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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[myc_lykaon]

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

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

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?

[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.

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

[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...

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

[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.

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!

Next stop: Kessel run

[patmandu]

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

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!

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: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

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

Free video link

[caffeine_monkey]

cbc.ca has video clips in realvideo and quicktime.

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: 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.

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....

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: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.

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.