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."

Comments

Canadian Content

[edwardog]

Glad to see that there's some Canadian content! Hope it doesn't turn into another Avro Arrow...

Re:Canadian Content

[DeeBs]

It figures. Rutan et all have a sleek, high tech rubber composite powered spaceship carried by a state of the art high altitude airplane. We have a kerosene powered rocket lifted into the air by a balloon.

Re:Canadian Content

[Pi_0's don't shower]

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.)

Re:Canadian Content

[Rei]

Um, Rutan's dumb choice of oxidizer means that he has a heavy oxidizer tank without getting a worthwhile ISP, and could never scale it up to orbital flight. On the other hand, LOX/Kerosene is a pretty darn good fuel/oxidizer combination.

I don't know enough about blimp or aircraft operating costs to say which method of lifting the craft aloft is best, but carrying a craft up to altitude is a definite bonus;that whole thing about air resistance being proportional to v^2 on the macroscopic scale is a really big pain. I am surprised to see no tow-launch craft, however.

Re:Canadian Content

[peacefinder]

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.

I'll put my money on Burt Rutan.

[MtViewGuy]

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.

And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[chill]

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.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Or for that matter, population pressure. The way livable real estate is going on earth, within the next five centuries for sure and maybe even after just one century, land will be so expensive that it will be a good deal to put bubble cities on Mars to exile people to.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[Christopher Chang]

I don't buy the population pressure rationale. It will be cheaper to build underground cities than to build space bubbles on Mars.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[Sgt York]

No mention of capitalistic exploit, such as mining of minerals; low-G manufacturing; etc.

I was talking with a friend a while back, who brought up a good point for Rutan's concept having a real commercial application : travel. Not tourist travel, but actual travel to other places.

Rutan apparently has an orbital vehicle on the drawing board that is a scaled up version of SS1 (rumor only, AFAIK). If something like this could be set up, it's about 2hr to anywhere in the world. Even for $10k, there are a lot of business travellers whose time is worth that much.

Think two hours from NYC to Sydney or Tokyo, compared to 17+ by passenger jet. It's a niche market, but there are people that travel very long distances like that who would like to be able to do it much faster, and are willing to pay a lot for the ability. They already purchase day-of-travel prices with first class tickets; how much is that from NYC to Tokyo?

The niche is small, but probably big enough to sustain a company or two. And that sounds kind of like the start of the airline industry, minus the government subsidy.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[jcr]

Think two hours from NYC to Sydney or Tokyo, compared to 17+ by passenger jet. It's a niche market, but there are people that travel very long distances like that who would like to be able to do it much faster, and are willing to pay a lot for the ability.

It's not as small a niche as you think. Picture a factory that's down at a cost of $1M/hour, waiting for a technician to arrive and fix a critical piece of equipment. $10K for the ride? No problem!

-jcr

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[AuMatar]

I'm not so sure its niche. If I could fly to europe in 2 hrs, I could make it a weekend trip. As it is now, it'd have to be a week vacation. I'd definitely be buying some tickets.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[geomon]

...low-G manufacturing...

More budget-bloating propaganda from your friends at NASA.

No one has ever shown the viability, or the necessity, of low-G manufacturing.

Search the American Physical Society for the "What's New" newsletter archives. Bob Park and other renown scientists can give you plenty to chew on regarding the utility of low-G manufacturing.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[Sgt York]

The "niche" comes in when you look at the price. Probably in the realm of $10k each way at first. Cost would come down, of course, but at first it would be niche.

The technician scenario above certainly makes sense, though. Hadn't thought of that one. I will now go seek markets where that scenario would apply, and become a highly skilled technician in that field.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[mforbes]

That population isn't evenly distributed. Places like India and China are intensely crowded already, while vast areas of Canada, the US, and Russia are sparesely settled if at all. Additionally, if not for immigration then the population of the US would actually be declining. China's population still has a while to go before theirs starts to decline-- gotta wait for the elderly to start dying in droves. India's, I have no idea what the growth rate (current or projected) looks like. Unless a better treatment for AIDS is found in the next couple of decades, Africa stands to lose a LOT of population.

The end result will be that some areas of the world, just like today, suffer from incredible population pressure; while others barely support anyone at all.

The problem isn't leibenschraum (apologies to German readers if I spelled that wrong). It's scarcity of resources.

Think about all the metals available in just one small asteroid, if only we had the technology to get there, bring it home, and mine it.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[mrchaotica]

if the lack of water doesn't get you, the winters will.

What, and you think MARS is better?!

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[Razor Blades are Not]

A First Class ticket to Australia is in the vicinity of $4K already. That's a 14 hour trip without stops. Anyone willing to spend four thousand dollars to get there in style in 14 hours may spend twice that to get there in a quarter of the time.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[grozzie2]

It's not as small a niche as you think. Picture a factory that's down at a cost of $1M/hour,

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.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[norkakn]

That would be the crappiest job though, you'd be flown everywhere at a moments notice and then have to take the slow way back.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[leeward]

Don't take it personally, but I am always amazed when I hear someone say something like this. And that is entirely too often. I can only assume that a person who says this is a "city boy", who thinks that food comes from a store, and water comes from a faucet, and gas comes from a gas station, and electricity comes from a power outlet...

I'm not real sure what your definition of "livable" is, but I think you will find that the environment will undergo total collapse long before all that space is filled with people.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[CaptainAvatar]

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.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[Ariane 6]

My school flew me to Germany from Honolulu for a conference last month...It lasted a week, and took about 30 hours each way to get there, on eight different aircraft. Once an SS1-derivative craft goes online, a ballistic flight might only be slightly more expensive, as it could reduce the number of aircraft involved considerably. This might go a long way towards offsetting the money spent on R&D.

YAY

[Anonymous Coward]

something to take my mind off of the perils of society. A good ol' boomin' rocket shitfest. Competition = good.

Time to Space

[usefool]

Did X Prize specify the maximum time allowed from launch to reaching the space?

The da Vinci Project Team is using helium balloon to lift its rocket for the first part of its journey, and SpaceOne is using WhiteKnight which goes round and round until it reaches a certain altitude.

Re:Da Vinci Tests? (LINK IS HERE)

[TheFlyingGoat]

Oops. I'm a web developer and can't form a simple link. :)

here (real link this time)

Re:What the Devil is Bezos up to?

[cmowire]

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.

Check out some SpaceShipOne hardware.

[funny-jack]

For anyone who is interested, check out the Dynon EFIS-D10, a basically home-brew electronic flight information system that went up in SpaceShipOne.

Re:Is this supposed to be a new form of mass trans

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Aargh

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Interesting Numbers

[grozzie2]

The interesting thing comparing Da Vinci project to the effort at Scaled Composites. There's more than enough rumors within industry, and outside it, that peg the Spaceship One project price tag in the 20 million dollar range, one can probably assume there's some basis behind that number. There's another article on the Da Vinci stuff here that pegs numbers on the Da Vinci expenses. They are quoted at $337,000, doesn't specifically say cdn dollars, but every other number in the article is tagged as $us. It's a canadian paper, the figure is likely $cdn, which puts it around 1/4 million us dollars.

It's NOT a given that Spaceship One will walk away with the X-prize. A lot of folks seem to think it is, but, those same folks thought shuttle flights were routine, uneventful, and safe. Flying into space is HARD. SS1 has a good chance at it, but this craft will be ready to give it a shot.

It would certainly go with the spririt of the X-Prize to see this true 'backyard' effort pull it out of the blue, and beat SS1 to the X-Prize finish line. Nothing against Rutan and his team, but, X-Prize was meant to spark the real backyard innovation. Da Vinci project is just that. I think it would be great to see them scoop the prize out from under the noses of the foks that spent 20 million to achieve the same goal.

Re:Interesting Numbers

[Coryoth]

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.

Re:Interesting Numbers

[grozzie2]

I'm well aware of how the aerospace industry burns money, I've been involved in it for the last 28 years. The point is, it doesn't have to be that way.

If you take a look at the methodologies used by NASA and thier contractors, and present them with a requirement for a man rated design, from scratch, to exit the atmosphere, the project would have to be cut to the teeth to achieve flight hardware by the time they burned thru 2 billion dollars. Scaled composites did it for 20 million, that's 2 orders of magnitude less. Along comes Da Vinci, and they did it for another 2 orders of magnitude less, with the caveat it has not been flight tested yet. Even if they use 100 dollar bills for fuel on the flights, they'll still end up an order of magnitude cheaper than Scaled.

The real difference between scaled and da vinci is in methodology. Scaled is a group of professional engineers, working on a budget with a benefactor. It's a full time job, and everybody is collecting a salary. Da Vinci is driven by professional engineers, working in thier spare time, and collecting satisfaction for thier efforts. Has anybody seen this contrast in methodologies before ? It's kind of ironic that the 'big budget' x-prize vehicle is funded by Microsoft money, and the long shot contender is a volunteer collaborative effort.

The real point is, the aerospace industry as we know it is carrying a LOT of fat, mostly due to the fact it's driven by government contracts. the job can be done 2 orders of magnitude cheaper, Rutan and crowd have proven it. Collaboration and co-operation works, and it would be great to see the Da Vinci folks prove that too, in a field other than software.

At this point in time, scaled is the odds on favorite to grab the prize. Da Vinci has yet to fly hardware. that doesn't mean it's not gonna fly, or it's incapable of flying, it means it hasn't been tested in full flight configuration yet.

August could well be a very interesting month. If the Da Vinci folks can scrape up the cash they need to get thier hardware out to the launch site, and into the air, and get a couple good test results immediately, there may well be a race for the prize.

As an engineer, I have to have great respect for what the Scaled team has done, it's outstanding. As an individual, I still want to sit back and cheer for the 'back yard' guys. However small a chance they have, it would be great to see them succeed.

Re:Is this supposed to be a new form of mass trans

[dillon_rinker]

What's the point of sending people 62.5 miles by airplane? What's wrong with cars?

What's the point of sending people 62.5 miles by car? What's wrong with horses?

What's the point of sending people 62.5 on horseback? What's wrong with shoes?

What's the point in walking 62.5 miles? Can't you find everything you need within an hour's walk of the cave?

And that, of course, is the point...if you can't go 62.5 miles, you can't go 200 miles. You can't reach low-earth orbit, or high orbit, or solar orbit, or anything else. Orbital flight is currently a governmental monopoly. If you fail to see the point of orbital flight in the short term, then feel free to chuck your GPS receiver, cell phone, pager, and international internet connection in the toilet. If you fail to see the point of orbital flight and beyond in the long term, then feel free to mine your back yard for every element needed to support your lifestyle.

Re:DaVinci

[Sgt York]

Take a joke, man. I'm from Texas, so I take 10x as much crap about that as any Canadian. And most of that is not in good humor. I know a lot of Canadians, and they're not all that bad. For Canadians (JOKE AGAIN!!!!)

Re:DaVinci

[kfg]

Yeah, but if Burt loses we can. . .blame Canada.

KFG

Wild Fire Stats

[PIPBoy3000]

From this story:

Another Canadian team, the da Vinci Project in Toronto, is also building a rocket. But their rocket won't fire its engines until it's already 80,000 ft off the ground and tethered beneath a reusable, piloted helium balloon. It will hang in an 80 up angle. After starting its engines and cutting the tether, it will fly a 90, straight up profile. This lets the designers reduce the propulsion system to one-fourth of what a ground-launch would require. The craft, weighing 7,200 lb on take off (3,200 lb, empty), uses two kerosene and LOX engines, each generating 5,000 lb of thrust, to take it the rest of the way to 100 km. The engines are newly designed with emphasis on light weight, reliability, and low cost.

A helium-fueled cold gas-reaction control system (RCS) will give the ship attitude control. The pilot uses two control sticks, one for main-engine gimbals, the other for the RCS, or relies on an autopilot. Like other X-Prize contestants, the da Vinci rocket uses an inflated shuttlecock or ballute to increase drag on descent.

For something I just heard of today, it sounds quite clever.

Re:Wild Fire Stats

[corngrower]

the da Vinci rocket uses an inflated shuttlecock

Maybe this is the thing that is used to mate the Shuttle to the 747 that caries it from Edwards AFB back to Florida on occasion.

Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Thinkit4]

You host consciousness just as the thalamus does, but on silicon instead of carbon. Its consciousness hosted on a computer, not a conscious computer.

Armadillo concedes

[LMCBoy]

After seeing this story, I wondered about the status of Armadillo Aerospace's effort. At their website, I found this news item, posted last month:

The Scaled Composites team deserves huge congratulations for the 100km flight of Space Ship One on Monday. They probably have the X-Prize in the bag now, but just in case, I did go ahead and place orders for all the long lead time items we still need. If their flight had been flawless, I probably wouldn't have bothered. We can still have our final vehicle assembled this year, but it isn't clear that we have time to recover from the inevitable setbacks during testing.

Too bad. I hope they are able to keep going, even if they don't win the X-Prize.

Re:Armadillo concedes

[ErikTheRed]

Actually, John Carmack has stated that they have a business plan that does not rely on them winning the X-Prize, or getting any other sort of cash windfall (I'm summarizing, so any mistake is mine and not his). Some great insight as to their plans can be gleaned from the Armadillo Aerospace Forum at XPrize.org.

Even though they are not as polished or well-funded as Scaled Composites, their openness with their processes, plans, trials, and tribulations makes them one hell of a lot cooler and several orders of magnitude more interesting, at least in my book.

CanCon

[TMB]

Here's your requisite 30%! ;-)

"We'll leave a jet-trail across the sky
Just like Armstrong and the guys
Vapour trail against the blue
I'd get off on getting higher
Is it over the Moon for the frequent flyer?
Straight to the arms of...

Jezebel, I hear you well
Or is it Gabriel? I can never tell

And the question's growing
'Cause it's not knowing
When it's coming, where I'm going"

-SOTW

[TMB]

If you're going

[jmichaelg]

Several points:

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.

Interesting information

[SkiifGeek]

I wonder how they are going to retrieve the piloted balloon (short of venting helium). If their design becomes commercially viable, how much Helium is going to be wasted to get their rocket to launch altitude. While there wouldn't be a problem for small scale implementation, on a global scale of tourism / usage, surely the logisitcs would drive Helium prices / usage up, and supplies down.

Just a couple of pondering points.

Re:Interesting information

[sotonboy]

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 :

http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/ te xt/He/key.html

Re:Host humans on computers first.

[0123456]

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.

da Vinci Project has only spent $337,000?!

[theluckyleper]

Looks like it's largely a volunteer project, on the cheap...

I wonder if those are Canadian dollars, too.

Yes of course you re-compress

[Corpus_Callosum]

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.

Re:Wild fire who?

[Rei]

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.

Not that overcrowded

[mykdavies]

Places like India and China are intensely crowded already.

That's not strictly true - here's some interesting comparisons (mainly from Wikipedia).

Population density (people per square km)

Monaco 16329
Hong Kong 6771
South Korea 491
Netherlands 477
India 319
UK 246
Germany 231
China 133
France 110
Iraq 55
US 32
Canada 3