SpaceShipOne Rockets To 68,000 Feet

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."

And so it begins.

[ActionPlant]

How long before commercial spaceflight tickets are offered by competing commercial organizations and WE get to pick the craft?

Damon,

Can't wait

[cybermace5]

When industry gets on the ball and starts developing space programs, we'll start seeing some real progress. Of course NASA's work is extremely valuable, but we need commercial support to really get things done. Satellites have been a huge success; now all we need is a very attractive financial reason to develop space commerce.

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....

50 years from now...

[RobertB-DC]

I did a quick Google on the first time humans passed the "sound barrier" in 1947 [popularmechanics.com]. 50 years later, every school kid knows^W should know Chuck Yeager's name.

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.

Re:space race

[Spoons]

If you want NASA to do it, it'll cost well over $50 billion.

Hmmmm... Iraq war $87 billion [cnn.com] or going to the moon 50 billion..... Hmmmmm.... Tough choice.....

Re:50 years from now...

[mabhatter654]

The joke is that most of the companies involved are getting their money from childhood "geeks" that made it big on toys or games and Still went to school to learn the "real work" we were all told in the 70's and 80's was so important. I find it more ironic that the very goverment that told kids to be astronauts and rocket scientists has a problem with them Actually being astronauts and rocket scientists WITHOUT govt help!

Supersonic Homebuilt

[CmdrTostado]

Bede Jet Corp.BD-10 may have been the first manned supersonic flight onboard a plane designed by a small private company It was a deadly, short lived, supersonic HOMEBUILT. Go supersonic, from your garage.
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& cid=3)

What's the big deal about rocket science?

[Mirk]

I'm serious. What's the big deal about rocket science? How hard can it be? You point your rocket the way you want it to go and have a reaction push it in that direction, with stabilising fins keeping it on course. End of story, one might think. So to this naive observer, rocket science basically looks like ballistics+chemistry, neither of which is exactly rocket-science. Er ... you know what I mean.

So: why is it so hard to make rockets work?

What altitude?

[zipwow]

Just to be snarky, I wonder if there's a ceiling to how high you can go for the round-the-world attempt. If you've got a working suborbital spaceship, it would be amusing to make an orbital spaceship* and say, "Yeah, we went around ten or fifteen times on one tank of gas. It was a big tank, tho."

-Zipwow

* I know, I know, orbit is waaay different than straight up, straight back. Its just an amusing thought...

Re:Can't wait

[adrianbaugh]

I was thinking about this recently. Of course we need corporations to bring inventions to mass markets, but how many really great inventions are made by corporations? Most of the defining inventions seem to be made, at least initially, by academics or driven private individuals rather than companies.

Anyone know. . .

[jafac]

what they're doing in terms of ground-tracking, telemetry, airspace and frequency reservation, etc.
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?

Re:What altitude?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

There's a semi-official definition of space. Anything below 100km is atmospheric, and the FAA takes jurisdiction. Above 100km, it's space, and nobody much does; until reentry.

Well, its doesn't go (far) downrange.

[reality-bytes]

This craft doesn't really fly 'downrange' very far as an orbital flight would, the only 'downrange' stages are when It's attached to their carrier plane and when It's pulling up.

If the worst was to happen (Im not sure if their rocket gimballs) and the craft went off course, the chances are that the out-of-envelope stresses would do a better job of self-destruction than any range safety officer.

Question: Does anyone know (I've searched scaled.com) whether the rocket nozzle is gimballed or whether they use dynamic control followed by 'balance'?

The only info on the motor control states the 2 button operation 1) Arm 2) Fire :)

Re:Truely amazing to even think about

[Timbotronic]

Having Burt Rutan in charge is the real key here. Design costs? He's probably the best aircraft designer alive and he's doing it for fun. Fabrication costs? Scaled have been producing experimental composite aircraft for years. They have their own CAD/CAM system and an autoclave to produce parts. They also have a highly experienced team of test pilots.

The biggest cost for them will be the rocket system which they had to contract out. For the most part though, the whole production is a side benefit of all the commercial and government work that funds Scaled. So in some ways there's still a government subsidy of sorts in there.

Re:Supersonic Homebuilt

[netringer]

Guess who was a lead enginneer for Jim Bede?

The very same Burt Rutan.

You want to know you can get back down

[johnjay]

Building a vehicle that's guaranteed to come back to Earth is a good first goal. Carmack's team is basically building a huge rocket to go up, and a parachute to make the coming down part survivable. Consider the extra math, physics, and computer processing that would have to go into getting back to Earth once you are in orbit. Sure it can be done, but wouldn't you want to test the other parts of the process first?

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.

Re:50 years from now...

[ralphclark]

The U.S.'s "allies" never respected it

Yes we did.

and certianly never respected it as being the "moral leader of the free world.

We did, to a point. Most of the time we were at least prepared to look the other way.

Anti-American resentment is no higher today than it was ten years ago

You could hardly be more wrong. To be honest the US had already lost a lot of respect when Bush stole the presidency, but that would have been recoverable had he proved in the end to be a good man. Instead, though, his hawkish response to the 9/11 terrorist attack, attempting to blow up a single incident into a world war, didn't go down well in Europe.

You may not realize that in the UK we have already lived with terrorism for thirty years and suffered numerous horrifying atacks without either attempting to drag the rest of the world into it, or attempting to invade any other sovereign country. We believe in proportionate response. Clearly, the US government doesn't though. It has behaved in this matter more like a psychopathic criminal who breaks people's legs for failing to show sufficient respect.

It should be obvious to you that this makes the US appear rather dangerous and irresponsible to the rest of the world. Governments who contine to ally themselves with the US now do so only out of fear and self interest rather than through any sense of moral alignment. For the peoples of these countries however the situation is much less ambiguous, and hence the numerous public demonstrations, for example the very large crowd who assembled to protest when Bush came to visit the UK recently. The US will not be able to regain the respect of the world until after Bush, and his corrupt establishment, have gone.

Some anonymous cowards will no doubt want to respond along the lines of "well we can kick your ass". But fear is not the same as respect. And most people don't believe "might is right" to be a moral standpoint. If the US does, then the US only shares the morality of gangsters and bullies.