SpaceShipTwo Design and Pics Released

An anonymous reader writes "Designs and photos for Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic's new suborbital spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, and its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, have been released." Lots of specs and numbers if you're interested in that sort of thing although nothing hugely detailed.

Comments

Re:Nothing to see here

[FlatEric521]

Really, the primary thing this project has going for it is that it is not funded by a government. It might be boring and not state of the art now, but further development of private space flight should lead to some truly interesting technology and vehicles.

Re:Nothing to see here

[geekoid]

Cutting edge technology is only one place to contribute to space flight. Production improvements can also aid space flight, and producing more of the material needed to do space flight may improve manufacturing techniques.

Then making 'space flight' available to more of the public helps create more awareness.

Re:Nothing to see here

[gstoddart]

It might be boring and not state of the art now, but further development of private space flight should lead to some truly interesting technology and vehicles.

But, really, if private space travel is to become commonplace, what we want is boring and un-sexy technology -- not exciting and cutting edge.

What we need is the equivalent of a Buick station wagon with wood-grain trim. Boring as hell, but a reliable vehicle which focuses on doing the task instead of pushing the envelope. Once you have that, then this stuff can start to become routine based on available technology.

Cheers

Re:Parallels and Perspective

[Rei]

First off, almost all orbital launches are private. Most are completely private except for government funding in the development stage and government launch contracts; the launches are run for-profit by companies like Boeing and Lockheed. Even for ones run by NASA, like the shuttle, the craft itself was largely built by private companies. If you want to rule out "large" private companies, there's SeaLaunch, Orbital Sciences, etc, who've developed and run for-profit their own rockets. And if you want rockets developed largely from scratch, look no further than SpaceX and their Falcon rocket (with soon upcoming Dragon spacecraft).

Why cheer for irrelevance? Cheer for what actually matters.

By the way -- I'm not sure the analogy with early aircraft is the one you're going for. Just ignoring how little capital it took to build an airplane versus what it takes to make an orbital spacecraft, you should realize that early airplanes suffered major crashes at very regular intervals. The pilots typically survived because the performance of said aircraft was so low. The first cross-country flight took weeks and involved dozens of crashes. For the first around-the-world race, the US strategically placed replacement parts and even entire replacement airplanes for its pilots to use.

Even if that was an analogy you wanted to use, you should be comparing early aircraft with early rockets (V2, Redstone, etc), not with SS1 and their "repeat what's done decades ago in a way that we know damn well won't scale to anything". SS1 isn't developing new technology or pushing the envelope; they're making craft that don't advance anything except people's ability to have a joyride.

Re:Nothing to see here

[edwardpickman]

Say the 29' Mercedes was far more impressive technically than what Ford was putting out but how many straight 8 engines do you see used in cars today? The most cutting edge isn't always the most practical. Do we wait for warp technology for space flight or use chemical rockets to get the ball rolling? The Space Ship 2 is the Model T of space flight. That's not an insult it's a major compliment. The Model T was one of the most successful cars in history for good reason. This craft puts space flight not into the hands of the average person but potentially into the hands of large numbers of people. Henry Ford would give it a big thumbs up and we should all view it as the stepping stone it is.

Have to say

[MacarooMac]

I'm surprised at the amount of scepticism over this project, esp on /. Let's face it, commercial designs such as SS2 are the only way any of us down here will be getting 'up there' in our lifetime.

FYI, from el Wiki: "More than 65,000 would-be space tourists have applied for the first batch of 100 tickets to be available. The price will initially be US$200,000. However, after the first 100 tickets are sold the price would be dropped to around $100,000. Then deposits after the first year will drop to around $20,000. The duration of the flight will be approximately 2.5 hours, and weekly launches are planned.

In December 2007 Virgin Galactic had 200 paid-up applicants on its books for the early flights, and 95% were passing the necessary 6-8 g centrifuge tests"

Re:Nothing to see here

[hador_nyc]

So is your average bobble head doll manufacturer. And they're just as relevant to improving orbital spaceflight. If you want someone to cheer for, cheer for SpaceX, for Orbital Sciences, for SeaLaunch, for any of the private companies involved in *actual orbital spaceflight*.

The problem with your logic is that you are missing the effects of changing the norm. Sure, like another commenter said in response to your comment, a Buick is not amazing, but it's reliability is compared to a Formula 1. The Shuttle is a Formula 1, so is SeaLaunch and the others. They aren't trying to move people on the scale and with the safety of these guys, but think if all the cars in the world were just race cars. This will change things; particularly, to continue my analogy, when SpaceShipTwo is basically the Model T. With the funds they will get from selling these trips to the public, sexy advances can be made; ones that I think the other companies will have difficulty keeping up with.

Re:Nothing to see here

[khallow]

Production improvements of low ISP vehicles contribute absolutely nothing to high ISP vehicles. Production improvements of vehicles with minimal to no TPS contribute nothing to the serious TPS challenges of actual orbital vehicles. Virtually nothing about SS1 applies to the serious challenges involved in spaceflight. Here's my take. You are very wrong. Scaled Composites is carefully putting together that vehicle with the high ISP engine, the thermal protection system, and all those other challenges. It just hasn't starting designing it yet. There's a lot more to a vehicle than the vehicle itself. You need experienced designers, ground crew, and pilots. You need testing experience and infrastructure (note, for example, that SpaceShipTwo has its own flight simulator already). You need to gain experience in jumping the substantial bureaucratic hurdles for a manned space vehicle. You need to understand what the problems and challenges are before you design much less put the vehicle together. And you need to do all that without going bankrupt. What you are seeing is IMHO how a master would approach this problem. The key is incremental design. You don't make the orbital vehicle all at once with all those unknown pieces snapped together. You build up to it with progressively more sophisticated launch vehicles and extensive testing at each step. Unlike the other "alt.space" players like SpaceX, Blue Horizon, SpaceDev, etc, Scaled Composites probably turned a small profit with SpaceShipOne, its first space vehicle. And I bet it's turning a profit with SpaceShipTwo as well. If SpaceShipTwo doesn't get the hoped-for business, then Scaled Composites can walk away from it all. The thing that gets ignored is that Scaled Composites has economically one of the soundest projects in the space business.

Not really

[WindBourne]

Probably half or more of the posters here are from America. If you check a number of polls, many Americans believe that NASA has been a waste. Sadly, they also believe that Science is a waste. It comes down to the more that politicians declare that science projects like Genetic Engineering, Stem Cell research, Global Warming Research, etc is bad for the world (and America), then by extension, then RD efforts like NIH, CDC, and even NASA must be worthless. Out politicians are killing us. It is no wonder that we see our RD labs torn down.

Re:Nothing to see here

[XNormal]

> If you disagree with this statement, go ahead -- explain why you feel that a vehicle with this low delta-V, horrible ISP, and proportionally high mass that faces bare minimal reentry heating -- advances the state of the art.

Other than contributions like feathered reentry I agree that it does very little to advance the state of the art.

But that is precisely the point. The state of the art does not need much advancing. Everything we really need know in order to get into space has been known for a couple of decades and has advanced very little even with much bigger budgets thrown at it by governments around the world. What we need to advance is the state of practice and Scaled/Virgin is doing exactly that.

Just one small example: an aircraft capable of carrying with proper ground clearance and safely dropping this size of load did not exist until now. It can be useful for many other applications like this one. Does this advance the state of the art? Of course not. We've known such an aircraft can be built for well over half a century. But having this kind of aircraft actually available shaves many millions and a lot of risk from the budget of projects that need it. We all know these projects are facing lots of risks and are always underbudgeted so every little bit of help they can get really counts.

So it has been funded by joyriders. Anything wrong with that? Would you rather fund such development with your tax dollars?