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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.
It is about time that we had someone other than Government make it to space. This should open up the market! Now, if they can just make this afforable to those of us who can't afford 100K or so...
Hope they go for the $50M prize for a vehicle that will house 5 to/from orbit....
If SpaceShipOne reaches the 100km mark on Monday, will the other competitors just give in, or will they too try to prove that they have the design and technology to reach space? Even if SpaceShipOne did not launch Oct. 4th, would anybody even be close enough to take advantage of this? (Hoping that any failure of the SSO mission would not result in casulties)
I am guessing that there succuss will come out of the fact that a pilot can control this ship and it is not reliant on predetermined scenarios. I always worry when aircraft have too many computers in them. The pilot obviously averted disaster here.
One thing that's amazing is that Melvill turned off the rocket something like 40 seconds early!! I wonder if SS1 could survive the stresses of atmosphere reentry falling from 200km altitude.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
I think it will be interesting to see how well they can repeat or even improve on the last flight. Or will they try to run an exact repeat?
Basically, how safe and sound are their methods?
That is what I think. He even said he thought it was kinda cool.
I think he just wanted to say "Yehaa...".
about what exactly caused the roll last time? Given that now they had time go to through the telemetry data one assumes they would know for sure exactly what happened: did they make the info public?
-- the cake is a lie
Branson is only funding his Virgin space ship line becuase he wants 2 hour flights from Australia to london instead of 20+ hour flights :o
It was flying the English Channel that did it. Nobody else could even fly the Kremer course (a one-mile or so figure 8), and then the group did the English Channel.
I watched the webcast, but the Scaled video has some of the in-cabin footage. After Mike cut the engines, you can see him working to stabilze the roll, then as he hit the zenith, he grabs a digi-cam and starts taking snapshots out the windows.
Gotta love it!
--
Free gmail invites
Gahhhhhhhhhh!!! Not everything needs government funding!
It shouldn't be some big tit that someone can just suck on for a little extra juice to keep on going (please tell that to the airlines & railroads...)
Besides as other posters have said, it was desigend to be privte avoid all the stupid red tape.
But your point about the state run groups is good. I would much rather have the fed hand out a contract to "develop X for us" with exclusive rights to the Fed, than have the Fed create a department to do "X".
Of course, national security concerns says that if the Fed ownes and wholely controlls the development of "X" then there is no company that could possible sue them for breach of contract, or accidentally leak data / information to the press, or other nations.
jason
because the webmaster reads slashdot. ;)
:)
And also when you try to load your own website and it takes 30 seconds to load the main page, this is the first place you look. Well, I'll post the torrent mirror link right now, that will help. There's three machines in a round robin, but the port only has so much bandwidth.
--Mike the webmaster
But not in a private vehicle. Eventually (hopefully) some one will be able to cross the bridge in a vehicle they personally own.
We got to the moon. And back. Multiple times. And what have we done since to develop on this ability?
... if we launched it before now.
We sent probes to Mars. And Venus. And beyond. And some of them still work. So how many of them - percentagewise - still work? Even better, how many worked right in the first place? And what are we doing with this information?
We sent rovers to Mars. That still work.And we could have sent people. I did a report on the Mars Odyssey years ago that said we could get people there with relative ease
We built several working space vehicles.And they are somewhat reusable. But they are expensive. A private venture would make them as cheaply as possible so as to save as much money as possible. A government organization doesn't worry about cost at first; after all, they're just spending tax money that would otherwise get spent on things that aren't worth as much, so it might as well be used to do this - that way in 5 years when their budget requirements go up (for actual work, that is) they can cut back on unnecessary programs, fund the things they actually need, and not actually need to get more money - but so they can continue to do it, they say "look at us, we had to shut down "x" program due to lack of funds."
We space-walked.Yes, many times. Again, what has it gotten us?
We build a space station. And then we built another one.Why did we build a second station? Oh wait, the first one quit working. Did we get a good return on the investment from it at least?
We chased comets. And sent the collected materials back. Yay! We have interstellar ice and small particles!
We've populated our solar system with several probes that have performed beyond expectation.And future spacecraft need to dodge the ones that don't work. And - in theory - what happens if one drifts into the path of a comet? Long odds, to be sure, but possible.
We have Tang.This is a GOOD thing?
We have titanium hips, golf clubs, glass frames, laptops, and spyplanes.True. How much of this would have been made without space travel? This isn't Civilization by Sid Meier - we didn't really *need* Space travel to get Plastics, it merely provided a reason to do so.
I don't think the space program has been entirely a waste of time and money; however, I do think they need to pay more attention to actual useful things that work rather than other stuff. How many things like Tang and Plastics have come from the Space Program since we landed on the Moon?
I suppose the big question is ... if NASA instead were merely a contracting arm of the goverment which put together specs for tender, would we have gotten further, faster, and cheaper?
And let's not forget the human cost: would we have lost similar or fewer people doing it (safety)?
No, really. I'm serious. This is not intended as a slam against government waste or corporate cost/corner cutting. It's really a question for thought. Is there a middle ground available where we get the same safety, but further/faster/cheaper?
Contractors would need to be able to find ways to compete against others for the research business. There are some things that competition is good for. But, then again, with only one possible customer at the time (NASA), would there be enough competition for those dollars? Now might be a much better time (than, say, the 1950's) to thin out NASA, spin off JPL, and then have NASA merely contract out: the competition will be competing for business from much more than NASA - airlines will be interested in some of this technology, too, I'm sure.
Question, and apparently draw conclusions based on knee-jerk analysis. MANY otherwise sound craft have experienced unexpected behavior (including rolls) because of pilot error or overcorrection.
This is why they use test pilots. These guys know how to recover when things go bad.
You are right that the press has an obligation to investigate. But BEFORE that, you need to make sure you know what the hell you are talking about. The ability to publish does not prove the ability to speak authoritatively on the subject.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
If these guys were investigating and developing a radical new technology that's orders of magnitude cheaper than the traditional ways of getting into space, then it would be really interesting. Even a stunt like the X-Prize shot would be worthwhile to help develop it. But it's not radical new technology. It's just the same old chemical rocket stuff all over again. With a lot of cut corners. (And, apparently, "unscripted maneuvers").
And they're not even particularly good chemical rockets. Hybrid rockets burning plastic/rubber/etc and N2O have inherently poorer performance than, say, the hydrogen/oxygen engines that are common on the upper stages of orbital launchers. Hybrids are simpler, cheaper and safer, and they've become very popular among amateur high-power rocketeers for this reason. They're fun. But they just don't have the performance for a practical orbital launcher, as opposed to a suborbital "stunt" flight. Or is "commercial manned space" just about quickie zero-g joyrides for people with too much money? I can already experience zero-g on an airplane or Six Flags' Superman: The Escape a lot more cheaply.
The problem is that there just don't seem to be any radical, new technologies promising to cut space access costs by orders of magnitude just waiting for entrepreneurs to commercialize them. And that means only a tiny handful of humans will ever be able to go into space in our lifetime, and for at least several more. I wish it were otherwise, but we have to face facts. In the meantime, we have to get the very most out of the expensive launchers we do have, and that means putting more and more capable robots into space to give us earthbound humans the best vicarious experience of space travel we can possibly get.
I'm also really put off by all this "go private enterprise, rah rah rah" stuff, as if NASA is full of complete idiots. (It got so thick the other morning that I had to turn the TV volume down.) Who do they think builds the rockets that NASA has been flying for decades? What about the many space launchers that have already been fully commercialized? And where did the money for SpaceShipOne really come from? (Hint: what if the US Government were to actually enforce its antitrust laws against large software companies?)
If you've got the money, you can already buy a launch from any of several commercial companies, and only some of them are American. And there are companies who routinely launch stuff and make money. Space is already big business.
But when I look at SpaceShipOne and similar projects, I see a bunch of rich guys publicly stroking their egos. SpaceShipOne is a dead-end hack. I'd actually be completely okay with that if only they would be more honest with the public about what they're really doing.
"government programs are doing useful research"
But that's a red herring. USEFUL isn't the topic of discussion; the X-Prize, or more generally, manned spaceflight, is the topic. The post the GP was replying to suggested that funding should go somewhere besides NASA. I don't suggest de-funding NASA (they ARE useful), but I would suggest funding some manned space programs that might actually get us out of the gravity well. LEO doesn't cut it. 20,000 bureaucrats doesn't cut it. Feynman's report on the shuttle bureaucracy (in the wake of the Challenger explosion) was quite damning. Nothing changed, and 15 years later we lost another shuttle and another crew to another avoidable problem again predicted in advance by engineers. We will NOT get large-scale manned spaceflight with NASA as it currently exists. Feel free to point to empirical evidence that suggests otherwise.
"Besides, if we liken NASA to..."
I'd liken NASA to one of the kings who had already turned down Columbus (he approached several monarchs of several nations before hitting it off with Isabella. I would liken her to the X-Prize. (Yeah, it's not a perfect analogy.) Columbus didn't care who funded him as long as someone did. I don't care who funds manned spaceflight as long as someone does. Again, hanging around in LEO doesn't cut it, and I haven't seen anything from NASA to suggest they'll do anything else.