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More SpaceShipTwo Details
Anonymous Coward from Manitoba writes "BBC news is reporting more details about Burt Rutan's proposed SpaceShipTwo. Apparently the new flyer will include five to eight passenger seats and have the 'same diameter crew cabin as a Gulfstream V business jet'. It will fly much higher than SpaceShip One - up to '135-140 km' that will permit an additional 90 seconds of microgravity. This will be important, since 'we want this roller coaster-type bar that you fold out of the way and you can float around'. They are also planning to 'have the option of landing in a different place from where they took off'. I can't wait until we can ride SpaceShipThree across the Atlantic in 20 minutes!"
Can you imagine how much more that baby behind you is going to cry when it starts floating around?
"A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -Mahatma Gandhi
Yes it did. Initially it didn't but then someone had the bright idea of asking the regulat passengers how much they thought they were paying (these being the CEOs etc, not the pencil-pushers who booked the flights....) and they all mentioned amounts 2-3 times what they/their companies were being charged. So BA raised the cost of the flights by 2-3 times. They also started running gift flights which would go out over the Atlantic, go supersonic, pop champagne and then head home. This combination made the Concorde profitable.
Now it's probable that had BA etc had to shoulder the full cost of designing and building the thing, they'd never have made anything.....
In the late eighties there was a recession in the UK and this reduced the number of regular passengers and Concorde started becoming less viable. The combination of 9-11, the French Concorde explosion and general world angst finally killed it.
But in the Eighties it made BA and Air France lots of cash.
Troc.
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Closer to 3%, at least for the SatV and recent Delta IV Heavy.
:)
A SatV weighs 3,038,500 kg, and can launch 118,000 kg to orbit. Lunar weight/payload ratios are even worse, at 47,000 kg to the moon, its about 1.5%.
I thought some of that might be for outdated technology (and some of it is, i'm sure, we could save structural weight now, not sure how much fuel requirements could change though) so I compared it against the Delta IV Heavy:
733,400 kg launcher.
25,800 kg payload to LEO.
3.5%
Don't whine about units, 'rocket science' generally uses metric, so thats what I found units in. I'm too lazy to convert them, use google calc and do it yourself.
They were worried about passing the heat tolerances of the SS1 materials at Mach 4. At near mach 25 it wouldn't stand a chance.
I'd like to see Rutan go orbital, but anyone who thinks it will be the small, light, inexpensive (for a space ship) craft it is today is fooling themselves.
For too much information about the topic of zero gravity sex, click here
Wow. Is that true? I find it interesting that U235 is 6 magnitudes beyond chemical fuels, while Antimater is only 3 orders of magnitude beyond that.
Well not exactly surprising. The fission of one U235 atom liberates approx 200 MeV which corresponds to roughly the mass of 1/5'th of a proton so the anihilation of one U235 Atom to pure energy would liberate roughly 1000 times more energy than fission..
Yours Yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
the point is that a single jumbo actually WOULD transfer more people over the atlantic in a weeks time perioid than a cruiseliner ever would be able to.
But it will use disproportionately more fuel to do so.
I think you're wrong.
The Queen Mary 2, which is a modern and fuel-efficient cruise ship, moves 50 feet per gallon, which is about 0.01 miles per gallon. At 2,712 persons (which includes 921 crew, by the way), that's 25.8 person-miles per gallon. Source data.
A Boeing 747-400, which is a modern and fuel-efficient jumbo jet, moves 666 feet per gallon, which is about 0.13 miles per gallon. At 524 persons (not including crew), that's 66.3 person-miles per gallon. Source data.
That makes the jumbo-jet nearly three times more fuel-efficient than the cruise ship. I realize that they don't use the same types of fuel so a real efficiency comparison might require some additional correction factors, but I bet the jumbo jet still comes out way ahead. Especially if you didn't give the cruise ship the unfair advantage of counting the crew in the calculations.