Twice the thrust is probably attainable with more engines(check)
1) It's not "twice"; it's level of performance is a tenth that of what is needed for orbit. 2) Thrust is not the problem; it's ISP and staging.
and a little more fuel
Try a hundred times more fuel and a craft equivalently large enough to manage it. See OTRAG for details.
that has a higher energy output(I hate acronyms - a pet peeve of mine).
Nobody who discusses rocketry any relevant amount will spell out the words "specific impulse" every time. It's just "ISP". Insisting on spelling everything out marks you as a novice as much as I'd come across as an internet novice by constantly spelling out www as "world-wide web".
The ship itself that launches them can also without a doubt be made to go faster, especially not IF, but WHEN we get scramjets and similar technologies working.
Lol. Just, lol.
4000m/sec from the module and 1-2000m/sec from the booster/plane/etc is suddenly not so far off the mark.
What is off the mark is that Scaled is going to go from polybut and nitrous to an as-of-yet in-development technology that requires carbon-carbon panels and an extensive regenerative cooling system with typically hydrogen fuel, without completely starting from scratch to boot.
Let us not forget that the point of SpaceShipTwo is ultimately to put people in orbit.
It is not. It's effectively SS1 with more payload.
SpaceShipOne, the predecessor to SpaceShipTwo delivered around 2250 m/s of delta v out of roughly 9500 m/s needed to get to LEO (including gravity losses). In a nasaspaceflight.com thread, I calculate the actual delta v of SpaceShipOne.... At the top of the peak it had a horizontal velocity of roughly 1200 m/s (mach 3.5).
Whoa, where to start here. SS1 peaked at about 112 kilometers altitude, almost 0 m/s (*NOT* mach 3.5 horizontal; it's ascent was nearly vertical. You're confusing it's peak ascent speed). LEO can be roughly defined as 300km, 7800m/s. E(potential)=mgh, E(kinetic)=1/2mv^2
SS1: E(potential)=m*9.8*112000 ~= m*1,100,000; E(kinetic) = 1/2m*0^2 = 0; Total energy ~= m*1,000,000 J LEO: E(potential)=m*9.8*300000 ~= m*2,950,000; E(kinetic) = 1/2m*7800^2 = m*30,000,000; Total energy ~= m*33,000,000 J
In other words, SS1 reached a state about 3% the energy of an equivalent mass in orbit.
Yes, SS1 suffered gravity losses. But Most observers consider SpaceX's launch a failure for one obvious reason. Because it failed to deliver the payload to orbit.
Anyone who would consider that is being unreasonable, since the mission was just a systems test, designed to to reach orbital velocity but an inclined trajectory, do one orbit around the Earth, then plunge down. It did a half orbit instead, and retired almost all of the rocket's risk (rather impressive for this early; most major rocket families have a lot more failures early on). As for "most observers", you've obviously not been to the same places I have. Or including NASA's opinion, for that matter.
Finally, the baffle should have been in the tank already
Many rockets don't use baffles in their upper stages. SpaceX used a baffle in their lower stage, but none in the upper stage because their simulations showed that it wasn't necessary. While it's still not entirely necessary (they fixed the kick problem that led to the oscillation in a way the simulation didn't expect), they're putting it in anyways.
This is one area that the development and testing cycle experience from SpaceShipOne and Two helps Scaled Composites.
As though they'll be "getting to orbit" on polybut and nitrous.
they probably would have caught the baffle problem
Once again, not every tank on every craft needs a baffle. You can't just stick safety features left and right on every component of an orbital rocket, or it'll never get off the ground. You only can afford to put in what's necessary. Or, in the case of SS1, you can do whatever the heck you like, since your performance envelope is so ridiculously lax.
a Buick is not amazing, but it's reliability is compared to a Formula 1.
Enough with the bad analogies. What you're not grasping is that you *can't* get to orbit with anything even *like* SS1/2. I don't have time to teach the fundamentals of rocketry to each and every one of you, but please, please take some time and start reading. Learn about specific impulse. Learn about payload fractions. Study some existing vehicle launch families to get an idea of how craft need to scale as they increase in delta-V. *Then* come back here and discuss.
If you really want your analogy corrected, if a Formula 1 car could go around a lap X times, for a Buick to go around the lap X times, it would have to be the size of the Space Shuttle's crawler to have enough fuel to do so.
Remember the Mercury and Gemini programs? You know, the ones we used to help us learn what it would take to get men to the moon and back, safely? They're taking STEPS, and you're complaining because they aren't jumping right to a space shuttle clone.
Right. Because Mercury and Gemini were simply copying what people did half a century earlier except getting worse performance despite greatly improved technology at their disposal, in a method that's completely unscaleable to orbit.
Right?
SeaLaunch, Orbital Sciences, and SpaceX require extensive launch infrastructure. Tell one of them "There's a runway, let's see you launch in a week", and they couldn't do it.
Right. Because they're actually going to orbit. Why, exactly, aren't you understanding the order of magnitude greater difficulty in getting to orbit than a suborbital joyride? SS1 went 850m/s. Orbital velocity is 7,800m/s. Kinetic energy is proportional to the velocity squared. Amount of fuel/oxidizer needed to reach a given velocity is exponential, with the exponent based on your ISP -- and SS1/2 inherently have very low ISPs, which can't scale up because of the fuel/oxidizer choice (and changing would require completely reengineering the engines and tankage -- i.e., almost the entire craft).
Are you starting to grasp the scale of how completely unlike actual orbital rocketry what they're doing is?
Right. So, let's cheer for a company to earn enough money so it can start from scratch at doing something relevant rather than for those who are already doing relevant things, eh?
But spaceX is doing the same thing NASA, Russia, the EU have done. sit on a giant explosion and ride it up into space. SS2 and white knight are working on flying up there. with any luck SpaceShip 10 will be SSTO which makes it 10 times better than anyone else.
Better yet, while we're ignoring physics, let's ride a magical unicorn up to the ISS and let it graze on stardust and moonbeams.
Scaled Composites is carefully putting together that vehicle with the high ISP engine, the thermal protection system, and all those other challenges. It just hasn't starting designing it yet.
Oh! Whew! For a minute there, I thought we were going to be talking about the remotely near future and cheering companies on for what they're *actually doing*.;)
You need testing experience and infrastructure (note, for example, that SpaceShipTwo has its own flight simulator already)
Ooh, a flight simulator! Those are so hard to come by these days, after all. Don't tell me that they also have a 3d model! Perhaps they're being daring and actually doing CFD simulations. Oh, when will this mystical technology end?
What you are seeing is IMHO how a master would approach this problem.
Zen Student: Master, I must leave Osaka and journey to Tokyo. Which direction should I travel?
Zen Master: A tenth of the distance in the opposite direction.
And the student was enlightened.
You build up to it with progressively more sophisticated launch vehicles and extensive testing at each step.
"Progressively" implies continuity. There is no "progressive" approach to orbit from their current design.
As though a cockpit is somehow the most challenging part, or even a relevantly challenging part, of rocketry.
A capsule carrying people is just a payload. The cost and challenge is in the launch vehicle.
(and let's not get into the term "man-rated", which nobody can seem to define outside of a few general concepts that most rockets can easily be designed to meet, such as limited Gs and not blowing up every other flight)
You're right. Because a cockpit with no TPS is so much more challenging than turbopumps that can drain the volume of swimming pools in minutes to seconds, pumping cryogenic and/or corrosive materials, into a combustion chamber operating hotter than the boiling point of steel, on the scale of a building dozens of stories high, built as light as physically possible despite accelerating this building-sized monster at several Gs with heavy vibration.:P
The most cutting edge isn't always the most practical.
Get to orbit on a pogo stick, then.
Rocketry is subject to the constraints of physics, and the constraints of physics say that their system (low-ISP air launched) simply cannot scale. Which means starting from scratch. Not like they've addressed any of the most serious rocketry challenges to begin with (like, say, a TPS)
So, in short, you're saying that we should be, instead of focusing on companies who are actually going to orbit, like SpaceX, instead focus on people who are trying to raise enough venture capital to start from scratch in trying to go to orbit.
Not to be rude, but you need to get a clue here. Joyrides mean more money in a growing space economy. SpaceShipTwo is a critical test of space tourism.
Successful joyrides mean more money thrown at joyrides. Soyuz (and later Dragon) are a test of orbital space tourism.
but SpaceShipTwo is state of the art in private manned space
SpaceShipTwo is state of the art in rocketplanes that go ~850 m/s instead of the 7,800 m/s needed for orbital rocketry (and remember, it's an exponential challenge to get more velocity, not a linear one).
Further, SpaceX has yet to successfully launch anything
NASA considers SpaceX's last launch a success, as does SpaceX, and as do most observers. All of their systems were flight qualified, which was the purpose of the launch. The only problem they had was a slightly early cutoff in the engine due to sloshing, which is a pretty trivial problem to solve (all you need is a baffle in the tank). Q1 will see a Falcon 1 with a higher performance, regeneratively cooled Merlin launch its first payload, and the first Falcon 9 will be in June. In general, SpaceX's stats have been very encouraging to the rocketry world. Especially their impressive turnaround on aborted launches; that was amazingly fast.
ISP = Specific Impulse TPS = Thermal Protection System.
Sorry; I figured people could look up any acronyms they don't know on their own. After all, they feel qualified enough to debate about rocketry; shouldn't they at least be bothered to learn the most basic terms and concepts?
The innovation is coming from the fact that they are reaching sub-orbit for somewhere around a 1/10 of the cost of the Mercury project
They're *not doing any relevant research*. Mercury was breaking new ground, and didn't have the benefit of modern materials to boot. This is repeating old ground. Mercury used Redstone rockets. The Redstone reached Mach 5.5, over twice as fast, which means over 4 times the kinetic energy per unit mass, which means dissipating that much on reentry. Getting to that velocity, however, is a lot harder than double or even four times the effort. In rocketry, as you try to scale up your velocity, you also have to scale up your fuel and oxidizer. However, that also means getting that fuel and oxidizer to velocity, which means more fuel and oxidizer, and so on. It's exponential growth and exponential difficulty.
the technology and innovations generated by the program are either being simply lost in time or are locked from private enterprise behind "classified"
The heck they are. Rockets designs far, far better than the Redstone are completely open and available to the public. Not to mention that most serious rocketry companies hire at least *one* engineer (preferably many) with a background in rocketry.
As long as that remains the focus of the entire space market, there will never be any prospect of people like you and I getting into space at all - orbital or not.
"Not" is irrelevant. "Not orbital" means joyrides, sounding rockets, and nothing more. "Orbital" is where virtually everything relevant is. SpaceX is reducing costs to orbit. Scaled is doing nothing of the sort. Hence, Scaled is irrelevant.
the more investment there will be in those industries and the more the state of the art WILL be advanced.
Success in offering joyrides means *more investment in joyrides*. VCs will invest in orbital rocketry based on the success of *orbital rocketry*. Orbital rocketry != joyrides, and VCs aren't dumb enough to be tricked into thinking otherwise.
But let's just look at that "success in joyrides" aspect, shall we? Historically, rocketplanes offer a several percent chance of blowing up with every flight. Let's be nice to Scaled, ignore their repeated near-catastrophic problems in SS1, and assume that they get this down to only 1%. What sort of business model involves blowing up half a dozen people with a combined net worth ranging from the hundreds of millions to the billions of dollars, every hundred flights (on flights that they plan to launch frequently)? I don't care what waivers you make them sign, blowing up millionaires every so often is a stupid business model, and a great way to *harm* the reputation of private rocketry.
SS2 is about pushing the economic envelope of what is achievable without government funding.
Sorry, but SeaLaunch, Orbital Sciences, and SpaceX already beat you to it, and they're doing *relevant, orbital rocketry*.
Yeah, it would be nice to hitch a ride on a heavy lift vehicle, but almost nobody can afford that.
Because they actually go to orbit, meaning that they have to deal with the real challenges of getting to orbit.
High ISP and the like more than exponentially increases cost, risk, and turn-around time, making those engines much less economically feasable for this mission.
And they actually get you to orbit Your ISP is similar to OTRAG's, meaning you'd have to scale like OTRAG does. Which means a 100 tonne launch vehicle with 64 stages just go loft 1 tonne of payload. Tell me, are you planning to scale to a 100 tonne launch vehicle with 64 stages? Are you? And how do you plan to bulk stamp out these stages like OTRAG was p[lanning to in order to keep such a monster econmoical? And how do you plan to lift a 100 tonne vehicle? Going to scale up WK2 big enough to make a Mriya look tiny?
ISP: Specific Impulse (properly, I followed by subscript SP). Defines how much thrust you get per unit of mass based on the exhaust velocity. Low ISP rockets simply don't scale up without...
OTRAG: OTRAG was a German rocket design concept which proposed a way to make low ISP rockets scale up to orbit: by making an utter monster, a skyscraper of a rocket with only a small payload. The idea was that if you have every part be as incredibly simple as possible, with hundreds of identical stages stamped out cheaper than you can make a car, even with low performance, you can still get to orbit. The project failed for a number of reasons, but the idea behind it is basically sound (although the many stage separations would have been incredibly risky). But building smooth composite structures or, really, anything SS1 did, just won't work with the sort of design needed to make an OTRAG system work. OTRAG is a Big Ugly Rocket(tm). And, naturally, having such a monster doesn't work with a carrier aircraft because you can't lift that much weight.
Perhaps before you argue that something you don't know much about is useful, perhaps you should familiarize yourself with even the most basic rocketry terms like ISP.
First off, almost all orbital launches are private. Most are completely private except for government funding in the development stage and government launch contracts; the launches are run for-profit by companies like Boeing and Lockheed. Even for ones run by NASA, like the shuttle, the craft itself was largely built by private companies. If you want to rule out "large" private companies, there's SeaLaunch, Orbital Sciences, etc, who've developed and run for-profit their own rockets. And if you want rockets developed largely from scratch, look no further than SpaceX and their Falcon rocket (with soon upcoming Dragon spacecraft).
Why cheer for irrelevance? Cheer for what actually matters.
By the way -- I'm not sure the analogy with early aircraft is the one you're going for. Just ignoring how little capital it took to build an airplane versus what it takes to make an orbital spacecraft, you should realize that early airplanes suffered major crashes at very regular intervals. The pilots typically survived because the performance of said aircraft was so low. The first cross-country flight took weeks and involved dozens of crashes. For the first around-the-world race, the US strategically placed replacement parts and even entire replacement airplanes for its pilots to use.
Even if that was an analogy you wanted to use, you should be comparing early aircraft with early rockets (V2, Redstone, etc), not with SS1 and their "repeat what's done decades ago in a way that we know damn well won't scale to anything". SS1 isn't developing new technology or pushing the envelope; they're making craft that don't advance anything except people's ability to have a joyride.
As far as I know, it is the only manned spacecraft without a complex or heavy reentry heat shield.
That's because it doesn't go fast enough to need one. It peaked out at Mach 2.5 (and this was in the upper atmosphere, meaning it was getting far less heating than a jet moving at this speed), not Mach 18 or so (and remember that energy is proportional to the velocity *squared*). This is not "state of the art". It's "state of the art fifty years ago". It's not contributing a damn thing.
Hey, if all you care about is joyrides that do absolutely nothing more than entertainment, power to you. As for me, I care about spaceflight that has more relevance than a sounding rocket. I.e., satellites, stations, bases, colonies, probes, telescopes, and so on. What's holding us back is the price of *orbital* launches, so pardon me if I'm a bit harsh on companies that pretend to be contributing to that when they're doing absolutely nothing.
Really, the primary thing this project has going for it is that it is not funded by a government
So is your average bobble head doll manufacturer. And they're just as relevant to improving orbital spaceflight. If you want someone to cheer for, cheer for SpaceX, for Orbital Sciences, for SeaLaunch, for any of the private companies involved in *actual orbital spaceflight*.
The design specs are enough. The ISP is tiny, the fuel/oxidizer combo will never scale without going OTRAG on it (which makes its carrier design as well as the entire construction method used impossible), and there's virtually no TPS. How, exactly, is this relevant to actual orbital spaceflight?
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Twice the thrust is probably attainable with more engines(check)
1) It's not "twice"; it's level of performance is a tenth that of what is needed for orbit.
2) Thrust is not the problem; it's ISP and staging.
and a little more fuel
Try a hundred times more fuel and a craft equivalently large enough to manage it. See OTRAG for details.
that has a higher energy output(I hate acronyms - a pet peeve of mine).
Nobody who discusses rocketry any relevant amount will spell out the words "specific impulse" every time. It's just "ISP". Insisting on spelling everything out marks you as a novice as much as I'd come across as an internet novice by constantly spelling out www as "world-wide web".
The ship itself that launches them can also without a doubt be made to go faster, especially not IF, but WHEN we get scramjets and similar technologies working.
Lol. Just, lol.
4000m/sec from the module and 1-2000m/sec from the booster/plane/etc is suddenly not so far off the mark.
What is off the mark is that Scaled is going to go from polybut and nitrous to an as-of-yet in-development technology that requires carbon-carbon panels and an extensive regenerative cooling system with typically hydrogen fuel, without completely starting from scratch to boot.
Let us not forget that the point of SpaceShipTwo is ultimately to put people in orbit.
... At the top of the peak it had a horizontal velocity of roughly 1200 m/s (mach 3.5).
It is not. It's effectively SS1 with more payload.
SpaceShipOne, the predecessor to SpaceShipTwo delivered around 2250 m/s of delta v out of roughly 9500 m/s needed to get to LEO (including gravity losses). In a nasaspaceflight.com thread, I calculate the actual delta v of SpaceShipOne.
Whoa, where to start here. SS1 peaked at about 112 kilometers altitude, almost 0 m/s (*NOT* mach 3.5 horizontal; it's ascent was nearly vertical. You're confusing it's peak ascent speed). LEO can be roughly defined as 300km, 7800m/s. E(potential)=mgh, E(kinetic)=1/2mv^2
SS1: E(potential)=m*9.8*112000 ~= m*1,100,000; E(kinetic) = 1/2m*0^2 = 0; Total energy ~= m*1,000,000 J
LEO: E(potential)=m*9.8*300000 ~= m*2,950,000; E(kinetic) = 1/2m*7800^2 = m*30,000,000; Total energy ~= m*33,000,000 J
In other words, SS1 reached a state about 3% the energy of an equivalent mass in orbit.
Yes, SS1 suffered gravity losses. But Most observers consider SpaceX's launch a failure for one obvious reason. Because it failed to deliver the payload to orbit.
Anyone who would consider that is being unreasonable, since the mission was just a systems test, designed to to reach orbital velocity but an inclined trajectory, do one orbit around the Earth, then plunge down. It did a half orbit instead, and retired almost all of the rocket's risk (rather impressive for this early; most major rocket families have a lot more failures early on). As for "most observers", you've obviously not been to the same places I have. Or including NASA's opinion, for that matter.
Finally, the baffle should have been in the tank already
Many rockets don't use baffles in their upper stages. SpaceX used a baffle in their lower stage, but none in the upper stage because their simulations showed that it wasn't necessary. While it's still not entirely necessary (they fixed the kick problem that led to the oscillation in a way the simulation didn't expect), they're putting it in anyways.
This is one area that the development and testing cycle experience from SpaceShipOne and Two helps Scaled Composites.
As though they'll be "getting to orbit" on polybut and nitrous.
they probably would have caught the baffle problem
Once again, not every tank on every craft needs a baffle. You can't just stick safety features left and right on every component of an orbital rocket, or it'll never get off the ground. You only can afford to put in what's necessary. Or, in the case of SS1, you can do whatever the heck you like, since your performance envelope is so ridiculously lax.
The advantage of the SS1 was that it was the very first craft in human history to get into orbit and come back while being fully self-contained
It didn't get to orbit. It didn't even come remotely close to orbit. And it's design cannot be scaled to come close to orbit.
. No booster rockets the size of an apartment building. No heat shielding to fail
That's because it needed those things about as much as your car does, because it doesn't come even close to getting in orbit
Sure, so long as the production model is completely unrelated to SS1/SS2..
a Buick is not amazing, but it's reliability is compared to a Formula 1.
Enough with the bad analogies. What you're not grasping is that you *can't* get to orbit with anything even *like* SS1/2. I don't have time to teach the fundamentals of rocketry to each and every one of you, but please, please take some time and start reading. Learn about specific impulse. Learn about payload fractions. Study some existing vehicle launch families to get an idea of how craft need to scale as they increase in delta-V. *Then* come back here and discuss.
If you really want your analogy corrected, if a Formula 1 car could go around a lap X times, for a Buick to go around the lap X times, it would have to be the size of the Space Shuttle's crawler to have enough fuel to do so.
You want private rocketry companies that are getting craft to orbit. There you go.
Please learn Rocketry 101 before you post again.
Remember the Mercury and Gemini programs? You know, the ones we used to help us learn what it would take to get men to the moon and back, safely? They're taking STEPS, and you're complaining because they aren't jumping right to a space shuttle clone.
Right. Because Mercury and Gemini were simply copying what people did half a century earlier except getting worse performance despite greatly improved technology at their disposal, in a method that's completely unscaleable to orbit.
Right?
SeaLaunch, Orbital Sciences, and SpaceX require extensive launch infrastructure. Tell one of them "There's a runway, let's see you launch in a week", and they couldn't do it.
Right. Because they're actually going to orbit. Why, exactly, aren't you understanding the order of magnitude greater difficulty in getting to orbit than a suborbital joyride? SS1 went 850m/s. Orbital velocity is 7,800m/s. Kinetic energy is proportional to the velocity squared. Amount of fuel/oxidizer needed to reach a given velocity is exponential, with the exponent based on your ISP -- and SS1/2 inherently have very low ISPs, which can't scale up because of the fuel/oxidizer choice (and changing would require completely reengineering the engines and tankage -- i.e., almost the entire craft).
Are you starting to grasp the scale of how completely unlike actual orbital rocketry what they're doing is?
Right. So, let's cheer for a company to earn enough money so it can start from scratch at doing something relevant rather than for those who are already doing relevant things, eh?
But spaceX is doing the same thing NASA, Russia, the EU have done. sit on a giant explosion and ride it up into space. SS2 and white knight are working on flying up there. with any luck SpaceShip 10 will be SSTO which makes it 10 times better than anyone else.
Better yet, while we're ignoring physics, let's ride a magical unicorn up to the ISS and let it graze on stardust and moonbeams.
Scaled Composites is carefully putting together that vehicle with the high ISP engine, the thermal protection system, and all those other challenges. It just hasn't starting designing it yet.
;)
Oh! Whew! For a minute there, I thought we were going to be talking about the remotely near future and cheering companies on for what they're *actually doing*.
You need testing experience and infrastructure (note, for example, that SpaceShipTwo has its own flight simulator already)
Ooh, a flight simulator! Those are so hard to come by these days, after all. Don't tell me that they also have a 3d model! Perhaps they're being daring and actually doing CFD simulations. Oh, when will this mystical technology end?
What you are seeing is IMHO how a master would approach this problem.
Zen Student: Master, I must leave Osaka and journey to Tokyo. Which direction should I travel?
Zen Master: A tenth of the distance in the opposite direction.
And the student was enlightened.
You build up to it with progressively more sophisticated launch vehicles and extensive testing at each step.
"Progressively" implies continuity. There is no "progressive" approach to orbit from their current design.
As though a cockpit is somehow the most challenging part, or even a relevantly challenging part, of rocketry.
A capsule carrying people is just a payload. The cost and challenge is in the launch vehicle.
(and let's not get into the term "man-rated", which nobody can seem to define outside of a few general concepts that most rockets can easily be designed to meet, such as limited Gs and not blowing up every other flight)
You're right. Because a cockpit with no TPS is so much more challenging than turbopumps that can drain the volume of swimming pools in minutes to seconds, pumping cryogenic and/or corrosive materials, into a combustion chamber operating hotter than the boiling point of steel, on the scale of a building dozens of stories high, built as light as physically possible despite accelerating this building-sized monster at several Gs with heavy vibration. :P
The most cutting edge isn't always the most practical.
Get to orbit on a pogo stick, then.
Rocketry is subject to the constraints of physics, and the constraints of physics say that their system (low-ISP air launched) simply cannot scale. Which means starting from scratch. Not like they've addressed any of the most serious rocketry challenges to begin with (like, say, a TPS)
So, in short, you're saying that we should be, instead of focusing on companies who are actually going to orbit, like SpaceX, instead focus on people who are trying to raise enough venture capital to start from scratch in trying to go to orbit.
Um, why?
Not to be rude, but you need to get a clue here. Joyrides mean more money in a growing space economy. SpaceShipTwo is a critical test of space tourism.
Successful joyrides mean more money thrown at joyrides. Soyuz (and later Dragon) are a test of orbital space tourism.
but SpaceShipTwo is state of the art in private manned space
SpaceShipTwo is state of the art in rocketplanes that go ~850 m/s instead of the 7,800 m/s needed for orbital rocketry (and remember, it's an exponential challenge to get more velocity, not a linear one).
Further, SpaceX has yet to successfully launch anything
NASA considers SpaceX's last launch a success, as does SpaceX, and as do most observers. All of their systems were flight qualified, which was the purpose of the launch. The only problem they had was a slightly early cutoff in the engine due to sloshing, which is a pretty trivial problem to solve (all you need is a baffle in the tank). Q1 will see a Falcon 1 with a higher performance, regeneratively cooled Merlin launch its first payload, and the first Falcon 9 will be in June. In general, SpaceX's stats have been very encouraging to the rocketry world. Especially their impressive turnaround on aborted launches; that was amazingly fast.
ISP = Specific Impulse
TPS = Thermal Protection System.
Sorry; I figured people could look up any acronyms they don't know on their own. After all, they feel qualified enough to debate about rocketry; shouldn't they at least be bothered to learn the most basic terms and concepts?
The innovation is coming from the fact that they are reaching sub-orbit for somewhere around a 1/10 of the cost of the Mercury project
They're *not doing any relevant research*. Mercury was breaking new ground, and didn't have the benefit of modern materials to boot. This is repeating old ground. Mercury used Redstone rockets. The Redstone reached Mach 5.5, over twice as fast, which means over 4 times the kinetic energy per unit mass, which means dissipating that much on reentry. Getting to that velocity, however, is a lot harder than double or even four times the effort. In rocketry, as you try to scale up your velocity, you also have to scale up your fuel and oxidizer. However, that also means getting that fuel and oxidizer to velocity, which means more fuel and oxidizer, and so on. It's exponential growth and exponential difficulty.
the technology and innovations generated by the program are either being simply lost in time or are locked from private enterprise behind "classified"
The heck they are. Rockets designs far, far better than the Redstone are completely open and available to the public. Not to mention that most serious rocketry companies hire at least *one* engineer (preferably many) with a background in rocketry.
As long as that remains the focus of the entire space market, there will never be any prospect of people like you and I getting into space at all - orbital or not.
"Not" is irrelevant. "Not orbital" means joyrides, sounding rockets, and nothing more. "Orbital" is where virtually everything relevant is. SpaceX is reducing costs to orbit. Scaled is doing nothing of the sort. Hence, Scaled is irrelevant.
the more investment there will be in those industries and the more the state of the art WILL be advanced.
Success in offering joyrides means *more investment in joyrides*. VCs will invest in orbital rocketry based on the success of *orbital rocketry*. Orbital rocketry != joyrides, and VCs aren't dumb enough to be tricked into thinking otherwise.
But let's just look at that "success in joyrides" aspect, shall we? Historically, rocketplanes offer a several percent chance of blowing up with every flight. Let's be nice to Scaled, ignore their repeated near-catastrophic problems in SS1, and assume that they get this down to only 1%. What sort of business model involves blowing up half a dozen people with a combined net worth ranging from the hundreds of millions to the billions of dollars, every hundred flights (on flights that they plan to launch frequently)? I don't care what waivers you make them sign, blowing up millionaires every so often is a stupid business model, and a great way to *harm* the reputation of private rocketry.
SS2 is about pushing the economic envelope of what is achievable without government funding.
Sorry, but SeaLaunch, Orbital Sciences, and SpaceX already beat you to it, and they're doing *relevant, orbital rocketry*.
Yeah, it would be nice to hitch a ride on a heavy lift vehicle, but almost nobody can afford that.
Because they actually go to orbit, meaning that they have to deal with the real challenges of getting to orbit.
High ISP and the like more than exponentially increases cost, risk, and turn-around time, making those engines much less economically feasable for this mission.
And they actually get you to orbit Your ISP is similar to OTRAG's, meaning you'd have to scale like OTRAG does. Which means a 100 tonne launch vehicle with 64 stages just go loft 1 tonne of payload. Tell me, are you planning to scale to a 100 tonne launch vehicle with 64 stages? Are you? And how do you plan to bulk stamp out these stages like OTRAG was p[lanning to in order to keep such a monster econmoical? And how do you plan to lift a 100 tonne vehicle? Going to scale up WK2 big enough to make a Mriya look tiny?
Please, join the real world here.
ISP: Specific Impulse (properly, I followed by subscript SP). Defines how much thrust you get per unit of mass based on the exhaust velocity. Low ISP rockets simply don't scale up without...
OTRAG: OTRAG was a German rocket design concept which proposed a way to make low ISP rockets scale up to orbit: by making an utter monster, a skyscraper of a rocket with only a small payload. The idea was that if you have every part be as incredibly simple as possible, with hundreds of identical stages stamped out cheaper than you can make a car, even with low performance, you can still get to orbit. The project failed for a number of reasons, but the idea behind it is basically sound (although the many stage separations would have been incredibly risky). But building smooth composite structures or, really, anything SS1 did, just won't work with the sort of design needed to make an OTRAG system work. OTRAG is a Big Ugly Rocket(tm). And, naturally, having such a monster doesn't work with a carrier aircraft because you can't lift that much weight.
Perhaps before you argue that something you don't know much about is useful, perhaps you should familiarize yourself with even the most basic rocketry terms like ISP.
First off, almost all orbital launches are private. Most are completely private except for government funding in the development stage and government launch contracts; the launches are run for-profit by companies like Boeing and Lockheed. Even for ones run by NASA, like the shuttle, the craft itself was largely built by private companies. If you want to rule out "large" private companies, there's SeaLaunch, Orbital Sciences, etc, who've developed and run for-profit their own rockets. And if you want rockets developed largely from scratch, look no further than SpaceX and their Falcon rocket (with soon upcoming Dragon spacecraft).
Why cheer for irrelevance? Cheer for what actually matters.
By the way -- I'm not sure the analogy with early aircraft is the one you're going for. Just ignoring how little capital it took to build an airplane versus what it takes to make an orbital spacecraft, you should realize that early airplanes suffered major crashes at very regular intervals. The pilots typically survived because the performance of said aircraft was so low. The first cross-country flight took weeks and involved dozens of crashes. For the first around-the-world race, the US strategically placed replacement parts and even entire replacement airplanes for its pilots to use.
Even if that was an analogy you wanted to use, you should be comparing early aircraft with early rockets (V2, Redstone, etc), not with SS1 and their "repeat what's done decades ago in a way that we know damn well won't scale to anything". SS1 isn't developing new technology or pushing the envelope; they're making craft that don't advance anything except people's ability to have a joyride.
As far as I know, it is the only manned spacecraft without a complex or heavy reentry heat shield.
That's because it doesn't go fast enough to need one. It peaked out at Mach 2.5 (and this was in the upper atmosphere, meaning it was getting far less heating than a jet moving at this speed), not Mach 18 or so (and remember that energy is proportional to the velocity *squared*). This is not "state of the art". It's "state of the art fifty years ago". It's not contributing a damn thing.
Hey, if all you care about is joyrides that do absolutely nothing more than entertainment, power to you. As for me, I care about spaceflight that has more relevance than a sounding rocket. I.e., satellites, stations, bases, colonies, probes, telescopes, and so on. What's holding us back is the price of *orbital* launches, so pardon me if I'm a bit harsh on companies that pretend to be contributing to that when they're doing absolutely nothing.
Really, the primary thing this project has going for it is that it is not funded by a government
So is your average bobble head doll manufacturer. And they're just as relevant to improving orbital spaceflight. If you want someone to cheer for, cheer for SpaceX, for Orbital Sciences, for SeaLaunch, for any of the private companies involved in *actual orbital spaceflight*.
The design specs are enough. The ISP is tiny, the fuel/oxidizer combo will never scale without going OTRAG on it (which makes its carrier design as well as the entire construction method used impossible), and there's virtually no TPS. How, exactly, is this relevant to actual orbital spaceflight?