Slashdot Mirror
SpaceShipOne to Attempt Second Flight on Monday
m_member writes "There is a very cool video of the recent SpaceShipOne flight (on the Scaled video page) as covered by Slashdot. It shows some angles not on the webcast and most impressively has internal footage from when the roll occurred in the ascent. There are no M&Ms this time but Melville takes a few holiday snaps!" Gogo Dodo writes "After a successful first flight for the X Prize, SpaceShipOne is a go for launch to claim the X Prize on Monday. Takeoff is at 7am Pacific, ignition at 8am." October 4 will be the anniversary of the Sputnik launch.
I have to go out right now, but when I return (soon) I will have the videos mirrored on my website here: http://www.css-auth.com/ss1/ Perhaps within the hour.
Ads? What ads?
It was more like 11 seconds.
CNN story
The Canadian DaVinci project has already stated that they are a couple weeks from launching, so if SpaceShipOne for some reason is unable to complete its bid for the X-prize in the next 2 weeks there is a possibility it could occur.
In addition, they have stated that they will be proceeding with the launches regardless of whether the SpaceShipOne project succeeds in claiming the prize or not. Their goal is to prove that they can do it, even if they don't win the prize.
This is not a sig.
I think it was announced that it was wind shear which caused the roll on the first flight.
Actually, the method SpaceShipOne uses to re-enter the atmosphere is pretty robust and safe. Most times, entry vehicles use a blunt end - think the bottom of the Apollo capsule - to slow down through a process called 'aerobraking'. If a vehicle starts to spin rapidly during that time, bad things happen. SSO can enter the atmosphere in any orientation - nose down, nose up, sideways - and it will be OK because of it's back wing surface. In an orientation the Scaled guys call "feathering" the back end flips up 90 degrees in a high drag configuration. This forces the nose into the atmosphere at the right angle, so spinning isn't a vehicle loss issue Still, you go a lot slower re-entering from a suborbital flight than an orbital speed re-entry a la Columbia circa 2003
Download video via BitTorrent at X-Prize-flight-1.wmv.torrent
The Canadian Arrow team has put together the world's first private astronaut training centre. If they were only in it for the X-Prize, they wouldn't have built the training centre. They are looking to space tourism, and are also hoping to start a new extreme sport: Space-diving (like sky-diving, except from space).
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
They could put tickets for the two additional seats on E-bay
No, actually they couldn't.
N328KF is registered as an experimental glider. Under Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs) that means two things:
a) You can't carry passengers at all until the craft has been satisfactorily flight tested.
b) You can never carry passengers for hire.
Whether or not at this point SSO has been flight tested is up to the FAA. It's usually about 40 hours of testing, and I have no clue whether they've put that much time on the airframe at this point or not and whether the FAA inspector is happy with the suborbital flight tests they've done. In any event, they won't be able to recover costs from passengers until they develop a certificated platform.
This