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India Planning Reusable 2-Stage-to-Orbit Vehicle
WoodenKnight writes "India's ISRO Chairman, G Madhavan Nair recently gave a brief description of a fully-reusable 2-stage satellite launch vehicle that is being planned at ISRO. From the article: 'This is in its initial stages of vehicle configuration and the first stage is configured as a winged body configuration, which will attain an altitude of around 100 km and deliver nearly half the orbital velocity. This stage after burnout will re-enter and will be made to land horizontally on the runway, like an aircraft. The second stage after delivering the payload in the orbit will be made to re-enter the atmosphere and will be recovered using airbags either in the sea or land. This is only in its conceptual stage.'"
No it's the reverse of a space shuttle.
The part of it that launches the space craft flies back to earth, while the space craft comes back like it would a regular rocket via chutes.
Think of it as a rocket that piggy backs a jet airliner and launching from 100km up.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
In fact we will
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Here. Check out this link. Imagine the possibilities: long inclined launch ramp = low launch costs = pervasive human presence in space. Nuclear propulsion would be nice, too.
And I seriously wonder if the Indian aerospace industry is up to the task of building this thing. But if they are, then bully for them.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
This is not zealotry, but an informed comment.[1]
Unlike other societies that do have a lot of money to throw at such problems, ours does not (as you've noted). The difference is the way in which scientists in India go about designing these stages. All stage designs are done as efficiently as possible to allow reuse in multiple tasks---for instance between stages of missiles and rockets. The individual projects are not large scale, and built by using small addons to previously existing technology. This is not as expensive as you might imagine.
[1] This is stuff I cite from a couple of books I read by the Indian president, (really) a rocket scientist.
My photolog
From "Global Studies: India and South Asia, Seventh edition" Norton, James H.K.
Annual Population Growth rate: 1.44%
GDP Growth rate: 8.3%
The figure for # below poverty line are correct, though falling.
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It is extremely expensive to go into space with conventional rockets beacause it's near the limit of what's physically possible. Had our gravitational well (product of surface gravity and planet diameter) been twice as deep, we'd might as well forget about launching conventional rockets into orbit.
Spaceship One didn't go into orbit. It had enough oomph to get about 100km of altitude. That's only a few percent of what's needed to get into space, and the cost increases exponentially as the delta-g needed increases, with a doubling constant of about 2km/sec or so, the exact figure depending on the reduction and oxidizing agents used with hydrogen and oxygen giving the largest constant.
Additionally, for-profit businesses have virtually no incentive to invest in long term research. Their discount rates tend to be around 10% (even in this era of uber-low interest rates) and that's for a sure bet investment. Risky multi-decade investments that might or might have a huge payoff in 30 years are not what they like. Governments and non-profits (like the Mars Society) are the only groups that have the necessary long-term thinking to develop this field, and even then they miss more often than hit. There are plenty space shuttle-type boondoggles for one Sputnik or Soyuz or Apollo victory.
As far as I know, private space research is either lightly encouraged, or treated neutrally. It's more that few people are so foolhardy to invest in it at this point. Rutan might make money because of publicity and there being a limited tourist potential for sub-orbital flights, but his research is a dead-end that will not bring us any closer to routine orbital space flight.
In case if someone is wondering if this is true...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Kalam
My question is -- why do all these innovations come from governments?
Simple. The time discounted value of future, excludable rewards exceeds the cost of doing space exploration. Up to now at least. It follows there is no entrepreneurial incentive to invest in new space technologies without public support.
Consider the significance of Spaceship One. The chief innovation of this system was financing. Scaled recreated the capabilties of the X-15 from fifty years ago with private money, which is a milestone for private financing. Granted that milestone is a money losing one and easily an order of magnitude away from orbit, but it is still signficant.
Governments invest in this sort of thing for different reasons. One is of course that things that benefit humanity as a whole but can't be in a reasonable timeframe privatized are a reasonable sphere of public investment. But more to the point governments invest in this sort of thing for national prestige. The Russians put Sputnik up to show the world the superiority of their economic system. We put a man on the moon for the same reason.
Whether India should or should not is not a simple question. National prestige is not just chest thumping, it creates credibility for a country and its businesses. They may have reason to think that they can begin to bring space related business to their country in the way that they've brought IT related business.
There may be other reasons we aren't privy to as well. It wasn't lost on Cold War planners that the ability to put things into orbit was closely related to the ablity to delivery weapons to other people's countries. India may wish to obtain an intercontinental nuclear delivery capability.
$150,000 for a week in Vegas for 2 people, what's $150,000 to hit space?
This is money losing math. You have to account for costs and the effects of competition as well. If you don't recoup your marginal costs (e.g. it costs you $160,000 to send those $150,000 passengers into space), you lose. Even if you do recoup your marginal costs, the marginal surplus has to be enough to recoup the opportunity costs of investing in your space system.
Finally, the unobtainability of something is closely related to its value. People would pay millions of dollars to be uncomfortable on a orbital flight because it's practically impossible to get on one at any price. The fact that you have a business doing this makes it less exotic. Furthermore, if you can make a go of it, competition can as well. They may be people already in aerospace with subtantial capabilities; or they may just be hard knuckle investors who wait for you to make all the technological and marketing mistakes for them.
In any case, once there is a space tourism business and it has been running for a couple of years, prices are going to plunge.
The bottom line is that risks are against purely private space ventures as of this date.
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