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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."
Mostly because the White Knight/SpaceShipOne combination has demonstrated it can fly to 100 km altitude, even though the last flight wasn't perfect.
Meanwhile, the da Vinci project has yet to prove it can fly to 100 km altitude with its final flight hardware; they probably need to do a couple of test flights before attempting to win the X-Prize.
Re-reading the earlier article about James van Allen questioning the validity of human spaceflight, it struck me that his only argument was about scientific knowledge and research.
No mention of capitalistic exploit, such as mining of minerals; low-G manufacturing; etc.
He's probably right as far as it goes, but I don't think any of the teams competing for the X-Prize have scientific research as their primary goal.
If nothing else, just seeing the variety of launch vechile styles and different approaches to the same basic problem is worth the effort.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
There's very little new information available from their website Da Vinci, but you can always look to the X-prize site for information about the teams. I personally think that the development of many different ways of reaching your goal is the best way to go -- facilitating as much development of future technology as possible! (Which is probably the whole point of this anyway.)
You do realize that lifters are absolutely useless for real space travel. Electrogravitic? No, just Ion Wind -- same thing as the Sharper Image Ionic Breeze, which also doesn't work as well as the designers claim. ;)
You are laboring under the misassumption that all of the space activity is solely built around solving the prize. In fact, the prize is only the first step. The real prize is building a company that operates spaceflight JetBlue-style and/or builds the craft. Bezos is a little late to the game for an X-prize run, so if he doesn't give up partway through, I doubt anybody will know much substantial for another few years.
Gentoo Sucks
No, it's not supposed to be a new form of transit. It's a new form of developing space hardware in the private sector. Early NASA and USSR flights focused on putting a man up high enough, then bringing him back down. That allowed them to test airframe, recovery methods, and engines without jumping straight to building a Saturn V. The knowledge gained from these flights was then used to put Yuri Gugarin (sp?) and John Glenn into actual orbit.
The point of the 100km flight is to reproduce much of that research. If we end up with 10 engines that can make the altitude, then at least some of those engines and airframes may be scalable to orbital flight. Even if they aren't, certain points in their design may be useful in designing cheaper and better airframes and engines.
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You host consciousness just as the thalamus does, but on silicon instead of carbon. Its consciousness hosted on a computer, not a conscious computer.
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You do realize that, as far as designing reusable space faring vehicles goes, $20 million is practically nothing and qualifies as a "true 'backyard' effort" as far as the aerospace industry is concerned?
I agree that it would be nice to see the Da Vinci Project do well, but as it stands it's pretty much untested. It's worth noting that Scaled was doing test flights over a year ago. Da Vinci could work, but I have yet to be convinced. It will certainly be interesting to see how it pans out.
Don't write Scaled off just because they have some cash behind them - in aerospace terms they have hardly any cash behind them (it costs way more just to buy a 747 than they've spent on the entire design, construction and testing of their project so far).
Jedidiah.
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Penrose is just a carbon chauvinist. A century from now our silicon-based overlords will be reading his books and having a good laugh at how stupid their carbon-based ancestors were.
And you just dropped a 7200 lb rocket. Size of the compressor is not an issue.
Venting the helium isn't a big deal either, btw: It's not like Helium is rare or anything.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Um, Rutan's dumb choice of oxidizer means that he [...] could never scale it up to orbital flight.
Who said he wants to scale it up that far?
Whe Rutan builds a specialized craft, it tends to be excellent at what he designed it for, and pretty much useless for anything else. For instance, Voyager went around the world on one tank of fuel, but you don't see FedEx trying to modify the design for long-distance cargo delivery, do you?
SS1 is meant to win the X-Prize and demonstrate safe, shirtsleeve suborbital flight. Afterwords, the design might possibly be produced as a suborbital tourism vehicle. (I think that's likely.) But the evidence suggests that the design was never intended to see orbit. It doesn't have the heat shielding required for re-entry, it can't attain anything like the necessary speed, and it probably lacks sufficient life-support, too. It doesn't need that stuff to do its suborbital job, and that's why it doesn't have it.
Rutan chose a good propulsion tool for the job he wanted SS1 to do. The hybrid rocket does its job, and does it safely. If Rutan decides to do something different (like go to orbit) I expect we'll see him roll out an entirely new craft with a different propulsion system.
Calling his choice of oxidizer dumb is not helpful to your credibility.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd