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Air Force Wants Reusable Fly-Back Rockets
FleaPlus writes "The Air Force is initiating a pathfinder program to develop a first-stage rocket booster capable of gliding back to a runway so it can be easily reused. Lockheed Martin has already launched a secretive prototype, and a Cal Poly team has a prototype based on Buzz Aldrin's Starcraft/StarBooster design (video). The Air Force estimates such a booster could cut launch costs by 50% over the current Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets, and could also offer a rapid surge/replacement capability if combined with reusable spacecraft like the recently launched X-37B. Initial test flights are planned for 2013."
In yelling at the moon.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
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I hope they can come up with something that works out. This should have been done decades ago when it became clear the shuttle would always be an albatross.
If flying cars could be made to blow up the enemy, or even just humiliate them, we'd have flying cars. Not to take anything away from the folks at Cal Poly, but I'm still waiting for the next Teflon.
1) You shouldn't reuse rockets. They are the most stressed components on Earth and space... They're just tubes full of fuel and some fiddly bits. The fiddly bits are not worth trying to reuse. I thought we learned that by now.
2) OK, so the skin of the rocket, assuming it doesn't do double-duty as fuel tank, should split in 4 like a banana, and turn into a helicopter.
Not sure why but I find the thought of a loads of little boosters gliding into base kind of funny. Why is it that weapon delivery systems can be cute too?
I have discovered a flaw in their request:
If the rocket flies back, it did not blow up. Is this desired?
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Flyback boosters have been proposed and studied ad nausem throughout the life of the Shuttle program.
All iniital sudies performed were never even close enough to feasible to warrant funding any sort of development.
Even with weight saving advances in composties, it's unlikely any breakthrough is at hand.
Boeing did a study of making a winged Saturn V first stage back in 1962.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/winturnv.htm
The payload penalty might be problematic. Also, you can't really cluster more than 2 flyback stages due to the size of the wings. If you could use a parafoil and land with skids, that might solve that problem and to be fair western rockets don't really use clustering (Delta IV Heavy being a notable exception).
Graham
Where has the research being going with that?
Fifteen years of development by committee, and they'll start construction on something that looks exactly like the Shuttle.
Because this is pretty much exactly where the Shuttle started.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
We are using 2,300 year old technology... It's time to quit teaching what can't be done, so we can open up to what can be... The subject of propulsion, or mass and inertia would be a good place to start.. Right now our systems are as comical as the old Flash Gordon pointy tin can with sparks(ions?) coming out the back.
You can't do that, it's impossible!
Well, nobody told me...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
WTF, they launched a Cal Poly team? Where's the copy editors when you need them?
Does the USAF want a pony too?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've been wondering if a bunch of SpaceCubs would be a good trick for this especially since these won't need a pressure-retaining cockpit, just a clamp to transfer extra thrust to another rocket body...
(Reminds me of the Heinleinian "Joyboat Junior"...)
This is Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, not Cal Poly Pomona. They both have engineering schools that play with rockets, but only one has a fine arts department that will survive the summer.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Air Force Wants Reusable Fly-Back Rockets
And so do the rest of us!
Oh wait, I read that as "Air Force Wants Reusable Backpack Rockets".
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Isn't the shuttle such an albatross precisely because reusability is so impractical?
Nope. It's because somebody goofed and they made the wings too big. As I heard it back then (caveat: didn't check it myself):
The shuttle was supposed to be a combined civilian and military vehicle, so the design budgets could be combined and the cost per unit could be brought down by building a bunch of 'em.
Civilian stuff mostly orbits equatorial and near-equatorial, launching eastward to get a boost from the Earth's rotation. This would be launched east from Canaveral, so crashes would be into the Atlantic. A lot of military stuff orbits polar or near polar, and doesn't get the boost. This would be launched south from Vandenberg, so crashes would be into the Pacific.
Without the boost from the Earth's rotation you get a significant reduction in payload capacity. There's a rule of thumb for computing this.
The shuttle lands as a glider. The wings are partly for steering it for cross-track on the way down. The farther the worst-case sideways distance from your orbital track to the landing site is, the bigger the wings you need.
For typical missions the Shuttle doesn't need much cross-range capability: You just wait for the orbit closest to going right over the landing site and go down then. This happens twice per day. You could get away with little stubby wings like the X-15.
But the military wanted to be able to run another mission profile: A polar, pop-up, once-around shot, landing back at the launch site. This would be for things like spying in a war or near-war situation, when you'd want to get the shuttle down with the info right away and also before the enemy could shoot it down. Problem with this is that the earth moves the landing zone out from under the orbit and you need a lot of cross-range capability to do it. So you need big wings.
So they ran a sanity check on whether the polar orbit was still doable with the big, heavy wings needed for this mission. They're heavy, and that weight comes right out of payload, so the payload capacity would be reduced and the cost-per-pound to low orbit raised a bunch. But it looked like the polar orbit could still launch a decent-sized cargo. So they went with the big wings.
But when they'd run the sanity check they'd applied the rule-of-thumb to the CARGO weight. Somebody had forgotten that, since it also ended up in orbit, the orbiter itself, along with the crew and their consumables, WAS ALSO PART OF THE PAYLOAD. So you have to apply the rule of thumb to the TOTAL weight: Payload, orbiter, consumables, reentry fuel, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Once they did the computation right it turns out that the shuttle would only have a couple hundred pounds of payload to polar orbit. No launching spy satellites for you! Oops!
So the military didn't end up using the shuttle (except for a couple equatorial shots testing some gear). They built their own big boosters and went their separate way. The Vandenberg shuttle launch site was demoted to an emergency landing site (so the shuttle could be landed if Canaveral had bad weather and then piggybacked to Canaveral rather than relaunched from Vandenberg). The military didn't buy any craft and the whole cost of construction and operation fell on the civilian projects, raising the cost-per-pound still further.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
yes, but when will the air force crack down on the real issue of making my key's return themselves to my pocket after a night of drinking?
The allusion to the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" should always be complete, i.e., "albatross around the neck", when used in relation to aviation since the albatross is among the most efficient fliers on earth; capable of flying thousands of miles with little expenditure of energy.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Actually, take your pick:
Centuri SST Shuttle
Centuri Space Shuttle
Estes Orbital Transport
Or going way back:
von Braun Passenger Rocket (1958)
I was bitterly disappointed that the actual shuttle looked so . . . clunky.
It is called SpaceshipOne. SpaceshipTwo is already owned.
Why do we need a rocket when a TSTO is a hell of a lot cheaper?? Launch from mid-air at the highest altitude possible is a lot cheaper than launching from ground level.
I think it would be a mistake to assume that. An orbital ship isn't fundamentally any more complicated than a passenger jetliner.
They're vastly different, not only in terms of what's under the skin (specially engineered components, ultra-hazardous chemicals, etc), but also in terms of economics. Jetliners are designed from the outset to be economical enough to make a profit, not to exceed physical performance goals. If Boeing can't make a jet that makes money for other people, then they drop the project, even if it's interesting. See the Sonic Cruiser for the latest example in a long line of them.
Private companies, by contrast, are just now taking the same approach to building rockets. And since NASA is a government agency... they're not concerned with profit at all.... then their priorities are performance and technical achievement. Cost has always far down on the list of NASA's priorities. Their in-house slogan during the Moon Race was, after all, "money is no object, but time is of the essence".
When NASA says that they're building something with economy in mind, they always fail in some way, because they don't really have the same kind understanding about economy as a business that lives and dies by profit. This is the main reason, even more than politics, that the Shuttle became so expensive, and why the Clinton Era "better, faster, cheaper" programs had so many spectacular failures.
I'm a big proponent of SSTO
I love the idea of SSTO, but it's the spacefaring equivalent of Cold Fusion; a modern day pipe dream at current technology levels. Lockheed couldn't even get it to work with the X-33, let alone with the VentureStar it was supposed to spawn.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Here is the video with better image quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLpUgDGjJuw
Reusable flyback rockets. Sure. Newfangled nonsense. Buy a goddamn boomerang already!
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
How often it happens is a product of orbital inclination and orbital altitude, for a typical Shuttle mission it happens on average twice a day.
That's what the designers of the Shuttle thought too, way back at the start of the design process. Then they actually started doing mission analysis - and discovered how very wrong they were. It turned out that average of only twice a day could leave the crew stranded, unable to reach a safe landing site, for periods of up to eighteen hours. Not good in the event of a problem on orbit, and the only way to fix it was to add cross range capability (read: bigger wings). They also discovered that lack of cross range capability limited the choice of abort scenarios and limited the orbital inclinations the Shuttle could reach. All of this meant the wings started growing - big and fast.
Wrong. Shuttle capacity to polar orbit is notionally 28000 pounds. (Probably greater now with the reduced weight External Tank developed for ISS missions.)
Wrong again. At least one military Shuttle mission went into a 61 degree orbit. Several launched classified satellites.
There has been a similar european project named "Hopper". It was planned as a first stage for a launch to orbit. Unfortunately it did not get past a glide test with automatic landing of a 1:7 prototype (German article with pictures). I remember that German state funding was cut after politicians became aware of the project, and comanies unwilling to finance this solely.
Flyback rocket sounds like a potentially monumental "Oh shit"-moment waiting to happen...