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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.
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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 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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