Canadian Team To Launch X-Prize Attempt Oct. 2

FreeHeel writes "A second team of rocketeers competing for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, a contest for privately funded suborbital space flight, has officially announced the first launch date for its manned rocket. The da Vinci Project, led by Brian Feeney of Toronto, Ontario, said Thursday the group plans to loft its Wild Fire Mark VI spacecraft on Oct. 2, just days after the planned launch of another X Prize contender, the U.S-based SpaceShipOne. The balloon-launched Wild Fire event will be followed by a second launch within two weeks to snag the X Prize purse, according to the plan."

Comments

Their new name.

[DAldredge]

"Since then, the effort has found a new title sponsor, the online casino firm Golden Palace.com, which has pushed the effort forward. In honor of that, the da Vinci Project has been renamed the Golden Palace.com Space Program powered by the da Vinci Project."

That is about the worst name for a space mission that I have every head.

Re:Newsflash... Newsflash...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Goofball, it's Eh, not ay.

Sheesh, I don't mind the mockery, at least get it right. All the pirates and Sailors are coming for your ass now.

Re:Days after huh?

[semifamous]

For people who *don't* know the historical significance and have to look it up, click here.

Re:No previous testing...?

[Rei]

They're sending their team leader as pilot. And his family is apprehensive, but supportive.

Re:Blackjack in Space

[Rei]

> Look at the sucess rate for super high altitude dirigible flights with respect to circumnavigation

Oy, where to start!

1) This is not a super high altitude dirigible
2) It is not circumnavigating the earth

I think that ends that right there...

> winds exceeding a couple miles per hour

That's only relevant for, as you put it, "super high altitude dirigibles", because they have to be built so thin. The atmosphere, where Wild Fire is released (24.4 km) is hundreds of times more dense than the atmosphere at the altitude that the record setters go up to (40+km).

> since the big bomb strapped to the balloon is a much bigger concern

Wild Fire is a LOX/Kerosene rocket designed with a pretty impressive "simulate the heck out of everything first!" methodology. SpaceShipOne is an N2O/Polybutadiene hybrid rocket. While both involve pressurization (since neither use a turbopump), the pressurized substance in SpaceShipOne is much larger, and is the oxidizer itself (as opposed to a relatively small helium tank in the case of Wild Fire). Furthermore, with a gaseous oxidizer, the explosion would be a lot more violent. So, if I have to call one a "big bomb", I'd call SpaceShipOne the "big bomb".

In general, I really like Wild Fire a lot better. Higher starting altitude, a much higher ISP engine, and a very good design methodology.

Re:Much Cheaper, I hope they win.

[Idarubicin]

True, but if one assigns a fair market value to tens of thousands of hours of volunteer labor reportedly spent on the project, the difference between the two becomes much smaller.

From the article:

The all-volunteer da Vinci team spent about $350,000 of cash, $4 million of in-kind donations and they've put in 150,000 man-hours in pursuit of the X Prize, Feeney said.

If they paid a hypothetical $30 per hour for the volunteer labour, the total cost would still be only $8.5 million. Further, the article doesn't mention whether or not those are Canadian dollars--if they are, then you can cut another 25% or so off the cited prices. Even paying a fair price for labour, the da Vinci effort would seem to cost a third to a half the amount of SpaceShipOne.

To be fair, we are all still waiting to see if it flies.

Re:Blackjack in Space

[Rei]

Polybutadiene is not "plastic". More accurately, it is rubber (one of the first synthetic elastomers; natural rubber is polyisoprene).

Hybrid rocket motors are *simpler* than bipropellant rockets. That makes them less prone to *failure*, but it doesn't make their failures less catastrophic. The facts of the pressure in the tanks and the chemistry remain the same. N2O makes up the vast majority of the propellant mass in SpaceShipOne. I can't find exact stats on how much it's pressurized to, but it's not uncommon to find N2O rockets with pressures up to 50 atmospheres at launch (steadily decreasing thereafter). In short, the vast majority of the oxidizer is *incredibly pressurized*, and is *gasseous*. That's a perfect recipe for, should failure occur, *catastrophic failure*. If the nitrous tank were to rupture, it would easily slice open the polybutadiene. The notably increased surface area in the polybutadiene would dramatically increase the combustion rate (damaging it more), etc. In short, it would be a catastrophic failure.

In case you're not familiar, surface area is everything with solid fuels. You can select your thrust over time by the pattern that you cut into the center of the solid rocket booster (circle, star, etc). The reason that solid rocket boosters tend to fail catastrophicly is because when they're ruptured, their surface area increases, and the explosion takes off exponentially (as described above). While hybrid rocket motors don't have the oxidizer mixed in, the situation we're describing is a rupture of the oxidizer tank - and since the oxidizer is a pressurized gas, it will be all over the solid fuel and ready to combust.

On the other hand, getting a fast conflagration from LOX and kerosene isn't that simple. Have you ever tried to get a conflagration from gasoline? It's not that simple. You need proper mixing ratios and fine particle size of the gasoline. The same holds true here. The LOX won't vaporize instantly (unlike the N2O, which is already gaseous). The kerosene will vaporize even more slowly. It's not that likely to form a major conflagration before the capsule was ejected and out of range; and, unlike using a solid fuel, the explosion of a liquid/liquid biprop rocket tends to *disperse* the fuel and oxidizer, *slowing* the reaction.