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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.
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
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.
Use metric!
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
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 . . .