Boeing Will Make the Military's New Hypersonic Spaceplane (theverge.com)

The Department of Defense has selected Boeing to make a new hypersonic spaceplane that can be reused frequently over a short period of time to deliver multiple satellites into orbit. "DARPA, the agency that tests new advanced technologies for the military, has picked Boeing's design concept, called the Phantom Express, to move forward as part of the agency's Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) program," reports The Verge. From the report: The goal of DARPA's XS-1 program is to create a spacecraft that's something of a hybrid between an airplane and a traditional vertical rocket. The spaceplane is meant to take off vertically and fly uncrewed to high altitudes above Earth. From there, the vehicle will release a mini-rocket -- a booster with an engine that can propel a satellite weighing up to 3,000 pounds into orbit. As the booster deploys the satellite, the spaceplane will then land back on Earth horizontally just like a normal airplane -- and then be fueled up for its next mission. DARPA wants the turnaround time between flights to last just a few hours. But perhaps the most audacious goal is the price DARPA wants for each flight. The agency is aiming for the spaceplane to cost $5 million per mission, a significant bargain considering most orbital rockets cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to launch. And Boeing says it's up to the task. "Phantom Express is designed to disrupt and transform the satellite launch process as we know it today, creating a new, on-demand space-launch capability that can be achieved more affordably and with less risk," Darryl Davis, president of Boeing Phantom Works, said in a statement.

Comments

Re:jajahaha

[Max_W]

>spaceplane

Impossible

It does not matter, it does not influence the financial flow.

Vs Rockets?

[monkeyxpress]

I like the idea of these scramjet planes, but I struggle to see how they are going to be economical vs the sort of thing Musk/Bezos are planning with reusability (I understand this is for significantly smaller payloads). In the end, is it really that big a deal having to carry oxidiser for the first stage with you? As Musk keeps arguing, the fuel costs are not a big issue with rocket launches, and the size of your rocket isn't such an issue if you can reuse it enough times.

In contrast, the main problem I see with these scramjets is that the atmospheric conditions required to allow scramjet operation (speed and density) also produce massive heating and drag on the airframe. Presumably you must carry extra fuel to pay for the ability to collect oxidiser, and it would be interesting to see just how much of an improvement in fuelling costs these designs can achieve in the best case.

For spaceplanes to really come into their own I would have thought a single stage to orbit system would really be required. Reaction Engines seems to think this is possible, but I doubt it is coming anytime in the next decade. Still, great to see progress being made on new concepts.

Re:Vs Rockets?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I don't think this is supposed to have a scramjet at all. The idea is simply to have a suborbital airplane in the Mach 10-13 region or so (for which you don't need a scramjet) that would allow the payload to reach orbit with a lower-cost second stage while serving as a first stage that is more easily reusable (lands like a glider, only needs a single engine burn - less wear - , the engine design can be conservative due to lower requirements etc.), doesn't use anything unproven (and no complicated TPS thanks to the suborbital regime), and also doubles as a (reusable) payload fairing (the payload and the second stage are only ejected in vacuum). It's actually a brilliant concept that could quite easily scale into the ~20 tonne region, but the aircraft would be necessarily larger. Hence the smaller prototype.

Re:Vs Rockets?

[Dorianny]

The turnaround time for a plane is far less then for a reusable rocket. My speculation is that the Air force wants this technology in case of all out war with a nation with advanced rocket technology (Russia or China) that would target and wipe out large chunks of its satellite systems. There is little that can be done to protect satellites in orbit, my belief is that the air-force solution is to put them up faster then they can shoot them down. Some of the "satellites" can even be dummies for the simple purpose of depleting enemy anti-satellite ordinance

Re:Vs Rockets?

[phayes]

It's not a scramjet as it uses Shuttle derived AR-22 H2/LOX rocket engines.

The problem is that either there is something missing in the released info or the XS-1 will never be able to deliver the claimed performance. H2/LOX is a great upper stage combination but a very poor first stage as liquid H2 has so little density (1/12th the density of RP-1) that it needs massive (heavy) tanks. The Shuttle needed SRBs to get off the ground for the very same reason.

So where are the missing SRBs, where do they attach and how much is throwing them away every launch adding to the claimed $5 million per launch? *

* The Shuttle's claimed reusability of it's SRB's was a farce. The cost of refurbishing the SRBs was higher than just expending them would have been.

Re:Vs Rockets?

[Richard_at_work]

I have no idea how much it affects the figures, but remember that with *every* launch, the Shuttle was lifting a fuckton load of structure, whether or not that structure supported the payloads mission or not.

Of course I'm talking about the crew compartment and supporting systems. They weighed a *lot*. Add to that the payload bay, which itself was a significant structure.

Think about it this way - each payload bay door on the Shuttle weighed 3/4 of the weight of the payload that the XS-1 is intended to launch.

Get rid of the systems required to keep a crew alive, put the fuel in the payload bay area, and you can cut down the weight of the shuttle fairly dramatically - add to that the fact that you can get a *lot* of weight saving from use of modern materials (the Shuttle was traditional aluminium, you could easily drop a third of that weight by moving to composites).

Re:Vs Rockets?

[budgenator]

It's actually a brilliant concept that could quite easily scale into the ~20 tonne region, but the aircraft would be necessarily larger. Hence the smaller prototype.

I beg to differ, It's a blatant attempt to award a "make work" program to the good 'ol boys, because SpaceX is on the verge of handing United Launch Allience's ass to them. It's also not up to the "brilliant concept" level, it basically a first stage rocket boaster with wings and landing gear; you get all of the drag of wings, plus the mechanical complications of landing gear.

Re:Delivery of multiple "payloads" every few hours

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If you could deliver a tonne and a half of payload into orbit for a few million dollars, you'd attract quite a lot of non-bombing customers.

Re:3,000 lbs. to orbit? Enough for one person?

[twosat]

Sounds like you read about the General Electric MOOSE and the Douglas Paracone.

http://www.astronautix.com/m/m...

http://www.astronautix.com/p/p...

Re:3,000 lbs. to orbit? Enough for one person?

[twosat]

Oops, replying to my own post, a quick search found a more-detailed article on Wikipedia about MOOSE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Cost?

[ytene]

Sorry to be cynical, but reading news on contracts like this it seems that the one group getting the worst deal are the American Tax-Payers.

The article doesn't say, but does anyone know if this is a fixed-price-bid or a "Cost-Plus" contract?

The differences could be absolutely huge. You only need to compare the cost-per-kilo-to-orbit of the various solutions being developed today (Falcon Heavy, New Glenn, SLS) to see how hugely expensive the government-funded solutions are in comparison with commercial enterprises.

I'm not for one moment suggesting that the new platform is a waste of money, just that it's value for money may have a huge dependency on the way that the contract is written.

Re:Delivery of multiple "payloads" every few hours

[AHuxley]

The rest of the world has mapped out every US spy and mil communications platform.
They know the hours when the US is looking down.
The US tried to make its spy sats really hard to see but they still get detected by people and nations.
Projects like this allow the US to add a lot more look down hardware if needed. New orbit times that will not allow other nations to predict or hide in time.
The other fear of the US mil is emerging anti-satellite weapon systems removing a few of its very advance systems. That gap will be quickly filled by a lot of new launches.
The US will flood space with its small sats and the enemy will run out of anti-satellite weapon systems.

Re:More Spacejunk, who is gonna clean up the mess

[MightyYar]

Sure, right after we filter all the plastic out of the oceans.

Unfortunate Acronym

[necro81]

What dolt at DARPA - an organization filled with pretty savvy people - came up with the acronym "XS-1"? Just say it out loud: "excess one". It just screams of government waste, no matter the merits.

I guess it could have been worse - the program's expanded name is "experimental spaceplane." If they had made spaceplane two words instead of one, the program could have been called "XSP", or "excess pee".

Re:Unfortunate Acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the US aircraft designation system.

X = Experimental
S = Space plane vehicle type
1 = Designation number

Just to to give you an idea:

*YF-16: Prototype Fighter 16, what the F16 Fighting Falcon was desginated before being selected as the Light Weight Fighter program winner.
*X-1, experimental plane 1. First aircraft designed to go super sonic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Defense_Aerospace_Vehicle_Designations

As Wikipedia notes: Spaceplane. A spaceplane is a vehicle designed to fly beyond earth's atmosphere and return. This vehicle code was poorly chosen, as it conflicts with the mission code S (Anti-Submarine Warfare). "ES" could equally designate a spaceplane designed specifically for electronic warfare or an anti-submarine plane modified for that purpose.

Re:Delivery of multiple "payloads" every few hours

[geekmux]

And making that cheaper is somehow a good thing?

Yes.

We humans haven't exactly done a good job at keeping Earth tidy, neat, and organized.

Actually, we seem to follow a pattern of letting shit get out of hand and then correcting. Western Europe and the US have improved their environments significantly over the last 50 years. China is just beginning to figure this out as well.

Uh, letting shit "get out of hand" in orbit would likely result in the modern world being thrown back into the proverbial stone age. Gonna be hard to "correct" it all after satellites play ping pong and destroy each other, and we've created an artificial ring of space junk around our planet.

GPS is used as the key timing source for high-speed communications. Hell, forget comm links, the younger generation doesn't even know what a paper map is in order to navigate on this planet, and they couldn't survive without the internet/social media.