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

[Rei]

Hey, if all you care about is joyrides that do absolutely nothing more than entertainment, power to you. As for me, I care about spaceflight that has more relevance than a sounding rocket. I.e., satellites, stations, bases, colonies, probes, telescopes, and so on. What's holding us back is the price of *orbital* launches, so pardon me if I'm a bit harsh on companies that pretend to be contributing to that when they're doing absolutely nothing.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Rei]

ISP = Specific Impulse
TPS = Thermal Protection System.

Sorry; I figured people could look up any acronyms they don't know on their own. After all, they feel qualified enough to debate about rocketry; shouldn't they at least be bothered to learn the most basic terms and concepts?

The innovation is coming from the fact that they are reaching sub-orbit for somewhere around a 1/10 of the cost of the Mercury project

They're *not doing any relevant research*. Mercury was breaking new ground, and didn't have the benefit of modern materials to boot. This is repeating old ground. Mercury used Redstone rockets. The Redstone reached Mach 5.5, over twice as fast, which means over 4 times the kinetic energy per unit mass, which means dissipating that much on reentry. Getting to that velocity, however, is a lot harder than double or even four times the effort. In rocketry, as you try to scale up your velocity, you also have to scale up your fuel and oxidizer. However, that also means getting that fuel and oxidizer to velocity, which means more fuel and oxidizer, and so on. It's exponential growth and exponential difficulty.

the technology and innovations generated by the program are either being simply lost in time or are locked from private enterprise behind "classified"

The heck they are. Rockets designs far, far better than the Redstone are completely open and available to the public. Not to mention that most serious rocketry companies hire at least *one* engineer (preferably many) with a background in rocketry.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Rei]

But spaceX is doing the same thing NASA, Russia, the EU have done. sit on a giant explosion and ride it up into space. SS2 and white knight are working on flying up there. with any luck SpaceShip 10 will be SSTO which makes it 10 times better than anyone else.

Better yet, while we're ignoring physics, let's ride a magical unicorn up to the ISS and let it graze on stardust and moonbeams.