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."
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 !
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:space race (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want NASA to do it, it'll cost well over $50 billion.
Truely amazing to even think about (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:50 years from now... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Future of manned space flight (Score:2, 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:50 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:5 times more distance to go (Score:3, Insightful)
People seem to be forgetting that this is just one of many test flights. The fact that this didn't come close to the goal isn't really a problem.
These test flights are very important because they build faith in the aircraft and anticipation for the "real" flights to come. Of course they also point to problems that need to be solved like the aparrent landing gear issues.
TW
SpaceShipOne versus the X-37 (Score:2, Insightful)
Meanwhile, NASA/Boeing have just announced that the X-37, part of the Orbital Space Plane program, will "deemphasize" actual space operations. Story at www.aviationnow.com. Great timing! Really highlights the differences between the good ol' government contractor way of doing things. Get the billions of dollars, build something that looks good for propaganda purposes, forget about flying into space.
I hope civilian space efforts wake everyone up to the pathetic reality of NASA before they have a chance to kill another batch of astronauts.
Re:Does the X-prize achievement scale to usefulnes (Score:3, Insightful)
The X-prize is not about reaching space, so much as it is about spurring development. The prize for a solo nonstop flight over the Atlantic drove development of methods to reach the rather artificial goal, and those methods were useful in achieving other goals later. Some may have been useful directly, and some as examples of methods to be avoided. The same should hold true of developments for the X-prize... that's the point.
I am not a rocket scientist, and I have no idea if the Scaled, Armadillo, or other teams' efforts will really scale up to true orbital capability. Probably not, I think. But with each entry achieving its own innovations, it is likely that some combination of the lessons learned will contribute to the success of the next goal... whatever that is. It's all progress, and pretty darn cool besides. We can worry about scaling up later.
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.
Re:space race (Score:3, Insightful)
Bruce
Re:50 years from now... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:50 years from now... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think your inability to put forth a cogent argument ought to disqualify your comments in general. Sorry, but argumentum ad hominem doesn't cut it.
You forgot to mention that Saddam's death toll, which is by most estimates about three orders of magnitude greater, is no longer increasing.
To get rid of that cancer on the human race? Absolutely. The UN had its thumb up its ass and was unwilling to do a thing to stop the murder, rape, and torture carried out on a daily basis in Iraq. It was unwilling to enforce any of the eightteen Security Council resolutions passed against Iraq. It looked the other way while France, Germany, Russia, and North Korea kept selling Saddam weapons systems and related equipment. Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world on the same scale as Hitler and Stalin. That we eliminated that threat at a loss of hundreds (vs. the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands lost in your average war) is an acceptable trade for the millions in Iraq who are no longer under his thumb...or for the billions elsewhere in the world who are a little bit safer tonight.
I don't agree with most of his social policies, but this is one occasion where he is right on the money. If Howard Dean had his way, Saddam and his thugs would still be tossing dissidents into industrial meat grinders (head-first if you're lucky, feet-first if you're not so lucky), kidnapping and raping women randomly pulled off the streets, and bankrolling terrorists and their training.
Re:50 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:50 years from now... (Score:1, Insightful)
Funny, I seem to recall the given reason for the war was that Saddam was going to rain WMDs down on American cities otherwise. If Bush's real reason was to get rid of a nasty tyrant, he should have based his arguments on that, instead of making up unsupported scare stories. If the world's nuclear superpower is going to make a habit of misleading its public in order to justify otherwise-unjustifiable invasions, then we are going to be in for a rough time indeed.
If Howard Dean had his way, Saddam and his thugs would still be tossing dissidents into industrial meat grinders.
I can guarantee you there are at least a half-dozen other evil dictators who regularly do the same sorts of thing. Shall I expect another half-dozen invasions and occupations if George W. is re-elected? If you think the answer is no, then that should be your first clue that human rights abuses are not what prompts the Bush administration to go to war.
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.
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.
Re:50 years from now... (Score:2, Insightful)
But do you understand the general process of medical development? Do you know, for example, when penicillin was introduced, or when the germ theory of disease was advanced? Do you know that prior to the 20th century, wounds routinely required amputation, performed without anesthetic? I'm not talking about day, month and year of discoveries, but more about general time frame. If your answer for penicillin is "sometime in the first half of the 1900's, before WWII," that's perfectly fine. If your answer is "I don't know, maybe 1700 or so?" then yes, I believe you are poorly educated.
Many facts are required for a proper perspective on the world. Details, such as inventor's names, are not necessarily important, but part of being a well educated person is having a general understanding of fields beyond your specific interests. It's not enough to simply look up facts as necessary. Indeed, in the above example of penicillin, it is meaningful to know not only that penicillin was introduced in the first half of the 20th century, but moreover that it was available during the Second World War, which in turn implies that you have a general idea of when that took place. I don't care if you think military history is boring and stupid, if you don't know the approximate dates of WWII, you are not going to be able to understand the importance of events that took place around it.
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.
Short Term Weightless Conditions (Score:3, Insightful)
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
I can get the same effect by jumping in the air, can't I?. Just for a shorter time?
Well, I'm off to emulate the characteristics I will later encounter during the planned space flights now.
Boing
Re:Well done and very impressive (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm too lazy to do the math, but at 2.5-g acceleration it'd take less than a minute to reach 330,000 feet. The engine has been test fired for at least 1 1/2 minutes; there's already very little air at 68,000 feet. Since they simply fall back into the atmosphere, reentry isn't much of a problem (and the feathered configuration avoids the instability problems the X-15 had).
All in all, I'd say they could have reached space the first time, but they're being cautious instead. Sure beats the "Just get it working, then we'll patch it until it's robust" approach.