Posted by
Hemos
on from the good-week-end-for-NASA dept.
lonedfx writes "After nine delays, STS 103 has launched and its crew should service the Hubble space telescope in the next few days. Hopefully Hubble will be soon back to give us great pictures to stare at. "
Venture Star killed the real competition
by
Tau+Zero
·
· Score: 5
Back in the days of the unjustly-maligned Strategic Defense Initiative, there was a group of people who were charged with getting SDI satellites into orbit. They had advantages over NASA in this regard. They were tied to neither the existing launch-vehicle fleet nor the high-cost aerospace contractors; this let them examine things afresh. They took out a clean sheet of paper and tried to design, not a vehicle, but a program for getting a vehicle.
What they wound up with looked very different from the Space Scuttle and VultureStar. It was a squarish bullet, covered in thermal-blanket material originally developed for the Shuttle. It was not terribly fussy about its engines; it could have flown on J2's or RL-10's. The innovations were several:
It was designed to land tail first, under power. This takes advantage of the engines, which are along for the ride, to provide landing capabilities. This eliminates the need to be able to glide subsonically; the glideslope, flare and landing maneuver required by Shuttle (and VentureStar) is unnecessary.
It did not have wings. This saved a great deal of weight in the airframe.
Its landing gear was a system of struts and pads. No wheels required. This saved more weight.
The pilot went away also. When so many missions are just putting unmanned birds or cargo in orbit, why carry people along all the time?
The vehicle was to be called the Delta Clipper, or DC-1.
The development program was very innovative: build a little, fly the results, roll the lessons learned back into the next generation. The first vehicle (low-altitude atmospheric testing, designed to prove some of the required maneuvers for takeoff, landing and aborts) was the DC-X. The second-generation, subscale, orbital (with no payload) vehicle was to be the DC-Y; it would have tested fuel tankage, weight-saving and thermal-protection systems.
The total cost of DC-X and DC-Y was to be less than one year's budget for the Shuttle program.
SDIO borrowed stuff from everywhere to build DC-X. They got 4 RL-10's on loan from Rocketdyne, had the aeroshell built by Scaled Composites (Burt Rutan's outfit), and reprogrammed an airliner autopilot to fly the bird. DC-X was a phenomenal success, proving everything it was set out to do. And then SDIO, shutting down and getting outside of their bailiwick (which was NOT to develop commercial spacecraft launchers), turned the program and the prototype over to NASA.
NASA completed the scheduled test flights and then crashed and burned the prototype when someone neglected to reconnect a landing-gear unlock line before flight. Accident? Deliberate? No one's talking.
After the destruction of the DC-X, NASA let a contract for the development of a successor to the Shuttle. The developers of the DC-X had a bid in, but the contract was awarded to a company whose vehicle:
Had no development record;
Could not be delivered for many years longer;
Had a much more expensive development program.
On the other hand it took off vertically like Shuttle, landed on (and required) a runway like Shuttle, and required a new engine development program. The winner was not the low bidder. Can you say "more pork"?
When the winner of the contract was announced, the counsel for NASA was present. This was apparently to keep the DC-1 proponents from getting the idea of suing to either get the contract or find out what funny business had gone on. In the mean time, the Shuttle and its standing army of maintenance people are still working, and there's a lucrative R&D contract for the VentureStar (even though it's having serious difficulties with its composite LH2 tanks delaminating). It's great for everyone except the taxpayer and people who might benefit from flying satellites cheaper; IOW, it sucks. -- The Karma Century Club is taking new members.
-- Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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What they wound up with looked very different from the Space Scuttle and VultureStar. It was a squarish bullet, covered in thermal-blanket material originally developed for the Shuttle. It was not terribly fussy about its engines; it could have flown on J2's or RL-10's. The innovations were several:
- It was designed to land tail first, under power. This takes advantage of the engines, which are along for the ride, to provide landing capabilities. This eliminates the need to be able to glide subsonically; the glideslope, flare and landing maneuver required by Shuttle (and VentureStar) is unnecessary.
- It did not have wings. This saved a great deal of weight in the airframe.
- Its landing gear was a system of struts and pads. No wheels required. This saved more weight.
- The pilot went away also. When so many missions are just putting unmanned birds or cargo in orbit, why carry people along all the time?
The vehicle was to be called the Delta Clipper, or DC-1.The development program was very innovative: build a little, fly the results, roll the lessons learned back into the next generation. The first vehicle (low-altitude atmospheric testing, designed to prove some of the required maneuvers for takeoff, landing and aborts) was the DC-X. The second-generation, subscale, orbital (with no payload) vehicle was to be the DC-Y; it would have tested fuel tankage, weight-saving and thermal-protection systems.
The total cost of DC-X and DC-Y was to be less than one year's budget for the Shuttle program.
SDIO borrowed stuff from everywhere to build DC-X. They got 4 RL-10's on loan from Rocketdyne, had the aeroshell built by Scaled Composites (Burt Rutan's outfit), and reprogrammed an airliner autopilot to fly the bird. DC-X was a phenomenal success, proving everything it was set out to do. And then SDIO, shutting down and getting outside of their bailiwick (which was NOT to develop commercial spacecraft launchers), turned the program and the prototype over to NASA.
NASA completed the scheduled test flights and then crashed and burned the prototype when someone neglected to reconnect a landing-gear unlock line before flight. Accident? Deliberate? No one's talking.
After the destruction of the DC-X, NASA let a contract for the development of a successor to the Shuttle. The developers of the DC-X had a bid in, but the contract was awarded to a company whose vehicle:
- Had no development record;
- Could not be delivered for many years longer;
- Had a much more expensive development program.
On the other hand it took off vertically like Shuttle, landed on (and required) a runway like Shuttle, and required a new engine development program. The winner was not the low bidder. Can you say "more pork"?When the winner of the contract was announced, the counsel for NASA was present. This was apparently to keep the DC-1 proponents from getting the idea of suing to either get the contract or find out what funny business had gone on. In the mean time, the Shuttle and its standing army of maintenance people are still working, and there's a lucrative R&D contract for the VentureStar (even though it's having serious difficulties with its composite LH2 tanks delaminating). It's great for everyone except the taxpayer and people who might benefit from flying satellites cheaper; IOW, it sucks.
--
The Karma Century Club is taking new members.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.