There are also just two manufacturers of commercial aircraft in the world,
Boeing
Airbus
Antanov
Dornier
Bombardier
Embraer
Beechcraft
Which 2 did you mean ? All of this list is currently manufacturing aircraft for commercial markets, and most of them are producing passenger jets. I'm sure there's more, these are just off the top of my head. In terms of number of aircraft delivered, Bombardier probably produces as many airframes as all the rest put together, even if we discount the executive jets, and stick just to those built for passenger service. There's probably a dozen more if you include all the manufacturers of executive jets.
The fiasco with product liability insurance in the late 80's certainly killed aircraft manufacturing in the USA, but it's alive and healthy in the rest of the world. This is what happens when the courts award multi million dollar product liability suits on incidents involving 25 year old private aircraft that were not properly maintained in thier lifetime, you kill an entire industry.
It's been more than 15 years since I've worked with modelling of supersonic stuff. I dont know of any online material, have never looked, and all of the good reference books I've got deal exclusively with subsonic flight regimes.
Nobody considers Armadillo anywhere near close. The other team that's close is Da Vinci project. They are the only other team that's actually got hardware constructed with any amount of testing (photos) done on it. Thier schedule calls for the first sub-orbital test flights in august of this year, and they are the only X-Prize team other than scaled actually planning to fly this summer. they are also the only other team that has minor details like launch permits etc all wrapped up.
I'll grant they are doing some interesting and probably fun playing with rocket engines. But, the X-Prize is about building a manned craft to go to into space. They have done basically zero vehicle design for the high altitude supersonic flight regimes required to achieve that. They have spent all thier time and effort fiddling with rocket engines basically.
Serious X-Prize contenders realized early on, there's a lot of rocket technology available 'for sale' out there. They bought rocket engines, and concentrated on the difficult part of the engineering problems, the vehicle to get into space and back.
There's 2 teams that have a chance of actually completeing the X-Prize flights this year. It's interesting, Scaled has used the 'all aerodymanic' approach, with a mothership for first stage lifting to get above troposphere. Da Vinci project is 'all ballistic' with a mothership to provide first stage lift above troposphere.
Scaled is currently the odds on favorite to achive the X-Prize flights first. They have a really good chance, they have all the flight hardware, and it's been thru rigorous testing. Still, manned space flight is HARD (just check with Nasa for reference), and it's NOT a given that the SS1 + WK combination can complete 2 more flights without incident. A serious incident with either vehicle, and Scaled will be out of the running for the X-Prize, there isn't time left to replace either of them.
Da Vinci project has flight tested engines, but, they have yet to flight test an all up final configuration. They have the permits in place, and, the hardware is built. They are expected to start flight testing within the next 6 weeks.
Armadillo, well, they are tinkering with rockets, and writing a blog about it. They dont have a vehicle to mount an all up configuation rocket in, and they dont have a design to build one from. The X-Prize must be claimed this year, and Armadillo hasn't even got a vehicle design yet. No, they are not in the running, and have no hope of being in the running. If you haven't done the engineering analysis on a design, to validate it should be capable of withstanding the launch/recovery portions of the flight, and got the hardware built, ready to fly this summer, you are not in the running for the X-Prize. No matter how much money you throw at it, you are not going to design/build that package in the next 4 months, and if it's not flight ready in 4 months, you cant meet the requirements for winning the X-Prize.
So the reason I am skeptical is that Rutan gives no explanation for how exactly wind shear caused the loss of control.
Your explanation sounds great, but, you are using the wrong frame of reference. You are considering classic wind shear at low level/low speed accident scenarios, because that's what the schools teach about. Finding a shear greater than 20 knots at low level is rare indeed. Head up to the tropopause, and it's a totally different story.
At the junction between troposphere and stratosphere is this little phenomena known as the 'jet stream'. 100 knots of shear on the boundary of the jet streams is actually 'quite normal' and 'not bad'. I've seen 150 knots of shear over a very short distance vertically (less than 2000 feet) while penetrating the jets. This is still not a huge big deal, just gets a little bumpy, but, take a good look at SS1.
At the time of the roll event, the aircraft was accelerating on the initial rocket boost. It was in transonic, or early supersonic flight regimes. Penetrating a shear layer that gives a 100 knot difference in relative airspeed would set up some very very interesting asymetric shock wave scenarios, where the shock buildup on one side of the airframe is completely different than on the other. Even if this situation is just momentary, the asymetric forces will be huge, and cause a very noticeable deviation from nominal flight path projections.
Your frame of reference for shear is 'low and slow' in 'low performance' aircraft. SS1 is a very high performance aircraft, operating 'high and fast'. The primary contributor to aerodymanic forces will be shock waves and various forms of drag they produce. It's a whole different world, and everything you learned about 'low and slow' just doesn't apply to the 'high and fast' flight regimes. The SS1 flight mode at the time of the upset was 'at or near vertical' at transonic or supersonic speeds. It would not be at all surprising to see a major upset in the craft stability if it accidently penetrated the core of a 150 knot jet during that flight condition.
At this time of year, at those lattitudes, the core of the jets would be at an altitude in the area of 45 to 55 thousand feet. It would be unusual to see a jet core that far south in June, but, not unheard of. It's to late, and i'm really not inclined to go dig up old met charts from a couple weeks back, and see what kind of jet stream cores were over that part of california that morning. Sounds to me like that's what they may have hit, and, means the meteorology guys will be watching the jet charts a LOT closer for the next launches. Wouldn't surprise me at all that they even overlooked the detail, with an attitude of 'jet stream cores, over california, in june, who are you trying to kid?'. It's common in the winter, but not in the summer.
It's not what they are doing that makes Armadillo a joke, it's that they represent it as a serious X-Prize attempt. there's 6 months left in the timeline for the prize, and they dont even have a design yet, never mind prototypes or flight hardware. The reason they dont have a design, is they haven't quite figured out that 'hacking' at it like they do a computer program isn't going to cut it for a project of this scale. They are tinkering like thousands of other back yard hobbiests that have been tinkering with rockets for years.
To be a serious X-Prize contender, at this stage of the game, the engineering has to be done, and flight hardware either under construction, or fully constructed. Scaled has done a full up flight test of flight hardware. Da Vinci project has done flight tests of flight hardware engines, and should be doing full up initial flight hardware testing by August. A couple more of the projects _may_ get to the point of flight qualifying hardware this summer.
Then there's a whole bunch of projects registered as X-Prize contenders, have spent a lot of time and effort promoting themselves as such, but have made virtually no progress in developing and testing hardware capable of actually competing for the prize. Canadian Arrow and Armadillo appear to fall into this category. The arrow folks can sure make the nice glossies, and run really good press campaigns, but, they dont seem to have a real rocket, just a mock-up, and a lot of talk.
Ultimately, the X-Prize will be claimed by an all out engineering effort, if it's claimed at all. Engineering involves crunching a lot of numbers to validate a design numerically, then going out into the real world, and flight testing the design to validate the number crunch. That's the only way to ultimately predict peformance that's going to be of the scale required to achieve the stated X-Prize goals. 100km is a lofty enough target that tinkering by trial and error in the back yard just isn't going to reach the goal.
Armadillo will be a serious aerospace company when they have put a vehicle over 100,000 feet. For now, they can put the 'little one' up in the air quasi controlled, but the 'big one' seems to be unstable once it's off tether. they dont seem to have even considered minor details like aerodymanics and structures yet. Even if they were the only player, and there were not teams with a realistic chance of actually accomplishing the flights this summer, you still couldn't consider Armadillo a serious contender for the prize. They may be playing with rockets, but, they are not gonna loft a manned vehicle into suborbital flight anytime soon.
I doubt this. We're in a horrible launch location (you want to be close to the equator),
This is only true for equatorial orbits. While it's true you do get some 'free ride' from the earths rotation when launching from the equator, it's actually 'penalty' and delta V that has to be removed from the vehicle to achieve a stable polar orbit. USA launches eastbound from JSC because it's an over the water shot, and it's 'significantly' south. They launch westbound from Vandenberg because it's over the water, and you need to give the vehicle 1100 mph westbound velocity to negate the rotation of the earth, to achive a stable polar orbit. Polar orbits are the most useful variety for missions that have a need to see the entire surface of the earth over time.
An ideal launch location has 1000 miles of 'nothing of value' downrange of the launch site. The usa likes to use water, hence locations on the 2 coasts. A launch location in northern Canada that sends vehicles over the Arctic ice pack is the 'ideal' location for launching polar orbit loads. The farther north its located, the less eastbound velocity penalty it accrues from the earth's rotation.
Yeah, when have you ever heard of an amateur rocket being used for terrorism?
Its being effectively used today. By setting up such rules, and making an issue of it, so it gets coverage, millions of americans who otherwise had no clue amateur rockets ever existed, now firmly believe they are 'terrorist stuff' and there must be laws to prevent it.
Those that dont 'get it' today, will surely understand in a few months when the government dials up the 'fear meter' to yellow, because 'reliable sources confirm that model rockets are possibly in the DC area', so they will dial up the meter to 'yellow' and the population will obligingly get 'very scared'.
What I want to know tho, is, if the meter gets dialed up to 'red', is that telling the public 'now its time to panic' ?
Go figure, NASA decides to abandon the ISS once the USA's commitment is finished, and somehow, the science used to build the ISS due to international collaboration just might save one of our most invaluable satellite telescopes.
Actually, the canadarm has been on shuttles since very early in the shuttle program. Using them to work on Hubble is nothing new, reference this photo . That's the shuttle variation of the arm holding Hubble in preparation for a past repair mission. The real difference in this proposal, is the use of a second arm from the same folks, with more manipulators etc, to do the repair work, instead of sending an astronaut out for a walk. Nasa is risk adverse, with only 3 years to perform the mission, they wont try find a 'new' contractor at this stage, they'll go with a known quantity, the folks that have been building them arms for as long as they've been in use on shuttles.
About the only downside to this style of repair mission, it'll emphasize the lack of relavence of 'manned missions' with modern robotic technology available. Cant help but wonder if that's really a bad thing. A robotic mission to service the Hubble will likely cost a LOT less than a manned shuttle launch, and achieve the same end result. Cant see any downside to it.
Buying US software also means American consumers will be able to buy more oil-guzzling SUVs, so if the Iraqies can fix their oil industry in the meantime, they will see their monies come back a runnin'!
There's no shortage of market for oil in this world. An average Iraqi would rather do business with the folks that didn't bomb thier infrastructure into oblivion, and kill anybody from the country that obliterated the infrastructure 'for the good of the population'.
It's a pretty good bet, when the news hit Bahgdad that 'the lights went out in NYC', a lot of people got a silly smile on thier face, and even had a bit of a chuckle. Those same folks would rather see all the SUV's in america stranded in the driveway with no gas, rather than actually sell oil to them. If they realize that piracy of American software is detrimental to american business, then, O/S doesn't have a chance over there. Sticking it to american business will have a much higher 'social value' than any prinicples of open source.
Of course, the absence of basic infrastructure (power, water, sewage) is a real obstacle to their goals; not to mention the monumental lack of security in many parts of the country.
The lack of security is an american perception. Iraqi's themselves are pretty safe in most areas of the country, unless they stand right in front of american ground troops. American troops otoh, are not safe anywhere.
This is nothing new. German occupation forces had the same problem throughout most of continental europe during WW2.
America is in the process of forcing democracy on a country in a very non democratic part of the world. They do this because the 'believe' its better for people. Cant help but wonder, how this makes them any different than the folks the 'believe' islam is better, and want to force that on parts of the world.
Fighting for democracy, fighting for islam, same shit, different stick.
pay for all the failed attempts at figuring out what sort of fuel combination to use, a la John Carmack and company,
The only competition carmack and crowd are in, is for the mindset of/. junkies. Nothing they have done even remotely resembles a serious attempt at lofting a spaceship. It's good for the pr machine tho, and I'm sure they sell a lot of $125 'droppings' on thier website. It's an interesting business model they have tho, play with rocket parts, write a blog about it, then sell the broken parts for $125 apiece. With good promotion, can probably make a decent living that way...
Isnt this comming a little late? I mean the X prize has been out there for a very long time, and now NASA is finally getting into it.
There's probably a few people at Nasa see the big light bulb coming on. Scaled has achieved sub-orbital capability on a budget rumored between 20 and 35 million dollars. This included the design, build, and test flight stages of the program. The same program running in the Nasa culture, using Nasa methodologies, would not be finished the preliminary design study before it had burned up 35 million dollars, and to achieve the result of 'successful manned test flight', the program would have burned up at least a billion dollars. the efficiency delta here is close to 2 orders of magnitude. that's very serious when you are talking the differences between millions and billions of dollars.
Nasa with it's current beaurocracy couldn't even consider writing the proposal that proposes creating a committe which would ultimately reccomend a study, without spending this much money.
The prizes are to small considering the scale of the achievements required. X-Prize was a 'radical' venture, with a 10 million dollar prize, but that's just for sub-oribital. If you want to truely inspire a 'gold rush' mentality, it's not hard. Set a worthy jackpot for an 'impossible' task.
The current environment of government contractors hanging around the 'space business' today just couldn't survive without a few open ended contracts to manage/maintain equipment on a cost plus basis. Serious prizes will generate serious ingenuity to win them. If Nasa offered 10% of it's annual budget in this fashion, they would achieve on the order of 10,000% the results they currently get by feeding the beaurocracy with nothing but money, money, and yet more money.
If you think about it logically, a martian sample return mission done by current nasa methodologies, would require a multi billion dollar budget, and it would still be looking at a high probability of failure. A billion dollars payable on reciept of 25kg of martian soil. this is not a contest, it's an offer to purchase. Publicize the offer, and verify the 'terms of purchase' via published documents. Sit back, wait. Somebody will deliver.
This is actually perfect for the existing bearocracy. They can get out of the business of doing scary things that kill people, but still keep enough beaurocrats on staff to administer the payouts. Not really a lot of change from what nasa is today, a 'space agency' that doesn't fly into space, just spends money.
The true elegance of this scenario, it's a results oriented system, that precludes any opportunity to pork barrel with the money. Fair value for work done will probably bankrupt a few companies currently working on Nasa projects tho, especially if contractual terms are changed from cost-plus to a results oriented system.
I just want to say that that is a VERY cool thing to do for the men and women who devote their lives to defending their countries.
That would be a cool thing for folks that devote thier life to defending ones own country. Problem is, most military folks today have devoted thier lives to invading other countries.
There used to be a time when 'properly configured' for an email server meant it would accept, and relay, email. Then times changed, and the definition was changed to 'accept for my domain and NOT relay for anybody'. Times changed farther, and now it means 'Accept for my domain, not relay for anybody, has published SPF records, and has reverse dns on the ip'.
I'm not part of a megacorp, I have a properly configured email server, have no problem in/outbound to/from anywhere.
You likely got blocked because you didn't properly set up your reverse dns, or because you are on a dynamically assigned netblock, possibly with port 25 blocking in place. All of those would construe an 'improperly configured email server' by today's definitions.
SpaceShipOne was point designed for commercial tourism of sub-orbital space.
and yes, IAARS.
As a rocket scientist, you should then fully understand the signficance of todays step. SS1 was point designed to a mission profile. The profile was to deliver 600 pounds (3 people and life support) to an altitude of 100km. That's a very significant point in the process, it's the point at which aerodymamics terms of all the relavent equations approximate zero.
The current system is a 2 stage lifting process, stage 1 (White Knight) carries stage 2 (SpaceShip One) which achieves a point outside the atmosphere. For commercialization, this may well be enough to start generating a revenue flow, but, it's obviously a building block for a third stage. With relatively minor mods, SS1 can be converted to a cargo carrier, which is capable of ejecting a 600 pound payload at that location 'in space'.
As an engineer, the next problem is relatively strait forward. Design a vehicle that can carry a payload into orbit, based on the starting parameters of ejection from SS1 at the top of it's arc. Considering the economics of the first 2 stages of the launch process, we can forego all the traditional redundancy found in satellite systems, and build cheap disposable ones, it's not going to cost millions to place them anymore.
I'm sure all the engineers at Boeing, Lockheed, and everybody else in the business will look at that as a silly/unpractical problem, you just dont build satellites that way. BUT, get a group of amateurs akin to the OSCAR series of amateur satellites, give them a set of parameters that is '600 pounds delivered to an altitude of 100km, with effectively zero forward velocity', and they will produce a vehicle that's capable of achieving orbit from that location, and carrying sufficient payload to that orbit to be a functioning communication satellite. A bunch of volunteers will design and build the unit, and it'll arrive at the launch site for a grand total budget well under a million dollars.
Is this practical in the business world? Just ask globalstar what will happen to thier business model if a competitor can step up, building disposable satellites for $100K, and putting them in low orbit for another $100K. They wont have the service life or reliability of a current globalstar satellite, but, who cares? We can launch 50 of them for less than the cost of a single globalstar bird.
To fully understand the commercial potential, just look around. What did Bic do to Zippo's business when they started selling disposable lighters for under a buck ?
I remember reading articles a few years ago about a vision of hundreds of low orbit satellites providing broadband coverage for data, the world over. It was a Bill Gates vision paper that came from, and guess what. Bill's original partner in Microsoft has just financed the development of the technology required to achieve that goal.
SS1 is the second stage of a 3 stage delivery system that will ultimately place thousands of inexpensive, disposable, satellites into low orbit. This is a 'disruptive technology' because the complete re-useability and quick turn around without an army of technicians means that the biggest obstacle to space commercialization will finally be overcome, launch costs. Disposable satellites have not been practical historically because the launch costs as much or more than the bird itself. For small deliveries, this is about to change.
It's now time for the next generation of engineers to take a good hard look at the operational parameters. Using the absolute latest in electronics, and the most efficient propulsion, what percentage of that 600 pound payload can become 'productive satellite', and how much will be the final acceleration stage? I'd be immensly curious what kind of ideas would come forth from the pathfinder teams given these parameters.
It's really easy to sit back and say 'been there, done that' for the atmosphere exit trajectory, it wa
And someone will have to regulate space flight so we don't have unsafe craft zipping around.
Before you jump on your bandwagon of lawyers to create yet more regulations, you better check on the little detail of 'jurasdiction'. About the only portion of the venture possibly under the jurasdiction of FAA/NASA would be launches originating within the borders of the USA. Once above the atmosphere, trajectories and orbits will be governed by a higher power, the laws of physics will prevail, no matter how much regulation the bearocrats feel they can apply. The same can be said for re-entry, once it's started, the laws of physics will prevail over anything on paper.
It's a Shuttle stack without all the expensive bits. Good engineering.
It's good re-use of existing design, but, suffers the fatal flaw. All of the components required to build one of those stacks are caught up in vastly overpriced government procurement programs. The second problem, the launch facilities are all wrapped up in the Nasa beaurocracy. By the time you tally up all the overhead these 2 details bring into scope, you probably increase the 'actual dollar cost' of a launch by an order of magnitude over what it could be done for.
I'm very afraid that people in other countries will one day discourage their kids from whining about their system by asking them that if they would rather live in America.
We have actually been doing exactly that here for a few years already.
And I have a queston: why couldn't Saddam prove he didn't have the WMDs
Mountains of documentation to that effect were provided to the UN bodies, at the deadline for delivery. The UN inspectors had barely started a full evaluation of the documentation when the American intelligence agencies piped up with 'the answer we are looking for is not here, so it must be all lies'. Of course the answer they were looking for was not there, because it didn't exist. It's truely a case of 'they got an answer, it wasn't the answer they wanted, so they ignored it completely'.
The real issue is like most scientific methodology. It's usually not possible to prove a theory, only to disprove it, or find more evidence to support it. In this case, the Iraqi's were working on the theory 'wmd do not exist' and providing supporting evidence. America was working on the theory 'wmd do exist', so were only interested in evidence to that end. When it was not forthcoming, they jumped up and said 'see they are lying to us, and not co-operating by showing us where the weapons are located'. The rush to invade was likely motivated by a fear that the UN inspectors would eventually make statements to the effect of 'the lack of any evidence to the contrary supports the conclusion that WMD do not actually exist in Iraq', and that would have been devastating to the american cause for invasion.
The question I have for all the americans that continue to insist WMD existed. If they existed, why were they not used to defend the border? If it was a regime of sadistic animals as perported by the Bush administration, and they had WMD, why didn't we see them used against the invaders?
One great thing about our digital society today, it's getting harder and harder for governments to re-write the history books, and suppress the truth. In time the entire truth will come out, but we've seen enough of it already to know, the administration drivel leading up to the invasion was anything but the truth.
I'm more interested now in seeing what consequences eventually come about for the self proclaimed 'leader of the free world' (who is in reality just the leader of one country, in a world where many free countries chose to not follow in the folly). The time is rapidly approaching, the american population has the chance to show the rest of the world that democracy does work, or, they can show us that the terrorists did indeed win. We'll know this result in November.
Slashdot Mirror
Boeing
Airbus
Antanov
Dornier
Bombardier
Embraer
Beechcraft
Which 2 did you mean ? All of this list is currently manufacturing aircraft for commercial markets, and most of them are producing passenger jets. I'm sure there's more, these are just off the top of my head. In terms of number of aircraft delivered, Bombardier probably produces as many airframes as all the rest put together, even if we discount the executive jets, and stick just to those built for passenger service. There's probably a dozen more if you include all the manufacturers of executive jets.
The fiasco with product liability insurance in the late 80's certainly killed aircraft manufacturing in the USA, but it's alive and healthy in the rest of the world. This is what happens when the courts award multi million dollar product liability suits on incidents involving 25 year old private aircraft that were not properly maintained in thier lifetime, you kill an entire industry.
It's been more than 15 years since I've worked with modelling of supersonic stuff. I dont know of any online material, have never looked, and all of the good reference books I've got deal exclusively with subsonic flight regimes.
Nobody considers Armadillo anywhere near close. The other team that's close is Da Vinci project. They are the only other team that's actually got hardware constructed with any amount of testing (photos) done on it. Thier schedule calls for the first sub-orbital test flights in august of this year, and they are the only X-Prize team other than scaled actually planning to fly this summer. they are also the only other team that has minor details like launch permits etc all wrapped up.
Serious X-Prize contenders realized early on, there's a lot of rocket technology available 'for sale' out there. They bought rocket engines, and concentrated on the difficult part of the engineering problems, the vehicle to get into space and back.
There's 2 teams that have a chance of actually completeing the X-Prize flights this year. It's interesting, Scaled has used the 'all aerodymanic' approach, with a mothership for first stage lifting to get above troposphere. Da Vinci project is 'all ballistic' with a mothership to provide first stage lift above troposphere.
Scaled is currently the odds on favorite to achive the X-Prize flights first. They have a really good chance, they have all the flight hardware, and it's been thru rigorous testing. Still, manned space flight is HARD (just check with Nasa for reference), and it's NOT a given that the SS1 + WK combination can complete 2 more flights without incident. A serious incident with either vehicle, and Scaled will be out of the running for the X-Prize, there isn't time left to replace either of them.
Da Vinci project has flight tested engines, but, they have yet to flight test an all up final configuration. They have the permits in place, and, the hardware is built. They are expected to start flight testing within the next 6 weeks.
Armadillo, well, they are tinkering with rockets, and writing a blog about it. They dont have a vehicle to mount an all up configuation rocket in, and they dont have a design to build one from. The X-Prize must be claimed this year, and Armadillo hasn't even got a vehicle design yet. No, they are not in the running, and have no hope of being in the running. If you haven't done the engineering analysis on a design, to validate it should be capable of withstanding the launch/recovery portions of the flight, and got the hardware built, ready to fly this summer, you are not in the running for the X-Prize. No matter how much money you throw at it, you are not going to design/build that package in the next 4 months, and if it's not flight ready in 4 months, you cant meet the requirements for winning the X-Prize.
Your explanation sounds great, but, you are using the wrong frame of reference. You are considering classic wind shear at low level/low speed accident scenarios, because that's what the schools teach about. Finding a shear greater than 20 knots at low level is rare indeed. Head up to the tropopause, and it's a totally different story.
At the junction between troposphere and stratosphere is this little phenomena known as the 'jet stream'. 100 knots of shear on the boundary of the jet streams is actually 'quite normal' and 'not bad'. I've seen 150 knots of shear over a very short distance vertically (less than 2000 feet) while penetrating the jets. This is still not a huge big deal, just gets a little bumpy, but, take a good look at SS1.
At the time of the roll event, the aircraft was accelerating on the initial rocket boost. It was in transonic, or early supersonic flight regimes. Penetrating a shear layer that gives a 100 knot difference in relative airspeed would set up some very very interesting asymetric shock wave scenarios, where the shock buildup on one side of the airframe is completely different than on the other. Even if this situation is just momentary, the asymetric forces will be huge, and cause a very noticeable deviation from nominal flight path projections.
Your frame of reference for shear is 'low and slow' in 'low performance' aircraft. SS1 is a very high performance aircraft, operating 'high and fast'. The primary contributor to aerodymanic forces will be shock waves and various forms of drag they produce. It's a whole different world, and everything you learned about 'low and slow' just doesn't apply to the 'high and fast' flight regimes. The SS1 flight mode at the time of the upset was 'at or near vertical' at transonic or supersonic speeds. It would not be at all surprising to see a major upset in the craft stability if it accidently penetrated the core of a 150 knot jet during that flight condition.
At this time of year, at those lattitudes, the core of the jets would be at an altitude in the area of 45 to 55 thousand feet. It would be unusual to see a jet core that far south in June, but, not unheard of. It's to late, and i'm really not inclined to go dig up old met charts from a couple weeks back, and see what kind of jet stream cores were over that part of california that morning. Sounds to me like that's what they may have hit, and, means the meteorology guys will be watching the jet charts a LOT closer for the next launches. Wouldn't surprise me at all that they even overlooked the detail, with an attitude of 'jet stream cores, over california, in june, who are you trying to kid?'. It's common in the winter, but not in the summer.
Were they ever in the running ?
It's not what they are doing that makes Armadillo a joke, it's that they represent it as a serious X-Prize attempt. there's 6 months left in the timeline for the prize, and they dont even have a design yet, never mind prototypes or flight hardware. The reason they dont have a design, is they haven't quite figured out that 'hacking' at it like they do a computer program isn't going to cut it for a project of this scale. They are tinkering like thousands of other back yard hobbiests that have been tinkering with rockets for years.
To be a serious X-Prize contender, at this stage of the game, the engineering has to be done, and flight hardware either under construction, or fully constructed. Scaled has done a full up flight test of flight hardware. Da Vinci project has done flight tests of flight hardware engines, and should be doing full up initial flight hardware testing by August. A couple more of the projects _may_ get to the point of flight qualifying hardware this summer.
Then there's a whole bunch of projects registered as X-Prize contenders, have spent a lot of time and effort promoting themselves as such, but have made virtually no progress in developing and testing hardware capable of actually competing for the prize. Canadian Arrow and Armadillo appear to fall into this category. The arrow folks can sure make the nice glossies, and run really good press campaigns, but, they dont seem to have a real rocket, just a mock-up, and a lot of talk.
Ultimately, the X-Prize will be claimed by an all out engineering effort, if it's claimed at all. Engineering involves crunching a lot of numbers to validate a design numerically, then going out into the real world, and flight testing the design to validate the number crunch. That's the only way to ultimately predict peformance that's going to be of the scale required to achieve the stated X-Prize goals. 100km is a lofty enough target that tinkering by trial and error in the back yard just isn't going to reach the goal.
Armadillo will be a serious aerospace company when they have put a vehicle over 100,000 feet. For now, they can put the 'little one' up in the air quasi controlled, but the 'big one' seems to be unstable once it's off tether. they dont seem to have even considered minor details like aerodymanics and structures yet. Even if they were the only player, and there were not teams with a realistic chance of actually accomplishing the flights this summer, you still couldn't consider Armadillo a serious contender for the prize. They may be playing with rockets, but, they are not gonna loft a manned vehicle into suborbital flight anytime soon.
This is only true for equatorial orbits. While it's true you do get some 'free ride' from the earths rotation when launching from the equator, it's actually 'penalty' and delta V that has to be removed from the vehicle to achieve a stable polar orbit. USA launches eastbound from JSC because it's an over the water shot, and it's 'significantly' south. They launch westbound from Vandenberg because it's over the water, and you need to give the vehicle 1100 mph westbound velocity to negate the rotation of the earth, to achive a stable polar orbit. Polar orbits are the most useful variety for missions that have a need to see the entire surface of the earth over time.
An ideal launch location has 1000 miles of 'nothing of value' downrange of the launch site. The usa likes to use water, hence locations on the 2 coasts. A launch location in northern Canada that sends vehicles over the Arctic ice pack is the 'ideal' location for launching polar orbit loads. The farther north its located, the less eastbound velocity penalty it accrues from the earth's rotation.
Its being effectively used today. By setting up such rules, and making an issue of it, so it gets coverage, millions of americans who otherwise had no clue amateur rockets ever existed, now firmly believe they are 'terrorist stuff' and there must be laws to prevent it.
Those that dont 'get it' today, will surely understand in a few months when the government dials up the 'fear meter' to yellow, because 'reliable sources confirm that model rockets are possibly in the DC area', so they will dial up the meter to 'yellow' and the population will obligingly get 'very scared'.
What I want to know tho, is, if the meter gets dialed up to 'red', is that telling the public 'now its time to panic' ?
Actually, the canadarm has been on shuttles since very early in the shuttle program. Using them to work on Hubble is nothing new, reference this photo . That's the shuttle variation of the arm holding Hubble in preparation for a past repair mission. The real difference in this proposal, is the use of a second arm from the same folks, with more manipulators etc, to do the repair work, instead of sending an astronaut out for a walk. Nasa is risk adverse, with only 3 years to perform the mission, they wont try find a 'new' contractor at this stage, they'll go with a known quantity, the folks that have been building them arms for as long as they've been in use on shuttles.
About the only downside to this style of repair mission, it'll emphasize the lack of relavence of 'manned missions' with modern robotic technology available. Cant help but wonder if that's really a bad thing. A robotic mission to service the Hubble will likely cost a LOT less than a manned shuttle launch, and achieve the same end result. Cant see any downside to it.
Silly americans.
two-fours = cases of beer.
blues = tickets in the blue seats.
There's no shortage of market for oil in this world. An average Iraqi would rather do business with the folks that didn't bomb thier infrastructure into oblivion, and kill anybody from the country that obliterated the infrastructure 'for the good of the population'.
It's a pretty good bet, when the news hit Bahgdad that 'the lights went out in NYC', a lot of people got a silly smile on thier face, and even had a bit of a chuckle. Those same folks would rather see all the SUV's in america stranded in the driveway with no gas, rather than actually sell oil to them. If they realize that piracy of American software is detrimental to american business, then, O/S doesn't have a chance over there. Sticking it to american business will have a much higher 'social value' than any prinicples of open source.
The lack of security is an american perception. Iraqi's themselves are pretty safe in most areas of the country, unless they stand right in front of american ground troops. American troops otoh, are not safe anywhere.
This is nothing new. German occupation forces had the same problem throughout most of continental europe during WW2.
America is in the process of forcing democracy on a country in a very non democratic part of the world. They do this because the 'believe' its better for people. Cant help but wonder, how this makes them any different than the folks the 'believe' islam is better, and want to force that on parts of the world.
Fighting for democracy, fighting for islam, same shit, different stick.
The only competition carmack and crowd are in, is for the mindset of /. junkies. Nothing they have done even remotely resembles a serious attempt at lofting a spaceship. It's good for the pr machine tho, and I'm sure they sell a lot of $125 'droppings' on thier website. It's an interesting business model they have tho, play with rocket parts, write a blog about it, then sell the broken parts for $125 apiece. With good promotion, can probably make a decent living that way...
There's probably a few people at Nasa see the big light bulb coming on. Scaled has achieved sub-orbital capability on a budget rumored between 20 and 35 million dollars. This included the design, build, and test flight stages of the program. The same program running in the Nasa culture, using Nasa methodologies, would not be finished the preliminary design study before it had burned up 35 million dollars, and to achieve the result of 'successful manned test flight', the program would have burned up at least a billion dollars. the efficiency delta here is close to 2 orders of magnitude. that's very serious when you are talking the differences between millions and billions of dollars.
The prizes are to small considering the scale of the achievements required. X-Prize was a 'radical' venture, with a 10 million dollar prize, but that's just for sub-oribital. If you want to truely inspire a 'gold rush' mentality, it's not hard. Set a worthy jackpot for an 'impossible' task.
The current environment of government contractors hanging around the 'space business' today just couldn't survive without a few open ended contracts to manage/maintain equipment on a cost plus basis. Serious prizes will generate serious ingenuity to win them. If Nasa offered 10% of it's annual budget in this fashion, they would achieve on the order of 10,000% the results they currently get by feeding the beaurocracy with nothing but money, money, and yet more money.
If you think about it logically, a martian sample return mission done by current nasa methodologies, would require a multi billion dollar budget, and it would still be looking at a high probability of failure. A billion dollars payable on reciept of 25kg of martian soil. this is not a contest, it's an offer to purchase. Publicize the offer, and verify the 'terms of purchase' via published documents. Sit back, wait. Somebody will deliver.
This is actually perfect for the existing bearocracy. They can get out of the business of doing scary things that kill people, but still keep enough beaurocrats on staff to administer the payouts. Not really a lot of change from what nasa is today, a 'space agency' that doesn't fly into space, just spends money.
The true elegance of this scenario, it's a results oriented system, that precludes any opportunity to pork barrel with the money. Fair value for work done will probably bankrupt a few companies currently working on Nasa projects tho, especially if contractual terms are changed from cost-plus to a results oriented system.
This has got to be the most intelligent/funny thing I've seen on /. in weeks.
That would be a cool thing for folks that devote thier life to defending ones own country. Problem is, most military folks today have devoted thier lives to invading other countries.
I'm not part of a megacorp, I have a properly configured email server, have no problem in/outbound to/from anywhere.
You likely got blocked because you didn't properly set up your reverse dns, or because you are on a dynamically assigned netblock, possibly with port 25 blocking in place. All of those would construe an 'improperly configured email server' by today's definitions.
If you look very carefully, you will notice, the 320 is the weekly figure, which works out to 1280 per month based on 4 week months.
His math is fine, but the real question, where did you learn yours ?
and yes, IAARS.
As a rocket scientist, you should then fully understand the signficance of todays step. SS1 was point designed to a mission profile. The profile was to deliver 600 pounds (3 people and life support) to an altitude of 100km. That's a very significant point in the process, it's the point at which aerodymamics terms of all the relavent equations approximate zero.
The current system is a 2 stage lifting process, stage 1 (White Knight) carries stage 2 (SpaceShip One) which achieves a point outside the atmosphere. For commercialization, this may well be enough to start generating a revenue flow, but, it's obviously a building block for a third stage. With relatively minor mods, SS1 can be converted to a cargo carrier, which is capable of ejecting a 600 pound payload at that location 'in space'.
As an engineer, the next problem is relatively strait forward. Design a vehicle that can carry a payload into orbit, based on the starting parameters of ejection from SS1 at the top of it's arc. Considering the economics of the first 2 stages of the launch process, we can forego all the traditional redundancy found in satellite systems, and build cheap disposable ones, it's not going to cost millions to place them anymore.
I'm sure all the engineers at Boeing, Lockheed, and everybody else in the business will look at that as a silly/unpractical problem, you just dont build satellites that way. BUT, get a group of amateurs akin to the OSCAR series of amateur satellites, give them a set of parameters that is '600 pounds delivered to an altitude of 100km, with effectively zero forward velocity', and they will produce a vehicle that's capable of achieving orbit from that location, and carrying sufficient payload to that orbit to be a functioning communication satellite. A bunch of volunteers will design and build the unit, and it'll arrive at the launch site for a grand total budget well under a million dollars.
Is this practical in the business world? Just ask globalstar what will happen to thier business model if a competitor can step up, building disposable satellites for $100K, and putting them in low orbit for another $100K. They wont have the service life or reliability of a current globalstar satellite, but, who cares? We can launch 50 of them for less than the cost of a single globalstar bird.
To fully understand the commercial potential, just look around. What did Bic do to Zippo's business when they started selling disposable lighters for under a buck ?
I remember reading articles a few years ago about a vision of hundreds of low orbit satellites providing broadband coverage for data, the world over. It was a Bill Gates vision paper that came from, and guess what. Bill's original partner in Microsoft has just financed the development of the technology required to achieve that goal.
SS1 is the second stage of a 3 stage delivery system that will ultimately place thousands of inexpensive, disposable, satellites into low orbit. This is a 'disruptive technology' because the complete re-useability and quick turn around without an army of technicians means that the biggest obstacle to space commercialization will finally be overcome, launch costs. Disposable satellites have not been practical historically because the launch costs as much or more than the bird itself. For small deliveries, this is about to change.
It's now time for the next generation of engineers to take a good hard look at the operational parameters. Using the absolute latest in electronics, and the most efficient propulsion, what percentage of that 600 pound payload can become 'productive satellite', and how much will be the final acceleration stage? I'd be immensly curious what kind of ideas would come forth from the pathfinder teams given these parameters.
It's really easy to sit back and say 'been there, done that' for the atmosphere exit trajectory, it wa
Before you jump on your bandwagon of lawyers to create yet more regulations, you better check on the little detail of 'jurasdiction'. About the only portion of the venture possibly under the jurasdiction of FAA/NASA would be launches originating within the borders of the USA. Once above the atmosphere, trajectories and orbits will be governed by a higher power, the laws of physics will prevail, no matter how much regulation the bearocrats feel they can apply. The same can be said for re-entry, once it's started, the laws of physics will prevail over anything on paper.
It's good re-use of existing design, but, suffers the fatal flaw. All of the components required to build one of those stacks are caught up in vastly overpriced government procurement programs. The second problem, the launch facilities are all wrapped up in the Nasa beaurocracy. By the time you tally up all the overhead these 2 details bring into scope, you probably increase the 'actual dollar cost' of a launch by an order of magnitude over what it could be done for.
We have actually been doing exactly that here for a few years already.
Mountains of documentation to that effect were provided to the UN bodies, at the deadline for delivery. The UN inspectors had barely started a full evaluation of the documentation when the American intelligence agencies piped up with 'the answer we are looking for is not here, so it must be all lies'. Of course the answer they were looking for was not there, because it didn't exist. It's truely a case of 'they got an answer, it wasn't the answer they wanted, so they ignored it completely'.
The real issue is like most scientific methodology. It's usually not possible to prove a theory, only to disprove it, or find more evidence to support it. In this case, the Iraqi's were working on the theory 'wmd do not exist' and providing supporting evidence. America was working on the theory 'wmd do exist', so were only interested in evidence to that end. When it was not forthcoming, they jumped up and said 'see they are lying to us, and not co-operating by showing us where the weapons are located'. The rush to invade was likely motivated by a fear that the UN inspectors would eventually make statements to the effect of 'the lack of any evidence to the contrary supports the conclusion that WMD do not actually exist in Iraq', and that would have been devastating to the american cause for invasion.
The question I have for all the americans that continue to insist WMD existed. If they existed, why were they not used to defend the border? If it was a regime of sadistic animals as perported by the Bush administration, and they had WMD, why didn't we see them used against the invaders?
One great thing about our digital society today, it's getting harder and harder for governments to re-write the history books, and suppress the truth. In time the entire truth will come out, but we've seen enough of it already to know, the administration drivel leading up to the invasion was anything but the truth.
I'm more interested now in seeing what consequences eventually come about for the self proclaimed 'leader of the free world' (who is in reality just the leader of one country, in a world where many free countries chose to not follow in the folly). The time is rapidly approaching, the american population has the chance to show the rest of the world that democracy does work, or, they can show us that the terrorists did indeed win. We'll know this result in November.