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Paul Allen Launches Commercial Spaceship Project
smitty777 writes "The phrase 'Where do you want to go today?' takes on a whole new meaning as Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and the world's 57th richest man in the world, looks to create a new spaceship company. Stratolaunch Systems plans to bring 'airport like operations' to the world of private space travel. Partnering with Burt Rutan, the plan is to field a test within five years and commercially available flights within ten. Spacecraft will be air-launched from a giant, six-engined aircraft. There is more information available on the Stratolaunch homepage."
*crash*
...Department comes:
the world's 57th richest man in the world
To distance himself from Microsoft, eh?
To the Moon, Alice!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
http://www.airlaunch.ru/index.htm
You should thank these kind of "senile" old man for putting a bet in innovation , people, work and society, instead of financing CDS and wars.
Paul Allen for the money spigot, Burt Rutan for the carrier aircraft, and Elon Musk/SpaceX for the rocket stages. When I worked on such concepts many years ago at Boeing, we generally found that launching from altitude like that doubles the payload compared to the same rocket starting from the ground, so it makes a lot of sense from an engineering and cost sense, as long as the carrier aircraft costs less than the rocket stages per flight (normally easy to do).
This design overcomes one limitation we had at Boeing, which was the 747 was not quite large enough in it's current form. By going to six engines of the same size as the 747 uses, they solved that problem. Eventually they can also look at flying back the first rocket stage, for even more savings. Once it is empty of fuel, the rocket stage does not weigh much, so it would not take much in the way of wings, landing gear, and some small jet engines so it can fly to a landing. Without knowing how far it will go on a ballistic arc doing it's launch job, it is hard to say if it should fly back to the launch site, or fly forward to another landing location.
You can get to anywhere in the universe at 1m/s if you have enough fuel and time.
and their buddies.
hey, this is money well spent. those billionaires work hard for their space travel. they deserve a break every now and then.
Think of it as the real Trickle-down in action - super rich entrepeneur puts hundreds of people to work, designing, crafting, building, wiring and so on. It's a good thing©
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
For a long time I have wondered why we don't just use massive helium balloons to carry rockets much closer to space. Even if the balloon only gets a quarter of the way to orbit, it gets through the thickest air before the rocket fires.
Unless helium is more expensive than rocket fuel, but helium can be collected from alpha decay right, so it seems like it would be cheaper.
Even if it isn't feasible for big payloads, there are several high class hobbyist rockets out there that can reach 100k feet. Why not ride a balloon up to 70-80k, and then launch the rocket?
I never want to under-estimate Rutan, but he wants to glue two 747 fuselages together and have them flying in 5 years? Like, above houses where people live? Okey doke.
Personally, I was stunned the first time I saw a space shuttle astride a 747. Looked completely ungainly, but those babies have some carrying capacity!
I curious why they don't latch onto some old B52s and bring them up to date. Quite amazing themselves.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Having your own space flight company seems to be the new fad among todays ultra elites.
I suppose it's better than yachting.
Who else is going to fund private space travel, you?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Any patents filed on this by Paul Allen yet? Quick, what have we got for prior art?
How about a wide variety of designs through aviation history in which smaller piloted aircraft are launched from larger ones while airborne, not to mention the X-1 through X-15 programs and of course the Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Not in an expanding universe you can't.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Yeah, yeah, it was just a model, but they had the concept down 41 years ago:
http://www.ninfinger.org/rockets/nostalgia/70estf.html
http://www.ninfinger.org/rockets/nostalgia/70est020.html
...perhaps we should have some better places to go? All these companies are spending $ to be able to fly rich idiots into low earth orbit. So what's the next step? the ISS? Oh wait, that's not going to be around much longer. The moon? Well China will most likely be there by the time everyone else is ready. Where else?
Fact is, we don't have the technology to reach even out into our own solar system, let alone anywhere REALLY meaningful (such as some of those "Goldilocks" planets we see millions of light years away but can't hope to get anything other than pictures of). Face it, the private space initiative if crap. It's something for the super-rich to spend their money on. Meanwhile the people who have actually been dreaming of space flight or venturing outside of our solar system, for more than the cheap thrill these private "space flight" companies are offering, for their entire lives are stuck at home in a 9-5 without any hope of being able to pay the cost of entry to the lowest form of space flight possible, or available, to the average person (a.k.a. NOT astronauts).
Instead of this, they should be pooling their money into R&D and backing NASA to help develop the tech we need to GET OFF THIS ROCK and really explore the universe. I hate to sound like a broken record, but we literally know NOTHING about the universe we live in. How can $20,000 - $200,000 (depending on who you go with and when) for a few minutes of weightlessness be what the world is happy with? I for one expected more out of human ambition and curiosity.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Where do you want to be strip searched today?
... for his administration making the policy and (I presume) regulatory changes that have allowed this flowering of commercial space transportation.
We'll never beat the Chinese on labor costs. But I imagine Chinese bureaucracies are as inefficient at American ones so putting their government up against our entrepreneurs gives us a chance.
Stratolaunch: Launch from the stratosphere. Seems apropos to me!
The launch aircraft has enough range to transport the rocket to an equatorial launch point, which I've read can allow up to a 25% increase in payload
.This might improve on the project's economic chances.
Fuck Paul Allen.
Screw him and his 'all you code are belong to us' brigade
I would be interested in a breakdown of the advantages of such launch technology. I understand the flexibility aspect, and the advantage of moving toward the equator - although that is only a plus for certain launch trajectories. How much is saved by starting at altitude? What is the value of starting at 500 mph? How does this all affect the bottom line? Adding a reusable first stage is nice, but are we talking 10% savings? 20? I saw nothing about the real economics on the trite website.
I don't see a problem. He's welcome to spend his own money in any manner he pleases as long as it's legal.
Mach 6 at 60,000 feet gives you 6% of the energy you need to to orbit. A carrier airplane isn't worth the effort.
Nobody wants to tell him that because...why turn off the money? Another thing poor old Paul isn`t being told:
Q: How do you make a small fortune in aerospace?
A: Start with a large fortune.
These guys are all playing...like the hot-air balloonists who were playing around while Orville and Wilbur were doing the real deal. What the brothers did was hard. Think of it in modern terms: what if there were two guys, one who could cobble together the hardware software and physics to simulate hypersonic flow, and the other guy who could beg borrow steal or pyrolize enough carbon/carbon and titanium to make a scram SSTO. It's almost unimaginable, just like what Orville and Wilbur did. We don't yet know if those two guys will ever exist.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Orbital Systems would seem to have lots of prior art w.r.t. the Pegasus rocket...
Wow, you should really check your sources a little more carefully before you turn the flame on.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
So I guess his patent troll profits are being used for something...
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
How soon will Allen put money into something like Bigelow or IDC Dover? Basically, to make this profitable, he will want to have multiple destinations to go to. Of course, they could rent out the carrier since it will have some impressive cargo capability.
But I really think that Allen's goal is to do for Space what Allen's charter did for internet over cable, or musk's tesla did for electric cars. Allen will likely want to hurry BA or IDC along.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
the reason is that the real costs of space systems are human costs and system costs. Humans are easy to lower esp. when you have a system rigged for that. Well, aviation is rigged for that. Likewise, when you take the expensive portion, the first stage and make it a re-usable airplane, you change the economics dramatically. Will this be more efficient in terms of energy? I seriously doubt it. However, at some point, we will have hypersonic flight in which crafts are doing mach 10 or more at 90K feet. If this can become the next stage, then we are looking at cheap access to space. Probably cheaper than skylon.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Anyone else notice that the fuselage has a passing similarity in appearance to the Howard Hughes Herculese (Spruce Goose as it was insultingly called too).
The fact is that the amount of LOX to get to 50K/500 MPH is not that much. The real ECONOMIC issue is re-usability. As it is, the spaceX rocket appears to be an F 5, not an F9.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Pegasus was simply grabbing a USAF/NASA project and scaling it down (both in size and economics). They used an L-1011 and creating that. The problem is that Orbital designed poorly. OTH, Scaled has done a number of launches from their system and showed that it worked well. As such, Allen is willing to fund it. I am also going to guess that within 1 year, we will hear that he is funding Bigelow or IDC Dover to put a private space station.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Just saw an interview on the news with Burt and Paul. Paul made a point of saying he would not be one of the first to go up. In fact he would wait for many launches before he would go. I guess he learned something from his time at Microsoft!
What is missing is building the world's first private space station. My guess is that he will back something from BA or IDC Dover in the next year.
And Charter was not so much about making loads of money, but about getting Cable industry to carry internet. And he succeeded at that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not even close. Orbital got their tech from NASA/USAF. The ability to drop a vehicle was pioneered back in the 50's. And all that orbital did was use a dead L-1011 and somebody else's rocket (after all, OSC develops NOTHING).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If somebody like gates will pour some money into it, but do it in the west, rather than China, perhaps we can get some thing going.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
747-400 engines have thrust between 265 and 282 kN (depending on engine model). 777 engines have thrust between 338 and 514 kN. You can get more thrust out of four 777 engines than you can six 747 engines. The design has a high wing, so engine diameter isn't an issue. Why use six engines instead of four?
(A330 and A380 engines have only a small advantage over 747, at 310-320 kN.)
The 747-400 has been around 6 more years than the 777, and 747-300 much longer again. Maybe they can get six used 747 engines much cheaper than four used 777 engines. As a low-usage aircraft, it makes sense to have increased maintenance costs if it saves enough on capital costs.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
if you benefit too many people with anti-aging, you'll find us all running out of room on Earth.
when that happens, you'll be wishing we had some kind of backup plan.
Hmm yeah that makes sense. I guess that's why Burt is out there building rocketplanes and making millions of dollars, and slashdot posters are... doing whatever it is they do in their basement :P
Googling for some data here -- a 747 weighs about 400,000 pounds empty and can carry its own weight, so a six-engine 747 should be able to haul 600,000 pounds.
Now a Falcon 9 weighs 735,000 pounds at launch, with a 23,000 pound payload -- 3.1%. With some Rutan composite skillz the Stratolaunch plane should be able to carry a Falcon 9. With the 3% fuel savings from air launching, the payload doubles to 46,000 pounds! Pretty damn good, I'd say.
Care to make a wager as to which one will fly first? Ideas are one thing. Engineering is hard.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
It's counter-intuitive but, actually, with infinite time you eventually reach your destination.
I agree, this is a stupid waste of money used to revive a rich man's childhood dreams and ego. The money would be much better spent funding grants at the NIH, they are peer reviewed by actual scientists who have a better feel for what ideas might work or not than some plutocrat who had a part in a company that had a def facto monopoly on operating systems..
Who else is going to fund private space travel, you?
All I an afford is the Ralph Kramden method - Bang! Zoom!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar