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SpaceShipOne Captures the X Prize
I got to Mojave yesterday evening (it's a long way from El Paso), slept in my car, and got to the airfield itself just before 4 a.m. Traffic on state highway 58 was brisk already, though not clogged (which it later became), and nearly every car was turning onto the two-lane entrance heading for acres of packed-dirt parking spaces near the runway from which SpaceShipOne would take off.
The crowd which built up in the following hours was surprisingly quiet on takeoff, which happened right at 7:45 local time. Not exactly hushed -- perhaps "hesitant" is a better word, or maybe just waking up. Only scattered clapping (guilty!) as the White Knight / SpaceShipOne piggyback duo lifted off, followed shortly by two chase planes, an AlphaJet and a Beechcraft Starship. The enthusiasm grew, though, as the flight progressed; a P.A. system kept the spectators informed of the trip's progress.
When SpaceShipOne finally separated and fired upward ("Good release, good release!" over the P.A, followed by enthusiastic cheering), it was after three separate two-minute warnings, then for one-minute and 30-second intervals. After an 84-second burn followed by a clean shutdown, SpaceShipOne coasted to its final altitude. At 90 seconds into the flight, the ship was well past 100,000 feet, and out of sight to the unaided eye. At 7:51, an altitude of 328,000 feet was reported, but the ship was still climbing for the next 40,000 feet under its own momentum. The reported peak altitude is enough to top the previous record, set by an X-15 at 354,200 ft. in 1963.
The descent was happily uneventful. At 60,000 feet, Binnie experienced "slight oscillations" -- consistent with previous flights, according to the announcer, who continued to count down the altitude. At approximately 45,000 feet, the conditions are right for contrails, and more cheering erupted when those popped into view. The crowd perked up and cheered even more with the first of two sonic booms audible on the ground (the booms that occur during ascent aren't), pointing and shading their eyes from the sun, following the ship as it traveled in wide arcs to bleed off the energy of the ascent, followed by a smooth 3-point landing.
(Special thanks to the members of the Foothill High School band who traveled the three hours from Orange County to watch the flight and play both before and after the flight. The launch itself was surprisingly low on ceremony, and their playing provided a bit of well-deserved pomp.)
According to Google's convertor, 368000 feet is 112 kilometers, not 102.
Besides, 368,000 feet is also higher than the X-15 altitude record (roughly 355,000 feet).
Maybe we deserve this world ?
It's officially won, if that will stop you sweating:
SPACESHIPONE WINS THE $10 M ANSARI X PRIZE
(apologies if slashcode mangles the above link)
This is nothing close to the Mercury missions. Even the first two
sub-orbital Mercury missions went nearly twice as high, and the rest
were all orbital. This is closer to the X-15 project: carried up by a
plane and dropped and then firing a rocket engine to just reach the edge
of space. There is a big difference.
I would say that it would be more accurate to say that SS1 reporduced the results of the X-15. What is interesting is that in terms of costs, both efforts cost the $25 Million.
If you assume that a 1960 dollar is worth 4x of what it is today, then SS1 cost 1/4 of the X-15.
Well done Scaled!
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
No, it is very much a valid comparison...
Rutan uses an engine of a very different design than anything used by NASA (Nitrous Oxide and rubber), and the re-entry configuration (feathering the wings to maximize drag)is totally new AFAIK. Think about it - the skin of this spacecraft is constructed of fabric and glue!!!
I would love to learn more about how Scaled was able to be so succesfull on such a limited budget using a completely new and radical desgn. There is probably a lesson here applicable to just about any engineering endeavor.
After all, today's flight's pilot, Brian Binnie, is a South African.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
"Microsoft Money," as you put it, has done some very interesting and beneficial things. The X-Prize isn't the exception to the rule, it's pretty much the standard practice.
Let's see fundamental research:
- flying (see Wright brothers- not NASA)
- rockets in general (see Chinese/Goddard/Germans)
- reentry feather tail (Rutan- not NASA)
- jet engines (Whittle- not NASA)
- hybrid rocket motors (irc Bevin, not NASA)
- supersonic flight (X1-US Airforce- not NASA)
In fact, I can't think of any technology on SS1 or WhiteKnight where the fundamental research was by NASA. Anyone?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Their navigation display did actually flake out while the rocket was firing three flights ago; the pilot said he just kept going since with his head straight forward he could see the earth out of the corner of his eye and knew he was still going up.1 4P m
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne_flight_
http://scaled.com/projects/tierone/logs-WK-SS1.ht
Bigelow has recently announced the logical follow-up to the X-Prize: America's Space Prize, a $50 million prize to build a vehicle capable of taking 7 people to an orbiting space habitat and back before the end of the decade.
Bigelow actually denies any plans for an orbital hotel, but with his background everyone keeps assuming that's his intention anyway.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I watched the documentary on the development & testing of SpaceShipOne, up through last week's flight. If you didn't see it, it was called "Black Sky" -- set your Tivo to look out for it. I'm sure they'll be showing it again.
karma capped
basically gave up on winning the X Prize. According to this press release, they were dogged by two things: 1) they had pinned their hopes on using 90% peroxide as their fuel, but it wasn't available to them, and 2) a test flight crash on August 8th.
They are continuing work, albeit at a slower pace.
The risk of traveling by plane is lower than by car even if you compute it per mile travelled. It's not lower because you fly by plane less often. You are a lot less likely to die on a 400-mile plane trip than you are to die on a 400-mile car trip.
No, no it doesn't. It doesn't encounter any heat whatsoever. It's quite cold in the upper atmosphere. The Shuttle generates a lot of heat upon re-entry, though. That heat is created by the friction of doing an atmospheric entry at a low angle and with high speed.
The genius of SpaceShipOne is that it essentially tumbles back into the atmosphere at a high angle of attack, with a high drag configuration, and very low speed. The low speed entry generates very little friction and therefore negligable heat.
...I REALLY hate to point out that the place that had the most coverage, and the timeliest, was Fox News.
Fox News actually had quite a bit of coverage. They only cut away during the (fairly) boring hour when the White Knight was still ferrying SpaceShipOne to 50,000 feet. Once it got close to separation, Fox stayed with it until well after landing, interviewing Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7 astronaut), Peter Diamandis (X-Prize founder), Eric Anderson (President of Space Adventures), and George Whitesides (National Space Society Executive Director). Their footage of the flight was not first-hand (it had another logo in the corner, so it was being rebroadcast), but it was quite good.
Remember, MSNBC (and Newsweek, owned by them) were the ones who saw China become only the world's third spacefaring nation and say, "so what?" Even if we end up with "The World's Craziest Rocket Explosion Videos", at least Fox is looking spaceward, while the rest of the (national) media has their heads in the proverbial sand.
On a related note, local coverage was really good. I was at the first launch last Wednesday morning, volunteering in the parking lot. Approximately 3 hours after the local Tuesday evening news coverage in L.A., traffic got really heavy. Seems the news coverage was compelling enough to make people drive through the night to get to Mojave. Even if the talking heads don't care, America apparently does.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
not to argue, just for info:
It only takes 15 hours of instruction until you can solo under the new Sport Pilot rules, full license can be obtained in as little as 20 total hours (minimum).
Private pilot certificate is 20hrs to solo and 40hrs total (minimum).
It takes absolutely no permits or instruction for you to legally climb into your very own (single-seat) ultralight... though you'd be very silly to do it that way. Even if you wanted to get training, you're only looking at 10-15 hours of work before you're on your own.
There've been a few reply posts to point out the fact that flying is safer than driving regardless of exposure, but here are some numbers for the interested:
According to the Research and Special Programs Administration Office of Hazardous Materials Safety (who said our government is bloated?) here are the stats:
Motor Vehicle
-General population risk for accidental death: 1 in 6,300 per year
-1.7 deaths per 100 million veh. miles
Commercial Air Carriers (Includes large and commuter airlines)
- General population risk for accidental death: 1 in 1,568,000 per year
- 0.19 deaths per million aircraft departures
To compare trip by trip risk, I'll estimate an average car trip at 20 miles. That yields 1.7 deaths per 5 million car trips, compared to about 1 death per 5 million airline departures. So using this estimate of car trip length, taking a car ride is almost twice as risky as taking a flight.
For some more perspective, I took a class on health care two years ago that spent a lot of time on an Institute of Medicine report. The report is famous for showing that preventable medical errors in hospitals are responsible for more deaths every year than motor vehicle accidents.
And the industry that health care experts often use as a model for improvement? The airline industry.
So you're healthiest in a plane...if you can't afford to fly all day, then a car will do. But don't go to a hospital!
actually, he's not... Mike Melville is South African. Binnie is ex-U.S. Navy.
Pilot bios: http://scaled.com/projects/tierone/info.htm
-- derby