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SpaceShipOne Rockets To 68,000 Feet
Posted by
simoniker
on Wed Dec 17, 2003 06:41 PM
from the that's-quite-high dept.
from the that's-quite-high dept.
ehartwell writes "According to Space.com, Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne flew its first rocket-powered flight today, the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' 12-second first flight. SpaceShipOne's engine burned for 15 seconds, pushing it to Mach 1.2 (930 mph) and a peak altitude of 68,000 feet. To win the X-Prize they need to reach 330,000 feet twice within 2 weeks."
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Well done and very impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
100 years ago manned flight was a hot technology, today everybody can jump on a plane (as long as you have the money but its cheaper and cheaper). Today supersonic flight is a hot technology for the masses so it will maybe become commonplace in the years to come...
The biggest point is not the altitude here because 68000 feet is quite 'easy' to reach (although its really impressive too) and going from 68000 to 330000 feet is gonna be way way way more difficult. But everything needs a beginning and that's a very nice one.
Congratulations to the Scaled Composite team for this astonishing result... This plane is a very cool piece of engineering.
This X-Prize is definitely becoming more and more interesting, I have to admit that I never though it was possible for a team to go so far !
50 years from now... (Score:5, Interesting)
50 years from now, will the class of 2060 recognize the name "Brian Binnie"? If this works out, they darn well should... especially if he's the one who gets to fly the craft "for real", twice in two weeks.
* 1903: Orville & Wilbur Wright achieve controlled, manned flight (but birds fly on a regular basis)
* 1947: Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in a military aircraft (but ordinary people fly on a regular basis)
* 2003: Brian Binnie breaks the sound barrier in a home-built spacecraft prototype (but ordinary people fly faster than sound on a regular basis)
* 2050: What's the next big advance when ordinary people fly to space on a regular basis?
I was sure rooting for the local boys (& girl) [armadilloaerospace.com], but I don't see how they can catch up to Scaled Composites' entry.
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Re:50 years from now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:50 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
The information is readily available for anybody with an interest. School shouldn't be about filling your head with facts, but about encouraging you to study things that you're interested in.
For me, that's airplanes. For other people, maybe musical theater. It's all good.
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Re:50 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
I second that. Ultimately, school is worthless if it doesn't teach people how to learn. The ability to educate one's self should be the greatest lesson of a compulsary education.
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Re:50 years from now... (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed. With the ability to dress one's self coming a close second.
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Re:50 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, Orville and Wilbur didn't do much out on those sand dunes. All they did was make a crappy little airplane not capable of flying in anything but a near direct headwind. It's a piece of crap as far as airplanes go and any kid today can make a better one with some balsa wood and a rubberband.
But the point is that they did it before anyone else thought they could. Chuck Yeager did his trick when people thought the sound barrier was a brick wall in the sky that would kill everyone that tried to get close to it. These names are attached to people that did something or discovered something that everyone else thought couldn't be done. You don't remember the name for the sake of the name, you remember the name as something to attach the courage to.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. That's the average person for you. But occasionally, someone sees one of those giants and says, "I can do that too." You see those heroes and you realize that you don't have to be trapped by the preconceptions that hold the rest of the world back.
Knowing the names Chuck Yeager, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Niel Armstrong, Einstein, Curie, Oppenheimer, Franklin, DaVinci, and so on gives you a sense of perspective. These things are done by people with a dream. And determination. A whole lot of determination.
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Re:50 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Wrights contribution was controled flight, not flying before anyone said it couldn't be done. There were other dare-devils out there flying their homemade "airplanes" as much as 200 feet, before "crashing" to the ground, with no way to tell where they land, at best more or less a straight line. The Wright brothers not only flew, they were able to turn and perdict where they would go. Once that breakthrough was made other engineers could observe why their design worked, and make something better that also got around patents.
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Re:50 years from now... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:50 years from now... (Score:4, Insightful)
If that were the case the majority of the students would be studying subjects like Football and there wouldn't be enough demand for Math and Scince to make it worth the effort of building classrooms to teach those subjects in.
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Re:50 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that, sadly, Brian Binnie breaks the sound barrier in a home-built spacecraft prototype the same year that commercial supersonic flights were discontinued.
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But what does it *mean*? (Score:5, Informative)
SpaceShipOne did more than break the sound barrier, it aimed toward altitudes and conditions unseen by private aviation. With those altitudes and conditions come possible markets, such as small-scale microgavity research on the cheap and even the mother of all roller-coaster rides. Here's hoping that it marks a realization that there are some things which don't work, and some things which do.
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PRIVATE commercial supersonic flight yet to happen (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:50 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:50 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:50 years from now... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Well done and very impressive (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite. 100 years ago manned, controlled, and powered flight had just become a curiosity. It took the Wright brothers about 6-7 years before they could commercialize on their idea.
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Supersonic Homebuilt (Score:5, Interesting)
a fan's page [cuug.ab.ca]
Results so far
The first one crashed, and the second one crashed as well. Each crash killed the then-president of the company developing the BD-10 for the market. Rights to the design were bounced around for a while, and I believe it's pretty much in limbo, now. At one point, a Canadian outfit was trying to develop it as a low-cost military trainer, but nothing came of it. I think there were four originally built... the Bede prototype, two crashed as noted above, and one constructed by a customer. There are two listed in the 2001 registration database. The prototype is still listed as being owned by Bede Jet Corporation, and the other one is registered to a man in California.(text from http://www.ipilot.com/learn/expert-view.asp?cur=0
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Re:Well done and very impressive (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, supersonic flight was a hot technology 40 some-odd years ago, and was more or less abandoned as impractical, uneconomical, and inefficient. Even Boeing has dropped their recent Sonic Cruiser concept (high subsonic cruise) in favor of slower, bigger, more efficient aircraft.
Now, I do NOT want to belittle the work of Scaled Composites. They do some incredible engineering there, and they deserve kudos for getting Spaceship One this far. As you say, they've still got a long way to go before reacing "Suborbital Flight" stage, but this is a nice step and every successful burn of the Hybrid engine gives them more data.
The X-Prize contest is certainly seeing some interesting engineering and innovations - though it seems unlikely any of the systems explored to win it will lead to the ultimate goal of the prize. Namely: Putting spaceflight within reach of "mear mortals."
Even these X-Prize craft are only suborbital birds, and that's a LONG way from putting people into orbit for a few quick laps around the equater.
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John Carmack ? (Score:5, Funny)
No kidding (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:John Carmack ? (Score:3, Funny)
It'd be worse if he'd confuse both projects. That'd mean his rocket would require a quad Xeon MP 2,0ghz with 16gb of RIMM memory to launch while Doom3 would put your computer in orbit...
Mirror, just in case.... (Score:4, Informative)
A privately financed passenger-carrying sub-orbital rocket plane screamed its way through the sound barrier today, the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers historic 12-second flight over Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Privately built by Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, the SpaceShipOne cranked up its hybrid rocket motor after being released from the White Knight carrier plane high over Mojave, California.
"This successful and historic flight is important because we are showing that the private sector can perform human space flight faster, safer and cheaper," said Jim Benson, founding chairman and chief executive of SpaceDev, the Poway, California-based company that built SpaceShipOne's engine.
Test pilot Brian Binnie then put SpaceShipOne into a steep climb. Nine seconds later, SpaceShipOne broke the sound barrier and continued its steep powered ascent.
At motor shutdown, 15 seconds after ignition, SpaceShipOne was climbing at a 60-degree angle and flying near 1.2 Mach (930 mph).
Binnie continued the maneuver to a vertical climb, achieving zero speed at an altitude of 68,000 feet. He then configured the ship in its high-drag "feathered" shape to simulate the condition it will experience when it enters the atmosphere after a sub-orbital space flight.
At apogee, SpaceShipOne was in near-weightless conditions, emulating the characteristics it will later encounter during the planned space flights in which it will be at zero-g for more than three minutes.
After descending in feathered flight for about a minute, Binnie reconfigured the ship to its conventional glider shape and flew a 12-minute glide to landing at a landing strip in the Mojave.
The landing was not without incident.
On touchdown, the left landing gear retracted causing the rocket ship to veer to the left and leave the runway with its left wing down. Damage from the landing incident was minor and will easily be repaired. There were no injuries, according to a press release issued by Scaled Composites.
The milestone flight of SpaceShipOne involved development of a new propulsion system, the first rocket motor fabricated for piloted space flight in several decades.
The new hybrid motor was developed in-house at Scaled Composites. The motor uses an ablative nozzle supplied by AAE and operating components supplied by SpaceDev.
This was the 8th flight of the SpaceShipOne completed this year -- the first done under powered flight.
And so it begins. (Score:5, Interesting)
Damon,
Looks bad for Carmack (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish the other X-prize hopefuls would take after Carmack's blogs, though -- reading about the little engineering challenges is the highlight of my Monday/Tuesday mornings.
Re:Looks bad for Carmack (Score:5, Informative)
On the [slashdot.org] contrary [space-frontier.org]
IMO, they are quite far along, i'd expect a hover test in a week or two ( if not for the _damn_ holidays )
BTW, as you probably know, official X-Prize flight attempt has to be announced at least two months in advance, so everybody still has a chance, as Rutan hasnt made such announcement yet.
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Can't wait (Score:5, Interesting)
It might start off slow, though; in the end it will probably require starting an entirely new economic sector. Why do we need to mine asteroids and build huge solar collectors? To supply energy and materials for other space structures, of course. A self-perpetuating system like that is going to take time to build up. Satellites plug in very well to Earth's existing economy, but where does manned space exploration fit in....
SpaceShipOne? (Score:3, Funny)
Truely amazing to even think about (Score:4, Insightful)
Aerospace progress (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't that long ago that the sound barrier was really considered a barrier - people involved in breaking the sound barrier are still around. Back then, it was a major effort that was incredibly risky and took the resources of a government to achieve. At the time, plenty of people wondered if it was really even possible.
Now, however, we see a small private company break the sound barrier on their first major rocket powered test flight, as if it's no big deal. We've come a long way. Nice one, Scaled Composites!
Trainspotting...Or, Resting On Our Laurels (Score:5, Insightful)
And....it's 2003, 31 years since the last lunar landing, people are getting excited about another small rocket plane that fired its engine for 15 seconds and coasted to 68,000 feet. What's different here is the funding mechanism, not the aviation technology.
Progress in aviation and space travel has been stuck in the muck and mire for 30 years.
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Further Link @ SpaceRef (Score:5, Informative)
Here's another one [spaceref.com].
With any luck we'll see regular manned access to space within the next ten years without a government involved. The X Prize and its follow-ons will be the equivalent of the barnstorming acts of yesteryear.
With any luck at least...
Burt Rutan (Score:4, Insightful)
He's the one that built the Voyager - the round-the-world-on-one-tank-of-gas turboprop plane. He used an Apple IIe to help make the plane as efficient as possible.
Not only is he working on this, but his building a plane to try a round-the-world-on-one-tank-of-gas solo jet plane.
This guy will get it done.
What altitude? (Score:4, Interesting)
-Zipwow
* I know, I know, orbit is waaay different than straight up, straight back. Its just an amusing thought...
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Re:What altitude? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Voyager... (Score:5, Informative)
I think Rutan's experience with the Predator, the Global Hawk and the aeroshell of the DC-X are far more indicative of his talents than Voyager; a very slow unpressurized aircraft is not much experience for a space-skimming vehicle which has to endure substantial heat loads on return to earth, but the others are much closer.
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Does the X-prize achievement scale to usefulness? (Score:4, Insightful)
But is this goal really a stepping stone to space?
Altitude alone is not especially useful since the pull of gravity will still exert its force upon the craft. The hard part about space travel is achieving orbit, a state where the craft has effectively escaped the earth's gravity well.
Escape velocity is 25,000 miles per hour. Geosynchronous orbit, the distance an object must reach to be in a stationary orbit above the ground is 117,427,200 feet.
These numbers are better than order of magnitude higher than the X-prize requirements.
So I wonder if the X-prize is really meaningful in the scale of realistic space flight?
Physics primer follows (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Does the X-prize achievement scale to usefulnes (Score:4, Insightful)
That's probably not true. Check out Space X [spacex.com] for example. Or Armadillo [armadilloaerospace.com]. The illusion needs shattering.
There's nothing inherently expensive about space (the fuel costs for putting something into space are under $50 per kg of payload for example)- it's just that right now there are so few launches that it's cheapest to throw the whole rocket away after each launch. Because it's so expensive, practically nobody goes. Catch 22.
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You want to know you can get back down (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as I can understand, this contests involves building larger than commercially available rocket engines, managing small-scale life support, dealing with simple launch paths, and surviving re-entry stress that doesn't involve serious heat. (I might be wrong on some of these, and I might not have realized other essential things involved) You can see how all of those pieces are simpler aspects of a full-blown orbital launch.
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On the landing gear failure (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone know. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a not insignificant portion of costs conventional spacelaunch - for the Russians, and the Americans. - you can't just light a fuse, stand back and cheer. Not safely, anyway. And at some point, it's not just the pilot's life and property at stake. Public infrastructure, or even private property (in the case of the crashes on 9/11) can be a significant liability as well.
I mean, sure, it's probably a trivial thing to file a flight path with the FAA to reserve airspace and sit on a radio frequency below 50,000 feet.
But what happens when they get into space? How are they going to tie in with existing safety and space infrastructure? Will their cost savings be the same with that integration? And if they don't how are they going to avoid collisions with existing satellites, etc once regular commercial access is established?
Paul G. Allen and the X-Prize! (Score:4, Informative)
December 17, 2003
PAUL G. ALLEN CONFIRMED AS LONG-RUMORED SPONSOR OF SPACESHIPONE
Allen Sponsors Scaled Composites' Cutting-Edge X-Prize Entry, Attends Today's Successful Test Flight of the First Manned Privately Funded Supersonic Aircraft
MOJAVE, CA and SEATTLE - Dec. 17, 2003 - Investor Paul G. Allen today confirmed international speculation that he is the long-rumored sponsor behind the innovative SpaceShipOne project, which broke the sound barrier today during its first manned test flight. SpaceShipOne and its White Knight turbojet launch aircraft represent the first private non-government effort to demonstrate a low-cost manned space effort. SpaceShipOne is a contender for the coveted X-prize.
"Being able to watch today's successful test flight in person was really an overwhelming and awe-inspiring experience. I'm so proud to be able to support the work of Burt Rutan and his pioneering team at Scaled Composites," said Paul G. Allen, who has funded the effort since he and Rutan joined forces in March of 2001. "As we celebrate the centennial of flight, it's wonderful to be able to capture the spirit of innovation and exploration in aviation. SpaceShipOne is a tangible example of continuing humankind's efforts to travel into space, and effectively demonstrating that private, non-government resources can make a big difference in this field of discovery and invention."
"Today's milestone and the SpaceShipOne project would never have been possible without Paul's tremendous support," said Burt Rutan, the acclaimed inventor and aerospace engineer who leads the project along with his research and development team at Scaled Composites, which Rutan founded. "Paul shares our energy and passion for not only supporting one-of-a-kind research, but also a vision of how this kind of space program can shape the future and inspire people around the world."
For details about today's test flight, including specifications on speed, altitude, etc., visit www.scaled.com
For details about the X-prize visit www.xprize.com.
ABOUT PAUL G. ALLEN
Paul G. Allen owns and invests in a suite of companies exploring the potential of digital communications. Allen's business strategy includes encouraging communication and synergy between his portfolio companies for mutual benefit in the areas of technology, new media, biotechnology, entertainment, telecommunications and entertainment. His primary companies include Vulcan Inc. of Seattle and Charter Communications of St. Louis, the nation's fourth-largest cable provider. Allen is owner of the Portland Trail Blazers NBA team and the Seattle Seahawks NFL franchise, and a partner in the entertainment studio DreamWorks SKG. Allen co-founded Microsoft Corporation with Bill Gates in 1975 and served as the company's executive vice president of research and new product development, the company's senior technology post, until 1983. Allen gives back to the community through the six Paul G. Allen Charitable Foundations, which support arts, health and human services, medical research, and forest protection in the Pacific Northwest. He is also the founder of Experience Music Project, Seattle's critically-acclaimed interactive music museum, the forthcoming Experience Science Fiction Museum and Vulcan Productions, the independent film production company. For more information about Paul G. Allen visit www.vulcan.com
Re:space race (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want NASA to do it, it'll cost well over $50 billion.
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Re:For those that haven't used imperial for ages.. (Score:4, Informative)
km is also good for the circumference of the earth... it's 40,000km because an original definition of a km was that 10,000 of them was the average distance from the earth's pole to the equator.
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Re:What's the big deal about rocket science? (Score:5, Informative)
If the rocket didn't have to fly, you could just put loads of engineering margin into every part, and end up with something big and heavy but reliable. But you can't, because "big and heavy" won't get off the ground.
The sheer amount of power that has to converted from chemical to mechanical energy is staggering. In a liquid-fueled rocket engine, you have to push fuel into the chamber against the pressure of combustion. That turns out to be very hard, since you have to move a LOT of fuel and the pressure has to be HIGH for good efficiency. Just the pumping requires a major engineering effort to handle the power required to drive the pumps.
If you have cryogenic liquid propellants (the most efficient for tankage), you have all kinds of material-science problems from the temperature extremes. If you fly less exotic materials, like nitrous oxide, you have less mass margin because the tank is heavier.
Then there are all kinds of weird pitfalls like uneven distribution within the combustion chamber; uneven fuel/oxidiser mixing; choked fuel flow; accumulation of large volumes of fuel mix (which have an alarming tendency to explode later if they don't burn instantly); quenching of the burn by the amazing volume of stuff flowing into the chamber; eddies and cavitation in the turbulent flow out the throat of the engine; detonation (makes your car engine knock, makes your rocket explode); things shaking loose because of the engine's vibration; the nozzle itself starting to combust, ablate, or burn-through; and making a poorly designed nozzle that limits your thrust.
None of those things is unsurmountable -- it's having to get everything more or less right the first time that is the real kicker.
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Biggest difficulty of rocket science (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why rockets drop pieces. Less tank to push. But dropped pieces are expensive and wasteful, meaning rockets are too expensive to be much use.
The best chemical fuel, liquid hydrogen and oxygen, just barely scrapes the threshold at which it can launch a sensibly sized single staged rocket into orbit, maybe. It's so close that the difference between "will" and "won't" is lost inside the calculation's margin of error.
That's the main reason rocket science is hard.
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Re:Biggest difficulty of rocket science (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Biggest difficulty of rocket science (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:who makes this component at armadillo ... (Score:5, Funny)
They use D motors.
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