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Virgin Galactic Announces New Satellite Launch Vehicle
An anonymous reader writes "Virgin Galactic has announced a new craft called LauncherOne, which it will use to put satellites into orbit. 'It appears to leverage some of the hardware already developed for SpaceShipTwo, Virgin's suborbital tourist vehicle. Like SpaceShipTwo, the new rocket rides up underneath Virgin's big carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, to about 50,000 feet. After release, the rocket drops for approximately four seconds before the first stage ignites. After the first stage burns out, a second stage takes the satellite to orbit.' Launching from a moving airplane eliminates many cost and scheduling concerns inherent to ground-based launches, and it's much easier to reach a broad range of trajectories for putting objects into orbit. According to the press release, LauncherOne will get objects up to 225kg into orbit for less than $10 million."
Orbital Sciences build something very similar, called Pegasus. It's air launched, is quite reliable, can throw 440kg into LEO, has a very good launch record -- and costs roughly as much ($11m a pop, if memory serves correctly.)
Branson is nuts if he thinks he can prevail against Orbital in this segment of the launch market.
... and to some extent he is as the CEO and the figurehead for Virgin. But he does ambitious stuff nobody else is doing.
I hope he makes mad profits in the space business and other companies see the potential.
I am not an expert but some quick calculations reveal that if they can launch 225kg payload for $10M that puts it at pretty close to the same cost other vehicles have been providing for years, like an Athena 2 or Taurus launch vehicle (which can also support much heavier payloads). Is this unique in that it is specifically for smaller payloads? Or, is the ability to do launches "wherever, whenever"? This has interesting implications but doesnt seem like it would shake up the market too much given that most satellites are planned out pretty far in advance of going to orbit.
$10M for 225 kg is more than $40000 per kg. That's even more than Shuttle's effective price-to-orbit for its payload. Once they get their price at least 10 times down then they can start thinking about competing with real rockets.
Say you got a 200kg sattelite you want in orbit. How do you get it to launch on a normal rocket? Not alone for sure, it may be the same kilo price but those rockets are not going to go up for just you. Which means you got to fit yourself around the schedules and requirements of others. Want an odd orbit? Sorry, our rocket ain't going there.
Sending cargo by ocean vessel is insanely cheap. Pity if you got a parcel to be delivered to Switzerland. The right vehicle, at the right cost.
Lets just assume for a second that a self-made billionaire knows more about making money then all of slashdot put together.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The Concorde will never be replaced. It was horrendously expensive and in the same league of complexity as the SR-71. It was given to private industry for a song and a dance after a horrifically expensive government-funded development and build process. The Concorde was always horrifically expensive to fly on, more than first-class tickets on conventional airliners.
The super-rich will have supersonic private jets soon enough, but there will certainly never be another supersonic airliner. Us proles will never fly supersonic, although Boeing is working on a near-sonic design that could actually make sense.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Well, except that they lose a lot of the efficiency by carrying the vehicle up already fueled. The ideal from a cost standpoint, particularly because of what it does to the structure of the spacecraft being carried, is to carry it to altitude without at least the oxidizer, then transfer the oxidizer in flight. Means you need a tanker as well as a carrier aircraft (unless the spacecraft can operate as a jet in the atmosphere, which introduces other complexities), but it makes your vehicle structure lighter and thus dramatically increases how much cargo you can loft for a given size vehicle. This in turn dramatically reduces the cost per unit mass per flight. Rocketplane had it right; they were just too early to make it work as a business.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
When I met Richard Branson he was living on a houseboat on the Thames. Unlike many of the people who have made a lot of money, he didn't start off rich. He seems to have been successful because he is good at delegation, focusses on the bottom line, and looks after his managers. If he wants to sell space tourism, some very clever people will have worked out how it will get to the bottom line.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
That's just enough to orbit my mother in law.
I've been told his businesses have to make a business case for every publicity stunt he does, and they have to fund it. Think of it as saving some of the money spent on expensive celebrity endorsements by being your own celebrity, and it makes a lot of sense.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Ditch the space suit. If your capsule is going to fail it is going to fail catastrophically, and if it fails catastrophically, a space suit ain't gonna help.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Dug around in Wikipedia a little and found that White Knight 2 has a carrying capacity of 35,000 lbs (~16k kilos). The X-37B is listed at 11,000 (5k) fully loaded, the crewcab version X-37C should be under 25,000 and even the old pre-composite X-15 was 34,000(15.4k). Now the X-15 was far shy of orbital velocity, but rocket design has advanced some in the 40+ years since the end of the program and building a standby vehicle for quick launch to orbit might be getting feasible.
I, like many, have mourned the decline of manned space exploration. However, I see the work of Virgin Galactec and SpaceX as reasons to hope that not all is dead.
Maybe the parts are coming together.
-Xanthos
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
Of course the Concorde will be replaced. Or at least its function will be replaced and Branson's venture may, or may not, have what it takes.
Also, I have serious reservations about supersonic anything that doesn't carry bombs. So far the technology's just not there to build supersonic aircraft for civilian use at a price that's not nuts where as Branson might have the makings of much faster travel at a lower price.
As, or perhaps more important, it's not an all-or-nothing proposition like a civilian supersonic exective jet. Branson can sell joy rides at a profit, which he's already doing. That helps amortize the cost of a satellite launch capability which sets the stage, maybe, for a long distance, ballistic passenger/package service. When it absatively, possilutily has to be there in ninety minutes or less Branson Ballistic delivers!
With a supersonic zeckujet you have lots of previous work to draw upon but you have the hurdle of building a commerically-viable supersonic, multi-passenger jet to overcome. So far, no one's managed that trick or even come close. It just may that bypassing the atmosphere is easier then going through it.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Maybe the consensus among armchair rocket scientists is it's not much benefit. Among real rocket scientists the consensus is it doubles payload over launching the same rocket from the ground. A rocket starting from sea level has the following losses:
* Gravity loss - when you are thrusting vertically, that is not adding to your orbital velocity.
* Drag loss - aerodynamic drag flying through the atmosphere resists your acceleration
* Thrust loss - rocket engines have less thrust at sea level because of air pressure x nozzle exit area.
Launching at jet airplane altitude helps with all of these, you spend more of the flight near horizontal, less drag because you are above most of the air already, and higher thrust. In addition, you get 10 km altitude and 240 m/s free from the carrier airplane.
I ran a study at Boeing on "jet boost", which is similar to air-launch except we dispense with the airplane part, and just strap fighter engines as boosters to a rocket core. We used the same trajectory program as NASA used to plan Shuttle missions, and got our engine data direct from Pratt & Whitney, so I am fairly confident we were getting accurate results.
I wonder when Branson will announce the intent to start a passanger service?
Ever since the Concorde was grounded there hasn't been anyway for the uber-rich to get from here to there faster then us proles. I'm pretty sure there are folks who'd pay more then a few dollars to get from New York to Paris and back with time left over to flog their yacht crew for letting the boat get wet.
Concorde tickets were remarkably cheap - not much more than a first class fare on a real (non-american) airline -- SQ, BA, EK etc. Think about a situation where your factory, costing $100k/hour, is broken, and you need an expert person, or a part, to get there ASAP. A 3 hours flight saves $500k rather than choosing an 8 hour flight, so a $100k ticket would be well worth it.
Sadly the lack of reasonable length journeys were blocked politically (unable to offer supersonic JFK to LAX in 2 hours gate-gate for example), and technologically (range quite low -- can't do none stop Europe to Far East), so the number airborne never materialised to keep maintenance costs down.
It wouldn't surprise me if supersonic private jets come along at some point in the next 50 years, and thus smaller, targetted, scheduled routes (like the LCY-JFK run)