Two-Stage-to-Orbit Spaceplane Program Shelved

MadMorf writes "According to this article in Aviation Week, for nearly twenty years the USAF and "a team of aerospace contractors" has designed, built and tested a two-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, which could be used for "reconnaissance, satellite-insertion and, possibly, weapons delivery". Now this highly classified project may have been shelved for budgetary reasons."

Comments

So...

[jimbo3123]

So, now the program that "Doesn't exist" doesn't exist any more.

I love The Slashdot Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot reports this spaceplane being shelved as a certain fact. Even the article can't report it as certain. It's mostly conjecture and hearsay at this point.

When did slashdot turn into the Weekly World News? First it was political conspiracy theories, not this. It's getting ridiculous.

Re:I love The Slashdot Headline

[LWATCDR]

'When did slashdot turn into the Weekly World News? "
Actually Aviation Week is a very good source. It is often called Aviation Leak by people in the military. Some of this makes a lot of sense. I was reading that Redstone arsenal got rid of some of the last of it's Pentaborane not too long ago and that they had disposed of a large supply of it at Edwards as well.
Pentaborane is some very nasty stuff and the Air Force was supposed to have stopped development of it way back in the 60s.
Lots of people have been reporting an XB-70 like aircraft flying around the south west around Groom Lake. There is also the law suits about toxic chemicals that some black project workers have been exposed to. A borane compound really fits that bill. I would have to give this a probable. It would just be a development of work done on the X-30 and XB-70 projects from the 60s.
It makes a lot more sense than UFOs at Groom Lake.

Re:I love The Slashdot Headline

[iamlucky13]

It's not that Aviation Weekly is a bad source, but the Slashdot submission discussed the planes existance as fact. The AW article said there were unconfirmed reports of a possible plane and orbiter. It's also possible that over-zealous AW readers saw SR-71's launching drones, and thought they were something cooler (yes, cooler than an SR-71, if you can believe that).

This isn't uncommon. There have also been reports of a flying wing stealth reconnaisance plane referred to as the TR-3. More concretely, there was a lot of speculation during the 80's that the air force was developing a stealth fighter called the F-19 Ghostrider. The Air Force made a bit of fuss when drawings of it were leaked, the Wall Street Journal discussed it, Revell created a plastic model kit of it, and even Tom Clancy featured the plane in Red Storm Rising. It turned out the leak was a misleading cover up to help keep the true design of the F-117 secret, which flew for several years before being made public.

Replaced by smaller, unmanned or disposable drones

[Isca]

I'll bet that if they have retired this, they've determined that the can do the same with unmanned drones, or a smaller unmanned satelite system that's launched as one piece package.

My money is on the drones, however. Some of the newer models can orbit at close to 100k feet for long periods of time, and are so small hard to spot that they might as well be satellites. Also, if they've been successful enough with hiding the sats that are launched, as in last month's Wired article (discussed here on slashdot) then maybe they don't need as much quick launch capability.

Wishful thinking

[codell]

I *want* to believe, but I doubt seriously if we have achieved this just yet. It would take a major breakthrough in fuel technology and/or hypersonic flight to make it from 100,000 ft. to 300 miles, even starting at mach 3. A craft the size of this hypothetical spaceplane would need a huge amount of fuel for that, not to mention heavy heat shielding a la the STS. I'm betting the NRO has found much cheaper methods of quietly getting satellites into unannounced orbits.

Re:Wishful thinking

[AKAImBatman]

It would take a major breakthrough in fuel technology and/or hypersonic flight to make it from 100,000 ft. to 300 miles, even starting at mach 3.

What makes you say that? We've had the technology for this sort of thing for quite a long time. The reason why the Space Shuttle sucks so much is:

• It carries the largest payload of any rocket currently flying, despite design recommendations to the contrary.
• Its budget was cut up into smaller yearly parcels, thus resulting in changes to the craft that would fit development within the yearly budgets.
• The craft is designed to be both a heavy cargo hauler and human transport for no other reason than because we can. This increased the vehicle's complexity by an order of magnitude.
• The Space Shuttle pioneered and/or was used to perfect many of the technologies built into its design. By now there should be a Shuttle-II system that uses that knowledge in a newer, safer, and more compact vehicle. Unfortunately, a lot of money was spent on more pie-in-the-sky endevors like compact SSTOs utiliziing bleeding-edge rocket technology.

That being said, the Space Shuttle is a marvel of engineering. The engineers were merely given a task that didn't make sense (combine cargo and human lifting), and the space vehicle industry has suffered from a lack of follow-up.

A craft the size of this hypothetical spaceplane would need a huge amount of fuel for that

All rockets do. The entire point of the Rocket Equation is to figure out the percentage of mass that will need to be expended using a given propulsion method. That's why the shuttle weighs 2 kilotonnes on the pad just to get 135ish tonnes into orbit. Or in percentages, about 6.75% of the Shuttle's mass makes it to orbit. The rest is either burned or discarded.

Re:Wishful thinking

[AKAImBatman]

Here's the math. Plug in an Isp of about 400 for LHOx engines, a desired velocity of about 8.3 km/s, and a starting velocity of about 0.92 km/s.

Taking the final velocity minus the starting velocity, we get a required Delta V of 7.38 km/s.
Converting from Isp to exhaust velocity, we get (9.81 m/s * 400) = 3.924 km/s.

Thus our equation looks like:

m1 = m0 * 2.718^(-7.38 / 3.924)

"m0" is the starting mass of your rocket, m1 is how much mass you'll have left after you achieve the required Delta V. So, if we take a 20 tonne starting craft (for example) and plug it into the equation, we get:

m1 = 20,000 kg * 2.718^(-7.38 / 3.924)
m1 = 3,050 kg

To get the ratio of fuel to craft, we compute 1-(3,050/20,000) to come up with a craft that is about 85% fuel, leaving about 15% as craft mass. Considering that the Space Shuttle only gets about 6.75% of its mass to orbit, 15% is pretty darn good.

To compute the other way (how much fuel mass is needed for a given final mass), you can compute the following:

m0 = m1 * 2.718^(7.38 / 3.924)

If we assume a larger number than before (say, 20,000 kg of ship+cargo to orbit), we come up with the following figures:

m0 = 20,000 kg * 2.718^(7.38 / 3.924)
m0 = 131,140 kg

Again, we see the same ratio (1 - (20,000 / 131,140) = ~85%), but the sizes have increased. The question is, could the Valkyrie (XB-70) carry 131,140 kg of spacecraft?

Well, according to the specs I have, it had an empty weight of 93,000 kg, and a maximum takeoff weight of 250,000 kg. Maximum loaded capacity was 242,500 kg, so you can assume that the 8,000 kg difference is probably fuel expended to get off the ground. Doing some simple math (242,500 kg - 93,000 kg) we come to a final cargo capacity of 149,500 kg. Taking away the weight of our craft (149,500 kg - 131,140 kg) we find that the Valkyrie would have 18,360 kgs left over for fuel and other weight. That shaves it pretty close, but it's doable.

If you assume that the Air Force has increased her Thrust to Weight ratio with some of the more powerful jet engines that have been designed since the 1960's, the margins actually look pretty darn good.

Does that answer your question?

Re:good.

[Kesh]

The fatal flaw in your argument is that any vehicle designed to put anything into space is capable of deploying weapons there.

In the end it's to AVOID killing others

[Goldenhawk]

>It seems infinitely sad to me that the primary motivation
>for most technological advance in the world is to come up
>with a better means of killing others.

I'm sure I'll burn some karma on this, but I would beg to differ.

There is an interesting premise to Larry Niven's sci fi writing about the Kzin war - the Kzin telepaths reported to their masters that the humans had no military weaponry, and were sure to be an easy conquest. Yet when they first attacked, humanity threw them back in short order, because the civilian technology we DID have was so powerful it cut thru their military systems like butter.
http://www.larryniven.org/kzin/empire.htm
Hmmm.

I see things a little differently, however. I work for the US military as a civilian, directly involved in the procurement of weapons of war. Anyone in our organization will immediately tell you that the goal is not to wage war, but to avoid it. Ronald Reagan knew this when he emphasized his "peace thru superior firepower" mantra. If we allow ourselves to become weaker than our foes, we will find war waged upon us, simply because it's possible. Granted, the only way to stay ahead is to work hard at it, and stay atop the technological king-of-the-hill game. To many (and apparently to this person) it looks as if we want the weapons so we can use them - but I assure you that the vast majority of soldiers, airmen and marines in this country want nothing to do with going to war. I have great respect for the armed services in America, because they are willing to put themselves in death's way to free others. But nobody that I've ever talked with had any interest in conquering another county for the sake of expanding our territory, or taking something that was not already ours.

In the end, I find it fortunate that our military research ends up providing such dramatic benefits for the civilian world.

Practical observation

[amightywind]

How arrogant, to think that 'democracy' and 'capitalism' (american style of course) once adopted by those savage backward countries

'American style' is your embellishment, not my words. The need for democracy and capitalism is not so much derived form hubris as practical observation. What else to you suggest? Islamic faciscm? Stalinism? Maoist dictatorship?

RLV News on Blackstar spaceplane

[FleaPlus]

There's some pretty good coverage of the supposed Blackstar spaceplane over on Clark Lindsey's RLV News. According to the latest post, the existence of the project as previously described is looking rather dubious. Here's what Lindsey wrote:

Despite the many details provided by AvWeek about the purported Blackstar program, the existence of an "operational" TSTO reusable system seems wildly inconsistent with what has been happening with all the rest of the government space programs since the early 1990s and with what they have planned for the next couple of decades.

- As a reader already commented, NASA's whole approach to space transport is based on the claim that fully reusable space vehicles are not feasible with current technologies.
- DARPA has had programs like Falcon and RASCAL (canceled due to cost overruns) that are intended to provide "responsive space" capability. For the next 5-10 years, this simply means launching microsats on short notice. Why not just use Blackstar or build on its capabilities?
- Why would a system like the Blackstar be "shelved" when it is so far beyond what anyone else is flying and beyond what the rest of the government claims is even feasible?
- The magazine article speculates that the program was run directly or indirectly by an intelligence agency and they managed to kept it secret from even "top military space commanders". So how did they manage to fly this thing to orbit and not have it show up on the military's space tracking system?
- In a government where secrets seem to stay secret only until more than one person knows about them, I find it extremely hard to believe a huge program like this could be kept under wraps for over 10 years. And not just from the public but from most of the military and NASA.

If it was the beginning of April, I would take this whole thing to be a big leg-puller.

If we were still in the 1980s, I would assume AvWeek had been led astray by a disinformation campaign aimed at the Soviets. But the Soviets are gone so I'm not sure why anyone in the Pentagon or the Intelligence agencies would bother to run an elaborate spaceplane ruse other than perhaps to get back at AvWeek for breaking so many stories about secret programs over the past several decades...

A design study program and some prototype tests, maybe, but a secret operational orbital system borders on sci-fi. I like sci-fi and I hope this story is true but I'll wait for independent confirmation before I'll buy it.