Slashdot Mirror
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!"
... my husband could take a hint from spaceship two.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
All they need now is to reach orbit and offer some serious microgravity.
It seems like they are making the thing bigger, but at the same time, suddenly they can go higher... it must mean there will be more than one engine or a much longer burning engine. It seems like if they put the same engine on the same ship they have now, they could go even higher... like for instance to the space station... I still wonder if they could ever pack enough fuel to go into orbit then have enough to deorbit so they don't have to use the heat-shield method of returning.
Will they be able to hear you scream???
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This is the kind of "kick in the butt" that NASA has been needed. Bravo to the SpaceShip team for the continuing development of their fleet.
I'm still waiting for it to grow and to become capable of reaching 500 km in altitude. If it can reach the altitude with a small payload launching capability, then a on-the-cheap space experiment becomes possible in future. I think that could change the way we think about space research.
quite friggin many.
karma capped
Until they get somewhere in the neighboorhood of SpaceShipTwentyEight, its still gonna be too expensive for me!
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
I think they need to find a better way of launching those things into space. Because the amount of fuel they require now is unbelievable and I don't believe the oil price will drop within 10 years.
"This experience is going to have very few restrictions on what you can do because these payloads are doing it for fun and every person has a different idea of what fun is.
Floating in space (Ansari X-Prize)
The X-prize vision is about to be realised
"Does that mean that some guy and his girl might want to take the whole ship? OK!"
Is that a euphemism for zero gravity sex? It'll be one of the few times when being quick is actually good! Also, with presumably multi-year waiting lists, it'll take performance anxiety to new high.
I think that this is going to be the biggest push for sub orbital flights.
Can you imagine SS3 taking people from Mojave to Japan in 2-3 hours? Or what about the US govt/DoD using it to deliver specalized troops anywhere in the world withing 4-5 hours. Hostage situation in Africa? SeAL's on the ground from the US to the target in 3 hours. Earthquake in Iran? Specalized rescue teams on site in hours and not days. It makes sense to send people around the globe just like you send ICBM's.
Imagine a first class airline service for people to needed to get from NY to London quickly (or just didnt want to sit on a long airline flight.) Sure, the flight would cost more, but its the same economics as first class compared to coach. If people are willing to pay more for faster speeds then eventually someone will find a way to make it financially viable.
My sig can beat up your sig.
What alternatives exist to combusting various gasses and solid fuels? Do explosives like TNT pack more potential energy if it could just be exploited usefully? Some sort of series of shaped, small, explosions every tenth or every second? With some sort of backplate to protect the ship?
So they are gonna pay how many tens of thousands of $$$ for exactly how many SECONDS of something close to weightlessness???
A half hour flight I could see...
This??? A classic example of early adopters getting royally screwed?
Mod me up, mod me down, flame me, praise me -- whatever you do, you help prove I exist...
Eh, I wouldn't exactly call it homebuilt.
Tell that to Concorde. It never made a penny.
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
I can't wait until we can ride SpaceShipThree across the Atlantic in 20 minutes!
...and imagine still wasting one hour travelling to the air/spaceport, three ours in check-in and security lanes, half an hour on the other end to get your luggage back, and yet one hour travelling off the port.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
I think it is absolutely amazing that ordinary people will be able to experience space and zero gravity. But I also think that we need to look into the environmental aspects of this development.
e r2 000/01.html
If we will come to see daily flights of maybe hundreds of planes it might have a significant impact on the ozone layer and thus our health. It is therefore important to get an estimate of the impact on the ozone layer so that cleaner fuels and other measures can be taken to prevent this.
Here is a bit of background info on the ozone layer and the impact of the space shuttle and high flying aircraft and rockets on it:
http://www.aero.org/publications/crosslink/summ
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ozone-depletion/intro/
Not including the two to two and a half hours it takes for the mother ship to climb to release altitude, and the flight itself takes more along the lines of a half hour to descend. Still faster than anything short of the concorde, but you'll still have to wait eight hours for your luggage - SS2 is designed for you and enough oxygen to keep you pink on the ride.
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
TNT has an energy density of around 4.6 MJ/kg, a 1:8 H2/O2 mixture achieves 13 MJ/kg. Hydrogen has little density however (even the liquid), so volume is a major problem there.
Much higher energy densities require more exotic techniques, with Uranium (235) fission at 90 TJ/kg. This is 6 magnitues beyond regular fuels.
Antimatter/matter annihilation is the most energy dense fuel possible so far, and would be 1000 times denser in energy compared to U235.
* Just how many jumbos would you need to transfer all the people on a big cruiseliner over the atlantic?*
...and besides. 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.
ah.. but a jumbo gets over in a day.
cruiseliner is for having fun in this day and age. nobody uses them for just transporting themselfs unless they fear flying for one reason or another.
(and "An advanced one-class layout would accommodate a maximum of 600 passengers." I'd expect the cruiseliners you're referring to take maximum of 2000 people in them at a time. a concorde took 100 people for comparision, and took 3.5h for new york to london, and wasn't commercially viable route for MASS TRANSPORT, which means transport for common folk like us).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
But it will use disproportionately more fuel to do so.
I'm a North American, currently living in Australia. The flight seems to take forever when you factor in the inevitable layovers and flights on each continent to the final destination. As a general rule I won't pay for first class service, but I would pay at least twice my usual amount for 'fast' class. Maybe Concode should have tried the LAXSydney route.
Will it have bad food, grouchy flight attendants and lose your luggage?
the Canadian Brian Feeney and the da Vinci guys? Last I heard they were going ahead with their October launch even after Burt&crew won the X-prize.
..but in the end the supersonic fast flights gave way to humongous subsonic planes.
else they would have designed another concorde..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
I stand corrected.
If so, you may want to consider to book a parabolic flight with ZERO-G.
John Carmack has taken the ride and seems to have liked it a lot.
If you want to experience freefall its going to be much cheaper to take a ride on the "Vomit Comet" or just spend fifty bucks at an indoor skydiving facility for a go in the vertical wind tunnel. But I guess the views and bragging rights wouldn't be anywhere near as good. experience is similar
You'd best hurry. Motion sickness is a very common effect of weightlessness. It takes some astronauts days to get used to it. :)
Maybe they should rename them to 'Thunderbirds' or something.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Can or do people (individuals or VCs) invest in Rutan's company? I mean other than P. Allen and Virgin?
They get a shitload of press, both here and on TV. I figure they must be trying to build recognition. And from what I see, they're doing a kick-ass job at it.
wasting one hour travelling to the air/spaceport, three [h]ours in check-in and security lanes, half an hour on the other end to get your luggage back, and yet one hour travelling off the port
The ground travel is an unavoidable item of overhead (unless you live at the [space,air]port). The security lines for international flights (including customs) are also unavoidable. Travel light and you won't have to worry about the baggage claim; check-in is usually faster when you are not checking luggage.
Anyway, I think you are missing the bigger picture: if I could fly from Europe to the US in twenty minutes - instead of 7+ hours - I would happily do so riding in the overhead bin. Drawbacks include getting delayed on the runway and the difficulty in receiving beverage service in the bin, but overall the time savings would be worthwhile. YMMV.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
How's that jumbo airliner come out against a schooner?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Zero gravity can play havoc with peoples stomachs,
I hope they remind future passingers to skip eating the gumbo special
at the spaceport before launch...
Supersonic flight is for an exclusive club, not the masses. Nobody wants to stump up the development costs for something that won't have an economy of scale. BA and AF didn't have to cover those costs, although they certinaly profitted in the end - directly through premium rates and indirectly through the prestige factor. They also didn't have to buget for upgrades to newer models as nothing was going to replace Concorde.
This book -- The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin -- has a great section on Concorde. It explains the whole thing.
You foolish fool! We have to conserve water too! If you want a group of people to do something for the environment, mass suicide is the way to go.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
If you apply the same packing density to the QM2 it would be MUCH more efficient. Suspended animation would allow even more pax under both scenarios.
It works better
It was a pointless comparison.
karma capped
Out of interest what altitude would you need to reach before you could feasibly perform ballistic intercontinental hops. I would have thought that this is the most practically useful direction for sub-orbital flight to take rather than just being a glorified rollercoaster for the rich ??
Take no notice of the book behind the curtain.
:)
:)
Bah, that's right, just as I am starting to look intelligent, someone goes and blows my source
It's a good book.
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
I think, however, we might miss out supersonic altogether now, and go for hypersonic sub-orbital or even orbital craft.
Stick Men
Don't forget the cargo carrying capacity of each. There's more than bipedal organic lifeforms to move about the planet.
Of course there is often more than efficiency or economy to moving those pesky humans. Sometimes they just want to get "there" in a hurry.
The Airbus A380, on the other hand, is of a more recent design, and its target mark is 81 person-miles per gallon.
"Oh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-my-own-Grandpa." - Dr Hubert Farnsworth
Ok it gets 666 feets per gallon.. In optimal flight altitude? Yes? Correct if i'm wrong here...
And when you add the ascent and descent. What do you get?
I don't know =) but i bet less than 666 feet/gallon.
Agreed that it might not turn the taples, but you need to check these numbers too.
And besides, if you calculate that crue to 747 the fuel consumption will be mutch greater. Cos not only you need to carry that passenger but you need to carry the weight of the fuell in air.
But as i said, i cannot calculate it cos i don't have all the variable's.
but you get to take more luggage on a ship.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
So, will we be seeing Heinlein's mail rockets too?
I wonder if the additional speed will really be worth the additional cost. If I need to be somewhere else for business purposes, the only important parts of my presence can arrive in milliseconds via telephone, or even television if someone can think of a convincing reason to see me.
To me, travel itself is painful and boring, and I don't see much difference between being subjected to transportation for 12 hours or three. Let me know when I can step into a transfer booth, insert coin, dial a number, and step out in Düsseldorf.
I'm far more interested in riding SS3 to some orbital facility of interest, since there's no other (affordable) way for me to get there.
If you accommodate them at the same relative level of discomfort you can fit 6000+ in the QM or only 100-150 in the Boeing.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
A ship can haul more tonnage per pound of fuel than an airliner. That is why things like grain, cars, and clothes tend to go by ship. The problem is when that tonnage is people you have to work time into that equation. When it takes days to travel you then need to provide food, entertainment, space to move, and medical services. All that takes fuel to move as well. For commercial grade travel a jumbo jet wins. Now if you got back to WWII the original Queen Mary once carried 10,000 troops. If the QM2 could do the same it would then beat the jumbo jet. However very few people would ever want to travel that way.
All in all a modern Airliner and yes while the 747 first flew over 30 years ago the -400 has many improvements and very state of the art engines are truly marvels of mass transit. Very fuel efficient, clean, and safe.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... either in zero gravity or under acceleration or deceleration.
make absolutely sure what you're about to do will go in the bag and nowhere else
Infuriate left and right
Sub-orbital reaches speeds of Mach-5, well within the capabilities of current aviation. Oribtal re-entry reaches Mach-20, requiring heat shielding which adds weight and expense.
Why do you need to ride SS3 to the orbital facility, since "the only important parts of [your] presence" can also arrive there in milliseconds?
I have a job where I provide IT services in my own building and in another one 800 miles away. Invariably, when I physically go there, I find out about things and get stuff done that would have taken orders of magnitude more effort, and/or never gotten done at all, by phone or even videoconference.
Like it or not, we are great apes, and our capabilities are limited. We are not able to relate to each other "over the phone" in the same way that we can in person, because we posess millions of years worth of evolutionary adaptations geared towards physical presence. As a result, we need to be there when anything genuinely complex or worthwhile is on the line (which includes most significant business negotiations, but does not include, for example, a tech support call).
-Graham
And when you add the ascent and descent. What do you get?
Most of the energy you expend lifting the plane to its cruising altitude is stored in the plane. When you descend you get the energy back, so except for friction, there's no extra energy used to go up and down.
I saw this over on X Prize Space Race News, and figured it might be of interest:
STUDENTS AND YOUNG PROFESSIONALS WANTED FOR THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME
The X PRIZE Foundation is issuing out a call to arms for those interested in getting their hands dirty to further the cause of private spaceflight. In a tribute to the majesty of SpaceShipOne, the X PRIZE Foundation will be creating several full-size mockups of the historic private spacecraft to be used as early as this summer for outreach and education.
We are offering 10 students and young professionals the chance of a lifetime to come to the World's First Inland Spaceport at Mojave, California, to build multiple full-scale mockups of the SpaceShipOne.
This amazing opportunity is only open mainly for students and young professionals as an educational project. We are also looking for a project lead with experience in composites and/or fiberglass lay-up to oversee the project to completion.
Working at Scaled Composites' facilities, this team will dive in and get their hands dirty as they learn the spaceship building business.
Using the original tooling and methods employed in fabricating the actual spaceship, this will be an opportunity unlike any other. The project will take off in mid-January 2005 and continue throughout the spring semester. This highly competitive program could count for academic credit and will provide students and young professionals with the outstanding experience of working with composites, fiberglass lay-up and other processes associated with the building of a spaceship.
"This is an extraordinary educational opportunity to actually build a copy of SpaceShipOne using Burt Rutan's original tooling," said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, CEO and Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation. "The folks who get chosen for this project will work within the Scaled Composites facility and have the opportunity of a lifetime. In fact, I hope to get out to Mojave to participate when I can as well."
Project timeline: Mid January - Mid May
Location: Mojave, CA
Compensation: N/A
Other: Physical work required - must be able to lift more than 40lbs
Security: Background check will be performed
Transportation: You must provide your own transportation
Individuals who wish to be a part of this project should send a resume and cover letter describing why you would like to participate to:
Brooke Owens, Director of Team Relations & Special Projects at brooke@xprize.org. Deadline for application is January 10, 2005, however, we will fill available slots on a rolling basis so please apply as soon as possible. Interested parties should be advised that this opportunity is unpaid, but rich in opportunity.
This month's issue of Wired has a cover article on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which will be using SpaceShipTwo to run a commercial spaceflight service.
...
...
Some interesting quotes:
But look at the upside. The total price tag [of Virgin Galactic] is half the cost of a single Airbus A340-600 - and Virgin Atlantic ordered 26 of those last summer. In return, Branson gets bragging rights to one of the cooler breakthroughs of the early 21st century, with rocket-powered marketing opportunities that could fuel excitement - and sales - in his entire 200-company holding group.
SpaceShipOne's "shuttlecock" design adds an extra measure of safety. When the craft reaches its airless apogee, it hinges (feathers, in pilotspeak) into a broad V shape that automatically brakes the descent. "It lets you take an averagely competent pilot - like me - and throw anything you can think of at him, and still have everyone aboard get away safely," Tai explains. "The space shuttle does that with all sorts of fantastically complex systems. Burt's brilliance is that his ship uses smart design and the laws of physics. Which are, in fact, the only ways you can be truly drop-dead safe."
Why stop there? "I hope we'll get to the moon in my lifetime. The first baby born there - what country will it be a citizen of? Maybe we can put a Virgin bank in space, or maybe a Virgin tax haven. We could pay for all our people to go up there just by depositing their money." Now, that's adventure capitalism!
The simple fact is that going into space gives Branson a chance to do what a lot of massively successful guys wish they could do: grab the wheel of history and tug. Opening the final frontier to private citizens will ensure Branson's place in the human saga. And if that means fleets of Virgin spaceships soaring through the inky void, serving sip-packs of Virgin Cola on the way to the latest Virgin Clubhouse, so be it. "Space is virgin territory," Branson says, trying out a prospective marketing line and shooting another grin. "Is that 21st-century enough for you?"
Well, at least that statement seems false. I don't know what Scaled Composites uses for fuel, but it doesn't sound like that most environmentally friendly propellant I know of.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
If by "getting royally screwed" you mean "making a conscious, unforced decision to purchase something, knowing fully ahead of time what they're purchasing, then getting it", then yes.
This information was released back in October. http://www.spacedaily.com/news/xprize-04zo.html
Yes, relating to one another "over the phone" is different. Unless I actually wish to touch someone, it is *better*. Email is better still since I can go back and edit stuff before sending it. I really like the way that electronic communication pares away so much of the junk that I don't use anyway, but which would demand brainpower regardless.
:-)
I provide IT services too, and 99 times out of a hundred what I do works as well from home or my desk as it would onsite. Obviously we can't install equipment over the phone, but much is so doable remotely that I'm lazy enough to ssh into a server that's just across the hall rather than get up and go tickle its actual keyboard. We've got other people in place to do the hardware stuff. (I've actually used rdesktop to work with a Windows box that's less than 2m away, rather than shift my chair. The wheels are bad, okay?
So what you are saying is we have A.
perpetual-motion machine =) i had to look that word up.
Ok =) lets not diviade from the subject. Anyway, you can't calculate it either. And please show me the proof on that.
Hypersonic is a LOT harder than supersonic. What would have really made the Concorde would have been greater range. It could not make it across the pacific or over the pole to Rasia. I would bet if you take a look at the ratio of Business passengers to tourists the Asia routes have a higher percentage of business flyers than the Atlantic routes. When they started the Concorde Asia was not seen as an important market. Boeing's 747 with it's low costs and very long range really cleaned up in that market.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I can't wait until we can ride SpaceShipThree across the Atlantic in 20 minutes!
There are SOME CEO's I've always wanted to stuff into an ICBM. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What someone was talking about above sounds like something they tried with Nuclear weapons in the 60's with that idea of a charge going off every so often and a backplate protecting the crew. Well that didn't work out, because the expsoion needed to lift off would destroy the launch site and anything there as well. With a Nuclear reaction you could have a nearly self susistaining launch vehical having the size to contain everything you would need (i.e. a whole barn yard for food and stuff) for a long term mission, like to say mars. Which would only take about 6months or less. or so they planned way back when this was a new idea. But of course that little bit about the Nuclear blast and the anti-nuclear movement killed the idea.
I have decided in advance to never have kids so that I will be able to save for a flight into space.
Before you laugh, know that I'm not kidding.
er...also, I don't want kids anyway so it's not a big sacrafice. It's just that now I have a more concrete reason to give my parents other than "I don't want kids".
Damn! I hope you tried to submit this as a story to the front page of /.
I wish they would have put some ages on the announcement, such as 18-25 or something along that line. Or can high school kids get involved?
Still, this would be a neat opportunity that I would have loved to be involved with, but my life has moved on. I have a son who would love to do this, but he is a little young (9 years old) and will have plenty of other opportunities as he gets older... especially if Scaled Composites actually goes anywhere with their projects or the X-Prize Cup turns out to be anything useful.
Polymers, to the Internet, to Spaceships. The one thing that is absolutly universal about every new technology is that it's most profound use will be somehow related to sex.
'69 was the year they launched birth control. It's not hailed as the year of women's lib (where woman can get married, fall in love, and NOT have 20 kids), it's the summer of love.
The automobile, at least in America, is synonimous with sex.
The telephone, probably the greatest single invention of potential in the history of man since the wheel: Phone sex.
http://www.robrob8.com/rude_and_crude/barbie_sex.
Not complaining mind you. No, not at all. Anything that can drive a geeks imagination to get us into space is fine by me.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
...the submitter was saying this along the lines that he's actually waiting for it to happen already, that those 5 person planes would be within reach of masses.
the point being that it's not going to be viable means for masses for another few decades probably, just a very short expensive joyrider.
and in current state quite useless for the big money - launching satellites.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
How's that jumbo airliner come out against a schooner?
About the same as it does against the hot-air balloon..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"