Slashdot Mirror
White Knight Testing X-37
mknewman writes "The innovative carrier plane used to air-launch SpaceShipOne has a new mission. At its inland spaceport in Mojave, Calif., the White Knight mothership has been involved in fit and high-speed taxi checks with a new passenger: the X-37, an unpiloted, reusable space plane. "
The cynical people (like me) know that the best way to kill an agency is to starve it to death slowly. The Mars mission is a classic example of this process. First you cut back on all smaller missions to consolidate spending under one gigantic program. Then you allow the costs for the gigantic mission to ballon until their is no public support for it any longer. At that point you can kill the agency without political damage.
Fortunately there are newer, less expensive methods for delivering payloads into LEO and with this vehicle it will be possible to perform much of what NASA proposed doing with the ISS with a fraction of the cost.
Universities would be a good customer for this type of launch/service space company because the payloads launched by NASA come with significant strings attached to them and they do not get to control the vehicle once launched.
How much do you think a partnership between a university and a private company could save by doing their own space probes?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
reminds me of the one that Steve Austin crashed in the Six Million Dollar Man tv program intro...
Are you trolling?
Burt Rutan may be a superhero, but he needs to eat, just like everybody else. He is not a charity. It doesn't seem like White Knight or its pilots were doing much anyway. I can't imagine that renting out a plane to NASA is a huge distraction.
Rutan's current project, Virgin Galactic, has nothing to do with orbital flight. It is merely a souped-up version of Spaceship One. Rutan has himself said that scaling up to an orbital spacecraft would be many orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive, and it doesn't seem to be a priority for him right now.
And in what sense is this selling out? If taking Richard Branson's and Paul Allen's money was not selling out, then how does it follow that he is tainting his principles by helping NASA out with a test platform for reusable space technology?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Cost of the X37 -- $173 million.
Maximum speed of spaceship one - mach 3.5
Maximum speed of X37 - mach 25
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Hmm. So it sounds like they'd either have to speed up the preparation of the plane they'd planned to use, or to delay the program, either of which could be a lot more costly than if they had the aircraft ready to go.
I wonder too if Scaled isn't charging something closer to marginal cost rather than average costs (e.g. not accounting for sunk costs in the fee). I can think of several strategic reasons to do so, not the least of which this is a one time opportunity to demonstrate that this kind of thing could be handled by a private contractor. It's clearly a potential service they could offer which would commericalize some of the technology they used for the X-prize.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Aviation Week says that the new NASA administrator likes the idea of putting a manned capsule on top of a single space shuttle solid booster. The booster is already man-rated and (by rocket standards) in mass production, so the idea does make some sense.