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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."
Competition is good.
Although we're comparing apples with oranges here. Many of Elon's technical choices are extremely conservative, e.g. old gas-generator cycle engines, pintle injectors, etc. OTOH, DARPA is doing what DARPA does best -- highly speculative, high-risk, high-payoff research which may or may not result in a working launch vehicle.
What _will_ be interesting, is if DARPA comes up with totally new ways of building tough, low maintenance hypersonic vehicles cheaply.
Dude, do you know anything about DARPA? They fund the far out there project. Some of them work, and some of them don't. They are directly responsible for the current research into self driving cars. A big success, though I'd imagine you're freaking out about that too. News flash, any new technology has military applications.
Spaceplanes aren't even a new idea. Hell, the Pegasus Rocket is able to lift nearly a thousand pounds into orbit. What they really seem to be pushing is scramjet technology. The demonstrators so far flew for a few minutes or less before being crashed into the ocean. Even worse, they used solid rockets to get it up to speed before the scramjet could start working. It's like Chuck Yeager's first flight all over again. First they started with solid rockets to get it up to speed, now they're working on doing it using an air breathing engine.
So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
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.
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.