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Science

NASA's X-37 119

Posted by justin++ from the is-plane-the-right-word? dept.
jacobm wrote with a story about the NASA/Boeing project. Called the X-37, it's not like other X-class planes - it can actually stay in orbit. The purpose of the plane is to test "new reusable rocket technologies". Apparently, it designed to reach only a mere Mach 25, but a Boeing VP says another goal is to make space travel as affordable as travelling by plane. The article also includes a neat little insert with pictures of the other X-class planes.
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NASA's X-37 More

NASA's X-37

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  • We don't know what the real top speed of the SR-71 Blackbird is...every time someone else brakes the air speed record, they take the Blackbird up and break them. One record was 2,193.17 MPH, and it can go up to a sustained horizontal altitude of 85,069 feet. It gets so high that the atmosphere is so thin that it needs attitutude rockets. It's published theoretical top is 88,000 feet. It's exact specs are still top secret. All the speed records are for sustained speed...we have not seen published data on any burst speed.

    I do see one notice of an attempt last year to put an aerospike engine on a SR-71...I don't have any data on what happened there...but the work was done by NASA.

    It is a fine bird, and even today, we don't have anything that can replace it.

    ttyl
    Farrell
  • The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird was not ramjet powered. It had relatively conventional jet engines, albeit specially designed to operate at the altitudes and speeds the SR-71 was designed for. There was a ramjet powered drone designed to be launched from a Blackbird, but that was a different beast anyway.

    I've seen films of Blackbirds in flight, as well as taking off and landing. All was under power from its two engines -- the Blackbird was NOT designed for a dead-stick landing, as would be necessary if it was ramjet powered.
  • If you want commercial space travel, go to Disneyland.

    Personally, I can't wait for Orbital Disneyland. The zero G gymnasium would be a blast! As for the risks of space travel? Strap me in baby! Life is short anyway, may as well take some risks and keep it interesting. Besides, I fully expect space travel to eventually become as complace and safe as air travel.

    Thad

    We are living in a sci-fi future world, and all I have to say about it is... I wan't my flying car! ;-)

  • The nice thing about evolution is that it's all true. As long as we get there someday then even the space shuttle did _eventually_ make routine, safe, low-cost acces to space possible. Just as the Wright brother's first flight did.

    So, it's probably not blowing smoke, but it isn't a very useful statement either... other than to drum up support.

  • If you give space travel all to the private sector, there would be no scientific vision. We would have even more of the current problem, which is:

    When man first went out into space it was to look out further into the universe. Nowadays, we only go far enough up to look back down at Earth.

    Translation:
    Business needs satellites for communications and earth telemetry. That's really all they want to send rockets up to deliver.

    It's important for the scientists to have say in how space technology is developed, not just the beancounters.
  • In that box in the middle of the page they show pictures of about 6 X rocket planes. 3 or 4 or "classified." What do you think they are about?

    Perhaps some of that area 51 aurora stuff?

  • Wrong country, wrong words, (roughly) right translation.

    Others have pointed out the NASA phrase, which you're mingly with the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) motto:

    "Per ardua ad astra" - through hardship to the stars.
  • >I think I remember terminal velocity being 186 miles an hour or something close to that

    Near the ground, yes. Terminal velocity is dependent upon atmospheric drag. He started in the much thinner atmosphere at 59,000 feet, so less drag.

    If you fell from orbit around the moon, there would be no terminal velocity limit -- you would just keep accelerating until the rather sudden stop.
  • This reeks of being an urban legend.

    The Commodore 64 was never a robust enough system for military use. It was designed to be inexpensive and easy to work with, which is the opposite of military-grade. The military version would have to be in a titanium case, and the switch for just the letter 'A' key would cost more than the entire keyboard on the C-64.

    This is not meant as a criticism of Mil-Spec or the C-64. Both have their purposes, and both fulfill(ed) them quite well.
  • >What does it mean when the shuttle tells NASA they've throttled up to 104%?

    It's based on the maximum thrust of the original shuttle engines, they've tweaked them for slightly higher performance since.
  • "what if the blades stopped rotating?"

    Then your glide angle resembles that of a set of car keys.

    (One of my dad's favorite sayings. I couldn't resist :)
  • Hadn't you heard? Peter Norton's name has officially been changed to "Bitmap" since all he's been for the last 10-odd years is a bitmap on the outer packaging. It was a nickname long enough, so now it's official.
  • Wasn't part of the reason also because of the stubby wings (real short compared to body length), which couldn't develop enough lift except at high velocities (much too high at ground level)?
  • I used to be one of those wide-eyed kids who thought NASA could do no wrong. If something like Challenger happened, well, that was pressure from the White House; NASA was bright engineers interested in finding problems and fixing them.

    Since then, I've been enlightened. Probably the biggest kick in the pants came from reading _The Hubble Wars_ and _Dragonfly_, about the space telescope and Shuttle-Mir programs, respectively. I've now realized that the astronauts put up with a hell of a lot of crap for the one to three chances most of them get to fly in space. The politics is unbelievably craven. The programs NASA touts as its future -- like ISS -- are boondoggles that have been disavowed by the scientific community. NASA program justifications become bureaucratese circular logic ("Why are we building a space station? So we can know how to build a space station."), keeping the congressional gravy train going. The space vehicle projects (like X-37) have some utility, and may be better managed than in the past (i.e. a program that successfully demonstrates a handful of technologies is probably superior to one that never gets off the ground due to sheer hubris), but the shuttle system still has years to go -- these puppies are rated for 100 flights, which gives them 80 (avg) remaining X 4 orbiters / 10 (optimistic) flights a year = three more decades.

    VentureStar isn't the answer: VS is corporate welfare for LockMart, a defense contractor down in the dumps due to the end of the Cold War. X-38 is a useful project to provide a Crew Return Vehicle for the ISS; the X-33 and X-34 may succeed in showing off their tech for future projects.

    X-37, though, is definitely just pork, a disappointing project designed to revive technopride or something like that. As Concorde has proven, superfast transport may look good on paper, but the business model may not be able to support it out in the real world.
  • In most previous X-planes, they've been testing primarily one new technology per plane. The X-33 selection process was muddied by politics and now they're re-learning why they used to do that. They bit off more technology than they can easily chew... aerospike engine, large internal fuel tanks, large-scale lifting body, and tests applicable toward a future single-stage to orbit reuasable launcher. None of these things have been done before.

    Expect delays. Unless NASA cuts off the funding, don't lose hope that they'll get X-33 off the ground eventually and learn something from it. But also don't forget there are other reusable launcher developments in the industry...

    And even a few ambitious projects by amateurs (non-government, funded out-of-pocket)...
  • That would be a great view. But they'd go the other direction. :-)

    Most orbital launches are eastbound because you get up to 1000mph for free just from the Earth's rotation. You'd only go a different direction if you need to put a satellite in a specific orbit (i.e. often so it can observe higher latitudes than the launch point is located at.)

  • You're right, but you're wrong...

    It's like this. (BTW - I am an aerospace design engineer, specializing in structures and systems. Structurally, I am certain of my facts; entire systems, GIGO but otherwise I'm pretty sure. Anything else, I'm not a qualified "expert" although my degree says I am. We'll wing it.)

    Since then, I've been enlightened. Probably the biggest kick in the pants came from reading _The Hubble Wars_ and _Dragonfly_, about the space telescope and Shuttle-Mir programs, respectively. I've now realized that the astronauts put up with a hell of a lot of crap for the one to three chances most of them get to fly in space. The politics is unbelievably craven. The programs NASA touts as its future -- like ISS -- are boondoggles that have been disavowed by the scientific community.

    With you so far. :) The problem is that NASA was given the goal of becoming obsolescent, which is something no government agency will ever deliberately do. NASA was supposed to develop the technology to allow anyone access to space quickly, cheaply, and easily, and also to improve Air travel technology in the same way. (That first A, remember?) Well, along about 1975, NASA realized that they weren't needed for the Air stuff anymore - private industry had taken it all over and was doing more of it better than NASA could. Which meant that they had done their jobs, of course, but it also meant that they only had one thing left to keep them funded. Space. And so the games began.

    There's a very interesting phenomenon in space research. There are only a few successful private aerospace companies in the US; Orbital is one, Hughes in their own kinky way, and one or two others. They all have one thing in common:

    NASA is just a customer.

    Whenever a start-up starts allowing NASA to "assist" them, things start to fall apart. Which is odd, because some of them had really good ideas. DC-X. Kistler's K-1. And on, and on, and on.

    Two other odd things, and then I'll shut up. One's even on-topic. :)

    1) Take a good look at the X-37. Then go dig up an old photo of Boeing's proposal on X-33. Hmmm. Shrink the X-33 a bit, and PRESTO! You've got an X-37. Wonder how that happened? Yet NASA tossed Boeing's design for X-33 because it was "technically unfeasable."

    2) I recall hearing about the new NASA project to build solar-power sats in LEO or HEO and beam it down to Earth with microwaves. Hemos - or maybe Commander Taco, I forget - mentioned that it would take until 2015, and be really expensive, and NASA was commissioning a preliminary study to see if it was worth it. It jogged my memory, so I wandered over to my old bookshelf, the engineering one. Yup, right there - Gerard K. O'Neil, a study of production possibilities and techniques and costs. Published by NASA and Princeton, 1978. Conclusion? Too expensive. BUT there's a little graph O'Neill did showing lift costs versus production costs. What it boils down to is that in 1978, you could produce power on the order of 10 lbs. lift cost per kilowatt of power production - meaning that you have to lift ten pounds of material, men, and supplies into orbit to produce the capability for 1 kilowatt of power on the Earth. Which was too expensive. But USING 1978 LIFT TECHNOLOGY, the numbers showed that if you could manage to get it down to 5 lbs. per kilowatt, it became economically possible, and at 4, profitable. Anybody care to guess the production numbers for today, even still using 1978 lift capability?

    We could produce at about 2.3 lbs. per kilowatt.

    Is Commonwealth Edison or any other power company listening?

  • The test that put an aerospike on a blackbird was part ofthe X-33 program, designed to test the airworthiness and performance of the aerospike at multiple-Mach speeds.
  • Now, I may be bringing up a sore spot that's been done to death (wouldn't be the first time), but isn't another part of the outragous costs of space the continued use of conventinonal rocket engines?

    Now, I'm not going to nessacarly suggest any one alternative. I can't. And, of coarse, most of them are still in the infant stages, further comounded by the fact that it seems all the big research goes into improving O2 + Fuel rocketry...

    For example, in The Millennial Project : Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps by Marshall Savage, Mr. Savage proposes a Mass driver, dug down along the slope of a mountain somewhere near the equator, and continuing out something like 15 KM. The launch vehical is placed on a sort of slede in the tunnel of the driver. The system pushes the sleigh up till the top of the mountain, where the vehical continue upwords I think 6 off of gravities pull (against the earth's rotation). Shortly thereafter, a series of Lasers placed around the exit of the mass Driver focus on a chunk of Ice, about a cubic yard in size. As the Lasers heat the ice, it of coarse turns to steam, and that steam provides what remaing power is needed to escape earth's gravity.

    Vola! Out of earth's gravity, and while the overhead might be a burden, as might the energy cost (something that is solved in the book), you're no longer lifting the fuel, and the weight to thrust ratio finaly is high enought to be worth something...

  • Anyone want to guess what number they'll reach before they have a feasible space craft? The X-3.7e3?

    There is a good history of what can happen when you remove government meddling and NASA bureaucracy; Check out the book Sled Driver [thepoint.net] by Brian Shul, about the Skunk Works and the SR-71 Blackbird. The author piloted the SR-71.

  • In my opinion Bifrost is the weakest section in Marshall's plan. His costing for the tunnel is *way* too low. He ignores the cost of an undersea High tension cable (Very high) and I still haven't seen a convincing way of keeping the massdriver tunnel in a vacuum while chucking a launch vehicle out of it at hyper-sonic velocities.

    (Shame 'cos I think Aquarius might work and Asgard is way cool ;-))

    We don't need radical alternative technologies yet. What we need is reliable technologies run at operational levels similar to airlines. Its operations that cost, not fuel.

    (Does anyone have any hard information on the viability of the *skinny* spacesuit? I know they are popular with Pournelle and others but I cannot find any hard research on them)

    BigTom

  • Re:Not again NASA (Score:4)

    by BlaisePascal ( 50039 ) on Thursday July 15, 1999 @09:49PM (#1799870)
    Of the projects you mentioned...

    Some were failures. NASP spent years in development, and was eventually given up as infeasable as designed. Perhaps the same should have happened with the shuttle. But the others...

    DC-X (aka Delta Clipper) was not originally a government project, but rather a privately funded testbed. The DC-X was built as a proof-of-concept, to show that the idea had merit, then the companies involved went looking for money for step two (of three), the DC-Y. Neither the DC-X nor the DC-Y were designed or intended to be orbital -- that would have been the third step.

    When no money was forthcoming, NASA bought it, and tested it to (unintentional) destruction -- a landing strut failed on the planned final landing, causing the vehicle to fall over and burn. It successfully served its function as a testbed and proof-of-concept vehicle.

    The DC-Y was pitched as a potential candidate for the X-33 project, but was turned down in favor of the Lockheed project. X-33 is also supposed to be a testbed, instead of an orbital vehicle. It's goal is not to -be- the Shuttle replacement, but to be a prototype for the RLV.

    Similarly, the X-34 appears to again be a testbed and demonstrator, not an cheap-to-orbit vehicle. The X-37 is also a testbed, not a cheap-to-orbit vehicle.

    I expect that the various technologies pioneered and tested in these various projects will be used in future full-scale project. Those projects will likely have lower development and operating costs because when they are designed and built, we will -know- what will work already, rather than trying to forge lots of new ground.

    In a way, I think that NASA learned from the Shuttle and NASP projects. Instead of one giant, expensive, project like the Shuttle or NASP, which are great if they work, and a big boondoggle if they don't, they are funding many less expensive, demonstration projects, each with modest goals. If they fail, it's less of a problem, and they've spend less money to find out what doesn't work.

  • Hmmm (Score:1)

    by Jordy ( 440 )
    You are right... the aerospike allows better compensation between external pressure and internal combustion gas pressure resulting in better performance at high altitudes.

    Thanks for the info.


    --

  • If something goes wrong at 40k feet in the air, chances are you won't make it either.

    I don't know of too many commercial airlines which package parachutes & o2 tanks for each passenger on their plane for high altitude jumping.

    The same goes for low flying aircraft where parachutes are not useful. Being a chopper at 100 ft, you are done for if something goes wrong.

    --
  • In high mach planes, one of the main problems is keeping the tip of the aircraft from melting. One of the "technologies that will be tested" is bleeding liquid hydrogen continuously through the leading panels (nose, wings, tail) to keep them cool. So they have a mechanism to take something that is kicking 70 Kelvin (-200 C), pump it through an area of the plane that is reaching 600 - 700 degrees kelvin (500 C)to cool it down and then take that now heated hydrogen and pump it into the SCRAM jet for ignition. In Aerospace design class, my prof was always very skeptical of this technology - "too many ways to blow you up" was they way he put it. Carbon carbon materials and crazy smart ceramics must have come a long way in the last 5 years...

    Water Spider
    Rome didn't conquer the known world by having meetings, they did it by killing all that opposed them.
  • Nah... This is NASA we're talking about here.

    They'll spend 2 billion on it and then mothball everything.

  • What was the name of that company awhile back that for 35 grand would put you into space by December of 2001 or your money back?
  • Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Mach 25 was orbital velocity. Sounds good enough to me.

    Of course, I'll be surprised if this project is successful and not just another "interesting technology testbed" that runs over budget and way over schedule... but that's just me. Someone already posted links to Kistler and Rotary in another comment; take a look there if you're interested in private gambles toward the goal of cheap spaceflight.
  • No, the lunar module was not based on the 6502. Maybe your acquaintance had source code to the 1970's Lunar Lander games.

    • The 6502 [berkeley.edu] appeared in 1975.
    • Apollo [nasa.gov] was designed in the 1960's and the last mission was in 1972.
    You do the math.
  • Bullshit.

    I worked on the periphery of the X-33 project for 2.5 years. Adjusting for inflation, they threw away more money than Apollo, made lots of promises (both Lockheed and NASA) and ignored reality.

    Fact 1:
    The X-33 still hasn't flown. Why not? It is not capable of flight, because it doesn't have enough thrust, it's still 5000 lbs. (roughly 2 tonnes, for the metrically inclined) overweight.That's empty weight, by the way. No payload.

    Fact 2:
    Building and operating VentureStars, even if they ever do manage to get one off the ground, will be expensive as hell. I've seen studies - conveniently shuffled off, of course - that prove non-reuseable Big Dumb Rockets using modern engine technology and perhaps just using a reusably engine pob would be 3 to 4 times cheaper than any X-33 derivative.

    Fact 3:

    NASA ate the fucking dream. We gave NASA our dreams of spaceflight, and they turned it into a dog-and-pony show. It started when they shitcanned fully-operational man-rated Saturn V rockets and turned them into lawn ornaments, continued through a "reuseable" shuttle that can't leave LEO, flys like a brick, and costs more per mission than a Saturn V. And finally, in choosing your precious VentureStar, they ignored the advice of their own engineers, selected the Lockheed proposal, and ignored an already-operating SSTO in the form of the Delta Clipper. Why? Nobody knows. Who in their right mind would select a paper-only program with no actual hardware and a lot of evidence that the design was crap over a flying prototype? Only NASA...

    So why am I no longer working in the Space Program? Because I'm tired of it. NASA killed any chance of ordinary people flying into space, which is why I wanted to be an aerospace engineer in the first place. So if NASA asked me back tomorrow, I'd say no - I'd rather be a whore. It may be immoral and somewhat dirty - but so's working for NASA, and at least I've met some honest whores...

  • I think PanAm offered future space flight reservations around the time "2001:A Space Odyssey" appeared. Did they offer your money back?
  • I put my son in the cockpit of the Blackbird at the museum next to Minneapolis-St. Paul airport last Sunday. The museum volunteer next to the aircraft said several thousand SAMs have been fired at these aircraft. Only one SAM hit, and the aircraft landed at its base with part of the missile stuck through a wing (obviously not an entire SAM, as that's like a telephone pole and a Blackbird is not a large aircraft).

    I wonder how powerful a SAM explosion is when compared to the forces of the airflow over one of these birds.

  • Actually the X- designation really has nothing to do with being a space plane but rather designates that the aircraft is expiremental. Then again I could be completely wrong.

  • While the X-37 is interesting, what I like is the X-33, which is the experimental prototype for testing technology for the VentureStar [venturestar.com].

    The VentureStar virtually eliminates those bulky O2 tanks by using O2 in our atmosphere most of the ride up. It weighs a little more than half of what the current shuttles weigh and can lift roughly 80% of what current shuttles can lift.

    The great thing about it is it's single stage which means a whole lot of money is saved.

    Commercial space travel would seriously be a great thing to see in my lifetime.

    --
  • I've always wanted to cruise the asteroid belt, live on the moon, etc. Unfortunately, with the rate at which things are developing, I had better hope that the immortality pill becomes available first. It seems like that investment in space is being done mostly by governments, but governments have to spend a lot of their money and effort in critical areas such as maintaining vast databases on their subjects and buying $400 toilet seats, plus there are a bunch of people in government who don't like space travel anyway, so I wonder if we shouldn't use some other means to get off the home world. Since it costs a lot of money, big business might be able to do it, but then again big business is pretty evil. So I wonder if it's feasible for millions of geeks to get together, pool their stock options and considerable talents, and do the damn thing them/ourselves. Could there possibly be a large yet decentralized space program? I'm sure it would have to be decentralized given the tendency towards anarchism in Geekdom.
  • It looks like I'll be able to get into space eventually. At the rate things were going I thought I'd be well into heart attack age before cheap space travel came about. Happy, happy, Happy! Joy, joy, joy!
  • Nope, you're right..
    Aside from just knowing you're right, the article agrees with you saying:

    Airplanes and rockets that get the X-designation are experimental, high-speed vehicles...
  • If proportion is right... reminds me of a certain aircraft of Dr.Evil...



  • Has anyone else been watching the X33? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've been following the web cams for over a year, and the progress appears downright glacial. While I've heard that they're going to mate the aerospike engine to the rest of the airframe at the pad in order to make up schedule, the airframe looks less than half done.

    It's supposed to fly this summer, but I don't see how that can happen. According to the build-up pictures they've published, construction is supposed to move from the back forward. What they have in the hanger appears to have begun from the O2 tank, and not moved far from there. The nose looks pretty complete, but the H2 tanks are not in place, and none of the body around them appears to be. Well, maybe the bottom, but it's hard to tell. About two weeks ago they put in some exterior framework that may be used to build the top. But still no H2 tanks.

    Anyone know what's going on with the X33?
  • Do you actually have any QNX expierence?

    This is the kind of stuff its meant for- its an OS that delievers deterministic maxamum latencies..
    Thats qhy QNX is a real-time OS, and linux isn't.
    Whats this mean..
    Well, a real-time OS isn't normally as efficient at processing mid-large level stuff
    (quiz: whats the best system for large large jobs? Batch processing.. its the most efficient.. but not to interactive...), however it gives you gaurentees that when you make a syscall, etc, it WILL happen in a certain amount of time.

    If I'm making machinery go, and this machinery is responsible for something important, I'm sure as heck gonna make sure I use a real-time OS.

    Linux is cool, yes.. been running it for a long long time, but RTlinux isn't nearly as mature as QNX...

    I must say, from my experience programming on, and for QNX: its nice.

  • X37 vs X11 (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So does the X37 server support antialiased fonts finally?
  • I still want to know why we don't boost up the main tanks from each shuttle mission, and put them in a parking orbit...

    I can think of many uses for such things, even if they're not airtight/spaceworthy...

    And I'm glad that Nasa is considering more replacements for the Shuttle.

    the Shuttle is cool and all, but its not designed NEARLY as well as it should have been imho. Too expensive for what it does!

    On that note, Go NASA!!
    (but get some publicity this time, its the key to the Moneys that the politicians have been sucking from ya!)
  • you're too high to bail. Or breath, or otherwise escape. Parachutes are useless. Flotation cushions become irrelevant. Getting stuck in orbit could be a lot worse than being stuck on a runway. When you technicolor yawn, it wouldn't go in the sack and would be real hard to clean up. They probably wouldn't have a stewardess pushing a little drink cart down the middle, as turbulence at Mach 25 would make that difficult to handle.

    If you want commercial space travel, go to Disneyland.

  • The X37 gets launched into orbit by something else, it doesn't get there on its own. From the Marshall fact sheet [nasa.gov], it's a testbed for "the orbital and reentry phases of flight". It's not nearly as cool as the article lead made it sound. OTOH, the X38 "Space Lifeboat" has a certain sort of appeal... "We're hit! Order the crew to the escape pods!"
  • If you look out of the right windows you'll see Boston, I mean Rhode Island, I mean Long Island, I mean New York, no, Atlantic City, oh screw it.

    Boy would commercial spaceflight be fun.

  • Re:The path to commercial space travel (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You make a good point about the politicians pulling money...

    NASA's Nexe Fundraiser:

    S K Y W R I T I N G

    "VOTE GORE", of course the letters would be so big your whole state could only see a portion of the message.

  • Really doesn't apply to anything because Skunk Works and the BlackBird were for the most part *military* spy projects with their own little fiefdom. Think about it.
  • The Amiga wasn't "invented" until 1986, I seriously doubt the SR71 was retrofitted with this technology :)

  • I have heard RTLinux response time was around 12ms and QNX's response time was aroun 1ms...so there still is room for improvement but this is already a great jod done. Rremember, Linux was designed for the 386 and wasn't even planned to be ported on other processors at first. Now linux is ported on many architecture and work well on many situations.
    I think this is a compliment that Microsoft used such a big server for the Mindcraft test, they acknowledged that Linux may soon be able to compete here.
  • Projects like the X prize will do more for space travel than NASA.

    http://www.xprize.org/
  • Yeah, the test flights have been pushed back to next year. They hope to start flying in June 2000. The X-33 is strictly a sub-orbital test vehical. If all goes well the Venture Star would go operational in 2005
  • While the total amount of money spent on sport is certainly of the magnitude nned to speed up space research must of this business. It's a commercial enerprise just like T.V. or any other entertainment business.

    I doubt the amount spent by Goverment on sport would help much with space reasearch.

    Disclaimer: I could be wrong. I live in the UK, maybe the American goverment spends much more on sport funding than we do.
  • A excellent book which covers the design and implementation of the SR-71 is "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich. He ran the Skunk Works for about 20 years after Kelly Johnson and designed the F117-A and worked extensively on the SR-71, D-21 and U-2 projects.

    The most interesting thing about the SR-71 project is that it was largely a exercise in theromodynamics. The biggest problems were keeping the plane from melting due to air friction and keeping the pilot from being roasted alive from all that heat!
  • Wow...that's really too bad to hear such a pessimistic view from someone close to the industry. I always get excited about the thought of the average joe getting to fly through space some day...and even more excited to think that it would occur in my lifetime. I can't say that if find your testimony suprising, though, given all the crap i've heard about nasa.

    I'll keep dreaming, though. Maybe I'll find it easier than you, having not been kicked so hard by nasa.
  • A lot of embedded designs are based on the 6502. That does not make them Commodore 64's. The Apple II is based on the 6502. In fact, the 6502 has been rendered in a hardware description language so that you can embed a 6502 processor right into an FPGA if you like. The reason that this is possible (so that an engineer can just specify to plug in the Intellectual Property code for the 6502, in effect embedding one into a big custom chip) is that the 6502 is such a simple processor to implement in this fashion.

    Calling this a Commodore 64 and claiming that this means the Space Shuttle has a C-64 in it is like saying that because there's a crankshaft in your lawn mower and also in a Porche engine, that your lawn mower runs on a Porche engine.
  • If the common man flies in space in my lifetime, I can bet that it wont be because of NASA. NASA was once the cream of the crop for aerospace engineers. However, these days very few NASA centers are capable of producing good, cheap hardware. The shift has moved into the commercial sector. Until a business man comes up with a profitable venture for putting the common man in space, it will remain a dream. There are several companies and people who are trying to make a case, but most come up short. Roton, which has gotten a lot of press lately just scrapped the one good piece of technology they were developing for a derivative of a NASA developed engine that won't get them to where they want to go (IMHO).
  • Oh sure, I know. That's one of the safety features gained by launching from the Cape. I was thinking of applying this to commercial air travel, which is not always in a sensible direction.
  • I don't believe X33 will ever fly... they're having major problems with the O2 tanks and aerospike engine. The X34 holds much more promise for developing and testing new technology... of course I'm biased :)
  • Just to clarify... X34 is not over budget. It's a firm fixed price contract, so NASA can't spend more than it allocated on it. Any cost over run would be sucked up by the prime contractor.

    The reason that private SSTO won't happen, is that SSTO won't happen. The technolgy sipmly does not exist at this time to create a feasable SSTO vehicle. More likely, a TSTO (Two Stage to Orbit) reusable vehicle will emerge first. Kistler started down this track, but is having major financial problems. They recently magaged to get Northrup Grumman to bail them out about $30mil worth, but at a time when NGC has decided that it wants out of the space busniess (new business strategy for them apparently) Don't see how this can help them out. Also, there are several technical problems with Kistler's design that they haven't addressed yet (no need to go into them here). Finally, Roton, which started out as a design whacky enough that it just might have worked, has abandoned all of it's technical inovation and settled on a design thats basically DC-X all over again with rotor blades attached. DC-X was a good design, but never meant to go to orbit... my 2cents (more like $2...)
  • The original shuttle concept was ALOT slimmer than it exists today. It originally wasn't going to do many of the tasks it does now. The designers kept "adding" to its duty list, so that it now has to have an ET and SRB's to get all of the extra equipment up. The X37 really isn't going to replace the current shuttle, but it looks cool. :)
  • As mentioned, the debris hazard is one reason. The other is that the tanks aren't very useful by themselves; since nearly every shuttle orbit is to a different altitude or inclination (let alone that being in the same inclination can mean orbits as much as 90 degrees perpendicular!), there's no easy way to collect a bunch of them in one place. (Perhaps if the shuttle-derived orbital transfer vehicle had been approved...) Then came Challenger, and the end of commercial space launches, and the approval of ISS. Why spend money on a "cheap" space station, if you're trying to get approval for a space station costing $billions? Bad politics. Finally, ISS flights -- the majority of future scheduled flights now -- will utilize the maximum capability of the shuttle system; the extra effort to boost the tanks isn't worth the safety risk.
  • The problem isnt NASA. It's what the government does To NASA. NASA comes up with a good idea, they find a contractor to build it, the contractor agrees to a reasonable sum, they start construction.. in comes the USAF wanting them to test something they already know is crap, but which they want to know the exact crapiness of. The final straw in the x-33 project was when the USAF had them slap some shoddy russian-design aluminum fuel tanks on it to see what the working parameters were so they'ed know what the russians could do. Or NASA is forced to comply with stupid government regulations, like the prices they're forced to pay. Shuttles could be built for probably a 10th what they are now if it werent for them having to go by government parts procurement procedures requiring them to buy from government suppliers, makers of the $500 hammer. If NASA werent given such a raw deal they could have done well.. but almost since the beginning the USAF has been against NASA on principle and trying to drive it into the ground. Make NASA a government funded independent organization and we'll see some progress.. giving it all to the private sector and we'll get shuttles just barely capable of spaceflight that exist for the sole purpose of taking rich businessmen on a thrill ride.
    Dreamweaver
  • The big thing here is the reusable rockets. Our current rocket technology is decades old and it's been too expensive so far to make it better. Shuttle was designed as a military vehicle. Enormous redundency, low angle-of-attack on reentry to serve as a fighting vessel, and a big transport bay for modular loads. Usable for science, yes. Usable for military purposes, yes. Good for science? Not really. It's hideously inefficient for what it's used for. We're not ready to move past rocketry yet, but we really do need a boost as to what rockets we use.
    Dreamweaver
  • I believe that you meant to say the SR-71 (aka. blackburd) and well, that was not a cargo plane and if I remember correctly it did somewhere between Mach3 and Mach5.

    The X-15 was pushing it to break mach 1, and was incapable of taking off by itself - wasn't it just a bigass engine on a cockpit??

    I don't follow your logic.

  • Dork (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It does not use the O2 from the atmosphere on the way up. It's aerospike engines use the atmosphere to gain better rocket effeciency over regular bell shaped rocket because the outside air pressure contains the rocket plume instead of a bell nozzle. there's still a large o2 tank in it. check out the schematics... www.venturestar.com [venturestar.com]

  • Re:The path to commercial space travel (Score:3)

    by Tom Rothamel ( 16 ) on Thursday July 15, 1999 @08:19PM (#1799942) Homepage
    I still want to know why we don't boost up the main tanks from each shuttle mission, and put them in a parking orbit.

    The biggest reason is because there's no real need to do so. NASA doesn't want to spend the time needed to strip the insulation off the tank safely, and if noone else does it, it will flake off, providing a massive debris hazard.

    the Shuttle is cool and all, but its not designed NEARLY as well as it should have been imho. Too expensive for what it does!

    The shuttle design process was full of tradeoffs... the decision to go with solid boosters a prime one. Still, it represents the triumph of 1970s technology.

    As for publicity... there's a reason why they bumped up the next mission so it launches on the 20th. (Most shuttle missions launch on Thursday, BTW... so they can do a 3 day countdown w/o overtime. This one's going up on a Tuesday, and the 30th anniversary of something important...)

  • aka blackbird, possible typing mistake? While the x-15 was incapable of self powered takeoff, it was capable of much faster speeds than mach 1. check out this [af.mil]. the unofficial speed is over 4500 mph. If my math works like it used to do in high school-- mach 1 is the speed of sound at sea level. .2 mps * 60 sec * 60 min = 720 mph, then this gives the x-15 around mach 6.25 if the speed of sound remained constant up to the height which I do not think it does, but I would think that it wouldn't decrease by a factor of 6.25.
  • At least thats what it says at the Apollo 204 pad.
  • It's our society in general. When athletics are more important than science, progress suffers. We have a great obsession with watching various sports in stadiums and colliseums, the modern equivalent of gladiators, while we could be spending it in more productive manner. Near the end of the Roman Empire, around 200 days of the year in Rome were devoted to the games at the colliseum. It gives something to think about. Athletics contributes little to society.

    If we spent 1/2 of what we spend on sports, we might have a chance of getting somewhere in space.

    What really makes me sick is when some major league baseball/football/hockey team owner decides he needs a new stadium, threatens to move the team to another city, and gets the politicans to open up the public purse strings up.

    This is an endemic problem in North America. I recall that at the time of the last US Senate election, there was a referendum in some US city/state on whether or not to use public money to build a stadium for a pro sports team.

    Five years ago, here in Calgary, AB, Canada, federal money intended for Roads, utilities, hospitals, etc. was spent on upgrading the hockey arena for the NHL team, while our roads were in the worst of shape, and we had flooding problems in several locations in the city for 3 years straight.

  • FYI, there has been a disturbing trend in the US lately, in which professional team owners demand large amounts of money from local (city and state) governments to build new stadiums and then move their teams if the governments refuse. Sometimes the governments simply build entire stadiums at the cost of 100's of millions of dollars, while other times they give large, debt free loans to the owners to build the stadiums themselves (amounting to 10's of millions of dollars). In either case, substantial amounts of money are involved, even though the national government is rarely involved.

  • Think of it as NASCAR for humans. Many of our recent advances in medicine have come from putting humans back together after we take them apart on the field.

    That being said, I'm more in favor of space research.
  • "Prosser said the technologies developed and demonstrated on X-37 would eventually make routine, safe, low-cost access to space possible with high reliability, fast turnaround and minimal operational crews."


    Oh yeah, that was supposed to be the shuttle. NASA's blowing smoke again.


  • Your translation is blatantly wrong.
    Ad Astra Per Aspera is Latin for "To the stars through hopes"
  • Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:

    Yes, the X-15 had a lot of promise. The main problem in those days was fairly simple - they didn't have the materials to make an aerodynamic vehicle that wouldn't burn up.

    That was why the mercury/gemini/appollo capsules used to come down on their back-sides.

    The shuttle heat-shield tiles were supposed to solve this problem. They didn't. During re-fireing, they have a nasty tendency to warp. The result of this is that they have to re-make a lot of them. This is one of the reasons why the shuttle is so damned expensive.
  • Well, duh...Energy weapons. :)
  • The SR-71 was a spy plane, and couldn't go anywhere near space. The X-15 was a rocket plane, and could go mach 6.7, which, while not orbital speed, isn't too shabby. It made some suborbital runs in which the pilots were awarded astronaut wings for reaching the (IIRC, 50 mile high) edge of space.

    You may be confusing the X-15 with the X-1, which was the first plane to break the sound barrier. Both were dropped from a converted bomber, probably because the rockets would be none to efficient on takeoff.

  • The XR-71 became the SR-71. The SR-71 can be called back to service at any time. It was used in the persian gulf. It is a ramjet powered aircraft capable of approximately Mach 5 (to start it on the ground they have to attach turbojet engines to it to get the air moving). Ramjets require oxygen from the atmosphere.



  • I think the author was possibly kidding, I doupt he could possibly be serious when he calls Mach 25 "mere". I mean geez sure, my sports car can go close to that speed, but I still don't consider that slow. (note: I have no sports car unless you call a tercel a car.)

  • Re:sr-71 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually I don't think the SR-71 could go faster than Mach 3.2 (but I should check somewhere). A funny thing about that plane is that russians managed to hit it only once, using a laser-beam and making all the onboard systems crash (perhaps it was already running on NT ;-) ). However, the plane returned safely back home. You can see an sr-71 at the aviation museum on the Hudson River.
  • Linux Base, Moon ---

    Today in Linux Base we have Alan Cox issuing yet another 103 of his famous *AC series of patches.

    Linus Torvalds is not amused, because it is a pain in the ass to recall the million of spacecrafts because of bugs.

    On the other hand, on NT Base, crashes happen left and right, and no one wants to insure any crafts flying on NT no more.

    When asked about the insurance crisis, Mr. Gates shrugs, and Peter Norton crosses his hands.
  • You are indeed correct about the top speed (at least from what the documentaries say). The SR-71 program was scrapped during the last budget by Clinton due to certain constraints (the program cost 24 million a year...quite affordable for the kind of planes but satellites have long since taken the place of these wonderful aircraft).

    Just as a useless information tidbit wrt the OS, since the SR-71 has been around for so long, and that the budget has been so horribly small, they actually still operate off of some variation of Amiga machines. :)
  • The real one wouldn't be.
    The X-37 test vehical would be carried up because its not large enough to hold the fuel and its not a finished rocket for real use.

    It is a test vehicel, and experimental one.
    They want to carry it up and see if their computers, automation, etc stuff work

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