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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.'"
I've not spent much time on the issue of space -- I do want to go, and I will pay almost anything to do so in my lifetime.
My question is -- why do all these innovations come from governments? Are there regulations or requirements that prevent private investment into the new inventions?
Space tourism will be a huge business. Just from discussing it with customers of mine (who pay $150,000 for a week in Vegas for 2 people, what's $150,000 to hit space?), I bet there are at least 100,000 people in the world who would pay $50,000 to travel.
I just can't see why a country has to pay for space research. India is gaining wealth, does that mean taxing the new business owners to go to space? How about stopping that, and letting these new business owners be the ones who want to go to space and fund it themselves?
For anyone who has done more research than I could, what are the obstacles to private research? There's a market, there's a will, so there must be a way. Who is putting the kibosh on it?
"I've kiboshed before, and I will kibosh again." -- Crazy Joe Davola
Have you been to India? I used to believe the same thing- people in poverty in India are responsible for their own demise. I believed that right up until I was there for three weeks this past summer. I was in that place without clean water. Let me tell you something, until you too don't have basic human necessities available to you, like clean water, you have no idea what it feels like. Yes, the whole space thing is great for India and will probably help it overall, but let's not overlook the importance of human life. It's not like the Indian government is going out of its way to help people in need, although progress has been made recently.
Actually, it the Space Shuttle as it was originally designed. I remember: two stages, the first to bring the joined craft up to high altitude, then release stage two and airbreathe back to earth on a runway. The second stage was supposed to fire up to orbit, then come back down as an airbreather and land on a runway.
The whole concept had to be scrapped because Congress wanted to kill the whole program after Apollo. To survive, NASA shopped the Shuttle to the Air Force. The Air Force had no use for the two-stage, small payload shuttle which was designed for mostly passengers, not freight.
The Air Force wanted something to lift the Keyhole spy satellites, which were pretty damned big -- the Hubble Space Telescope is essentially a Keyhole, just pointing away instead of at the license plates of evil Russians -- so NASA redesigned the Shuttle into a heavy lifter by getting rid of the flyback first stage, adding a disposable external fuel tank, and tacking on two solid rocket boosters to get the whole mess into orbit.
The Air Force signed on to add their weight to lobby for the new system, and lo! the idiot Shuttle, good for nothing but lifting Keyhole telescopes into orbit. NASA engineers probably cried themselves to sleep for years.
The Air Force later stopped using the Shuttle for spysats, leaving NASA with the flying boxcar that no one wanted to use.
Most of the above is from the book Enterprise, by Jerry Grey.
And remember this: it was the solid rocket boosters, and later the external tank, that destroyed two shuttles. Air Force: our thanks...
We never got an actual cheap shuttle, because Congress (the american people) didn't care about it, and the Air Force barely got a bastardized version built. They've been underfunded and unused by an American public who doesn't understand about what could have been done -- read The High Frontier by Gerard K. O'Neill to get an idea of what we've lost -- and the funds to build a successor went into an insanely expensive scramjet program in the nineties that merely made aerospace companies richer by a few billion bucks. There have been shoestring programs, like the Delta Clipper DC-X single-stage to orbit prototype that never was developed, as well as rotor-landing concepts that never got past the testing stage, because Congress (that's us, in toto) constantly whittles NASA down to a state where only ONE development program can proceed at one time. It's a fake zero-sum game, where decades go by while NASA is chastised for it's "waste" while the military and new off-shoots like Halliburton drain trillions withut stay or let. NASA would love to have multiple programs testing different systems, like railguns supplanting the first stage, or winged dual stages like India's concept, or Pournelle's Delta Clipper one-stage vertical launch and land, or laser assisted takeoffs, or an advanced spaceplane, or just dirty old Saturn V's to get jobs done... but the US does not have a citizenry that has the education, the imagination, or the spirit necessary to fund even one program thru final operations, let alone multiple concepts.
The US is just not the country to do this. We did Apollo because we hated the Russkies so much that price was no object. After Apollo reached 17 (there were supposed to be 20, then the Selene permanent lab on the moon along with the Zeus Mars missions -- atomic powered, that one) there simply was no political pressure to keep going. Even today, NASA tries to get one-off Mars manned landers because they think that that is all the public will buy -- and they're right. Americans won't finance space colonization or L5/L2/L4 space industry. They don't even know what an ORBIT is, much less what all the rest means. And "sci-fi" in movies and TV sure as hell didn't help. Without the science, it's just WW II in space. Space has advantages for industry and solar energy transmission to ground, but you have to have a special kind of education and imagination to understand what the ideas mean -- and we don't have it
... you just havent looked hard enough:
xcor
blue origin (Jeff Bezos, Amazon)
spaceX
Armadillo Aerospace (John Carmack)
(Not mentioning the obvious: Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites.)
And don't forget about America's Space Prize a $50 million dollar prize for the development of a reusable vehicle to service http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/">Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable space hotel. (Robert Bigelow owns the "Budget Suites of America" hoetl chain). Several contendors for the prize at the moment.
And actually the american government is quite progressive on commercial space travel. They have an office: the office of Commercial Space Transportation. They actually recently put out a 120+ page proposal on regulations for human spaceflight, open for suggestions from the "players". Revisions are being suggested from companies and actually heeded. The system is working quite well.
Just from discussing it with customers of mine (who pay $150,000 for a week in Vegas for 2 people, what's $150,000 to hit space?), I bet there are at least 100,000 people in the world who would pay $50,000 to travel.
I've read studies that have similar numbers of people willing to pay bigger dollar amounts. The market is there; thats why the companies listed, among others, are working on a solution.
For anyone who has done more research than I could, what are the obstacles to private research? There's a market, there's a will, so there must be a way. Who is putting the kibosh on it?
Money. Gotta get those venture capitalists to see the vision. There are safer investments than human space travel. The companies that are most likely to succeed are the ones that are self-funded (see the ones with big names next to them) or the ones that handle both commercial and govenment contracts (for example, Xcor does government research, and spaceX does government launches. It pays the bills and bolsters investor confidence.)
-everphilski-