Canadian Company Developing New Space Shuttle

Archimboldo writes "CNN is carrying an article on the development of a new space shuttle design by Ontario's PlanetSpace called the Silver Dart, which is based on the U.S. Air Force's Flight Dynamics Laboratory-7 (FDL-7) program. Advantages over the aging Shuttle design include an all metal exterior for all-weather re-entry, twice the shuttle's lift coefficient at sub-sonic speeds, a lighter inner body, and newer electronics." The company has high hopes of snagging some of the space tourism market along with grabbing some of the resupply missions to the ISS.

Comments

All metal?

[YA_Python_dev]

It seems a bit strange to me that an "all metal aircraft" can have sufficient heat insulation for an orbital re-entry... someone can clarify this?

Re:All metal?

[Hadlock]

Maybe they put the ceramic tiles on the inside? If they switched to Titanium for the frame from aluminum, you jump up about 2000 degrees in melting temperature, so the frame doesn't have to be as safely insulated.
 
Aluminum melting point = 1400F (or thereabouts); Titanium melting point = 3500F (or thereabouts).
 
Some aluminum alloys have melting points near or below 1000F, so insullation is more impostant. By starting over from scratch, you can avoid the aluminum spaceframe design and work with modern materials.

Re:All metal?

[WindBourne]

Well, reentry is ~3000F, so Titanium would work. But I sure would prefer something that was higher than that.

Re:All metal?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

It's called a hot airframe. The space shuttle is a cold airframe. If it gets hot, it fails, therefore it requires an additional heat protection system. On the shuttle, this is a very fragile ceramic/silica tile.

This spaceship uses a hot airframe. The metal parts of the vehicle are designed to get hot during reentry, and all the parts that are delicate are protected behind the very strong metal exterior.

Predictions!

[mister_llah]

"Say, Terrence, do you know what my space suit smells like?"

PFFFBBBBLLLT!

Is it cost-effective?

[pv2b]

The main question on my mind is whether it's cost-effective.

From what I've heard, the current Space Shuttle is actually more expensive to operate than an equivalent single-use vehicle, partially because of the amount of work that has to be put into making the Shuttle operational again after landing.

Will the Silver Dart actually fare any better?

Re:Is it cost-effective?

[Vo0k]

1) Various parties had their business in putting their parts in the shuttle, and cost and quality were often on a far place when considering priorities (political friendships being most important). They often need checking, replacing, in short they suck. A commercial-made shuttle won't have this kind of weight attached. Middle ground between safety and price is the key value. And good-bye all the 60's - based parts still kept for political reasons.
2) The shuttles have -enormous- amount of redundancy/safety features because of all the publicity related to astronaut deaths. Commercial solution for own use should be just secure enough to pay itself back and give profit. Likely some/lots of the redundancy will be removed. Cheaper, easier, simpler, lighter. And lesser chance of -any- part failing (if there are 4 sensors instead of two, sure, in flight 3 will still work if one fails, instead of one, and two instead of none, but on Earth you need 4 checks instead of two, the chance that at least one sensor will be broken doubles and so do costs associated with them.) In short, astronauts are a bit more disposable...
3) If it's not cost-effective, it will just end up in bankruptcy of this company and taking over the market by others. Not in stalling progress for decades by pumping billions into failed design just to keep it flying for showoff. These guys get paid for actually delivering stuff to the orbit, not for providing some parts that may or may not quite work like intended but uncle governor said they should be used.

Re:Is it cost-effective?

[wulfhound]

... and despite all that redundancy and safety, two have been lost in around a hundred missions.

If space travel is to be scaled up, and space tourism to catch on, we certainly can't afford to have it any -less- safe -- how many people would fly commercial aircraft if one in 100 airline flights ended in a fatal accident (as opposed to of the order of one in a million)? OK, so space tourism is a bleeding-edge, once-in-a-lifetime experience, but still - a safety record worse than one fatal accident every 1000 flights (roughly equivalent to the very early days of airlines c. 1930) is not going to win a lot of business, and no existing manned rocket system has gotten close to that.

Won't it be hard to launch that far north?

[aapold]

I mean there's a reason most space agencies launch from closer to the tropics... to gain additional velocity from the rotation of the earth...

I guess they'd have to launch from somewhere else...

That is unless their reviving the Gerald Bull Space Cannon program...

Re:Won't it be hard to launch that far north?

[lashi]

They are building it to sell to NASA or space tourism agencies. They are not launching it. Someone else is.

Avro Arrow et al

[pettau]

Some of Canada's aerospace history ...

• The Canadarm2
• The Canadarm
• The Avro Arrow
• The o-rings on 51-L (if memory serves me correct)

sorted in some kinda order --please fill in the gaps.

Ten rockets?

[Zarf]

from the article:
The spacecraft is expected to launch vertical atop a stack of about 10 Canadian Arrow rocket engines and land horizontally on an aircraft runway, they added.

If I remember my space history correctly, Russia had a moon rocket design that tried to incorporate the firing of 20 or more independant rocket motors. The design proved far too complex for the electronics of the day to coordinate and control.

With todays computer processing power I'll be interested to see if the problem of coordinating that many rocket motors simultaneously has become trivial enough to make a reliable launch vehicle.

IIRC: The old soviet rockets would spin out of control.

However, IANARS (I Am Not A Rocket Scientist).

Re:Ten rockets?

[bryantthesmith]

The Delta II can use up to 9 strap on rocket boosters in addition to the main main motor. This configuration has flown successfully for many years. If they try to make all 10 boosters controllable I could see them having problems (like the Soviet Moon rocket). If they just have a few motors for control and use the rest for boost it will probably be an easier task.

Shuttle tiles

[JetScootr]

Shuttle tiles were used cuz in the 1970's the metal alloys to withstand the >4000 F reentry temps (allowing for hot reentry in failure/emergencies) were either too expensive or not yet invented. In the 1990's NASA JPL developed a metal alloy that can take the heat without losing strength. Titanium may melt at 3500F, but it loses strength long before that.
Unfortunately, the NASA program was scrapped after a few test flights of working 1/2 scale models.
The knife-edge surfaces are needed for hypersonic flight. The shuttle does not "fly" at mach umpteen, it "falls", belly first, and ablates orbital speed in exchange for a huge plasma cone that can probably be heard on radio out to pluto.
modern tech can probably build a high-temp reentry surface that can actually fly under (limited) control to any chosen landing spot - making the New York - Canberra run an hour-and-a-half or so.

Ablation is the word and Im slightly skeptical

[technoextreme]

It seems a bit strange to me that an "all metal aircraft" can have sufficient heat insulation for an orbital re-entry... someone can clarify this?

Im not sure about the shuttle but the Apollo mission always used ablative cooling. Basically the concept is similar to sweating. A metal with a high vaporization actually turns into a gas that channels the heat away. This article has more information: http://www.nasa.gov/lb/centers/ames/news/releases/ 2004/moon/adventure_apollo.html Unfortunately, the problem with this system is weight and I doubt they could actually get a decent payload into space with this system. I remember reading NASA rejected the idea for this type of system for the space shuttle because it would result in no extra weight.