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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.'"
NASA's stuff to India now?
The Western Nations (US,Canada, UK, etc.) also have starving and homeless people and yet they also send things into space and spend billions of dollars on defence. It may not seem like a worthwhile endevour but the technological fallout from a project of this scope (in experience, new materials, new technology, etc) will benefit everyone in the long term.
Strangly enough history shows us that government spending on large projects like a space program are very good things for an economy. They provide jobs mostly and encourage spinoff innovations.
Everytime there is a post about India, some know-nothing decides to chime in with just such a comment. First off, there will always be a problem somwehere. So, if you insist that progress is only allowed to occur after all old problems are dealt with, nothing will ever be accomplished. Second, what the hell makes you so qualified to comment? You were posting on Slashdot when you could have been helping backwoods Indian villagers! (And, so am I!) You express a concern about it, so I'll assume you do volunteer work, and donate just like I do. But, neither of us dedicates 100% of our time and money to helping others. Nobody does. So, no government does for the exact same reason - governments are made of people!
Lastly, India uses the space program to do a lot of very real good. Weather satellites save lives. Earth observation satellites can help see how crops are doing, and make it easier to get better yields. They can help find where water is, and help make maps to figure out how to get it where it needs to go.
Jerk.
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
The developed world seems to have a notion that every last penny of the budgets of developing countries should be spent on eradicating poverty and hunger. Unfortunately, it takes more than throwing at money at the problem to make those things go away (why hasn't the US eradicated hunger and poverty in that case?). I think India realizes that one way to a better economy is by utilizing that massive amount of engineering/IT/science brainpower that all its universities are spewing out every year. Better economy leads to better infrastructure, which is the first step thats needed on the road to curing the other problems. So no -- their priorities are not messed up, and it's not like they're snatching money from the poor to send rockets up in space. Your view of economies and development is overly simplistic.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
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.
Sure, India has a long way to go. But the country has some of the world's best scientists and has become a significant center for global technological innovation. Why shouldn't they put their skills to work in space?
Of course, it all may be about ego, about promoting national pride. Americans, though, are hardly in a position to judge others about that. After all, our entire space program was built on beating the Soviets to the moon!
If you build it, they will come...
I'm planning to have Catherine Zeta Jones as my wife. The project is in a conceptual stage right now, but I'm planning real hard. If only I could get some private funding to make myself fiscally attractive, I'd be all set.
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