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DARPA Launches Military Spaceplane Project
RocketAcademy writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a new program to develop a reusable first-stage launch vehicle. Experimental Spaceplane 1 (XS-1) would be capable of flying 10 times in 10 days, with a small ground crew, reaching speeds of Mach 10, and deploying a small upper stage to place a 3,000-pound satellite into orbit. The XS-1 program is complementary to the Air Force's Boeing X-37, which is a reusable upper stage. The X-37 is currently launched by an expendable Atlas rocket but could be launched by a vehicle derived from XS-1 in the future. Military planners have dreamed of a two-stage, fully reusable Military Spaceplane for several years, but funding has not materialized up to now."
This seems to dovetail nicely with Elon Musk's plans for a reusable Falcon first stage.
What was the usual warhead size for an ICBM again?
...let me be the first to say: oh shit!!!
Aside from the obvious screaming lunacy of militarizing even Earth orbit, I have to wonder what the hell the "leaders" of this new Amerikan Union are trying to accomplish with this. Surely if they were responding to a threat, they wouldn't be announcing it for the whole planet to know. They want the whole planet to go "fuck, I'm scared of those Americans".
Well, I am. The USSA is terrifying at this point. But that's not going to make people think, "ooh we better be nice to the Americans so they don't kick our asses" - what they're going to be thinking will be more along the lines of "the Americans are dooming us all, we must do something to stop them".
Which, come to think of it, might be exactly what they want: a war that they didn't start.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
The US Space Shuttle and USSR Buran proved conclusively that resusable spaceplanes are hugely wasteful. The only way the X-37B (the current "shuttle") could be considered successful is that it spends more time in the air than on the ground, since it's up for about 6-18 months at a time.
Spaceplane mass is wasted mass that can't be used for payload mass. Launch electronics are cheap these days, I am honestly very curious what good a reusable spaceplane provides over existing expendable rockets. As Tsotha mentioned the Falcon 9 will be fully reusable in 4-5 years if everything goes according to plan. Spaceplanes are hugely wasteful, even if they aren't manned.
moox. for a new generation.
The US Space Shuttle and USSR Buran proved conclusively that resusable spaceplanes are hugely wasteful.
Not really, since neither of them was really reusable, more vaguely refurbishable, and both were prototypes with no development path.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Shuttles were built for military purposes, not efficiency. Just like this one.
DARPA is not always right, but they are not a bunch of dummies either. The see enough need for a spaceplane that they want to invest resources on it. They obviously disagree with you that "Spaceplanes are hugely wasteful".
Why is Snark Required?
So basically a revival of X-33/DC-X, neither of which should have been cancelled in the first place, and they're willing to pay 10X the original estimated launch costs of the most expensive one ($5,000,000 per launch vs. the X-33 estimated cost of $500,000) and 20X the least expensive one ($250,000 estimated per for the DC-X).
Seems a bit redundant compared to simply reviving DC-X.
Yeah, a mach 10 staging requirement (as XS-1 is a first stage) means only the big boys will try that. Unless you do a serious boost glide back to launch site, your infrastructure requirements get painful. This seems like a sleazy way to get a boost stage for a hypersonic based precision global strike (PGS) vehicle.
If they really wanted a X-37 launcher that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, they are really going to need a lower staging speed or the first stage will be wayyyy to far downrange. Also, none of the space startups will touch mach 10 staging, so this in no way is promoting commercial space tech development.
The UN's outer space treaty dates from 1967, and the stated intentions to drive it further were never realised.
The intention seems to be to set up a framework against the weaponization of space.
And so it is the USA that puts those hopes beyond our reach.
Thanks, ally.
no they aren't hugely wasteful. especially the Buran which didn't have the main engines mounted in it. The Buran died with the collapse of the soviet union.
Even the space shuttle put more people into space ever. Russian capsules have another 100 launches or so before they will come close to putting the number of people and equipment that the shuttles did.
Also no one other than the shuttle has gone EVA to repair large satellites.(the hubble repair missions) As they literally can not carry both the people and the equipment.
The waste of the space shuttle came from the fact that it was stripped after every flight had the engines gutted and rebuilt. It used expsensive and fragile tiles for a heat shield.
remove the main engines like Buran did and find a better heat shield. that is what it will take to make the shuttle better.
The shuttle also could do one thing that no other vehicle could do. Bring things home safely. Personally I wish the last shuttle mission was a mission to hubble to bring it back to earth. a fitting tribute the hubble would be permanent display in a museum. You can not do that with any other vehicle design.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Well, technically, if the point is reusing the thing, the Buran only launched once, thereby failing to offer that feature.
Use metric!
The Soviets tried this idea back in the 60s. The basically developed the X-37 as a small manned ship. They actually got through gliding tests of this component, the Mig 105, which is now on display in their big aerospace museum outside Moscow.
This is a video showing the concept:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLCUEVp-iU8
They're not wasteful if they don't use a massive rocket boosters to fly to space. Make it nuclear powered or something efficient like that. Booster technology has come a long way since the shuttle days. I'm pretty sure that they could create something like a cargo plane fly at mach-10 if they really tried and I don't mean having it strapped to a giant rocket either. If each launch can cost only five million dollars, then it will have been well worth it so long as it could carry as much if not more payload than before.
The kneejerk response is to say bullshit, but I trolled through the responses for anything that looks like a business case, and the only one I can find is for military "responsive launch" type stuff.
Maybe this time we'll get a real six million dollar man.
-Styopa
The US Space Shuttle and USSR Buran proved conclusively that resusable spaceplanes are hugely wasteful.
One poor implementation and one copy of a poor implementation isn't enough to dismiss an entire concept. especially as the STS was hobbled with massively bloated specifications by having the DoD get involved compared to it's original design based on the DynaSoar concept.
Yep. A Rocket To Nowhere remains the best analysis of this mess that I've seen. If the STS had been built to the original, smaller specs and launched on top of a rocket it still wouldn't have been efficient, but certainly would have been cheaper and safer.
I bet you are suffering from the misconception that fuel is a major part of the cost of a launch, so conserving fuel is what matters - that's what I thought too. So I had no clue what the point with reusable rockets/spaceplanes was. In fact the fuel costs very little in comparison to the rocket, IIRC it's not far off from 100:1 in terms of cost. With that knowledge, suddenly the world makes sense again. :) Reusable hardware is a big deal - it potentially offers more than an order of magnitude reduction in launch costs. The US Space Shuttle was a poor solution because it was only reusable after a lengthy and expensive process of fixing it up between each launch. If it was ready to go again the same day it landed and if it only rarely required replacement parts, it would have been much cheaper than the rockets we've got today.
Actually, what I learned from it was that the Soviets were perfectly willing to nuke Cananadia . From space.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Seriously. How much time and money has been wasted constantly trying to re-invent something we had in the mid-60's? The X-15 program was *very* successful, with only one serious accident *and* there was a version with drop tanks for greater range/speed. If they had simply continued this line of development instead of stopping everything to put a man in a tin-can on top of a missile, we'd already be going to space casually, for weekend trips and vacations.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The realisation that instead of carrying massive amounts of oxygen in order to force your way through massive amounts of oxygen is indicative of something rather different to a "dead-end technology". A plane that can take off horizontally, burning atmospheric air while accelerating and climbing, which then switches to using its own on-board oxygen in order to reach orbit makes a lot of sense. The only real challenge there are the engines, which if to be an economically viable solution, have to provide both phases of flight. Luckily, Reaction Engines Ltd. are working on those engines, and have had a lot of success (including creating one of the most impressive heat-exchangers ever seen), and are on their way to developing their first prototype. The Shuttle and Buran were not space planes - they were large, partially-reusable rockets with bits that looked like planes which helped on the return leg back through the atmosphere. Conflating the two isn't going to help the issue. The Space Shuttle, while inspirational, was terrible compared to what it originally promised. Just because no-one has made a viable SSTO space plane yet doesn't mean they are a dead-end technology.
my spaceplane can fly 20 times in 20 days!
Launch electronics are cheap these days, I am honestly very curious what good a reusable spaceplane provides over existing expendable rockets.
The good is the same good as when you visit your parents for the holidays, you don't throw away the the two 747's you used to fly there and back.
Bending new metal for every flight takes a lot of manpower. It's the cast of thousands where the cost is. If you can swap dozens of man-years of building to a few dozen man-days for maintenance and refuel, that's when you save big. That's why the target is to demo 10 flights in 10 days.
"proved conclusively that resusable spaceplanes are hugely wasteful."
Their implementation proved very wasteful, but the basic concept wasn't all that bad. The problem was that, at least here in the US, the shuttle program became a symbol of national pride and a good place to hang pork projects. I've seen estimates that say the shuttle only cost about $200-300 million to launch, about the same as a normal expendable launcher with half the payload and no return capability. The rest of the "per launch cost" that is often attributed was maintaining of massive grounds, continuing high level R&D, an obscenely large administrative system & thousands of on the clock experts available for every launch just in case something went wrong. I don't know what Buran ever proved, the Soviet Union collapsed soon after its development was finished.
In the MIT OpenCourseware on the shuttle design one of the shuttle designers or engineers that worked on the program said that if the hookups to diagnose the shuttle engines had been included they could be test fired without removing/rebuilding them. That alone would have contributed to a faster turnaround time.
On the tiles, I got tnothing.
No, the problem is that the shuttle weighed almost a quarter million pounds dry. That is a quarter million pounds of lost launch capacity. Look at the tiny tin cans that the ISS is made of, all glued together. SkyLab had the same internal volume as the entire ISS put together, and it went up on a single rocket. That is the kind of inefficencies you see when you put things up piecemeal with a reusable orbiter instead of a dedicated rocket.
moox. for a new generation.
I came across some estimates of the fuel cost once for the space shuttle. I think it was in the neighborhood of $1-2 Million, most of which was the SRB fuel. That sounds like a lot, but a 747 costs over $200,000 to fuel. So even if you needed 4 times the fuel to launch a fully reusable craft that used a significant amount of solid fuel it would only cost $4-8 million per launch, a cost savings of at least 50 times (also assuming minimization of ground support, administration & turn around costs).
This one look promising:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_%28spacecraft%29
...by the scientologists?
...sounds as if they're just reinventing the Brit's approach...
Initially during the days of space exploration, there were 2 programs to get to space. The civilian one which later became NASA, and the military one called Dynosoar (http://www.astronautix.com/craft/dynasoar.htm).
The military one was more ambitious (reusable spacecraft), but the rocket and capsule idea was considered faster and an easier way to catch up to the Russians in the space race. With limited funds and talent, one program was selected, the other axed. It's a pity - when the X-20A was cancelled, it was only 8 months from testing.
" A plane that can take off horizontally, burning atmospheric air while accelerating and climbing, which then switches to using its own on-board oxygen in order to reach orbit makes a lot of sense."
Until you look at the physics/economics. Extracting oxygen from the atmosphere isn't free. It shows up as drag, which requires more fuel to overcome. The liquid oxygen in a rocket's propellant tank has already had kinetic energy added to it. The oxygen you get from the atmosphere is at a much lower energy state, so you have to add energy to it. This makes high-speed airbreathers very difficult.
The "massive amounts of oxygen" you are saving are actually quite cheap. Liquid oxygen is one of the cheapest fluids you can buy. Cheaper than bottled water. The idea that it's going to be cheaper to manufacture it in flight than on the ground is inherently flawed. What you save in LOX, you lose in additional fuel. Moreover, the fuel needed to make these schemes work is not hydrocarbon (cheap) but liquid hydrogen (expensive). The structures needed to contain LH2 are also expensive, due to the low propellant density. These factors make airbreathing a non-starter.
SkyLab had the same internal volume as the entire ISS put together, and it went up on a single rocket. T.
I'm going to call shenanigans on that statistic, while at one point Skylab had the same interior volume as the ISS that is now no longer the case. The interior pressurized volume of Skylab was 319.8 m^3 the ISS as it stands now has a pressurized volume of 837 m^3.