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SpaceShipOne and Wild Fire to Go For the Gold
Fizzleboink writes "Space.com reports that with the upcoming January 1, 2005 deadline for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, Rutan and his team have given their official 60 day notice. Brian Feeney, leader of the Canadian da Vinci Project also reported today that his team is rolling out on August 5 with the balloon-lofted Wild Fire rocket."
Oops. I'm a web developer and can't form a simple link. :)
here (real link this time)
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
For anyone who is interested, check out the Dynon EFIS-D10, a basically home-brew electronic flight information system that went up in SpaceShipOne.
You probably shouldn't click this.
1 - Being a Canadian, I should be cheering for da Vinci. But Rutan is my hero.
2 - There's nothing on the da Vinci site about launching on Aug. 5. It looks like the site was last updated on July 10.
3 - The X Prize site looks like it has an interesting story, but you need a password to get at it.
4 - Similar to at least one other poster, I am seriously worried that da Vinci is not sufficiently tested.
Aargh, aargh, aargh, aargh!
Too bad. I hope they are able to keep going, even if they don't win the X-Prize.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
If you're going to go watch the first shot and you want to party, hang out at the airport the night before. Mojave proper is dead.
Secondly, when the wind kicks up the night before, don't go home discouraged. It was gusting up to 70 mph around 3 am the last time around and when the sun came up, the gusts completely died off.
Don't expect to have a great view of what's happening. The spaceship is tiny when it's 200 feet away and invisible when it's 10 miles away. Maybe this time around, they'll turn on a smoke generator just before they launch so you know where to look but then again, they may not. Last time, the craft was almost directly in the sun and it was awfully hard to see until it was spewing smoke.
While you're there, be sure to check out the Aloha Air plane that peeled its skin in midflight. It's next to the two rightmost 747s that are parked half a mile northeast of the viewing area.
There's already a whole industry built around this. One of the mainstays of income for the air taxi business, is moving parts on a rush order because equipment is down in the field. I did a job a few weeks ago where we were delivering parts into the field, as they came out of the machine shop from fabrication. We would dispatch an airplane the moment the part arrived. Each piece weighed about 200 pounds. There's 4 flights a day by airline to the destination, it would have cost about 100 dollars each to ship on the airline. The private air taxi cost about $5000 per trip. Each delivery brought another machine back online, and the downtime estimate was on the order of $5000 a minute in cost (per machine). Nobody blinked at the price of the charters, they were only interested in 'how fast can we get it there'. Nobody was interested in holding the parts till the next scheduled airline departure to save 4800 on shipping costs.
These types of jobs are not at all unusual for air taxi operators.
As the AC said, bollocks. The rate of increase is decreasing . The absolute increase is also decreasing. The UN's latest projections have a majority of even the developing countries falling below the replacement level. And on their "low" projection, the absolute world population peaks at less than 8 billion in the 2030s and then starts declining. (The other projections will also peak, but beyond the UN's 2050 cutoff date.) Who knows? Maybe things will change again and we will end up with a population of 80 billion by 2500. But it's absurd to assert that it's inevitable. On current trends, it's not even likely.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
Oh, for God's sake. Rutan's rocket couldn't scale up to orbital any more than you can bake a cake twice as fast by doubling the temperature of the oven. His ISP is just too darn low, and his oxidizer tank too darn heavy. It's custom designed *specifically* for the X-prize, and very little of the technology will transfer over to full spaceflight. It's designed for a level of operational simplicty that do not apply to real orbital flight (very, very short flight times, and comparably very limited reentry stresses and temperatures, for example, which allow a lot of shortcuts).
Just as an example of how much things don't scale linearly, take a look at how quickly aluminum tensile strengths fall off with heat. At room temperature, your best aluminum alloys (lets use T7651 for our numbers) will have an ultimate tensile strength of ~600MPa. However, go up to 400 degrees celcius, and you're down to a mere 45MPa. It's a really steep slope. Linear scaling just doesn't work.
At high reentry velocities (and temperatures), all sorts of other new problems arise. For example, control surfaces and inlets/outlets become huge engineering problems, because the openings act like blowtorches into the inside of the craft.
Linear scaling doesn't work from a thrust standpoint, too. The more fuel you add, the more fuel you need to accelerate. Your maximum velocity follows a sharp logarithmic curve compared to how much fuel you carry - not to mention how much the mass of your craft increases. That's why higher ISP fuels are critical.
There are all sorts of other things I could go into (power concerns, heating systems to stop parts from freezing up, longer term crew accomodations and life support, etc), but I think you get the picture: most of their tech won't just transfer.
SILENCE BLATHERING TOADIES! We are your new masters.
Whilst helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, Its supplies are more limited that you would think here on earth, have a look at :
/ te xt/He/key.html
http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements