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SpaceShipTwo Flies Again
schwit1 writes "The competition heats up: For the first time in six months SpaceShipTwo completed a test flight [Tuesday]." The article linked is from NBC, which also has a deal with Virgin Galactic to televise the first commercial flight. It is thus in their interest to promote the spacecraft and company. The following two sentences from the article however clearly confirm every rumor we have heard about the ship in the past year, that they needed to replace or completely refit the engine and that the resulting thrust might not be enough to get the ship to 100 kilometers or 62 miles: "In January, SpaceShipTwo blasted off for a powered test and sailed through a follow-up glide flight, but then it went into the shop for rocket refitting. It's expected to go through a series of glide flights and powered flights that eventually rise beyond the boundary of outer space (50 miles or 100 kilometers in altitude, depending on who's counting)." Hopefully this test flight indicates that they have installed the new engine and are now beginning flight tests with equipment that will actually get the ship into space.
Oh so close to something truly cool--the 1 hour to Tokyo flight. Yeah, you'd have to be insanely rich to buy a ticket; but you already have to be insanely rich just to get into suborbital space on this thing. Don't get me wrong. The guys who put this together are fantastic. It's just that it seems like a little more effort could get you something so much more fantastic.
How many other companies are making air-dropped sub-orbital spacecraft to help wealthy tourists stroke their egos?
Next time, please direct people to a site where the web developers know what they are doing and can display basic text and images without the need for a JavaScript security hole. Thank you.
It needs a new motor now. This one has been on deck and ready for many years!
http://v-serv.com/usr/crr457mm.htm
http://v-serv.com/usr/motors/images/18in/e03Firing010-2.jpg
It's time to really do this thing after all other options have been exhausted.
JJ
According to the linked article this was a glide test, not even a powered one. Given the fact that SpaceShipTwo (a bit of a hyperbolic name - RocketPlane would be more accurate) has flown dozens of times, some of those powered, I don't get the "news" aspect exactly. Is it that they had stopped for a few months and it is "news" that they resumed? Still how does that translate to "competition heats up"? And when we say "competition", which other recreational high altitude planes are we talking about and how are they doing?
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When watching the previous test I noted a "dirty burn" to many.
This is a "flag" that says ... the test was successful but it was only by dumb luck.
The engineers did the right thing afterward.
Cheers.
It's a solid rocket motor, of course it needs to be replaced after every flight.
Bored middle-aged elites will be burping, farting and vomiting for five minutes at 100,000 feet soon!!!!
a sequel to a bad movie
Notice how in one part of the summary, 100km is 62 miles. Then later it becomes 50 miles. Is this Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction at work? If the summary had meandered on, would the ratio increase further?
Odd how L-F contraction only affects imperial measurements. Maybe Haldane was right, and the universe is indeed queerer than we can imagine.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
I didn't realize Virgin Galactic was sending missions to the ISS already.
I was expecting public subortial launches in 2011. Almost as slow as NASA which is likely to slip seven years behind in a shuttle replacement.