SpaceShipTwo Design and Pics Released 245
An anonymous reader writes "Designs and photos for Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic's new suborbital spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, and its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, have been released." Lots of specs and numbers if you're interested in that sort of thing although nothing hugely detailed.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Interesting)
Cheer for the rocketry not matters, not the irrelevant joyrides.
Parallels and Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/top10/wright-flyer.jpg [aerospaceweb.org] Here is the wrights' "space ship one"
http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/786/506847.JPG [dkimages.com] Here is what the aircraft started looking like 4 years after the Wright's first flight.
It took 30 years for Jet technology to appear, I wonder if it will be a similar amount of time before we get private orbital cabability.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:1, Interesting)
Rutan isn't a billionaire like Musk, he has to get the funding however he can, and has to follow a different path. Musk can afford to spend $200 or $300 million without a single successful flight and ever-increasing launch costs. Scaled can't, and has to rely on smaller steps in the hopes of convincing enough people with deep enough pockets that there is a big-enough market, at a low-enough technical risk, for the step to orbital flights.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Interesting)
As to my understanding of rocket science, well, for starters, maybe you should learn manners before you return to the discussion. You're not going to convince people to agree with your opinion if you insult them first. You only come across as an idiot when you do it; regardless of how smart you may be. You also might try opening your mind to ideas that don't fit with your own narrow view of the world.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nose Skid (Score:3, Interesting)
This flies directly in the face of the early poster that claims SS2 doesn't push the state of the art. SOA applies not only to new materials or designs that have never been seen before. It also applies to using old techniques in new ways, or in places that they weren't used before. It's not only reaching out for new things, but includes reaching back to make the old new again.
NASA, SpaceX, et.al., all have one approach....payload on top of a huge roman candle. Scaled is exploring an alternative approach.
And doing it with STYLE, I might add.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:3, Interesting)
~300km/~5000m/s is "barely off the pad"? In what universe? It'd have easily been 7,800 m/s if they just had an upper stage baffle.
Who do you think came up with and has built and flown a throttleable solid rocket engine? (I'll give you a hint, It wasn't SpaceX.)
I'll give you a hint: It wasn't Scaled. They flew a hybrid rocket. One that got them a mere 3% of the energy of an equivalent mass in orbit and cannot scale to orbit.
They've also come up with some interesting canopy (window) designs that are fairly novel and structurally as well as visually better than what is commonly used today.
Read: Pretty and unscalable. That won't work with a TPS.
Oh also there is the little thing I bet you didn't know. Scaled Composites helps build the Pegasus air launched vehicle which regularly puts 1/2 ton satalites into low orbit
Yes, they make its tail fins. Color me impressed.
and a few simulated launch videos and a few ground test as achievements.
Wow, you really know absolutely nothing about SpaceX, don't you?
Re:Design Changes (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe that the corkscrew problem of the first of the two X-Prize flights might have been due to pilot error or something easily correctable.
The second flight, by the ex-Navy pilot, didn't have the problem. In fact, the pilot broke the unofficial altitude record held by an X15.
(Of course, on an earlier test flight if my memory is right, the same pilot landed SS2 a bit hard, causing the landing skid to collapse. Embarassing, but not a disaster. But that is what doing test flights is about.)