Japanese Shuttle has Successful Test Flight 55
spacecomputer writes "First test flight of scaled-down version of Hope-X is a success! They have additional test flights in the coming week, but have no funding to proceed beyond the test stage."
Re:It's happened before... (Score:5, Insightful)
The shuttle's government anyway, so it doesn't respond to reality the way the auto industry had to when Japanese imports took off. (It'd be real nice, but I don't see this kicking Yankee political pride enough to make it happen.)
There are lots of folks trying to make it in the space launch business, many with government subsidies, and not that much stuff that needs to be launched. I wish 'em the best, but I don't see how the Japanese could make money doing this. And their government is also BIG on pork...
Re:could japan step in for russia? (Score:3, Insightful)
The cheapest and best solution is probably to just fund the Russian space program. They already have dependable large rockets. It would be much more expensive to revive that kind of program in the US. If we decided to kick in more Europe might be convinced to do it too, especially if they could get the designs of Russia's rockets, since Europe only has smaller rockets.
Japan has a very small program, they want to create a larger space program but they are in a deep 10 year depression with no end in sight. We could also adapt the Russian engine designs for the shuttles to lift larger payloads. I've read their engines are at least 10% more efficient, but they use much cheaper fuel so some re-engineering would have to happen for them to work with our stuff. Cheapest solution is to fund the Russians esp. if we can get the Europeans to pick up most of the tab in exchange for technology.
It's also good from a world peace standpoint to keep rocket builders employed in Russia.
Japan will at some point develop a space program, but it won't be fast tracked unless it really has to be (say if they feel they need to build tactical nuclear weapons, which they are severely antogonistic toward for all kinds of reasons.)
Why hasn't the US shuttle been more successful? (Score:3, Insightful)
I read, a long time ago, that the US shuttle's design incorporates features to serve the USAF, or reasonable equivalent. The story, as I read it, was that NASA didn't think it could get the funding to build the shuttle if it didn't have allies inside the Beltway. Elements in the Defense department agreed to endorse the shuttle, provided they got input into its design. The large size of the shuttle was given as one of those compromises. The suggestion was that if NASA had been allowed to build a shuttle without design compromises, it would have been more successful.
I'd welcome knowledgeable comments on this story. Sorry, I can't remember where I read it.
As it turned out, the US military doesn't use the shuttle, do they? Don't they use the old one-shot rockets?
Why does the shuttle have to be so big? Okay, Hubble, and the various ISS modules more or less fill the shuttle bay. But there have been something like 100 shuttle missions so far, how many of those missions had payloads that fully filled the cargo bay? They could all have been launched with big one-shot rockets, couldn't they? The 197?s Skylab was launched by a surplus Saturn V wasn't it?
The Hubble repair missions could have been mounted from a more modestly sized shuttle, couldn't they?
I read, something interesting back during the first years of Hubble's deployment, back before its optics were corrected, and everything was out of focus. NASA cut corners. They tested all the pieces separately, on the ground. But they didn't test the fully assembled telescope on the ground. I read that they considered doing so, but it required the construstion of a test jig. The test jig would have been expensive, and the decision was made to gamble.
The story was that the US already possessed a test jig suitable for testing large space telescopes. But NASA couldn't use it, because it was top secret, because it was used to test the large telescopes of top secret spy satellites, which were focussed on the Earth.
Can anyone debunk this story? If true, those satellites must have been launched by one-shot rockets.
Re:But why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Long term the other space launch capable countries probably are researching alternatives. The only thing is research takes time and money. Basing your immediate solution on something that is known to work is the best alternative. While very similar the solution is likely to have innovations, that will make a difference. A good analogy are automobiles, since they all look more or less the same, but each have varying features based on what the manufacture feels is important. It does the job, so why change the approach?
Max Faget's straight-wing shuttle (Score:3, Insightful)
Max Faget was the early and leading proponent of a blunt "capsule" instead of a winged reentry vehicle as a cost-effective solution to the reentry problem. His unique contribution was to have the "capsule" (Tom Wolfe tells us that astronauts hated that word -- they preferred "spacecraft", although capsule distinguishes the thing from lifting-body or winged-reentry vehicle) reenter ass-backwards -- the Air Force Corona/Discoverer capsule reentered face forward.
An axi-symmetric capsule is zero lift, meaning you have little control over where it lands once you fire the retro rockets, and the G-forces can get quite high. You can give a capule a small amount of lift by shifting its center of gravity by rearranging stuff inside, reducing the G's a little bit and giving some control over where you land by doing a roll in the direction you want to head, all without sacrificing the minimal heat shielding requirement compared to a winged reentry vehicle. Gemini, Apollo, and Soyuz use this trick.
The Faget straight-wing Shuttle was supposed to reenter belly first. His critics complained that straight-wing hypersonic vehicles aren't the most stable: Chuck Yeager's famous recovery of the X-1B going end or end and Mike Adam's fatal reentry in the X-15. What Faget explains is that by reentering belly first (think of it as angle of attack of 90 degrees -- in a full stall if you weren't going hypersonic), his straight winged shuttle works just like a capsule -- the belly of the Shuttle and the underside of the wing are like a cookie cutter applied to the underside of a traditional capsule. He argues that it is perfectly stable and works just like proven capsules.
The trick is that as you come out of reentry, you have to do this kind of stall recovery maneuver descending from 80,000 to 60,000 feet and start flying like a conventional glider or airplane. This stomach-dropping transition maneuver, the higher G-load of a capsule style reentry, the limited choice of a landing spot compared to a delta wing Shuttle (the Defense department did not want to make emergency landings in Communist China), all conspired to shelve the straight-wing shuttle. The consequence of going with the delta wing, however, was much higher heat shielding requirements for which the infamous tiles were the answer, and now you know THE REST OF THE STORY.
Seems to me... (Score:1, Insightful)
2. it can't go even remotely near space
At best, it can be described as a test plane, but calling it a space shuttle is a little much. Okay, it's ridiculous.