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NASA's X-37
jacobm wrote with a story about the NASA/Boeing project. Called
the X-37, it's not like other X-class planes - it can actually stay in orbit. The purpose of the plane is to test "new reusable rocket technologies".
Apparently, it designed to reach only a mere Mach 25, but a Boeing VP says another goal is to make
space travel as affordable as travelling by plane. The article also includes a neat little insert with pictures of the other X-class planes.
We don't know what the real top speed of the SR-71 Blackbird is...every time someone else brakes the air speed record, they take the Blackbird up and break them. One record was 2,193.17 MPH, and it can go up to a sustained horizontal altitude of 85,069 feet. It gets so high that the atmosphere is so thin that it needs attitutude rockets. It's published theoretical top is 88,000 feet. It's exact specs are still top secret. All the speed records are for sustained speed...we have not seen published data on any burst speed.
I do see one notice of an attempt last year to put an aerospike engine on a SR-71...I don't have any data on what happened there...but the work was done by NASA.
It is a fine bird, and even today, we don't have anything that can replace it.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Espionage. The idea was to build a plane that could fly into enemy terrirory, take pictures of stuff (it has onboard camera's the likes of which aren't available commercially to this day) and fly out without getting shot down. By flying at superdupermach speeds, it simply outruns any weapons fired at it in hostile territory.
"ad astra"
isn't that 'ad astera'??
The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird was not ramjet powered. It had relatively conventional jet engines, albeit specially designed to operate at the altitudes and speeds the SR-71 was designed for. There was a ramjet powered drone designed to be launched from a Blackbird, but that was a different beast anyway.
I've seen films of Blackbirds in flight, as well as taking off and landing. All was under power from its two engines -- the Blackbird was NOT designed for a dead-stick landing, as would be necessary if it was ramjet powered.
Personally, I can't wait for Orbital Disneyland. The zero G gymnasium would be a blast! As for the risks of space travel? Strap me in baby! Life is short anyway, may as well take some risks and keep it interesting. Besides, I fully expect space travel to eventually become as complace and safe as air travel.
Thad
We are living in a sci-fi future world, and all I have to say about it is... I wan't my flying car! ;-)
The Bolachek Journals
The nice thing about evolution is that it's all true. As long as we get there someday then even the space shuttle did _eventually_ make routine, safe, low-cost acces to space possible. Just as the Wright brother's first flight did.
So, it's probably not blowing smoke, but it isn't a very useful statement either... other than to drum up support.
Edu. sig-line: Choose rhymes with lose. Chose rhymes with goes. Loose rhymes with goose.
Comparing? THEN use THAN.
There's also another mission the SR-71 has been used in.
Since the aircraft is virtually untouchable, they will have one run through a target's airspace. Meanwhile, flying on the boarder, is a signal intelligence aircraft. While the target is busy painting the SR-71 with targeting radar, the intel aircraft records the radar spectrum and hopefully picks up what kinds of radar "packages" the target weapons systems are currently using.
That information is later analyzed and used in developing "war" settings for electronic warfare systems used to track and defend against threat radars such as anti-aircraft artillary (AAA) and surface to air missles (SAMs).
This cat-and-mouse game is ran constantly as weapons systems are reprogrammed to be harder to counter and electronic warfare systems are reprogrammed to counter the changing threats.
There is a theory that this practice is what lead to the shooting down of that Korean airlines aircraft by the Soviet Union. The belief is that one of these missions were being run while the Korean airline wandered into Soviet airspace. The Soviets, believing they had caught a signal intelligence aircraft making an error, went after it. Signel intelligence aircraft are remarkably simular to commercial aircraft (in some cases, they're just refitted commercial airframes). With this simularity in mind, and the pressure to "catch" an offending intel aircraft before it could realise its mistake and make it back to safe airspace, its easy to see how such a mistake in identification could lead to tragedy.
If you give space travel all to the private sector, there would be no scientific vision. We would have even more of the current problem, which is:
When man first went out into space it was to look out further into the universe. Nowadays, we only go far enough up to look back down at Earth.
Translation:
Business needs satellites for communications and earth telemetry. That's really all they want to send rockets up to deliver.
It's important for the scientists to have say in how space technology is developed, not just the beancounters.
Perhaps some of that area 51 aurora stuff?
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
Wrong country, wrong words, (roughly) right translation.
Others have pointed out the NASA phrase, which you're mingly with the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) motto:
"Per ardua ad astra" - through hardship to the stars.
>I think I remember terminal velocity being 186 miles an hour or something close to that
Near the ground, yes. Terminal velocity is dependent upon atmospheric drag. He started in the much thinner atmosphere at 59,000 feet, so less drag.
If you fell from orbit around the moon, there would be no terminal velocity limit -- you would just keep accelerating until the rather sudden stop.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
This reeks of being an urban legend.
The Commodore 64 was never a robust enough system for military use. It was designed to be inexpensive and easy to work with, which is the opposite of military-grade. The military version would have to be in a titanium case, and the switch for just the letter 'A' key would cost more than the entire keyboard on the C-64.
This is not meant as a criticism of Mil-Spec or the C-64. Both have their purposes, and both fulfill(ed) them quite well.
>What does it mean when the shuttle tells NASA they've throttled up to 104%?
It's based on the maximum thrust of the original shuttle engines, they've tweaked them for slightly higher performance since.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Until then, SS aircraft are only of benefit for over-ocean travel and as hi-tech curiosities (the concorde comes to mind [and it's really pretty old]). Los Angeles to New York is still a 5 hour flight. Sheesh.
"what if the blades stopped rotating?"
:)
Then your glide angle resembles that of a set of car keys.
(One of my dad's favorite sayings. I couldn't resist
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Hadn't you heard? Peter Norton's name has officially been changed to "Bitmap" since all he's been for the last 10-odd years is a bitmap on the outer packaging. It was a nickname long enough, so now it's official.
Wasn't part of the reason also because of the stubby wings (real short compared to body length), which couldn't develop enough lift except at high velocities (much too high at ground level)?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I used to be one of those wide-eyed kids who thought NASA could do no wrong. If something like Challenger happened, well, that was pressure from the White House; NASA was bright engineers interested in finding problems and fixing them.
Since then, I've been enlightened. Probably the biggest kick in the pants came from reading _The Hubble Wars_ and _Dragonfly_, about the space telescope and Shuttle-Mir programs, respectively. I've now realized that the astronauts put up with a hell of a lot of crap for the one to three chances most of them get to fly in space. The politics is unbelievably craven. The programs NASA touts as its future -- like ISS -- are boondoggles that have been disavowed by the scientific community. NASA program justifications become bureaucratese circular logic ("Why are we building a space station? So we can know how to build a space station."), keeping the congressional gravy train going. The space vehicle projects (like X-37) have some utility, and may be better managed than in the past (i.e. a program that successfully demonstrates a handful of technologies is probably superior to one that never gets off the ground due to sheer hubris), but the shuttle system still has years to go -- these puppies are rated for 100 flights, which gives them 80 (avg) remaining X 4 orbiters / 10 (optimistic) flights a year = three more decades.
VentureStar isn't the answer: VS is corporate welfare for LockMart, a defense contractor down in the dumps due to the end of the Cold War. X-38 is a useful project to provide a Crew Return Vehicle for the ISS; the X-33 and X-34 may succeed in showing off their tech for future projects.
X-37, though, is definitely just pork, a disappointing project designed to revive technopride or something like that. As Concorde has proven, superfast transport may look good on paper, but the business model may not be able to support it out in the real world.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Expect delays. Unless NASA cuts off the funding, don't lose hope that they'll get X-33 off the ground eventually and learn something from it. But also don't forget there are other reusable launcher developments in the industry...
- Rotary Rocket Company
- Kelly Space & Technology
- Kistler Aerospace
- Pioneer Rocketplane
And even a few ambitious projects by amateurs (non-government, funded out-of-pocket)...There is a club of people trying to put together a space program. All I know is they test their rockets at the Salt Flats in Utah and that they're about as far as Russia was in the late 50s (nothing close to orbit yet).
Most orbital launches are eastbound because you get up to 1000mph for free just from the Earth's rotation. You'd only go a different direction if you need to put a satellite in a specific orbit (i.e. often so it can observe higher latitudes than the launch point is located at.)
Not being able to get ordinance out of a weapons bay is a fairly common problem. There are lots of neat pictures of 500 lb bombs bouncing around in a weapons bay.
The YF-12A helped develop the Phoenix missile and the associated radar. These were later part of the F-14 Tomcat fighter. Not only Air Force politics but DOD politics played a part in its demise. This was the era of McNamara's Pentagon. The one that decided a fighter with a long loiter time with supersonic dash was the same as a low level high-speed penetration bomber. There is a YF-12A located at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, OH.
The SR-71, YF-12A, and their predecessor the A-12 broke a lot of ground. They provided a unique capability not met by any unclassified vehicle before or since -- and that's with their unclassified speed. It doesn't make sense the Air Force would cancel the SR-71 without a replacement (the official reason, satelites will fill the need, doesn't fly). But, it would not be the first time somebody did something stupid in the Pentagon.
The test that put an aerospike on a blackbird was part ofthe X-33 program, designed to test the airworthiness and performance of the aerospike at multiple-Mach speeds.
Now, I may be bringing up a sore spot that's been done to death (wouldn't be the first time), but isn't another part of the outragous costs of space the continued use of conventinonal rocket engines?
Now, I'm not going to nessacarly suggest any one alternative. I can't. And, of coarse, most of them are still in the infant stages, further comounded by the fact that it seems all the big research goes into improving O2 + Fuel rocketry...
For example, in The Millennial Project : Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps by Marshall Savage, Mr. Savage proposes a Mass driver, dug down along the slope of a mountain somewhere near the equator, and continuing out something like 15 KM. The launch vehical is placed on a sort of slede in the tunnel of the driver. The system pushes the sleigh up till the top of the mountain, where the vehical continue upwords I think 6 off of gravities pull (against the earth's rotation). Shortly thereafter, a series of Lasers placed around the exit of the mass Driver focus on a chunk of Ice, about a cubic yard in size. As the Lasers heat the ice, it of coarse turns to steam, and that steam provides what remaing power is needed to escape earth's gravity.
Vola! Out of earth's gravity, and while the overhead might be a burden, as might the energy cost (something that is solved in the book), you're no longer lifting the fuel, and the weight to thrust ratio finaly is high enought to be worth something...
Anyone want to guess what number they'll reach before they have a feasible space craft? The X-3.7e3?
There is a good history of what can happen when you remove government meddling and NASA bureaucracy; Check out the book Sled Driver by Brian Shul, about the Skunk Works and the SR-71 Blackbird. The author piloted the SR-71.
In my opinion Bifrost is the weakest section in Marshall's plan. His costing for the tunnel is *way* too low. He ignores the cost of an undersea High tension cable (Very high) and I still haven't seen a convincing way of keeping the massdriver tunnel in a vacuum while chucking a launch vehicle out of it at hyper-sonic velocities.
;-))
(Shame 'cos I think Aquarius might work and Asgard is way cool
We don't need radical alternative technologies yet. What we need is reliable technologies run at operational levels similar to airlines. Its operations that cost, not fuel.
(Does anyone have any hard information on the viability of the *skinny* spacesuit? I know they are popular with Pournelle and others but I cannot find any hard research on them)
BigTom
Of the projects you mentioned...
Some were failures. NASP spent years in development, and was eventually given up as infeasable as designed. Perhaps the same should have happened with the shuttle. But the others...
DC-X (aka Delta Clipper) was not originally a government project, but rather a privately funded testbed. The DC-X was built as a proof-of-concept, to show that the idea had merit, then the companies involved went looking for money for step two (of three), the DC-Y. Neither the DC-X nor the DC-Y were designed or intended to be orbital -- that would have been the third step.
When no money was forthcoming, NASA bought it, and tested it to (unintentional) destruction -- a landing strut failed on the planned final landing, causing the vehicle to fall over and burn. It successfully served its function as a testbed and proof-of-concept vehicle.
The DC-Y was pitched as a potential candidate for the X-33 project, but was turned down in favor of the Lockheed project. X-33 is also supposed to be a testbed, instead of an orbital vehicle. It's goal is not to -be- the Shuttle replacement, but to be a prototype for the RLV.
Similarly, the X-34 appears to again be a testbed and demonstrator, not an cheap-to-orbit vehicle. The X-37 is also a testbed, not a cheap-to-orbit vehicle.
I expect that the various technologies pioneered and tested in these various projects will be used in future full-scale project. Those projects will likely have lower development and operating costs because when they are designed and built, we will -know- what will work already, rather than trying to forge lots of new ground.
In a way, I think that NASA learned from the Shuttle and NASP projects. Instead of one giant, expensive, project like the Shuttle or NASP, which are great if they work, and a big boondoggle if they don't, they are funding many less expensive, demonstration projects, each with modest goals. If they fail, it's less of a problem, and they've spend less money to find out what doesn't work.
You are right... the aerospike allows better compensation between external pressure and internal combustion gas pressure resulting in better performance at high altitudes.
Thanks for the info.
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
If something goes wrong at 40k feet in the air, chances are you won't make it either.
I don't know of too many commercial airlines which package parachutes & o2 tanks for each passenger on their plane for high altitude jumping.
The same goes for low flying aircraft where parachutes are not useful. Being a chopper at 100 ft, you are done for if something goes wrong.
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
I hope this X37 doesn`t crash as often as X11 };))
In high mach planes, one of the main problems is keeping the tip of the aircraft from melting. One of the "technologies that will be tested" is bleeding liquid hydrogen continuously through the leading panels (nose, wings, tail) to keep them cool. So they have a mechanism to take something that is kicking 70 Kelvin (-200 C), pump it through an area of the plane that is reaching 600 - 700 degrees kelvin (500 C)to cool it down and then take that now heated hydrogen and pump it into the SCRAM jet for ignition. In Aerospace design class, my prof was always very skeptical of this technology - "too many ways to blow you up" was they way he put it. Carbon carbon materials and crazy smart ceramics must have come a long way in the last 5 years...
Water Spider
Rome didn't conquer the known world by having meetings, they did it by killing all that opposed them.
Nah... This is NASA we're talking about here.
They'll spend 2 billion on it and then mothball everything.
Deleted
>Ramjets require oxygen from the atmosphere.
So there is no oxygen at sea level then?
> It is a ramjet powered aircraft
Is it ? I dont think so.
What does it mean when the shuttle tells NASA they've throttled up to 104%? It sounds to me like they're running the engines beyone spec, which is always a recipe for disaster. Would you run your car's engine in the yellow or red region of your tachometer for extended periods of time? Of course not, and why not?
Actually, the shuttle tiles work a lot better than anyone expected them to; you may be thinking of the Russian shuttle clone, which came close to melting because they only stole half the design and missed some important details...
Tiles are a small part of the cost of a shuttle flight.
What was the name of that company awhile back that for 35 grand would put you into space by December of 2001 or your money back?
You have obviously never seen the footage of a pilot who bailed out of a weather baloon at 90,000 feet. He broke the speed of sound on the way down. It was done back in the 50's when spy planes were being tested and the gov't wanted to see if a pilot at that height could survive. They had it on a television show on speed a couple weeks ago. It really is unbeleivable.
Being a chopper at 100 ft, you are done for if
something goes wrong.
Hey buddy ever hear of auto-rotation? As long as the blades are parallel to the ground its no problem.
The Commodore 64 was never a robust enough system for military use. It was designed to be inexpensive and easy to work with, which is the opposite of military-grade.
ehh ... not quite urban legend.
The C-64 and the lunar module/shuttle were all were based on the 6502. A faculty member at an old job, taught dynamics and control on C-64's, and bragged that he had a copy of the Lunar Lander source code.
You have to remember that the shuttles uses 256K computers in tandem, which at the time (it was the 70's) were state of the art.
Probably part of the experimentation for the X-37 is probably going to be to test for EM interference of the onboard computer systems. To my (uneducated) view, there could be problems if they're not shielded properly.
posting anonymously because I already have to many userid's and passwords to remember.
Actually, DC-X was a military project "It was intended as a one-third scale model of a proposed SDIO single-stage launch vehicle" (from http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/dc- xa.htm) (SDIO = Strategic Defense Initiative Organization).
But SDI was sh*tcanned (we don't need any defense from ballistic missles, now do we) and DC-X was transferred to NASA.
If I were a cynic I might say it was too successful and had to distroyed (good thing I'm not a cynic then), it demonstrated that off-the-shelf technology could be used to build a re-usable, single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle.
Arguably, NASA's not interested in off-the-shelf technology (even when it could radically reduce the cost of space travel). They prefer expensive, state-of-the-art technology demonstrators (like VentureStar), especially if it can guarantee their jobs well into the next millenium.
The principal problem with X-33 is they're trying to do too much in one vehicle. Linear aerospike engines _and_ conformal fuel tanks _and_ new heat shield design in a VTHL (vertical takeoff horizontal landing) configuration _and_ it has to work first time, on schedule, on budget. Well, it's already over schedule, over weight, and over budget, but that's ok... because it's guarenteeing their jobs.
Actually, there was a fighter derivative, the YF-12 (AFAIR), which carried a number of missiles internally. While Lockheed had initial problems getting the missiles out of the plane, after a bit of development work it was hitting the targets 90% of the time, even though the YF-12 was flying at 70,000-odd feet at Mach-3 and the targets were flying at 70-odd feet below Mach-1 to simulate low-level Russian attack bombers. The intention was that the Air Force could spot attacking bombers and have fighters there very quickly to shoot them down.
Unfortunately a combination of operational cost and Air Force politics brought the project to an end; I think one or two of the YF-12s are in museums somewhere, and I think NASA have or had another one.
Delta Clipper was a military project sponsored by SDIO (Strategic Defense Initiative Orginization, aka Starwars) and it was delivered on time, on spec, and under budget. Until NASA got it's hands on it.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Mach 25 was orbital velocity. Sounds good enough to me.
Of course, I'll be surprised if this project is successful and not just another "interesting technology testbed" that runs over budget and way over schedule... but that's just me. Someone already posted links to Kistler and Rotary in another comment; take a look there if you're interested in private gambles toward the goal of cheap spaceflight.
> Just to clarify... X34 is not over budget. It's a firm fixed price contract, so NASA can't spend
> more than it allocated on it. Any cost over run would be sucked up by the prime contractor.
True, but I wonder... If the contractor says they can't (read "won't") complete the project because of budgetary constrants, will NASA find some way to slip them a few tens or hundreds of millions. Yeah, I know they're not _suppose_ to.
> The reason that private SSTO won't happen, is that SSTO won't happen.
Very, very arguable. Of course, _NASA_ says SSTO is impossible, and they're trying to prove that with the X-33. Watch for them to cancel the X-33 project in a year or two and then use Lockmart's incompetence as "proof" SSTO is impossible.
- The 6502 appeared in 1975.
- Apollo was designed in the 1960's and the last mission was in 1972.
You do the math.I worked on the periphery of the X-33 project for 2.5 years. Adjusting for inflation, they threw away more money than Apollo, made lots of promises (both Lockheed and NASA) and ignored reality.
Fact 1:
The X-33 still hasn't flown. Why not? It is not capable of flight, because it doesn't have enough thrust, it's still 5000 lbs. (roughly 2 tonnes, for the metrically inclined) overweight.That's empty weight, by the way. No payload.
Fact 2:
Building and operating VentureStars, even if they ever do manage to get one off the ground, will be expensive as hell. I've seen studies - conveniently shuffled off, of course - that prove non-reuseable Big Dumb Rockets using modern engine technology and perhaps just using a reusably engine pob would be 3 to 4 times cheaper than any X-33 derivative.
Fact 3:
NASA ate the fucking dream. We gave NASA our dreams of spaceflight, and they turned it into a dog-and-pony show. It started when they shitcanned fully-operational man-rated Saturn V rockets and turned them into lawn ornaments, continued through a "reuseable" shuttle that can't leave LEO, flys like a brick, and costs more per mission than a Saturn V. And finally, in choosing your precious VentureStar, they ignored the advice of their own engineers, selected the Lockheed proposal, and ignored an already-operating SSTO in the form of the Delta Clipper. Why? Nobody knows. Who in their right mind would select a paper-only program with no actual hardware and a lot of evidence that the design was crap over a flying prototype? Only NASA...
So why am I no longer working in the Space Program? Because I'm tired of it. NASA killed any chance of ordinary people flying into space, which is why I wanted to be an aerospace engineer in the first place. So if NASA asked me back tomorrow, I'd say no - I'd rather be a whore. It may be immoral and somewhat dirty - but so's working for NASA, and at least I've met some honest whores...
-- The meek shall inherit the Earth. In very small plots, about 6 feet by 3.
I wonder how powerful a SAM explosion is when compared to the forces of the airflow over one of these birds.
Damn straight.
NASA's nothing more than a high tech jobs program now. I had hopes for Goldin's "cheaper, faster, better" philosophy, but he seems to be corrupted now too.
They should chosen the Delta Clipper follow-on for the X-33 project. They had the people, the experience, the hardware, and the technology. In the words of an aeronautics engineer I know, "The DC-Y would, at least, 'scare the hell out of orbit'", and that's with 30-year old technology. But no, they bought the pie-in-the-sky from Lockmart. X-33 is never going to fly, it will be cancelled in a year or so and it will used to "prove" that SSTO doesn't work so can we have more money for Shuttle please. Blaa.
the dog-and-pony crap started when we got hooked on "manned spaceflight" instead of sending zillions of probes everywhere. The Old Pilots think we never should have short-changed the X-15 in favor of installing bucket seats on top of ICBMs. It's a religious war.
Bottom line: if you'd told John Glenn back during his salad days that he'd wait 30 years to get back into EARTH ORBIT, he'd have knocked you out.
I guess that means, as with crypto, that both our friends and our... other friends will just have to dismantle their space programs and go home. Uh huh. Anyone remember when John Denver got in so much trouble for writing the Soviets and saying he wanted to go up in one of their ships? How very presumptuous of him, eh?
Actually the X- designation really has nothing to do with being a space plane but rather designates that the aircraft is expiremental. Then again I could be completely wrong.
While the X-37 is interesting, what I like is the X-33, which is the experimental prototype for testing technology for the VentureStar.
The VentureStar virtually eliminates those bulky O2 tanks by using O2 in our atmosphere most of the ride up. It weighs a little more than half of what the current shuttles weigh and can lift roughly 80% of what current shuttles can lift.
The great thing about it is it's single stage which means a whole lot of money is saved.
Commercial space travel would seriously be a great thing to see in my lifetime.
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
I've always wanted to cruise the asteroid belt, live on the moon, etc. Unfortunately, with the rate at which things are developing, I had better hope that the immortality pill becomes available first. It seems like that investment in space is being done mostly by governments, but governments have to spend a lot of their money and effort in critical areas such as maintaining vast databases on their subjects and buying $400 toilet seats, plus there are a bunch of people in government who don't like space travel anyway, so I wonder if we shouldn't use some other means to get off the home world. Since it costs a lot of money, big business might be able to do it, but then again big business is pretty evil. So I wonder if it's feasible for millions of geeks to get together, pool their stock options and considerable talents, and do the damn thing them/ourselves. Could there possibly be a large yet decentralized space program? I'm sure it would have to be decentralized given the tendency towards anarchism in Geekdom.
-- $SIGNATURE
It looks like I'll be able to get into space eventually. At the rate things were going I thought I'd be well into heart attack age before cheap space travel came about. Happy, happy, Happy! Joy, joy, joy!
If proportion is right... reminds me of a certain aircraft of Dr.Evil...
I've been following the web cams for over a year, and the progress appears downright glacial. While I've heard that they're going to mate the aerospike engine to the rest of the airframe at the pad in order to make up schedule, the airframe looks less than half done.
It's supposed to fly this summer, but I don't see how that can happen. According to the build-up pictures they've published, construction is supposed to move from the back forward. What they have in the hanger appears to have begun from the O2 tank, and not moved far from there. The nose looks pretty complete, but the H2 tanks are not in place, and none of the body around them appears to be. Well, maybe the bottom, but it's hard to tell. About two weeks ago they put in some exterior framework that may be used to build the top. But still no H2 tanks.
Anyone know what's going on with the X33?
Do you actually have any QNX expierence?
This is the kind of stuff its meant for- its an OS that delievers deterministic maxamum latencies..
Thats qhy QNX is a real-time OS, and linux isn't.
Whats this mean..
Well, a real-time OS isn't normally as efficient at processing mid-large level stuff
(quiz: whats the best system for large large jobs? Batch processing.. its the most efficient.. but not to interactive...), however it gives you gaurentees that when you make a syscall, etc, it WILL happen in a certain amount of time.
If I'm making machinery go, and this machinery is responsible for something important, I'm sure as heck gonna make sure I use a real-time OS.
Linux is cool, yes.. been running it for a long long time, but RTlinux isn't nearly as mature as QNX...
I must say, from my experience programming on, and for QNX: its nice.
An interesting scientific note:
The slashdot article says it is designed to go a "mere mach 25." If memory serves me right, this is somewhere in the vicinity of 18000mph, which is the speed that any craft goes at when it is in low Earth *orbit*. So, presumably, if it is designed to be in orbit, it would be a nice plus to have it travel at this speed...
So does the X37 server support antialiased fonts finally?
Something does not smell right.
:-)
So: NASA spends millions of dollars on _another_ cheap to orbit test project. Was not the Space Shuttle, NASP, then the DC-X, then the X-33/X-34 supposed to do the same thing? (cheap launch to orbit)
But what happens, NASA spends the money, not just the money alloted by 5-10X more. What do we get? Either a) the project gets canceled after a couple years (NASP, DC-X) or b) the project "succeeds," in costing 100X as much as it should have. If you read what people were saying about the space shuttle in the 70's you see it was supposed to launch stuff into orbit for something on the order of $100/lb. In fact it costs well more than $10,000 a pound to launch something on the shuttle.
I love space, but I hate NASA. They went to the moon and made it boring. Dammit, I want to go to the moon.
Now if they were encouraging private industry to develop launch vehicles that would be one thing, but in fact they are actively discouraging it. Dan Goldin, NASA's head, has been going around telling investors that private SSTO isn't going to happen.
But there are people who believe in the dream that low cost access to space will happen and will happen soon. Most prominent amoung them are Kistler Aerospace and The Rotary Rocket corporation.
Ad astra!
you're too high to bail. Or breath, or otherwise escape. Parachutes are useless. Flotation cushions become irrelevant. Getting stuck in orbit could be a lot worse than being stuck on a runway. When you technicolor yawn, it wouldn't go in the sack and would be real hard to clean up. They probably wouldn't have a stewardess pushing a little drink cart down the middle, as turbulence at Mach 25 would make that difficult to handle.
If you want commercial space travel, go to Disneyland.
I wouldn't worry about QNX just don't let the thing have Windows
The X37 gets launched into orbit by something else, it doesn't get there on its own. From the Marshall fact sheet, it's a testbed for "the orbital and reentry phases of flight". It's not nearly as cool as the article lead made it sound. OTOH, the X38 "Space Lifeboat" has a certain sort of appeal... "We're hit! Order the crew to the escape pods!"
I sometimes think that the space race did more harm than good for space exploration. If all the money that was diverted to the mercury/ gemini/ apollo was spent on furthering the x program we might have had technolgy like this years ago.
While it was a great acheivement putting a man on the moon, in a sense it was all a waste of money considering that we would have to start all over again to go back now.
If you look out of the right windows you'll see Boston, I mean Rhode Island, I mean Long Island, I mean New York, no, Atlantic City, oh screw it.
Boy would commercial spaceflight be fun.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The Amiga wasn't "invented" until 1986, I seriously doubt the SR71 was retrofitted with this technology :)
I have heard RTLinux response time was around 12ms and QNX's response time was aroun 1ms...so there still is room for improvement but this is already a great jod done. Rremember, Linux was designed for the 386 and wasn't even planned to be ported on other processors at first. Now linux is ported on many architecture and work well on many situations.
I think this is a compliment that Microsoft used such a big server for the Mindcraft test, they acknowledged that Linux may soon be able to compete here.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Projects like the X prize will do more for space travel than NASA.
http://www.xprize.org/
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While the total amount of money spent on sport is certainly of the magnitude nned to speed up space research must of this business. It's a commercial enerprise just like T.V. or any other entertainment business.
I doubt the amount spent by Goverment on sport would help much with space reasearch.
Disclaimer: I could be wrong. I live in the UK, maybe the American goverment spends much more on sport funding than we do.
A excellent book which covers the design and implementation of the SR-71 is "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich. He ran the Skunk Works for about 20 years after Kelly Johnson and designed the F117-A and worked extensively on the SR-71, D-21 and U-2 projects.
The most interesting thing about the SR-71 project is that it was largely a exercise in theromodynamics. The biggest problems were keeping the plane from melting due to air friction and keeping the pilot from being roasted alive from all that heat!
A lot of embedded designs are based on the 6502. That does not make them Commodore 64's. The Apple II is based on the 6502. In fact, the 6502 has been rendered in a hardware description language so that you can embed a 6502 processor right into an FPGA if you like. The reason that this is possible (so that an engineer can just specify to plug in the Intellectual Property code for the 6502, in effect embedding one into a big custom chip) is that the 6502 is such a simple processor to implement in this fashion.
Calling this a Commodore 64 and claiming that this means the Space Shuttle has a C-64 in it is like saying that because there's a crankshaft in your lawn mower and also in a Porche engine, that your lawn mower runs on a Porche engine.
The original shuttle concept was ALOT slimmer than it exists today. It originally wasn't going to do many of the tasks it does now. The designers kept "adding" to its duty list, so that it now has to have an ET and SRB's to get all of the extra equipment up. The X37 really isn't going to replace the current shuttle, but it looks cool. :)
Nature abhors a vacuum. So does my sister's dog.
What is the big deal if it requires a rocket or a shuttle to ferry it into orbit? Space shuttle also stay in orbit and do re-entry. I thought it is a break through if it is able to take off, fly into orbit, stay there and come back.
I find it interesting that this technology was
developed in the 1950's. The X-15 was never
allowed to got orbital even though some who
flew felt it was capable. If I remember, it
wasn't allowed to go over 150,000 feet the so
called boundary of the atmosphere and space.
It shouldn't take a "Rocket Scientist" to figure
out that after 40 years something has to be able
to do this. Why was the XR-71 retired? What is
the rumored Aurora?
It does not use the O2 from the atmosphere on the way up. It's aerospike engines use the atmosphere to gain better rocket effeciency over regular bell shaped rocket because the outside air pressure contains the rocket plume instead of a bell nozzle. there's still a large o2 tank in it. check out the schematics... www.venturestar.com
At least thats what it says at the Apollo 204 pad.
The SR-71 is definitely has very cool yet ambiguous specs.
;)
In college, my RA was deep in the Air Force before becoming an RA. When certain info. was declassified and made public, we used to talk about it. He'd tell me about some of the testing for the SR-71. He said it's a great plane for recon, but it was too fast for ordinance deployment aka bombing etc.
Heck, its medium speeds were faster than the bullets it tried to fire.
Bombing experiments were really fun, since the dummy bombs couldn't exit through the bombay doors. Going at around even around Mach3(I believe that's the speed he said), the bomb would hover on the air stream. Pretty cool until people suggested trying it with live ordinance.
I always asked him why the Air Force would build a plane that fast and have it use weapons.
Would it just be used for recon? Fast VIP travel?
Or as a fast response vehicle?
That particular air craft would have use its slowest speeds to be practical.
Pardon my ignorance, but does somebody know what the military applications are aside from travel.
What? Making huge holes in large airborne cheese?
Anonymous an' likin' it
It's our society in general. When athletics are more important than science, progress suffers. We have a great obsession with watching various sports in stadiums and colliseums, the modern equivalent of gladiators, while we could be spending it in more productive manner. Near the end of the Roman Empire, around 200 days of the year in Rome were devoted to the games at the colliseum. It gives something to think about. Athletics contributes little to society.
If we spent 1/2 of what we spend on sports, we might have a chance of getting somewhere in space.
What really makes me sick is when some major league baseball/football/hockey team owner decides he needs a new stadium, threatens to move the team to another city, and gets the politicans to open up the public purse strings up.
This is an endemic problem in North America. I recall that at the time of the last US Senate election, there was a referendum in some US city/state on whether or not to use public money to build a stadium for a pro sports team.
Five years ago, here in Calgary, AB, Canada, federal money intended for Roads, utilities, hospitals, etc. was spent on upgrading the hockey arena for the NHL team, while our roads were in the worst of shape, and we had flooding problems in several locations in the city for 3 years straight.
FYI, there has been a disturbing trend in the US lately, in which professional team owners demand large amounts of money from local (city and state) governments to build new stadiums and then move their teams if the governments refuse. Sometimes the governments simply build entire stadiums at the cost of 100's of millions of dollars, while other times they give large, debt free loans to the owners to build the stadiums themselves (amounting to 10's of millions of dollars). In either case, substantial amounts of money are involved, even though the national government is rarely involved.
Think of it as NASCAR for humans. Many of our recent advances in medicine have come from putting humans back together after we take them apart on the field.
That being said, I'm more in favor of space research.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
"Prosser said the technologies developed and demonstrated on X-37 would eventually make routine, safe, low-cost access to space possible with high reliability, fast turnaround and minimal operational crews."
Oh yeah, that was supposed to be the shuttle. NASA's blowing smoke again.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Yes, the X-15 had a lot of promise. The main problem in those days was fairly simple - they didn't have the materials to make an aerodynamic vehicle that wouldn't burn up.
That was why the mercury/gemini/appollo capsules used to come down on their back-sides.
The shuttle heat-shield tiles were supposed to solve this problem. They didn't. During re-fireing, they have a nasty tendency to warp. The result of this is that they have to re-make a lot of them. This is one of the reasons why the shuttle is so damned expensive.
Well, duh...Energy weapons. :)
One interesting thing I learned whilst watching FLightpath on discovery channel was that one of the most difficult design decisions for the SR71 was the necessity of not sealing the fuel tanks. Apparently the plane generates a LOT of heat while travelling at super-mach speeds, which means any rubberized materials used near any surfaces would melt. They rely on the heat expansion of the external frame at speed to seal the fuel tanks. When they send it on a mission, the plane is fueled up on the ground and it IMMEDIATELY STARTS TO LEAK! In fact the plane is refueled in the air shortly after takeoff because most of it's fuel has leaked out during taxiing and take-off. Once it gets up to speed though, the fuel tanks heat up and seal themselves.
Nifty!
For the persian gulf war, the US government hired out some asian company to build them 1,000 new commodore 64's for use "in the field". The SR71 program may be one place where they went.
The XR-71 became the SR-71. The SR-71 can be called back to service at any time. It was used in the persian gulf. It is a ramjet powered aircraft capable of approximately Mach 5 (to start it on the ground they have to attach turbojet engines to it to get the air moving). Ramjets require oxygen from the atmosphere.
Linux Base, Moon ---
Today in Linux Base we have Alan Cox issuing yet another 103 of his famous *AC series of patches.
Linus Torvalds is not amused, because it is a pain in the ass to recall the million of spacecrafts because of bugs.
On the other hand, on NT Base, crashes happen left and right, and no one wants to insure any crafts flying on NT no more.
When asked about the insurance crisis, Mr. Gates shrugs, and Peter Norton crosses his hands.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !