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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

[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: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.