to the live radio transmissions, which was excellent though hard to hear, of course there was no announcement they were cutting to the radio feed which was at least 2x as loud as the announcer feed.

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!

Hurray!

[Fjornir]

Hope Eyrie

Worlds grow old and suns grow cold
And death we never can doubt.
Time's cold wind, wailing down the past,
Reminds us that all flesh is grass
And history's lamps blow out.

But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
Cycles turn while the far stars burn,
And people and planets age.
Life's crown passes to younger lands,
Time brushes dust of hope from his hands
And turns another page.

But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
But we who feel the weight of the wheel
When winter falls over our world
Can hope for tomorrow and raise our eyes
To a silver moon in the opened skies
And a single flag unfurled.

But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
We know well what Life can tell:
If you would not perish, then grow.
And today our fragile flesh and steel
Have laid our hands on a vaster wheel
With all of the stars to know

That the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
From all who tried out of history's tide,
Salute for the team that won.
And the old Earth smiles at her children's reach,
The wave that carried us up the beach
To reach for the shining sun.

For the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

(c) 1975 Leslie Fish

"less than 12 parsecs" explained

[gumpish]

Er, a parsec is a measure of distance, not speed.

First of all, you meant "distance, not time"...

Secondly,

Read this and then STFU.

Re:"2001 Odyssey": commercial space flight by 1980

[john82]

...Reagan Cold War

You mean the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Castro, Krushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev Cold War don't you? It's not like Reagan started this all on his own in '46.

My apologies to readers from the UK for leaving out Churchill from that list (given that he coined the term "Iron Curtain").

Fast forward...

[adept256]

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?

Reporting "news" (OT)

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Looks like you're getting sucked into the "get the scoop" game. That's one of those artificial games the news media have created to increase profits: Make people think that getting all news a split-second before anyone else is Very Important, then sell more by doing that.

In reality, scoops are good for some news: when they affect stock prices in a surprising way, when there is imminent danger to the public, etc. But most news, like this one, doesn't affect you adversely if it's delivered some time after it occurs.

If you're really into getting the scoop, you can visit major news media where most stories are pre-written for that reason. Here at Slashdot, we're pretty relaxed about such things. We like our news late, duped, with lots of typos and inaccuracies. But then, Slashdot is not really about "news" (the title is very much tongue-in-cheek), it's about the comments, moderation and trolls.

-hadohk

Re:Excellent! Now, the sooner we see real, ...

[Zak3056]

...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.

Private space travel = bad idea

[EvilStein]

We have people that can't manage to get across town without getting into an accident.

Can you imagine soccer mom's private spacecraft, with her using one hand to hold the cell phone and the other to beat the kids? :P

We still need to get aircraft to stop running into fixed objects.. and each other! :)

Re:Private space travel = bad idea

[squarooticus]

Because, of course, the government's 3% failure rate is much better than private industry could achieve.

Re:Private space travel = bad idea

[DerekLyons]

Because, of course, the government's 3% failure rate is much better than private industry could achieve.

The best reliability currently for a private launcher is around 98.5%, the best reliability for a goverment launcher (the Shuttle) is around 98.2%. Not much of a difference there. (Even the much vaunted Soyuz (booster, not the capsule) only clocks in with a reliability around 99.2%)

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.)

Time to offer the Y-Prize

[Anonymous Coward]

100 million $ For the first commercial moon shot?

Followed by the Z-Prize of 1 billion $ for the first commercial interstellar flight to Proxima Centauri.

Or how about 1 quadrillion Quatloos for the first inter-dimensional "slide"?

Some milestones for comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

On October 14, 1947, the Bell X-1 became the first airplane to fly faster than the speed of sound. Piloted by U.S. Air Force Capt. Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager, the X-1 reached a speed of 1,127 kilometers (700 miles) per hour, Mach 1.06, at an altitude of 13,000 meters (43,000 feet, 8.1 miles). (Source: Air & Space Museum)

On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. His remotely controlled Vostok 1 spacecraft lofted him to an altitude of 200 miles and carried him once around planet Earth. (Source: NASA)

[Alan Shepard] holds the distinction of being the first American to journey into space. On May 5, 1961, in the Freedom 7 spacecraft, he was launched by a Redstone vehicle on a ballistic trajectory suborbital flight--a flight which carried him to an altitude of 116 statute miles and to a landing point 302 statute miles down the Atlantic Missile Range. (Source: NASA)

The X-15 research plane had some mission similarities to SpaceShipOne. The X-15 was lifted under the wing of a B-52 bomber to around 45,000ft and was then dropped before its rocket engines were fired and testing began. One of the primary purposes of the X-15 was to test the physiological effects on both man and machine of high-speed, high-altitude (near space) flight. The information gathered certainly qualified as high altitude as even under NASA's strict guidelines Joe Walker achieved astronaut status while testing the X-15 on August 22, 1963 by going over the 62 mile mark--to an altitude of 67 miles. (The US Air Force recognizes the limit as 50 miles, under this system many prior X-15 pilots reached "astronaut status." It is interesting that NASA's mark was only passed after they had taken over the X-15 project on 1960.) (Sources: various)

The pilot of SpaceShipOne, Michael Melvill, brought the ship into a vertical ascent at Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. The craft coasted in a massive arc, about 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, above the Earth. Melvill, the first astronaut to pilot a private spacecraft, experienced weightlessness for about three minutes. (Source: CNN)

A question for the Rocket Scientists on /.

[NoNeeeed]

Lots of people have been asking about how SC can take SS-1 and turn it into something that can get people into LEO and beyond.

One option is that perhaps they won't, and they will go back to the drawing board to come up with a totally new design. That doesn't seem right to me; Bert is a smart guy, and they have put a lot of resources and time into this, would they just throw it away.

My thought is that they will scale things up and add another stage.

In essence, what Burt has done is design a rocket where each stage is designed to suite it's part of the flight, and then return in one piece. At the moment they have a stage to get high in the atmosphere, and a stage to get into space, why not add a new stage to get you to LEO and beyond.

If WK and SS-1 (SS-2?) were scaled up, is there any reason why a third stage couldn't piggy-back on SS-1 to 100km and then detach and boost into LEO. Both the previous stages would then land and wait for the return of the orbiter. Each would have it's own crew (or perhaps a really good auto-pilot).

Basically you end up with the advantages of a multi-stage rocket (or the shuttle) but with completely reusable stages.

Have I completely missed something? Would the seperation at 100km be too difficult? Would there be too much mass for it to be feasible?

Paul

p.s. Well done to everyone at Scaled. An amazing achievement, no matter what the "but I want a pony!" crowd might say. This has been one small step in the right direction, on a long journey.

Re:A question for the Rocket Scientists on /.

[Baldrson]

I'm an amateur "rocket scientist", mainly versed in high pressure liquid fuel engines, so I'm a bit biased against the low pressure engines used by Carmack etc. but even so my prior response to this issue bears repeating:

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.

Re:A question for the Rocket Scientists on /.

[Baldrson]

Carmack can stage and he will probably need to stage to get to orbit. I expect a 2 stage system will turn out to be optimal, as it usually does. His important innovation is the simplified fuel (H2O2(90%)+methanol monopropellant) system per stage -- primarily for the first stage where reliability (due to liablity problems) and cost per mass is more important and specific impulse is less important. Each stage can have its own landing/reuse mode. Parachutes aren't that bad and if the engine can be restarted, as Carmack's can, they can be used in lieu of ablation during early reentry (the shock attach points would be to the engine's exhaust shock) as well as assuring a soft landing.

Monopropellants are fantastic if you can get them to work. I paid a chemical engineer to do a literature search on propalox (propane/lox solution -- they are miscible at tankage pressures) but it turns out to be too easy to detonate. If there were some sort of stabilizer it could deliver >300 seconds as well as remaining liquid at a higher temperature/lower pressure than most cryogenics. Carmack's low specific impulse (200 seconds for his methanol/H2O2(90%) solution -- he says he may be able to get that up as high as 250 seconds if he pushes) is a serious draw-back but the simplicity he achieves is a big deal: you can buy a lot of tankage, methanol and H2O2(90%) for the money you could have spent developing and operating alternative systems.

Scaled Composite may be _talking_ 150km but the fact that they ran into control problems upon leaving the atmosphere is exactly the sort of thing I was concerned about in my first message regarding their limitation as a "space" vehicle.

I think Carmack should go for the prize. I'd be happy to be the test pilot but I doubt I'm qualified even to be spam in a can for his vehicle.

As to other techniques for 100% reuability and minimal maintanence -- well -- reusability per se is over-rated. There are reasons to believe you can manufacture rockets very cheaply if you can just get the volume up. The goal is to get the cost per mass to low earth orbit down dramatically. I've had guys who studied industrial production of automobiles and looked at the Saturn V boosters tell me that those engines aren't really any more difficult to manufacture (in terms of tolerances, materials, quality assurance, etc.) than the engine in my 1969 VW microbus, which I replaced a few years ago with a new one for under $1000. The rest is basically tankage and electronics.

If you can go single stage to orbit then you _really_ don't want reuse -- you want that tankage and mass to stay where it provides locally-available feedstocks for various proceses.

Re:Escape Velocity is a non-issue

[Etcetera]

I can't get over how many Slashdotters don't know the simple physics of satellite orbits.

Yeah, that bugs me too... I mean, come on people, it's not rocket science!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Advertising is next

[hey]

Pretty soon Coke or Nike will charter a flight to erect some dumb ad in space. What a great day!

Re:But can they do it TWICE in two weeks, for the

[kireK]

This launch doesn't count for the X-prize. You need to take two passangers up to count for an X-Prize launch.

Re: YES The da Vinci project!

[ArcticCelt]

--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.

Note to governments...

[Paul Bristow]

Get the f*** out of the way. Let private enterprise take us into space. You are slowing down the human race.

Tier One == SpaceShipOne, Tier Two == Orbiter?

[bburdette]

If SpaceShipOne is Tier One, then will there be a Tier Two? If you can get to the edge of space by piggybacking a rocket on a jet aircraft, what about having another, smaller rocket on board to accelerate to orbital or escape velocity? So Tier 'Zero' gets you to 50000 feet (jet aircraft), Tier One gets you to the edge of space, and Tier Two goes on to orbit. That way you don't have to accelerate all of your Tier One stage to orbital velocity, only the orbiter. That means that you don't have to worry about making a SpaceShipOne that can withstand reentry or accelerate to mach 25 in space; just build it large enough to carry something that can.

From a renown expert in space flight engineering

[Anonymous Coward]

Ye can'ne change the laws of physics

- Scotty

lift technology

[daraf]

It'll be interesting to see the implications of this and future private spaceflight from a national security point of view. Spacelift technology is remarkably similar to that of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Many existing lift vehicles, such as the Titan and Delta family, have their roots in modified ICBMs.

Physics. Orbit.

[rew]

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....

like a spent bullet...

[bpetal]

I like the way it's reported here!

Once the rocket's fuel was spent, SpaceShipOne kept going up for about three minutes to reach 104km, a height at which it lost speed like a spent bullet.

haha! "like a spent bullet"... Only the Arab world would use such an analogy so freely. :)

Re:Is Burt Rutan the Roger Moore of flight ?

[feargal]

He seems to 'crave' publicity with his projects.

Of all the X-Prize competitors, Scaled Composites have been the most media-shy. He receives lots of publicity for his projects because they are pretty, innovative, and successful.

Also I heard on Cnn interview of Rutan that he didn't develop this rocket with the X prize in mind.

They have spent more than double the prize money developing Tier One. They'd have to be pretty stupid to be in it just to win the X-Prize. While it would be nice to recoup $10m by winning the prize, they will continue their developement whether they win or not. (Mass fatalities excluded.)

Just another contest bought out by the richest guy.

Yes. That was the point. Encourage the private sector to invest in commercial space travel by rewarding the smart investor with $10m.

Really. I'm sure you can find out more on CNN.

Re:Ethics and priorities

[0123456]

'Nevertheless, I can't see the justification for this kind of thing while people starve right here on Earth.'

I take it that you donate every single penny of your disposable income to those starving people, rather than waste it on frivolous uses like internet access, beer and vacations?

No, didn't think so.

Why is this interesting?

[phr1]

I mean, the guy flew a plane real real high. It went up, it came back down almost immediately. Others have done that too, maybe not quite as high. Yeah, it's a milestone in the sense of a box on a list that one can check off. But what's the immediate practical consequence? Not much.

Spaceflight gets interesting when you can actually put stuff into orbit. So that once it goes up, it stays up without using more fuel. That means you have to get the rocket flying at close to Mach 25. Then once you've gotten up to Mach 25, if you want to land again, you've got to slow back down to zero, which means getting rid of a heck of a lot of kinetic energy. That's why the Space Shuttle needs those notorious problematic thermal tiles, to dissipate the ferocious amount of heat created by that slowdown. Think your car's brakes get hot driving down a mountain? Try it from orbit.

SpaceShip One's propaganda made it sound like they'd beaten NASA by developing better reentry technology that didn't need thermal tiles. In reality, they didn't need thermal tiles because they never reached anywhere near orbital speed, so they didn't have all that heat to dissipate. If they ever build an orbital craft, they'll have to deal with reentry heat just like everyone else has.

SpaceShip One is about as close to that as the Wright Brothers flyer is to a jet airliner. The amount of technical development (and expenditure) needed to get a reusable vehicle in orbit makes what's been done so far look pretty trivial. Space Ship One got about as far into space as the Redstone rockets of the 1950's.

I don't mean to belittle the accomplishment but it shouldn't be overestimated either. It's a step, an important step, but a baby step, there are a lot more to go.

Re:Ethics and priorities

[JabberWokky]

People have always starved. They always will. The house will never be in order. I agree that the human race should be considered and that they should share in the profits of colonialism; as the United States was a colony, so shall be the La Granges, the Moon, Mars and elsewhere. And humanity will starve there just as they do on Earth. And they will thrive there just as they do on Earth. And they will live, love, hate, fight, murder, have children, write songs, be heartbroken, be inspired and will participate in the sublime experience of humanity.

Stealing the stars from our future does not feed the world. But it does starve countless worlds.

--
Evan

Re:Summary?

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Cost comparison... Hmmm....

[LightJockey]

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!

Energy

[Cujo]

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.

Re:"2001 Odyssey": commercial space flight by 1980

[pyrrhonist]

Not to mention Stalin, Malenkov, and Chernenko.

Stalin was still the Soviet leader until 1953.

Malenkov was First Secretary before (and along with) Khrushchev.

Chernenko was only General Secretary for a 13 months, but still managed to escalate the cold war.

What a Tragedy it will be..

[cOdEgUru]

If we forget this moment..

What a tragedy it will be, to squander what we have achieved today.

What a tragedy it will be for all of us to destroy earth with out ever setting foot on another planet in the name of space exploration.

What a tragedy it will be for us to wither away and die, our gaze constant at the dwindling light in the horizon, watching all that we could have discovered and knowing all that we missed.

What a tragedy it will be for our sons and daughters who look upon us to set an example, who look upon us to lead and instead find us fighting in the name of God

What a tragedy that other civilizations, alien to ours, will oneday reflect upon what we were capable of, but miserably failed.

Re:Ethics and priorities

[pw1972]

If we followed that socialist attitude, technology and everything that has prospered from it would be back in the stone age. Unfortunately socialism fails because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics! Everything tends towards the lowest state of energy. So if we were in a socialist economy, we'd be doing the bare minimum to get by and nothing more. There would be no incentive to work harder and laziness would ensue.

Re:A Truly Historic Day

[Mordaximus]

"IMO the most historic event since 9/11."

I share your sentiment about the success of the flight, but I'm puzzled by the comparison. There have been many historic events, both in the US and abroad, that are at least in the same topic from which to draw comparison...

How about STS-107 - more recent, very historic. And although it was tragic, at least in the end good has come of it.

Or how about all of the Mars exploration? Or mankinds unified and rekindled interest in space? All more recent, more relevant and equally as historic. Not to mention, more positive!

Design notes: cheaper, safer, faster turnaround

[lpq]

BBC's Sci-Tech section reports more on how it was launched off a mach 3+ jet that should be recoverable. It's built off the old X-15 concept of using a re-usable hypersonic jet to carry the shuttle most of the way up. If the launch vehicle (a twin-engine turbojet) is reusable, it should allow for easy re-use and a faster turnaround time.

Also mentioned is the shuttle design that makes it self-orienting on re-entry thus always having it re-enter on a "least friction" path.

Various design differences would appear to make the shuttle inherently safer than the 30 year old NASA design.

The article also mentions the cost on the project, $69 million, is less than most government studies and considerably less than the 1 billion dollar cost of the US Shuttle and the per-fligh cost of $500 million.

-l

Thermal protection system

[john82]

No mention of what their thermal protection system involves, but there's a picture that is labelled as such. Here's another shot showing the wing coating. Look for the pinkish material on the nose/chin and leading edges. Does that give anyone additional clues as to the material involved?

Re:Working for Change

[Anonymous Coward]

I've made a number of trips to underprivileged nations to get a feel for conditions there.

The Bahamas and Cancoon don't count.

Just got back from Mojave

[Mafiew]

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.

Re:Just got back from Mojave

[netringer]

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.

That's a Beech StarShip which Burt Rutan also designed. The design was too unconventional for business types so it didn't sell well. Sadly Raytheon, current owner of Beech, is buying all of the few of them ever made and is destroying them to avoid any future legal liability.

*Thanks*, ambulance chasing lawyers.

Re:Just got back from Mojave

[JoeF]

We got some good spots as near to the takeoff and landing as possible
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...

Pop open the champagne, my boy Rutan made history

[sllim]

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.

Just so everyone knows

[CompressedAir]

Those of us at Johnson Space Center are cheering as loud as anyone.

Good job, Burt and Mike!

Re:"met the specs" ???

[AKAImBatman]

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?

Re:hollow cavity shockwave deflection

[Rei]

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!)

Re:Dead end projects

[Arcturax]

He proved it could be done. No matter what becomes of Space Ship One, this is a crowning achievement and could pave the way for further advancement.

Any research like this is well worth doing, even if the end benefits are not immediate.

What's with the care-free reentry?

[michajoe]

Something i don't understand about a quote from Rutan:

and how pleased I am that we have a ship that cannot only go to space but it is the first time that a winged-vehicle -- that can make this beautiful landing on a runway -- can make a care-free reentry. That is an enormous thing for safety

What's with the care-free reentry? I would think that the level care-free-ness is directly proportional to one's speed and angle. I'm sure once you get to orbit and have the required speed to actually stay in orbit for a while, your reentry will lose a whole lot of that "care-free" thing. No?

Pictures & story

[Kallahar]

I was there and did a writeup with some pics: quickwired.com

So do I get this right...

[thrill12]

...in that we should expect these guys with the pointy ears come down now and greet us ?

Re:DC-X

[AKAImBatman]

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?

Everything out of the sun

[Thagg]

I think that these pilots are old fighter jocks, every maneuver they did was right out of the sun. Unfortunately, the people on the ground weren't the enemy, but were the fans :)

It was an awe-inspiring show. It seems the crowds were about the same as those at the Voyager landing in '86 -- my wife joked that they were probably the same people, a little grayer and a little longer in the tooth :)

thad

"airframe buckling"???

[vanyel]

What's this bit in the CNN page about?

On landing, Melvill told of a loud bang he heard during the flight. He said it appeared to have been part of the composite airframe buckling near the rocket nozzle. However, the slight indention in SpaceShipOne's exterior did not appear to have jeopardized the craft's performance.

It may not have affected this flight, but it sounds like it came close to doing so, and should certainly impact the ability to do a quick repeat, I would think!

Re:That's supercavitation!

[sense_net]

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?

X Prize

[bondjamesbond]

Just give Scaled the X Prize and get it over with. If those other companies try this, they'll probably have loss of life and ruin the spirit of the whole, wonderful thing that Scaled is doing.

Some Picts for the curious

[QuantumFTL]

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:
http://www.lyle.org/~jwick/spaceshipone_jw/index.h tml

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

What if the gas had no mass?

[Anonymous Coward]

One alternative to a balloon (not the one currently being pursued) was proposed by Buckminster Fuller: use a rigid structure enclosing a vacuum. According to his math, a 400 ft, 15 ton, geodesic sphere could easily generate 200 tons of lift ASL by pumping out half the air. If you could maintain that pressure ratio as the bubble went up, I believe you could comfortably lift 10 tons to a height of 40 km. Obviously, you could lift more with a bigger bubble and you could make it a lot lighter if need be.

vacuum balloon?

[LiSrt]

would a rigid balloon filled with *nothing* provide some mass saving or would the materials req'd be too heavy?

Re:vacuum balloon?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Yes, a vacuum would provide plenty of lift. In fact, it would also solve the problem of the contents of the envelope expanding as the atmospheric pressure drops.

Now the trick is the materials. You need something that will withstand 14 lbs/in*in. It's not too hard for small volumes. But every time you double the surface area of the lift envelope, you double the force the air around it exerts, trying to fill it back up. One time on Mr. Wizard's World, they created a partial vacuum in a paint thinner can. The air around the can crushed it. (And it was a steel can!)

A peer poster noted a design by Buckminster Fueller. I haven't seen it, but it may merit looking in to.