Spaceship two reaches new hight!
 

Today, Spaceship two reaches new height!

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/lift...ight-2D11767010

Still not as high as the SR-71's sustained service ceiling.



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Yawn... wake me when they get to *orbit*...

Seriously the "X-Prize" was supposed to "usher in a whole new era in space" via "space tourism" and all that... build it and they will come, and all that... the floodgates will open, all that jazz...

It's been TEN FREAKIN' YEARS since SpaceShip 1 won the X-Prize, (well, come October 4) and these things STILL aren't carrying paying customers into "space" (for however briefly, and separating them from a couple hundred grand in the process).

So much for "commercial space tourism" speeding up the access to space...

Later! OL JR :)

I'm not bashing them, as I very much want them to succeed, but...a Skyhook-type plastic film *balloon* could carry a pressurized capsule higher than that, linger at its ceiling, and even enable fantastic skydives, as Felix Baumgartner demonstrated.

As with all rocket projects, there was drama associated with one person's ego. If the technical were to trump the personal and political, SS1 would have flown 3 years earlier, on a solid. The hybrid for SS2 would have been made by either eAc or USR or perhaps both, and there would have been over 200 flights by now.

But the drama and ego did have superiority.

Jerry

Absolutely. SS2 is "flying" to a lower altitude than an air breathing jet aircraft could sustain over a whole continent, and the only advantage over the balloon is that you can do a Vomit Comet parabola to feel weightlees at about 35k ft higher altitude than G Force 1's 727.

Don't forget the money! SS2 seat will cost you, what, $200 G's??

How much is a seat on the Vomit Comet??

The whole idea is pretty ******* IMHO...

I've said all along that as soon as the first group of bazillionaires ends up at the bottom of a smoking crater in the Mojave, that'll the be the end of it... most of them will think it through and decide it's much better to be a rich LIVE bazillionaire than a dead one with "astronaut wings" and will plan their next vacation somewhere with nude beaches filled with gorgeous women or something...

Most important thing is, DON'T FORGET THE MONEY!!!! We cannot forget the money...

Later! OL JR :)

I increasingly believe that we took a wrong turn in the late 1950s, when political and prestige considerations got us on the faster, but economically less viable, "ballistic missile track" to space. Up until then, the X-planes (and not just the rocket-powered ones) were steadily moving toward making reusable winged spaceships practical. In his 1960 book about the X-15 and the preceding X-planes (Ninety Seconds to Space), Jules Bergman wrote that the X-15's reusable XLR-99 rocket engine "could become a basic tool of the space age."

All of the hardware used in the rocket-powered X-1 series, the two X-2 aircraft, and the three X-15s was totally reusable. Between them, the three X-15s flew 199 times, and they had a peak altitude capability of 142 miles, although their pilots never ventured higher than 67 miles. Arthur C. Clarke also wrote that had that path of research been continued, space flight would have resulted from it. The Edwards AFB test pilots themselves--civilian as well as military--also commented at the time (in Lloyd Mallan's 1956 book Secrets of Space Flight, for example) that within ten years, they expected to be flying suborbital and orbital spaceplanes that would be directly descended from the then-current X-planes. Also:

We are just now--with XCOR Aerospace's rocketplanes and the rocket airplane racing events that people such as Dick Rutan are involved in--getting back to the paradigm of reusable, incrementally-improved vehicles whose testing enables more advanced, higher-performance successors to be built and flown with confidence. Expendable vehicles are not about to go away (nor should they), but only reusable vehicles--even if they are smaller than our one attempt at such an orbital spacecraft--will ever make space travel a routine occurrence. "Single-Stage-To-Tether" rotating tether/hypersonic aircraft systems (see: http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/stud...rt/391Grant.pdf ) could make possible orbital launches using quite small rocket- or jet-powered winged suborbital vehicles in concert with rotating momentum-exchange tethers.

Except. All the current projects you discuss, tossed all the information and results from the prior programs out the window as "old".

Simply mass-producing Saturn V rockets again would assure our access to space for decades to come. At least 5 engine vendors I know of have made "better" engines which are scalable to the task.

Instead we are going down the path of SLS and X47C. It's all about existing vendors.

When I went to DARPA this year for some spaceplane solicitation they are doing, I made a proposal, but mainly complained about their method of selection. They pick 4 candidates, down-select to one, and fund it in two additional phases.

I thought they should do 4 mains and 16 sub-contractor fundings, down-select to 2 and 4. Fund those the same way.

That way you get more final candidates for minimal extra cost, but you get more chance of an outsized discovery.

I think their entire project budget is about $100m. I bet a few other benefactors could fund that. Heck, just the Paypal guy's investment in Space-X was about $500m.

Jerry

Absolutely true... RAC 2 proved that on an incremental cost standpoint, cost per flight, recurring cost, whatever you want to call it, that the "reborn Saturn V" type vehicles handed SLS it's @$$ for a hat... MUCH cheaper and more efficient to operate.

BUT, it didn't check the "political boxes" IE support the current vendors, mostly ATK's SRB's... so we're stuck with an inefficient and breathtakingly expensive "shuttle derived" SLS...

As to blackshire's assertions that we 'went wrong' in the 60's going with "ICBM's to space" instead of super-duper-uber X-planes", well, I don't really buy that... NASA has had no shortage of ideas for SSTO's and "fly to space and back"... Anybody remember the National Aero Space Plane that Reagan ordered NASA to develop back in the 80's?? Reagan called it the "Orient Express to space" and talked about New York to Tokyo flights in less than two hours, and all that jazz... nothing came of it... some research and a fistful of studies were done, it was found to be too hard (read too expensive) and the whole thing was dropped. Then there was the X-33/Venturestar a decade or so later, again, total non-starter. Right about that same time was Delta Clipper (which NASA "inherited" from some Star Wars work when that program wound down-- DC was seen as a low cost rapid turnaround reusable SSTO for orbiting huge numbers of payloads on which Star Wars would depend... Of course NASA had their own "pet project" in X-33 that Huntsville wanted to do, so DC suffered from "not invented here" syndrome and work proceeded at a snail's pace until the vehicle toppled over and exploded after one of its landing legs failed to deploy... )

NONE of these plans came to fruition... surely if there were a "better mousetrap" there for the picking someone would have done it by now... We could expand the discussion to similar projects that were canceled overseas like HOTOL and the present crop of such vehicles like Skylon, which have yet to be proven feasible and capable of accomplishing what they're designed to do, let alone being economical and reliable.

No, the REAL mistake that was made was that we proceeded in huge leaps instead of in a more progressive, evolved, step-by-step constant improvement type of program. Mercury Redstone, Mercury Atlas, and Gemini-Titan were all rather "ad-hoc" vehicles to accomplish a limited and given mission, which they did very well, but there wasn't much room for improvement or evolving them into something else (though this is less true with Gemini-- there were a lot of interesting plans for Gemini, enlarged "Big Geminis" and even "lunar Gemini" plans, none of which went anywhere... Gemini was better suited from a cost standpoint for space station operations than Apollo was, but the lack of a forward docking mechanism and scaling difficulties with the design were major challenges that would have to have been overcome.

At any rate, the Saturns were VERY adaptable designs and all the expensive work had been done-- building the CAPABILITY to make more-- the design work, the construction tooling and knowhow... that was the expensive bit. The actual production and vehicles themselves were actually much cheaper than shuttle. Unfortunately, we canceled them as soon as the first run was off the line... It'd be about like designing a new super-sportscar to compete with the Corvette, something with totally new engine, transmission, chassis, body, and electronic systems, building factories and tooling up and training personnel to construct all those components, desiging and building all those new components, doing all the testing and verification work, then building an all new factory and hiring and training people to assemble the vehicles, then shutting down production after the first 15 cars roll off the line, firing everybody, and trashing the tooling and converting the plants to produce fertilizer spreaders... OF COURSE those cars would cost *millions* each, with all that underutilized research and design and development work, and personnel training and all that... THAT is what happened to the Saturns, and that's what's such a crying shame.

Bill Anders, who flew on Apollo 8 then left NASA awhile later, was on one of the review boards vetting the feasibility and program options and recommendations for the shuttle. His panel found that the program that made the most sense was an INCREMENTAL program to develop a reusable spaceplane lofted by a conventional (probably existing) rocket and then applying the "lessons learned" from that program towards a fully-reusable system. IOW, something more along the lines of "Dyna Soar" than the space shuttle. He presented his panel's findings to the NASA people and Nixon's people, and went on about his business... he got a call about the program options and fielded some questions... basically it boiled down to a political decision-- while the smaller incremental shuttle made a lot more sense-- it allowed for testing paradigms and stuff without a huge investment of a single giant leap program that would cost billions, and if it were predicated on the wrong assumptions (as shuttle was) would have no chance of succeeding as planned, it "didn't check the political boxes" and so Nixon decided to go with "the big full-on shuttle" to give his California-based aerospace something big to do as political payback... and of course we ended up with the compromised shuttle we were stuck with for 30 years...

There was no shortage of ideas to improve shuttle, or evolve it into a new vehicle, or a safer or more flexible vehicle, but NONE of them saw the light of day-- NASA's just not interested in "evolving" their vehicles into something better-- they want to use them as long as possible and then toss it for "something new". There was no shortage of plans to modify the Saturns for greater flexibility and cost savings, but none of those saw the light of day either-- they canceled Saturn for "something new"... Now we really have the worst of both worlds-- SLS is "something new" but built upon the most expensive parts of the shuttle program-- the SSME's and SRB's, instead of just going with something new that would at least make sense for the long haul.

As for X-37B, I dunno... I think if you could get that thing modified to carry a crew, and team it up with a Falcon 9 v1.1 with a reusable first stage (assuming Elon cracks that nut and it works and makes fiscal sense, and perhaps even managed second stage recovery, though I think that's a LONG way off yet, virtually off the radar screen IMHO) then you'd have something to get REALLY excited about! I guess Dreamchaser on a reusable Falcon 9 (even if you toss the second stage for a decade or so til you work the kinks out of recovering and reusing them) would do something pretty similar...

Shuttle was predicated on the idea of launch costs "too cheap to worry about" with the assumption that would somehow trigger an ENORMOUS increase in demand for launches, which would sustain the kinds of flight rates that pushed launch costs down to dirt cheap prices... This was a faulty paradigm that never had a chance of panning out... It'd be about like the price of milk going to a buck a gallon... sure, right after it happened, a lot of folks would "buy extra" and use more milk, BUT, that sort of thing doesn't last... and it's faulty thinking to assume that if you cut the cost to 50 cents a gallon that people will buy TWICE AS MUCH... they won't... In the same way, reusability schemes that rely on tens of thousands of tons of stuff being launched per year, and high flight rates in the weekly or less regime, are simply unrealistic... sure there would be SOME more payloads that would get built if it only cost say $10,000 bucks to launch it into orbit rather than $20 million, but it wouldn't be THOUSANDS OF TIMES the amount of current payload required to "make up the difference in volume"...

Later! OL JR :)