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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."
Glad to see that there's some Canadian content! Hope it doesn't turn into another Avro Arrow...
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.
something to take my mind off of the perils of society. A good ol' boomin' rocket shitfest. Competition = good.
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.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
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
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.
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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.
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!!!!)
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
Yeah, but if Burt loses we can. . .blame Canada.
KFG
For something I just heard of today, it sounds quite clever.
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.
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.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
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.