Northrop Grumman to own Scaled Composites

Dolphinzilla writes "According to Space.com, Northrop Grumman Corporation agreed on July 5 to increase its stake in Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites (designers of Space Ship One, Proteus) from 40 percent to 100 percent. They have purchased the company outright, marking a new future for the space pioneering firm. 'Scaled Composites currently is working with Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic venture on a vehicle designated for now as SpaceShipTwo, which would carry two pilots and six paying passengers into suborbital space for a few minutes of weightlessness. The company also is building a new carrier aircraft, dubbed WhiteKnight2, that will carry SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of 15 kilometers before releasing it to soar to suborbital space. The two companies last year formed a joint venture called the Spaceship Company to build the new vehicles.'"

Space ship two details here

[Harmonious Botch]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_Spa ceShipTwo [wikipedia.org]

That's a shame.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for one of the other mega-aerospace companies, and it's a wonder that anything we build ever flies after it's been through the cogs of the bureaucracy (to say nothing of the added blanket of the government customer). It's a shame that an outfit as innovative and down to earth (if you'll forgive the analogy) as Scaled Composites will inevitably be larded down with all the little empires and big nonsense of aero-bureaucracy.

proof of concepts

[Anonymous Coward]

Rutan is a great "proof of concept" guy, but given personal experiences with some of his products, he really does need to hand off development of finished systems to someone else. Not to say northrop is the answer, just that doing your drawings on the back of a cocktail napkin only gets you so far.. even 80% of the way, but that last 20% has to have a lot more rigor.

Kind of a bummer

[rastoboy29]

I know Mr. Rutan deserves whatever he gets, but still it's a bummer to me. I had kindof liked the idea of young whippersnapper companies being the ones to crack open mass market space travel.

Still, it was probably inevitable, and I certainly still wish them all the best luck possible.

Re:Great, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know jack shit about rocket science. To enter LEO, you need FAR more energy than required to reach 100km altitude. You need tangential velocity, not radial, and you need a minimum of 200 km of perigee or atmospheric drag will deorbit you soon enough.

And have you stopped to consider HOW would SS1 survive an atmospheric re-entry from orbital velocity? Its heat shield can handle falling down from 100km up, there's not that much energy to dissipate, but from orbit you're coming down a Mach 25+ and the only way to get rid of that energy is by atmospheric braking. You can't take a ballistic trajectory with SS1, it would rip the structure apart. You can't take lifting re-entry like with Gemini-Apollo-Soyuz, either, a capsule can take it but not SS1. Forget the Shuttle-like re-entry too, it doesn't have a heatshield that can stand it.

You can't put a stronger heatshield on it for the same reason you can't put a more powerful engine on it: the cold rocket equations. They mass more, and the more mass you put on, the more thrust you need. The new craft would be far heavier than SS1 and you would need a bigger plane. At this point you would actually save money by going the rocket/capsule way and be done with it.

By the way, what SS1 accomplished has already been done by NASA in the '60s. Google for X-15.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Sorry to kick your puppy. Now don't cry like a baby.

Scaled's business structure

[willboy42]

Scaled Composites has been a wholly-owned entity of larger companies in the past: it was Beechcraft around the time Scaled was working on the Starship prototype, and Wyman-Gordon soon thereafter. The prototype output from the shop has been pretty consistent throughout the history of the company, so I highly doubt there'll be much change there. Both NG and Scaled have supposedly said as much in their announcements of the deal.

Northrop Grumman has been heavily involved in the Proteus program for several years now, and was looking at using an unmanned Proteus in production as their response for some DoD RFQ [wikipedia.org] a short while back . And as previously noted, they did have 40% ownership prior to this announcement, and that would buy a fair amount of influence if that's what they were going for.

My guess is that NG wanted Scaled so they could wrap up Proteus whole cloth, and who knows, maybe even resurrect some older programs like ARES or ATTT, that Scaled had trouble getting DoD attention for back in the day. And with the cash infusion, Scaled will get the capital it probably needs to keep the SS2 program moving along and into low volume production, something you don't typicallly have to worry about with one-off prototypes that are their bread and butter.