SpaceShipOne to Try for Space on Monday 282
CommanderData writes "The first piloted private space flight will occur Monday at 9:30AM ET. SpaceShipOne is planning to ascend to the 62 mile (100 Km) mark and return to land at its takeoff point over the course of 90 minutes. With only a pilot (unnamed at this time) on board this does not qualify as a run for the Ansari X-Prize. If the flight is successful they will likely try for the prize soon afterward..." An anonymous reader adds: "Scaled Composites also has this page about the event."
I thought for X-Prize it was pilot + 2 sandbags (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hrm? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I thought for X-Prize it was pilot + 2 sandbags (Score:4, Informative)
Which, given that they are in the lead, I iamgine that they are going to draw things out a little bit.
I mean, if they are confident in the design, they may fly it crewed and allow a few honored folks to ride passenger (Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, etc) for the actual prize flights.
Re:Hrm? (Score:2, Informative)
You have to have three people IN the thing to qualify for the X-Prize.
Re:Fun ride (Score:4, Informative)
SpaceDev, the engine designer will reuse the tech (Score:5, Informative)
Currently, satellite launches can cost in the hundreds of millions.
Now if only their were more prizes.
Re:Hrm? (Score:2, Informative)
There was not a 30 day notifiction, and the flight will not carry the extra ballast.
This is not a prize attempt. But the next flight probably will be.
See rules:
http://xprize.org/teams/guidelines.html
yawn-inducing conventional engine (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Don't get your hopes up too far. (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.spacedev.com/newsite/templates/subpa
Look at the bottom of that article.
Re:Planet Express (Score:5, Informative)
more detailed PDFs also at
http://ast.faa.gov/lrra/stats_notices.htm
Check out the updated info page, includes posters! (Score:3, Informative)
6:30 AM Pacific (Score:5, Informative)
and assume that the cited time is launch site local. If you arrive at 9:30 local time, it will be long over.
That's 6:30 AM Pacific (local) time.
Yes ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:On TV Live? (Score:1, Informative)
Advice if you plan to attend the launch... (Score:5, Informative)
Quick summary:
Re:SpaceDev, the engine designer will reuse the te (Score:1, Informative)
NASA has suggested giving out prizes:
NASA was advised to turn over most launch responsibilities to private firms, offer financial incentives and prizes for innovation, and foster small, entrepreneurial aerospace firms. Although the space agency now contracts many functions to private contractors, the panel said that arrangement had only produced a constellation of vendors rather than an independent industry.
(Moon to Mars Commission released on the June 16th)
Essentially, NASA is going to become completely private in the coming years. This is going to open up a large market that was never there before, like what happened to the airline industry.
Re:Fun ride (Score:2, Informative)
An untrained, fit individual will probably loss consciousness somewhere between 3 and 5 g, if the g is sustained for more than a few seconds. Military pilots and aerobatic pilots are taught ways to temporarily increase the blood pressure by straining the leg and abdomen muscles, and "grunting" against a closed glottis. Modern fighter aircraft are designed to manoeuvre at up to about 9g (exact limits vary with different aircraft types). They are fitted with g-suits which fit tightly around the pilot's legs and abdomen. The suit inflates as a function of the g-level, and it helps keep the blood from pooling in the legs and abdomen, and thus helps keep the blood pressure up. But, older fighters, many military trainers and aerobatic aircraft, don't have g-suits. A properly trained and fit pilot can do sustained manoeuvring at more than 7 g. I did a structural loads flight test program on the Canadair CT-114 Tutor many years ago which involved quite a few test points at the aircraft's limit of 7.33g, without a g-suit.
The g level that can be sustained depends on fitness and training, but also on the axis of the acceleration. For example, if the aircraft accelerates forward, the axis of acceleration is such that it has no effect on the blood pressure in the head, as the acceleration is on an axis at 90 degrees to a line drawn from the heart to the head. So, 3.5 g during the ascent of SpaceShipOne would be of no consequence at all.
If you have some fluid in a vessel, the pressure varies with the vertical location due to the head pressure from gravity (or acceleration). I.e. the pressure is highest at the bottom of the container, and lowest at the top.
Re:On TV Live? (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5236958/
Re:Hrm? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SpaceDev, the engine designer will reuse the te (Score:2, Informative)
Wait till you see some of our future projects which could put a 200lb satelite into orbit for until $750k.
Re:Don't get your hopes up too far. (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, by replacing the Redstone with an Atlas you transformed a suborbital craft into an orbital one without changing the craft itself.
Re:The obligatory: "Mod parent up" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You gotta learn to walk before you learn to run (Score:4, Informative)
No!? So sure, are you?
Yes, actually. The physics of that calculation is trivial. Also, "work" has a well-defined meaning in physics, so strictly speaking that sentence is perfectly true.
Clue alert - he wasn't talking about energy. Try actually reading his post to discover he was talking about work to solve engineering problems, not how much fucking energy it takes to attain oribital velocity.
Clue alert - engineering difficulty is closely related to energy in situations like these. With orbital velocities comes a whole range of new problems related to hypersonic aerodynamics, heating, flight control, structural design, etc etc. Look, SpaceShipOne uses hydraulic-boosted (if even that)manual flight controls, and relies of passive stability to maintain the correct flight attittude. You couldn't get away with that for a Shuttle. It also doesn't have a heatshield the way the Shuttle does (it has some re--inforcement, but not even within an order of magnitude). The rocket on SpaceShipOne has a total impulse of maybe 1 km/sec, and the corresponding mass fraction of the vehicle devoted to fuel is maybe 20%. The rest can go to building a robust vehicle; on the Shuttle the mass fraction of fuel has to be closer to 90%. SpaceShipOne doesn't have cryogenic fuels, and the associated issues. I can go on and on, but hopefully by now you've grokked that these are two very different machines, and SpaceShipOne is as close to orbit as climbing Mt. Greylock is to climbing Mt. Everest.