SpaceShipOne Back in Action 200
JoeSilva writes "After a 3 month wait,
Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne is
back in the skies above Mojave! Not only is it patched up from a failed landing gear, it's got a 'thermal protection system' installed.
Looks like high temp insulation on the leading edges. Also they have a picture of it with 'the rocket motor for the flight 13p'. This was the 12th SpaceShipOne flight."
Lucky 13? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lucky 13? (Score:3, Funny)
Rutan, we have a problem!
-
Re:Lucky 13? (Score:5, Informative)
That's not to say they couldn't go to space unofficially, before going for the big money; in fact they probably will, as part of their test series.
--riney
Re:Lucky 13? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lucky 13? (Score:3, Informative)
With the results and proof that nothing has knocked SSO out of the contest, I do think that is perfectly possible for them to do this.
NeoThermic
Three people not necessary (Score:5, Informative)
The ship only has to have accomodations for three people. The rules allow for substituting ballast for the passenger's weight and letting the single pilot go up alone. The relevant rule [xprize.com] is
Re:Lucky 13? (Score:2, Redundant)
Close but not quite. It has to be capable of carrying three, but only has to carry one, plus the equivalent weight in ballast of the two other people.
From the X-Prize rules page [xprize.org]:
Re:Lucky 13? (Score:2, Insightful)
Which means that the X-Prize is incidental to Scaled goals here. Scaled is getting paid on contract terms to build this vehicle and it's pretty clear that the prize is just an incidental side-issue to their planned goal. The backers had this in line a long time before X-Prize was fully funded and they did not even enter it until after the P
I like that... (Score:5, Funny)
Wonder how much they could make selling rides on that thing.
missing flights? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:missing flights? (Score:3, Informative)
10G 4 Dec 03
09G 19-Nov-03
08G 14-Nov-03
Maybe they've updated the page since you looked, but they're all clearly there right now.
For those who don't know (Score:5, Informative)
WOOHOO!!!
Check out the test updates here. [scaled.com]
AFAIK, these guys are the closest to winning the X-Prize- go team!!!
Re:For those who don't know (Score:4, Informative)
There's no hand to tip because they already did that. SpaceShipOne had flown it's first powered flight back in December [slashdot.org].
Photos (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Photos (Score:3, Informative)
Minimal info (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Minimal info (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Minimal info (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Minimal info (Score:2)
Re:Minimal info (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe he's just unbelievably rich, thinks that this is a cool project and wants to support it? Lets go easy on the cynicism folks!
Re:Minimal info (Score:2)
-aiabx
Re:Minimal info (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no longer any need to keep secret the fact that people and objects can get to space - Wernher von Braun wanted to try it way back in 1945, but his A-9/A-10 project got killed and it took him almost 20 more years before he accomplished that goal. If there was ever any time for secrecy, it was way back then when all this was still a surprise to spring on the bad guys. Not when there's about to be a change as big as the one we went through when Gagarin and Shepard went up.
Global Flyer (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Global Flyer (Score:5, Informative)
Talk about similar designs... Burt Rutan designed Voyager.
Re:Global Flyer (Score:2)
Quite a difference (Score:2)
Re:Global Flyer (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Global Flyer (Score:3, Interesting)
My father was working as a welder on a solar collector project back around at the time down in the Mojave desert. Since the rest of the family was back in Montana, he had lots of free time and would pass the time by driving around the area.
One day, he happened across Scaled Compsites. He had heard of them from their work on the EZ-flyer and other projects. So, he just got out of his truck and proceeded to wander into a hanger. A couple guys looked up from their work but did
Armadillo Aerospace (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:5, Interesting)
FWIW, it looks like Carmack is taking the time to understand his engines before shooting them off and hoping they fly. This is particularly important since his Monoprop fuel has an Isp of a mere 160. (Shuttle SRBs get 250, and LHOx like the Shuttle main engines get 450.)
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:2)
Tests of this type are very important. If it weren't for the 5th and final ALT test, the first flight crew (Young and Crippen aboard Columbia for STS-1) might have found themselves in a pilot-induced oscillation [nasa.gov] and crashed on landing, which would have been disastrous and delayed the program even more than it had been by that point -
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:2)
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:2)
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:2)
BTW, I can't help but poke at your nick (considering the subject). The Vulkan Energia configuration is way cooler than the Buran Energia configuration! Everyone knows that!
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:2)
Take a look at this site [k26.com] -- it's really well done and informative.
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:2)
Just looking at the fact that Rutan is flying and Armadillo is not, might lead one to conclude that Rutan is far closer to completion. Nothing could be further from the truth. The two are about evenly matched right now. The actual winner is going to be hard to predict.
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:2)
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:2)
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:2)
Don't understand me wrong: I don't have anything against Carmack and I think it's great what he is doing. From a betting perspective, however, who would you put your money on: a game developer with lot of creativity and spare time, or a company le
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Armadillo Aerospace (Score:2)
I think that it is great that Carmack is trying to win this prize but Rutan is every bit as creative and know a lot more about building flying machines than Carmack. Saying that Carmack should not worry about Rut
Looks good (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, the project we have to compare it to is John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace venture (since they have the decency to provide week-by-week status reports, which I consider manditory Monday reading). The folks at Armadillo are still working on getting their engines to light reliably (extra important since they're using five of them) and still haven't had anything like a successful test flight.
I dunno, man -- If I'm Carmack, I'm thinking it's time to really get at it if you're still serious about winning the X-prize. The SpaceShipOne folks seem to be putting them further and further into the rear-view. Which isn't to say they *can't* catch up; if the Armadillo team can get their engines lighting reliably, they should be about ready to bolt the thing together and start flying.
Man, this beats the heck out of money pits like the ISS, eh? Nothing like a little old fashioned get-the-prize competition to turn up some interesting stuff. Maybe a $100 billion prize for the first company to land people on Mars and bring them back ought to be next -- get the government to cooperate with permits and NASA to share their tech. I'd bet you'd see people there inside a decade.
Re:Looks good (Score:2)
Proposal: The first human being(s) to survive one year on Mars and return safely to earth... gets their choic
Re:Looks good (Score:2)
Re:Looks good (Score:5, Funny)
Wait until you see the property tax bill...
Re:Looks good (Score:2)
Or the UN maybe?
Re:Looks good (Score:2)
>
> Or the UN maybe?
As I understand it, the only reason the Moon, or Mars, cannot be "owned" by US citizens is because the US is a signatory to a treaty.
All the US would have to do is say "We withdraw from this convention, on the grounds that property rights are the means by which all persons - Terran or Martian - exercise their unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Mars belongs to the Martians."
Re:Looks good (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, today's commercial airline industry [airlinetechnology.net] isn't flying planes built by Burgess, Curtiss, or Loening [centennialofflight.gov]... It was Boeing who got the contracts for training planes during World War I, and commercial transport planes afterwards...
Re:Looks good (Score:2)
heat shielding (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, IMHO the ship looks like some high-school science project with way to much duct-tape with the leading edges done the way they have it.
Re:heat shielding (Score:2)
What was more funny to me is that the nose piece looks like a giant shuttlecock.
Re:heat shielding (Score:5, Insightful)
As this is not an orbital flight there is no excessive velocity to burn off. Hence, the bathtub mode of recovery from altitude.
Re:heat shielding (Score:2)
So the re-entry heating won't be all that great. This is one of the things that makes the x-prize achievable.
MM
--
Heat shielding is minor compared to orbital craft (Score:5, Informative)
The kinetic energy required to accelerate a gallon of gasoline to orbital speed is more than the chemical energy contained in the gasoline.
By contrast, "merely" lifting something up 100km doesn't require much energy at all.
So, er, no, leading-edge heat shields ought to be just fine. Fiberglass or carbon-fiber composites might even survive a flight or two without any shielding at all.
Re:Heat shielding is minor compared to orbital cra (Score:5, Informative)
The energy content of gasoline is about 42e6 J/kg.
Orbital velocity (at the surface of the earth) is about 8000 m/s. Kinetic energy of 1 kg at 8000 m/s is 32e6 J. (That is, you need about 32 MJ/kg)
However for those who want the whole story, the parent to this is correct: to get all that energy out of the kg of gasoline, you *also* need about 2.8 kg oxygen. Gasoline-oxygen gets you about 11 MJ/kg, which is about a third of what you need to hit orbital velocity.
To get to 100 km altitude, you need only 0.96 MJ/kg, which is no problem for gasoline-oxygen.
Re:Heat shielding is minor compared to orbital cra (Score:2)
Re:Heat shielding is minor compared to orbital cra (Score:3, Interesting)
You've got it right on the heat dissipation, though I mentioned that more to address comments that all the heat would be "taken" along the leading edges of the wings, which isn't the case even though they do tend to get pretty hot - which you can see in infrared pictures of the Shuttle as it descends.
This isn't an orbital vehicle, no. A flight will take around half an hour and it'll reach an altitude of 100km or so - across the official space boundary, b
Re:heat shielding (Score:3, Informative)
The Space Shuttle comes in a lot faster and through far more atmosphere (Think angle of attack, not just vertical height). These guys are just barely getting out into "space", and aren't anywhere near the altitude or velocity required to get to even low earth orbit, so they don't need much heat shielding at all.
Of course LEO isn't a requirement for the X-prize.
Why yes, I am a rocket scientist.
Re:heat shielding (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:heat shielding (Score:3, Interesting)
so, basically you're saying that i can win 10 million bucks if i can reverse engineer technology developed before 1959? yes, that's 45 or more years ago.
neato
Re:heat shielding (Score:2)
Well... (Score:2)
Re:Well... (Score:2)
Re:heat shielding (Score:3, Informative)
Spaceship One will only generate temperatures of about 1000 degrees, an
How do you know? (Score:2, Interesting)
My point is is that you shouldn't be so quick to judge. Or maybe you're just shoehorning some semi-related facts in an insightful-sounding post t
Re:heat shielding (Score:3, Informative)
If you read thier site (after the slashdotting subsides) you will see that the wings fold up 90 degrees during reentry which gives them a very large amount of drag, while maintaining a stable angle of decent.
Re:heat shielding (Score:2)
If the Shuttle carried enough rocket fuel to slow it's tangential velocity to near 0 before re-entry, it would need very little heat sheilding. But... that is a hell of a lot of fuel, so it is easier to use the atmosphere (with all the
Re:heat shielding (Score:2)
So Alan Shepard wasn't the first American in space, and the Mercury capsule wasn't a spaceship? That was a suborbital flight too.
even at 100km I would think that re-entry like conditions would be encountered
The conditions on re-entry are governed primarily by the re-entry speed. Sub-orbital speeds are less than orbital speeds, therefore the conditions are different, although both cases (sub-o
Needed: Improved Fuels (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Needed: Improved Fuels (Score:3, Insightful)
Improvements usually come a few percent at a time.
Re:Needed: Improved Fuels (Score:2, Interesting)
Cryogenic hydrogen/oxygen (LOX/LH2) is about the best you can get without big handling difficulties. You can go with flourine combos, but that only nets another 3%-4% ISP with truely horrid handling problems.
There's no "improvement of 2 or 3 orders of magnitude" coming anywhere.
And LH2 has the problem with needing huge tanks because it's so non-dense. If you consider tank size, you can actually get more into orbit on a smaller/lighter vehicle using LOX/kerosene like the Saturn V. The smaller
Re:Needed: Improved Fuels (Score:5, Informative)
The 1970's NERVA nuclear rocket program managed to get about twice the Isp of our best chemical rockets with a decent amount of thrust. Ion drives might give you an order of magnitude improvement over chemical rockets, but they don't have the thrust to be used in launch vehicles.
The only propulsion system I've seen proposed that could realistically produce 2 to 3 orders of magnitude increase in efficiency is the Orion drive. The government doesn't like the idea of building hundreds of small, clean nukes, though. Greenpeace gets a bit riled up about it, too.
Of course, if I had my way, they'd be welcome to protest right at the launch site.
The why (and some of the difficulties) of NERVA (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear reactions yield about a million times more energy per unit mass than do chemical reactions, so it's natural to try to get the energy that way.
NERVA got OK Isp (about a factor of 2 better than chemical rockets, something like 1000 seconds), but its thrust-to-weight ratio was pretty low, about 4 if I remember right. That's because it included a critical, operating nuclear reactor with an actively controlled chain reaction, and them thar things are heavy.
Thrust-to-weight is just as important as Isp to a rocket: higher thrust-to-weight means you can tote more fuel, payload, and structure for the same Isp, since you always have to have the mass of the engine itself around. By contrast to the NERVA's thrust-to-weight of about 4, the Space Shuttle main engines have a thrust-to-weight ratio of around 75. Since solid rockets are technically made out of their own fuel, their effective weight is much lower for this calculation (pretty much just the bell nozzle) and you might see numbers in the several-hundreds range.
Of course, one could always work on making the NERVA more lightweight -- but do you really want to optimize a nuclear reactor for mass, rather than safety? I didn't think so.
Now, for use in space, thrust-to-weight isn't so important. The rocket doesn't have to support itself against gravity, so low-mass engines that also produce low thrust are perfectly OK.
Of course, international treaty bans the use of critical nuclear reactors in space, but that alone wouldn't slow down our current administration very much.
[Nuclear reactors get flown into space all the time, but they always have much less than critical mass, relying on spontaneous decay to keep the chain reaction limping along at a constant rate. NERVA would require controlled reaction rates, hence a critical-mass reactor.]
Re:The why (and some of the difficulties) of NERVA (Score:2)
Orion gets around the exhaust temperature problem by having the reaction external to the rocket. You've got a series of small nukes that create superheated plasma that pushes against a huge steel plate. 'Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship' by George Dyson goes into a lot of detail and presents some of the hist
Re:The why (and some of the difficulties) of NERVA (Score:2)
Re:The why (and some of the difficulties) of NERVA (Score:2)
Re:The why (and some of the difficulties) of NERVA (Score:2)
be careful what you wish for (Score:2)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Re:Needed: Improved Fuels (Score:2)
Armadillo Dreamin' (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Armadillo Dreamin' (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither of these guys are professional rocket builders. They're both private individuals spending their (ample) money to compete for the X-prize. Rutan has previous experience building aircraft and has worked more at putting together a team and securing infrastructure to help with the build, but it's not as if Rutan is leading a billion-dollar team of button-down 1950's engineers at Boeing or something while Carmack is competing out of his back yard shed.
Just because Carmack posts his day-to-day struggles on the web for us all to enjoy (and I *do* enjoy it, BTW) doesn't imply that the SpaceShipOne team isn't encountering the exact same sorts of technical hurdles, supply problems, permit bullshit and etc. In other words, whichever wins will be a victory for the little guy because they're *both* the little guy.
Re:Armadillo Dreamin' (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Armadillo Dreamin' (Score:4, Funny)
LS
I'm waiting... (Score:5, Funny)
A good thing too (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we'll see some exciting new developments in space technology over the next few years. I'm confident someone will win the X-Prize [xprize.com],(which is more a PR bonus for starting a space tourism company than anything else) the Bush Admin wants to send folks to the moon or Mars (probably using nuclear propulsion), and it's all but a foregone conclusion that someone [liftport.com] will try to build a Space Elevator soon.
Re:A good thing too (Score:4, Funny)
Despite what it looks like... (Score:4, Interesting)
The "early" kit planes he designed are still works of "art".
(bad news, the site is
Re:Despite what it looks like... (Score:5, Informative)
Love that Ship! (Score:2, Funny)
I called it.... (Score:2, Funny)
TPS report (Score:2, Funny)
no pilot will fly a pink spaceship... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:X Prize is impossible (Score:4, Informative)
Re:X Prize is impossible (Score:2)
Which is slightly more frequently than your average rural bus service.
Re:mirror / karma whoring (Score:4, Informative)
i know, i suck at slashdot
Re:Already slashdotted (Score:2, Informative)
[...]
Results:
Slashdot's editors are facists.
Launch conditions were 48,500 feet and 125 knots. All systems performed as expected and the vehicle landed successfully while demonstrating the maximum cross wind landing capability.
If it's for the good of the community, then don't put in your personal opinion in the middle of the post.
There may have been more random crap in there, this was the first one I saw. Feel free to remod the karma whore appropriately.
Cute text changes (Score:2)
Re:Cute text changes (Score:3, Insightful)
It's probably a bit of both, if you ask me.
Re:In Canada... (Score:5, Funny)