DARPA Launches Military Spaceplane Project 75
RocketAcademy writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a new program to develop a reusable first-stage launch vehicle. Experimental Spaceplane 1 (XS-1) would be capable of flying 10 times in 10 days, with a small ground crew, reaching speeds of Mach 10, and deploying a small upper stage to place a 3,000-pound satellite into orbit. The XS-1 program is complementary to the Air Force's Boeing X-37, which is a reusable upper stage. The X-37 is currently launched by an expendable Atlas rocket but could be launched by a vehicle derived from XS-1 in the future. Military planners have dreamed of a two-stage, fully reusable Military Spaceplane for several years, but funding has not materialized up to now."
SpaceX (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I reckon the "real" purpose of the program is to develop a mach-10 air-breathing aircraft, not to put 3-ton payloads in LEO. We already have many options for the latter, and they're getting cheaper all the time. (If that were the goal, they would use off-the-shelf tech to build a slower plane with a bigger rocket.) But hey, I'm not complaining, I'd love to see that kind of aircraft get developed. If they need an "excuse" for funding, that's fine with me.
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"I reckon the "real" purpose of the program is to develop a mach-10 air-breathing aircraft"
Certainly not. Hypersonic airbreathers are extremely difficult, and there's an enormous difference between cruise missions (airliners) and acceleration missions (space launch). Airbreathers tend to perform well at a specific velocity (cruise speed) while rockets must perform well over a wide range of speeds.
Jess Sponable knows that, have seen what happened in the X-30 NASP program, and will not go down that route
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The astrophotography of an uncooled 100kw reactor in a vacuum would probably be pretty neat; but it wouldn't be a good idea.
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Agreed. Getting rid of heat in space is *hard*, due to the fact that you only lose heat through thermal radiation.
There's no convection, conduction, or evaporation in a vacuum without doing "extra work" to make them happen.
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I think this is more likely to be for rapid replacement of GPS & other military satellites in response to other countries developing/having anti-satellite technology. Net-centric warfare is where everyone is going, yet the network part remains the most vulnerable.
Re:As a citizen of this planet... (Score:5, Interesting)
Dude, do you know anything about DARPA? They fund the far out there project. Some of them work, and some of them don't. They are directly responsible for the current research into self driving cars. A big success, though I'd imagine you're freaking out about that too. News flash, any new technology has military applications.
Spaceplanes aren't even a new idea. Hell, the Pegasus Rocket [wikipedia.org] is able to lift nearly a thousand pounds into orbit. What they really seem to be pushing is scramjet technology. The demonstrators so far flew for a few minutes or less before being crashed into the ocean. Even worse, they used solid rockets to get it up to speed before the scramjet could start working. It's like Chuck Yeager's first flight all over again. First they started with solid rockets to get it up to speed, now they're working on doing it using an air breathing engine.
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Well, DARPA is funded via the Federal budget... so China, mostly.
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It was a joke, numbnuts.
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Research Development Evaluation and Test part of the Department of Defense portion of the president's budget. The budget is available at http://www.darpa.mil/newsevents/budget.aspx [darpa.mil].
For those in the acronym game: President's DoD RDT&E funding, cross-service.
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Whats another spy sat/spaceplane with a cute mission badge? A nice commercial and gov funded workshop for staff and the skill sets are kept.
As for responding to a threat - it can anything from a stealthy mission to placing 'something' over an area very quickly.
The main threat would be budget cuts or been found to be wasting US tax payers cash on so
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At least we learnt from them that a dirty bomb is not a big deal. Any bits large enough to be a long term problem are as trivial to find as bits of nuclear gear from crashed satellites.
what did the Canucks ever do to them?! (Score:2)
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To be fair I don't think militarisation of space is as scary as it used to be. During the cold war the danger was it turning into an arms race as the USSR and USA try to leapfrog each other, but really at this point we all know the US has won in terms of militarisation, when the USSR collapsed they kept spending and their military tech is a good generation or two ahead of that in Russia or China.
At this point I don't think Russia or China could care too much about trying to compete with something like this
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Aside from the obvious benefit of collateral technologies (computers, jet aircraft, orbital satellites, GPS, etc., etc.), I wonder what the "followers" of the "Old World" are afraid of? Surely if they were as eager as we to create new technologies, they wouldn't sit around whining how we shouldn't do things just because they can't. They want America to go "Hey, never mind that we got here way ahead of you. Let us just sit around so you guys can get a fe
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You are sending your message over a DARPA project that went well.
Seriously? Spaceplanes are a dead-end technology (Score:2, Insightful)
The US Space Shuttle and USSR Buran proved conclusively that resusable spaceplanes are hugely wasteful. The only way the X-37B (the current "shuttle") could be considered successful is that it spends more time in the air than on the ground, since it's up for about 6-18 months at a time.
Spaceplane mass is wasted mass that can't be used for payload mass. Launch electronics are cheap these days, I am honestly very curious what good a reusable spaceplane provides over existing expendable rockets. As Ts
Re:Seriously? Spaceplanes are a dead-end technolog (Score:5, Insightful)
The US Space Shuttle and USSR Buran proved conclusively that resusable spaceplanes are hugely wasteful.
Not really, since neither of them was really reusable, more vaguely refurbishable, and both were prototypes with no development path.
Re:Seriously? Spaceplanes are a dead-end technolog (Score:4, Interesting)
DARPA is not always right, but they are not a bunch of dummies either. The see enough need for a spaceplane that they want to invest resources on it. They obviously disagree with you that "Spaceplanes are hugely wasteful".
Re:Seriously? Spaceplanes are a dead-end technolog (Score:5, Interesting)
no they aren't hugely wasteful. especially the Buran which didn't have the main engines mounted in it. The Buran died with the collapse of the soviet union.
Even the space shuttle put more people into space ever. Russian capsules have another 100 launches or so before they will come close to putting the number of people and equipment that the shuttles did.
Also no one other than the shuttle has gone EVA to repair large satellites.(the hubble repair missions) As they literally can not carry both the people and the equipment.
The waste of the space shuttle came from the fact that it was stripped after every flight had the engines gutted and rebuilt. It used expsensive and fragile tiles for a heat shield.
remove the main engines like Buran did and find a better heat shield. that is what it will take to make the shuttle better.
The shuttle also could do one thing that no other vehicle could do. Bring things home safely. Personally I wish the last shuttle mission was a mission to hubble to bring it back to earth. a fitting tribute the hubble would be permanent display in a museum. You can not do that with any other vehicle design.
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I bet you are suffering from the misconception that fuel is a major part of the cost of a launch, so conserving fuel is what matters - that's what I thought too. So I had no clue what the point with reusable rockets/spaceplanes was. In fact the fuel costs very little in comparison to the rocket, IIRC it's not far off from 100:1 in terms of cost. With that knowledge, suddenly the world makes sense again. :) Reusable hardware is a big deal - it potentially offers more than an order of magnitude reduction in l
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No, the problem is that the shuttle weighed almost a quarter million pounds dry. That is a quarter million pounds of lost launch capacity. Look at the tiny tin cans that the ISS is made of, all glued together. SkyLab had the same internal volume as the entire ISS put together, and it went up on a single rocket. That is the kind of inefficencies you see when you put things up piecemeal with a reusable orbiter instead of a dedicated rocket.
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" A plane that can take off horizontally, burning atmospheric air while accelerating and climbing, which then switches to using its own on-board oxygen in order to reach orbit makes a lot of sense."
Until you look at the physics/economics. Extracting oxygen from the atmosphere isn't free. It shows up as drag, which requires more fuel to overcome. The liquid oxygen in a rocket's propellant tank has already had kinetic energy added to it. The oxygen you get from the atmosphere is at a much lower energy stat
So basically a revival of X-33/DC-X (Score:5, Interesting)
So basically a revival of X-33/DC-X, neither of which should have been cancelled in the first place, and they're willing to pay 10X the original estimated launch costs of the most expensive one ($5,000,000 per launch vs. the X-33 estimated cost of $500,000) and 20X the least expensive one ($250,000 estimated per for the DC-X).
Seems a bit redundant compared to simply reviving DC-X.
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Of course the DC-X and X-33 were prototype/technology demonstrators - with pretty much none of the capabilities that DARPA wants. They ask for Apollo, and you propose reviving Mercury. What exactly would this accomplish?
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Of course the DC-X and X-33 were prototype/technology demonstrators - with pretty much none of the capabilities that DARPA wants. They ask for Apollo, and you propose reviving Mercury. What exactly would this accomplish?
The common wisdom is that you have to build Mercury before you can build Apollo; personally, I would have skipped the "technology demonstrator" phase and jumped right to building ships, but if you buy that philosophy, then the DARPA request is for another Mercury program before they get an Apollo program, and then the capability they want. So at the very least you skip yet another "let's almost build it than cancel it" Mercury style program.
The X-33 fuel tank problems were never resolved, which means a new
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Well, since the X-33 tank problems were solved in 2005... I fail to see the point. Not to mention the error of believing that lobed conformal tanks are the only solution.
Sure - in the same way a family sedan can be considered a working technology demonstrator for a high perfor
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I don't think any of the designs will get up to mach 10 in the atmosphere, there's little point. Staging out of the atmosphere is a lot easier. And once you're in space, it's probably easier to kick yourself along (a boosted skip-glide) around the world to get back to the launch point.
The Outer Space Treaty. (Score:1)
The intention seems to be to set up a framework against the weaponization of space.
And so it is the USA that puts those hopes beyond our reach.
Thanks, ally.
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Weapons were in space by 1973. Soviet weapons. [wikipedia.org]
But I'm not sure you're on about, unless you're weirding out about some non-standard definition of "weaponization of space" that involves weapons merely passing through space, in which case the non-weaponization of space was stillborn [wikipedia.org].
This is rocket science. (Score:3)
Use metric!
Good (Score:2)
Maybe this time we'll get a real six million dollar man.
reinventing the X-15 (Score:3)
Seriously. How much time and money has been wasted constantly trying to re-invent something we had in the mid-60's? The X-15 program was *very* successful, with only one serious accident *and* there was a version with drop tanks for greater range/speed. If they had simply continued this line of development instead of stopping everything to put a man in a tin-can on top of a missile, we'd already be going to space casually, for weekend trips and vacations.
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*golf clap*
Still have X-15 model rocket I built back in '73. Love that plane, um space, um thing!
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Yeah... but if you actually read the history of the flights with the drop tanks, going for extreme performance, you'll find there were a lot of problems. The X-15 was an airplane, not a spaceplane, and growing the former into the latter is not as easy as you seem to think. It's like trying to evolve a submarine from a battle tank.
That's nothing... (Score:2)