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SpaceShipOne Flight Not as Perfect as it Seemed
ArbiterOne writes "SpaceShipOne's flight wasn't as perfect as it seemed, according to Burt Rutan and New Scientist. Apparently, at one point in the descent, the pilot completely lost attitude control. According to him, "If that had happened earlier, I would never have made it and you all would be looking sad right now." Could this pose some problems for the X-Prize contender?"
I don't see anyone doing any better than they did (yet).
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
Build...test...improve...retest...etc
It's how aeronautical design's been done for decades. I very much doubt this'll be a major setback for them.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
...the pilot's skill. However, this is to be expected with any prototype. It's always the early pioneers who take the risks; I guarantee that Rutan and crew are working on fixing the attitude problem as we speak. And, knowing those guys, the next flight will be perfect.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
A few of my friends were very surprised that this run wouldn't count at all for the X-Prize, since it didn't have enough people or weight to replace them.
This is exactly why, it was a test run, things can, and did (though fortunatly not bad enough to have resulted in loss of life) go wrong.
I think this was exactly the right way for them to have approached this, go up with as little extra as possible, see what goes well and what doesn't, and make revisions based on that. Though an extra 300lbs might not have mattered much with this particular problem, in other cases it could have turned a small problem into a disaster.
paul reinheimer
And despite this: it *is* rocket science, and an experimental vehicle to boot. It isn't surprising there are some problems. Let's all be happy the pilot actually survived.
Attitudeis the crafts orientation. The article originally said altitude control, I emailed CmdrTaco to fix it before the article went live.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Is this a mistake or do pilots really have control over their attitude?
Uh... I would hope they have control over the plane's attitude.
Main Entry: at-ti-tude
5 : the position of an aircraft or spacecraft determined by the relationship between its axes and a reference datum (as the horizon or a particular star)
"Could this pose some problems for the X-Prize contender?"
Of course it could, bubblehead. Getting into space is HARD.
This is something that has always impressed me with Rutan; he has always been pretty honest with regards to the performance and safety of his designs.
He could have just as easily hid the issues and blamed the time to fix the problem on the FAA or a vendor (like the rocket motor supplier).
The attitude changes on motor light are significant problems that will have to be addressed although I wonder if it is due to center of gravity changes caused by the fully fueled motor. The big bang and deformed panel is a potentially bigger problem and may require significant changes to the structure.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
For spaceflight it seems to take fewer imperfections to kill you. For a first run mostly perfect is fantastic...especially since the not perfect parts didn't involve dying.
The flight was a success, the pilot survived, and the ship wasn't damaged? Good job guys! Don't get lazy!
As a society viewing the initial private sojourns into space we need to prepare for the risk these people will take and we need to prepare ourselves for the first casualties. Otherwise, when someone does die, we'll knee-jerk the issue to the point that someone will suggest "There ought to be a law...".
There's been quite enough of that already, thank you very much. Get ready for it, it's going to happen. Every pioneering effort accumulates causualties.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
The article says that he lost attitude control at the end of the burn as the ship was leaving the atmosphere. What else would you expect, considering the primary attitude controls are atmospheric flight surfaces? Once the ailerons, elevators and rudders have no air to push agains you're pretty much stuck with gyros, attitude thrusters or a controllable main engine thrust nozzle. This craft had NONE of those, so It would be completely reasonable to expect it to tumble until the air friction had built up enough for the fins to reorient the aircraft along the motion vector.
Indeed! NASA never has accidents that kill people. Through the mass application of science and billions of taxpayer dollars, all risk has been eliminated from space travel. Carry on, sir.
One of my favorite t-shirts has a picture of an Artifical Horizon showing a plane in an inverted dive with the words "Bad Attitude".
Credit Mike Melville and Burt Rutan for being so open about the problems they experienced. Remember, this is 1 day after the flight! Compare that with how NASA closed ranks and divulged Columbia information with an eye dropper for weeks after the disaster. The only statements made by the mission controllers were through their lawyers. The Russians and Chinese would never admit to problems at all. Burt Rutan is a genious, he puts his work on the line for all the world to see. Space Ship 1 is a class act all the way around.
an ill wind that blows no good
According to one article they had to run on backup systems, another said the pilot heard a loud BANG at one point (lost that link). Not happy stuff, clearly they moved too soon.
For me, i'm not all that interested in the higher cost version of scaled composites, Rutan IS a pioneer, but previous work has also been government related. Which is why I laugh at the whole notion of public/private. Don't get me wrong, govt funding/projects are a good thing. But im sick of the BS pretending that there's the government and there's private industry. They are interelated, and we would do well to discuss, and plan, that relationship and public funding of r&d. And dont get me started on healthcare.
All your preview button are belong to hello kitty.
I'm really impressed with the White Knight launching vehicle and the new rocket design but all the Spaceship One team have proven that given enough money, anyone can build a spaceship. We knew that already however.
Really? It seems to me that Scaled Composites have redefined "enough money" to be a hell of a lot lower than it used to be. So far they've spent about $20 million, which sounds like a lot, but let's put that into some perspective: That's less than the cost of a brand new 747. It's about 5% of the cost of a single shuttle launch. It's less than a 5th of what the Canadian government recently pissed away on cronyism in the recent sponsorship scandal. It's the amount of cash Peter Jackson is getting paid to direct King Kong. On the scale that these guys are operating $20 million is a piss in the bucket. It's more than you or I might happen to have lying around in spare change, but compared to the costs for standard everyday (non space going)performance aircraft it is unbelievably cheap.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Oh, you mean nose-uppy and nose-downy?
wrong.
Most objects do not spin cleanly about most axes. Rigid bodies (such as books, spaceships, rocks, lollipops, and bullets) have three "principal axes" that pass through the center of gravity and are determined by the mass distribution in the object. There's a "minimum" axis that minimizes the kinetic energy for a given angular momentum -- that's the axis around which the thing is the most clustered. For a screwdriver, the minimum axis generally points down the length of the scredriver shaft. There's also a "maximum" axis around which the thing is the most spread out of any direction. For a flat object like a book or a pancake, the maximum axis points directly out of the flat face. Those are the only two axes around which you can spin the object and have it stay stable.
Any other direction will give rise to precession and tumbling, even in vacuum! You can try it with a book -- most closed hardback books have the minimum axis pointing up through the top of the middle pages, and the maximum axis pointing out through the front of the cover. The third dimension -- pointing out through the spine -- is not stable. Tape a book shut and flip it in the air: if you flip it around the maximum or minimum moment axis it will do what you think -- just flip over before you catch it again. If you flip it around the intermediate axis (by, say, starting with the book facing you right-side up with the spine on the left, and pulling the bottom edge toward you as you throw it up in the air) then you might expect the spine to stay on your left side -- but it will flip back and forth, often ending up on your right side, as the book tumbles in the air. (Remember to tape the book closed before tossing it!).
Anyhow, that's a problem for stopping spin and tumbling, because it's not always obvious which way to fire the cold-gas jets to slow down your rotation: by the time you actually fire them you might have tumbled around so that they are speeding you up instead of slowing you down.
I guess that's why "carefree re-entry" is such a great feature of SpaceShipOne -- it's remarkable that they were able to land safely even without good attitude control at apogee.
The history geeks among us will remember that Yeager had the same problem with that modified F-104 used for NASA pilot training. Enough out of the atmosphere for the aerodynamic controls not to work, but not enough into space for the peroxide jets to function either. I hope SS1 recovers from a spin better than an F-104 does.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Say what you will about Reagan, regardless of how you felt about his policies (many were quite controversial), he sure could deliver great speeches.
The best lines in it, however, were paraphrased from John Gillespie McGee's famous poem "High Flight", which is also what Melvill was most likely thinking of. It's a standard reading at the funerals of pilots, and I personally feel that Reagan's speech would have been better, and perhaps more fitting, had he finished with the entire poem. It sums up the main reason why astronauts - military, governmental or private - will always want to strap themselves into something that will never be 100% safe and fly.