SpaceShipOne Rockets To 68,000 Feet 390
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."
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.
Their prerss release (Score:1, Informative)
--Karma whoring as AC since 2000.
5 times more distance to go (Score:1, Informative)
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.
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...
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.
I'm tracking press coverage.... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:space race (Score:3, Informative)
Re:For those that haven't used imperial for ages.. (Score:3, Informative)
It refers to the meter as 1/10,000,000 the distance from the pole to the equator through Paris, which is the same definition I had. Not a flame though, I'm glad we weren't sure, and I was able to find a (semi-) definitive answer!
Re:Spacecraft and aircraft are not the same! (Score:3, Informative)
Congratulations Scaled Composite's and Burt Rutan you guy's are truly making history !!
On the landing gear failure (Score:5, Informative)
PRIVATE commercial supersonic flight yet to happen (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Physics primer follows (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But what does it *mean*? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Spacecraft and aircraft are not the same! (Score:3, Informative)
It's true that rockets predate the airplane by at least several hundred years. But early rockets were just a bunch of gun powder in a tube with a fuse. Yes, there was a lot of experimentation to figure out how to make a rocket fly and to predict where it went. But frankly early rockets never had much control or accuracy. It wasn't until the field of aerodynamics that we really started to understand how the internals of a chemical rocket worked. While rocket's my use a "brute force" method to accomplish their goals, the design of the rockets themselves relies heavily upon aerodynamics.
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.
Re:who makes this component at armadillo ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Does the X-prize achievement scale to usefulnes (Score:1, Informative)
Where space begins is a human idea, not a gravitational one.
Re:And so it begins. (Score:3, Informative)
The real prize is not the 10M purse, but the tourists that will follow. Some estimates are that the global market is in the billions. Several studies [spacefuture.com] have been done indicating that people would spend 10k-100k for a trip, among people financially able to pay that.
I look forward to the day when a flight to space is a mundane vacation activity for rich people, right there next to hang-gliding rides and zorbing [zorb.com]. Of course orbital is much harder, but the X-prize lays the first brick on that path.
-- Bob
Re:Anyone know. . . (Score:3, Informative)
They must have the airspace thing sorted out, as Class A airspace goes from 18,000ft to 60,000ft, where the airspace reverts to class E. Class A airspace requires an IFR (instrument flight rules) flight plan. I can't imagine them actually giving him an IFR clearance, though. They must have done some kind of waiver for the flight and simply blocked out some space. Class E has no prohibitive requirements. I'm not familiar with the Mojave area; but there may even be some special use airspace already designated. I could imagine "borrowing" it from the government in some manner. In any event, once you got above 60, your airspace concerns wouldn't really change. The sub-orbital altitudes wouldn't be very crowded, with satellites, etc. being much higher.
As for frequency reservation, there really isn't a need. There are a few frequencies in the aviation band that they could use without prior arrangement. Most aircraft have more than one radio, so that they could talk to the ground team and still be able to hear Air Traffic Control.
Telemetry is the thing I'm curious about. You probably wouldn't need it if you put some kind of "black box" on board; but I would imagine Rutan would like to have a downlink.
Re:Biggest difficulty of rocket science (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well done and very impressive (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well done and very impressive (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, the patent on wing-warping is what utimately lead Curtis to invent ailerons and create a way to have controlled flight, even with metal wings (although he wasn't considering metal wings at the time). It's fairly ironic that now, 100 years later, NASA is using a custom F16 with carbon fiber wings as a testbed to study wing-warping as a more efficient flight control mechanism for sub- and super-sonic flight.
Re:What's the big deal about rocket science? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's the big deal about rocket science? (Score:3, Informative)
Often you don't bother to insulate the LOx tanks because you can just keep pumping it in the tanks as it boils off (shuttle and Atlas are exceptions). The ice just falls a way as the rocket lifts off. Look at a video of a rocket launching, you'll see ice all over the place. To insulate the hydrogen you put it inside of the LOx tank, and separate them with a vacuum. Vacuums weigh nothing, so there's no insulation mass to make any difference. The insulation isn't why people are looking at kerosene
The reason people are looking at LOx / kerosene (really RP-1 is more common) is because performance isn't always the driving factor. Kerosene / RP-1 engines are cheaper to work with, and cost is always a factor. Sometimes it's cheaper to build a bigger rocket that's powered by Kerosene then to use H2 and build a smaller rocket.
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:Biggest difficulty of rocket science (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Spacecraft and aircraft are not the same! (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, if you look at the development process, you'll see why the link. Early spacecraft were totally unrelated to aircraft. Capsules designed specifically to support life in the vaccuum of space. The only aerodymanics involved were those required for re-entry. A 3 dimensional shape profile was developed that met 2 requirements. The vehicle would have high drag on re-entry, required for deceleration, and the vehicle would fly stable, thru a stable trajectory, required to make the whole process surviveable.
As technology develped (and is still developing) it was determined, that transition thru the atmosphere is actually a major phase of flight for any spacegoing vehicle, so, the process of merging spacecraft and aircraft began. The space shuttle was the first such hybrid. A space mission profile was developed, and a craft for that profile was designed. The whole craft was then wrapped inside an aerodymanic package that turned it into a flyable aircraft. Finally, a boost system was strapped on that could actually boost the whole package into orbit. This was basically an engineering approach of 'take a spacecraft and wrap it up to be an airplane'.
The Spaceship one project took the other tack on the problem. Start with an airplane, and harden it up enough to withstand exposure to space. That brought along some interesting aerodymanic problems on the re-entry phase, where the fluids are so thin, that 'normal' aerodymanics dont really apply till it gets considerably lower. Propulsion is also different in this case, the aircraft propulsion system cannot rely on parasitic oxidizers enroute, since it's not in the part of the atmosphere where O2 is a readily available commodity in the quantities required. Typical engines (piston and jet) rely on being able to use oxidizers parasitically from local atmosphere where they are travelling.
There was a time we had an aeronautical industry, and we had a space industry. There is convergence happening, and thats why today, it's referred to as simply the aerospace industry. Aerodymanics is all about efficiency, and there is no more efficient medium for an 'airplane' to operate in than the zero drag realms of inner space. The problem so far is, the cost of propulsion to reach that realm is prohibitive, so building jets that fly in the 35 to 50 thousand foot altitude range is the best compromise economically. The drag is reduced, thereby reducing the cost of propulsion, yet there's still enough O2 available to run those jets, so the vehicle doesn't have to carry oxidizer, just fuel.
Everyone seems to think the race is about 'get to space', and the X-prize is the goal. Its not. X-prize sets a performance point that is an arbitrary milestone on the development path, and is some inspiration, but not a lot, to this type of development. The cost of achieving the altitude in question twice, in two weeks, far exceeds the value of the prize. This is why the Rutan project is going to win, and there is no way it can be stopped. Even if they dont win the X-Prize itself, they are on the right track, and here's the math as to why.
Transportation costs are measured in terms of fixed cost, and consumeables cost. To buy an airplane costs xx dollars, and it's amortized over the life of the plane. Using a medium sized commercial jet, you further amortize that over the cost per seat, per trip, and that number really does become insignificant. The other major cost (ignoring for the moment things like infrastructure for ticketing etc, cuz that'll be in the equation in all cases) is the per mile operating cost of the vehicle, divided by the number of seats, to achieve the cost per seat mile. Therein becomes the ticket price. The single largest factor in cost per seat mile on a commercial jet is fuel. A typical aircraft in commercial service today burns more than it's own value in fuel annually.
Fuel costs break down further into
Re:Anyone know. . . (Score:3, Informative)
So it seems you can just write a letter and get an authorization to operate without a clearance.
Re:50 years from now... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:PRIVATE commercial supersonic flight yet to hap (Score:2, Informative)
Now, Air France is a different matter!
Re:What's the big deal about rocket science? (Score:2, Informative)
Specific Impulse (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, for those readers who don't know what specific impulse is (or why it is measured in seconds of all things): specific impulse is a measure of the amount of impulse (=force * time) which a specific amount of fuel produces. A pound of fuel will produce a pound of thrust for X seconds, where X is the specific impulse. Ion and plasma engines can have specific impulses in the 1000's of seconds, but have a very low thrust.
BTW, Burt Rutan was a childhood hero of mine. I've heard of him crashing, but I've never heard of him failing. I've always thought that his team will be the one to win the X prize.
Re:50 years from now... (Score:3, Informative)
The Wrights didn't think that much of their invention although they defended their patents fiercely enough to retard American progress for quite some time. They apparantly considered air flight impractical for any use save the one they actively marketed it for.... warfare.