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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.
Reactor shield would be 1000kg, fuel mass 200kg, for ~ 10 years of 100 kilowatts of orbital super computing.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
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
We had issues about 15% of all nuclear powered space missions. From Transit, Nimbus to the Soviet Rorsat 954 over Canada, later Rorsat 1402 and Rorsat 1900.
Whats another spy sat/spaceplane with a cute mission badge? A nice commercial and gov funded workshop for staff and the skill sets are kept.
As for responding to a threat - it can anything from a stealthy mission to placing 'something' over an area very quickly.
The main threat would be budget cuts or been found to be wasting US tax payers cash on something anyone can track again.
Most smart nations have mapped everything the US and Russia put up and can take measures to allow the US and Russia to see just what they want to see.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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?
At least we learnt from them that a dirty bomb is not a big deal. Any bits large enough to be a long term problem are as trivial to find as bits of nuclear gear from crashed satellites.
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.
You'd have to factor in quite the heatsink for such a beast. The ISS active thermal control system is not a small device, and is good for only 70kw.
The astrophotography of an uncooled 100kw reactor in a vacuum would probably be pretty neat; but it wouldn't be a good idea.
To be fair I don't think militarisation of space is as scary as it used to be. During the cold war the danger was it turning into an arms race as the USSR and USA try to leapfrog each other, but really at this point we all know the US has won in terms of militarisation, when the USSR collapsed they kept spending and their military tech is a good generation or two ahead of that in Russia or China.
At this point I don't think Russia or China could care too much about trying to compete with something like this when they're still so desperately playing catch up in terms of boats, planes, and tanks.
Russia isn't going to get into another bankrupting arms race and China whilst building it's forces knows it couldn't compete either because even as the world's second largest economy it's still a long way behind and the only economic force that could compete with the US would be a combined-EU arms race but there's not much taste in the EU for an EU-wide military force, nor any reason to try and compete with the US given they're on the same side for the most part.
The game has moved on somewhat now, as we're seeing with Syria, and as we're seeing with China's economic policy the great game is being played in the battlefields of the UN debating chambers, and the world economy. Russia is trying to prevent the US acting internationally by weakening it's position politically, and China is more interested in growing itself, but if it can do so at the expense of the US by creating unfair trade terms that the US can do little to counteract having made itself dependant on Chinese manufacturing then it sees that as a bonus to it's growth.
So for the time being I think America's militarisation of space will be a kind of small side show. I don't think it'll trigger any kind of race by other countries to do the same other than the odd relatively trivial showcase (like China showing off the ability to accurately fling shit at other things in orbit). I think everyone else is playing a different game now and given Putin's recent political coup in completely outflanking Obama over Syria I'm not even sure the US realises that it's less about technical military superiority and more about politics, trade, and economics at this point.
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.
Use metric!
Maybe this time we'll get a real six million dollar man.
-Styopa
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.
I think this is more likely to be for rapid replacement of GPS & other military satellites in response to other countries developing/having anti-satellite technology. Net-centric warfare is where everyone is going, yet the network part remains the most vulnerable.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
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!
Research Development Evaluation and Test part of the Department of Defense portion of the president's budget. The budget is available at http://www.darpa.mil/newsevents/budget.aspx.
For those in the acronym game: President's DoD RDT&E funding, cross-service.
I don't think any of the designs will get up to mach 10 in the atmosphere, there's little point. Staging out of the atmosphere is a lot easier. And once you're in space, it's probably easier to kick yourself along (a boosted skip-glide) around the world to get back to the launch point.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Agreed. Getting rid of heat in space is *hard*, due to the fact that you only lose heat through thermal radiation.
There's no convection, conduction, or evaporation in a vacuum without doing "extra work" to make them happen.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Aside from the obvious benefit of collateral technologies (computers, jet aircraft, orbital satellites, GPS, etc., etc.), I wonder what the "followers" of the "Old World" are afraid of? Surely if they were as eager as we to create new technologies, they wouldn't sit around whining how we shouldn't do things just because they can't. They want America to go "Hey, never mind that we got here way ahead of you. Let us just sit around so you guys can get a few pages in the history books.
Well, I'm not into that. The United States of America is indeed terrifying at this point, just as I'm sure a muzzle-loaded musket would've been terrifying to a tribesman of the Serengeti. But that's not going to make Americans think "ooh, we'd better not do anything which might frighten the citizens of the emerging (third-world) countries" - we're more likely to think "okay, now that we've figured out how to do xxx we should start thinking about ways to use xxx to let us do more stuff" - you know, like weather prediction, air traffic control, and the internet. All based on technologies which must look like magic to the uneducated.
Which, come to think of it, is exactly what we want: a government which creates and develops technologies that the free enterprise system (despite it's tremendous abilities) will not do. I don't want to drop tons of explosives on hostile personnel at a range of over two thousand miles, but I sure love riding in modern jumbo jets. I may never ride in space with a spy satellite, but I get the benefits of improved weather predication and GPS on my phone. Don't even get me started on antibiotics, surgical techniques, submersible vehicles . . .
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.
You are sending your message over a DARPA project that went well.
It was a joke, numbnuts.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
" 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.
I suspect that other would-be users of the orbit (and possibly whiny people on the planet's surface) might object; but it would be fascinating to see whether a radiothermal fuel load (which can be a toasty little fellow even on earth) in hard vacuum would end up shedding enough heat by radiation to remain structurally sound, or whether it would get hot enough to become molten or semi-molten and held together largely by surface tension, or whether the vapor pressure of the material at that temperature would be high enough to generate an expanding cloud of zesty vapor.
Terrible plan, of course; but there are a lot of terrible plans that would be fun to watch.