t/Space Demonstrates New Air-Launch Method

FleaPlus writes "Last month t/Space, an organization with plans for constructing a simple, low-cost successor to the Space Shuttle, was mentioned on Slashdot. Recently t/Space used a portion of the concept study funds it had been awarded by NASA to also build and test actual hardware. They performed three weeks of drop tests of a 23%-scale model from a Scaled Composites Proteus carrier aircraft to demonstrate the feasibility of a new air launch method they had devised, dubbed 'Trapeze-Lanyard Air Drop.' The new method eliminates the need for wings on air-launched rockets, potentially leading to improved safety and cost-effectiveness. Last month at a space conference they also displayed a full-scale model of their vehicle. Unfortunately, with the recent selection of Boeing/Northrop-Grumman and Lockheed-Martin as the two competing teams for the contract to build the Shuttle's successor, t/Space's future path is somewhat uncertain."

Comments

Re:Uncertain future.. but not in space tourism..

[Rei]

Computers have been halving in cost for the same power every 3 years for most of the past century. Rockets have hardly dropped in price since the 1960s, *despite* the increased amount of private industry development. Despite the satellite boom of the 1990s. Etc.

PCs kept dropping in price because simpler (and higher power) manufacturing techniques kept being developed - and there was a clear path layed out for the next decade at almost all times, with research laying clear foundations for the every-three-year doublings of the next several decades. Nothing even close to this exists for rocketry. The only major thing that can do an order-of-magnitude reduction in prices are huge materials leaps forward (we'll get incremental improvements, of course - there's some nice ones due soon).

How about air travel in the 40's and 50's?

Driven almost entirely by people who needed to travel, paying the equivalent of several thousand dollars per ticket (not several hundred thousand), and getting to a destination that they had a strong need to arrive at. Very little of it was "joy riding", even if travelling places by plane was somewhat of a status symbol.

Give commercial space travel it's start

Private industry developed almost everything NASA ever built. Private companies like SeaLaunch and Orbital successfully built their own privately funded rockets; there was no leap forward, just incremental improvements. Several dozen companies outrght failed. It's not a "private industry" thing; it's a "technology thing". And no, a rocket that goes a tiny fraction of orbital velocity isn't a step forward; it's a big leap backwards. If you're going to hawk a "private enterprise" technology with promise, you should be hawking SpaceX or whatnot. The "100km straight up and then down" companies are as close to real space travel as a person who makes a go-cart out of a lawnmower engine is to making a car to race in the Indy 500. Seriously. The ISPs are awful, the payload fractions are awful (because of the low ISP engines and high tank/structural masses), they don't deal with much TPS if any, etc. I.e., they don't deal with the real engineering problems of spaceflight, and thus aren't advancing anything. Cheer for those who are actually advancing technology.

And no, before you state it, let me head it off: they're not helping parts be "mass produced" and thus cheaper. The materials that they use are generally all wrong (far more in common with aircraft) and the low performance engine designs share little to nothing in common with real rocket engines, which are more like jet engines. And of course, since they don't need much of any TPS, they don't advance TPS research/costs (most of which are labor, anyways)