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Spaceport America Begins Construction
eldavojohn writes "While a lot of people are wondering if commercial spaceflight will ever make it, Spaceport America is holding its groundbreaking ceremony today. You can watch it live at their site at 11am MST. The spaceport is aiming for a diverse clientele, including the delivery of small national security purpose satellites into Earth orbit as well as research and development for scientific purposes. After getting their FAA license and securing funding, the 27 square mile development project has officially begun. The target date for completion is the end of 2010 — let's all hope for success in the milestone goal!"
Back in the 1990s, one of the most realistic-seeming depictions of the rise of private spacefaring was Michael Fynn's future history beginning with Firestar . Flynn made it seem as if the biggest obstacle towards getting into space was not gravity and fuel costs as much as government hassles. If Spaceport America has successfully dealt with the FAA, then I would like to think that things are looking up from here (though Flynn suggested companies like FedEx would massively support the endeavour, which seems unlikely now in the age of the internet).
The Artist Concept of the spaceport is really quite stunning.
"...Why haven't space planes been developed?...Couldn't we just use a Scramjet until it becomes inefficient and then a rocket for the rest of the way?...."
First of all: we really don't have a production ready scramjet yet. There have been a few prototypes, but nothing that is ready to be built and bolted onto an aircraft carrying people. Making an engine that can "burn" fuel while that fuel-air mix is moving at speeds above the speed of sound relative to the engine, without blowing out, is not yet something we have mastered well enough to rely upon.
And that's the biggie right there: making a man-rated craft is HARD. You cannot tolerate any failures that can lead to loss of crew - look at how much crap NASA has taken (and justifiably so, to an extent) over the loss of 2 shuttles. You have to design EVERYTHING so that when it fails ("when", not "if") it fails in a way that allows the crew to make it home. Much of the design decisions on Orion vs. the Shuttle - the decisions that have many people crying "WE ARE GOING BACKWARDS! ORION IS TEH FAIL!" - are because the Shuttle way of doing things is a fail-unsafe and the Orion way is fail-safe.
Now, to address your question of "why not use jets, then scramjets, then rockets" - that is being discussed, but keep in mind that an engine you aren't using RIGHT NOW is just dead weight where cargo could be. There are good reasons to drop of the bits of the craft you aren't going to use anymore - hauling them the rest of the way up is just wasting fuel.
Then there is the problem that getting into "space" is only "hard", but getting into orbit is REALLY HARD. It takes roughly an order of magnitude more delta-V to get to a stable orbit than to just "get into space" like SpaceShip1 did.
That's why the idea of using a reusable vehicle (let alone a MAN RATED reusable vehicle) just to launch cargo is about as stupid as using a Lamborghini to move cattle - IMHO NASA should have built 2 systems: a man-rated shuttle just for moving people and a disposable cargo vehicle that shared many of the components of the shuttle to move freight - yes, you might have been "throwing away" big chunks of your cargo vehicle every launch, but the cost (in terms of "weight-that-isn't-cargo" as well as in terms of money) of re-usability vs. the cost of throwing it away is such that throwing it away makes more sense. I don't try to "re-use" snot-filled facial tissues as it doesn't make fiscal sense - same thing for ships.
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They aren't that stupid. Most officials recognize that people like to view major equipment like this.
The restriction of non-travelers in airports has made it difficult to spend time watching airplanes land and take off. Rather than ignore this, airports (like DFW) have been adding viewing decks available to those outside security. You may have to watch through glass or through a screen fence, but you'll be able to sit and enjoy your pasttime.
If they do it for airplanes, they'll do it for rockets and spaceships.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The SR-71 Blackbird had a combination jet/ramjet engine, where the turbines were used at lower speeds, and then once it broke supersonic it became a ramjet using bypasses that directed the air (compressed by the cones on front of the engine) around the turbines which comprise most of the volume of the huge engine cylinders.
Not only is the SR-71 anything but an economical bird, it was also terribly complex to design, ridiculously inefficient while using the turbine (without even accounting for the fact that until air friction caused its panels to expand and seal it leaked fuel literally like a sieve), and very heavy. Tacking a rocket onto that kind of system to reach space sounds all kind of inefficient and uneconomical. I'm no aerospace engineer, but I wouldn't be surprised if designing the engine to seal off the front and use an internal oxidizer was infeasible and the rockets had to essentially be a whole separate system.
Frankly as far as hybrid systems go, I still like the Spaceship One/White Knight approach. A separate carrier vehicle can take the spacecraft up to high-ish altitudes, and then when the space craft takes ignites its rockets and takes off, it doesn't have to carry the carrier vehicle's jet engines with it. But who knows if that can be scaled up to something capable of carrying an orbit-capable vehicle plus a significant payload? Well, Burt Rutan I'd imagine.
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