Well, that’s the problem. Whoever does it will be starting from the same point, technologically, that they would have without Rutan’s project, but without the X Prize as an incentive. It isn’t a matter of “infinite scaleability” either, Sam.
It will do that, yes - but the funding won’t be from “venture capitalists”, as has been suggested. The ROI, payback date, risk, etc. that govern their investments won’t be there. Somebody with the wealth of Paul Allen who can afford it as a hobby can do it, as has been shown here, but there aren’t too many of them (xtisme, I like your idea there).
No, it was never intended as anything but a low-earth-orbit delivery vehicle, which it is. There was and is no development program using it as a stepping stone.
Broomstick, you’re right about Raytheon; they had approached Rutan about designing the Beech Starship for them as a way of transitioning from aluminum to composites, and that relationship turned into a purchase by Raytheon. When the Starship program failed (so totally that they’re buying them all back and destroying them), they did him the courtesy of allowing him to buy his company back.
The big boys do have the equipment, or can get it easily. The Scaled crew seems to prefer to keep their operation small, fast, unbureaucratic, and focused on development rather than production. Rutan may well have “Tier 2” under way, and I hope he does, but he won’t want the distractions caused by public knowledge until test flight #1 - that’s how he works.
tuckerfan, that CNC machine is most likely for creating airplane-sized molds for composite layups. Cutting them all at once eliminates seams and dimensional variations from putting multiple mold pieces together. Sure is impressive, I gotta agree.
Actually, there is a picture of the flight on the Scaled site. Seems that the ship carries just the right amount of energy to go straight up 100km, nothing more.
Whatever horizontal distance it can cover it would have to do by gliding. What’s the glide ratio of this thing? I speculate it could glide less than 200km down from 80,000ft.
My question to some of the more technically minded posters here:
How much more energy would be needed to travel more horizontal distance during a suborbital flight? Imagine they could burn that rocket for 100 seconds instead of 80 seconds. Or 120. Or 180. Could they go coast-to-coast? Transatlantic? London-Melbourne in 2 hours?
This would seem at least as interesting a market as just tourist flights.
I’ve been secretly rooting for these guys. Can’t wait to hop on a Spacecab. Even if just for a London-Melbourne vacation, I mean, business trip in 2 hours…
But it seems they only have designs on paper so far.
First up, SS1 has thrusters, so no, it’s not just a guided missle. There is some control.
Second, the free fall isn’t necessarially terrifying. I mean, maybe to someone plonked into that situation it would be, but if you know and understand what’s happening in a situation, and you have some control, “terrifying” might become “exhilerating”. (This is basically the basis of such things as skydiving)
Well, first you calculate the forces involved, then design a structure that can withstand those forces plus an acceptable safety margin. Then you build a prototype and test the heck out of it (maybe even test some components to destruction). Repeat the proceeding steps as often as necessary to achieve satisfaction. Then you refine the design, and build the final form. Then do a lot of test-flying.
Let’s see… they spent what, 20,000,000 on this? Divided by 1000 and that’s 20,000 per unit… I dunno, what with modern codes and local requirements could you build 1000 housing units in Seattle? Interesting question…
62 miles is not the limit of this design - in fact, this flight was inteded to go higher but didn’t due to problem with the control system. Even from the first, they didn’t fuel the rocket for maximum burn. So we haven’t seen the limit of this particular system.
Nor do I know how far you “scale up” this system. For all I know, it might be enough to reach low orbit with some tweaks.
Back in 1910 they were saying the same sort of things about airplanes and those crazy boys from Ohio.
People spend millions on private planes and boats, for their amusement. What’s the ROI on those? Not all decisions regarding money are made as you suggest.
Yeah, but it was designed by committee to be all things to all customers and thus satisfies none. It is not entirely reusable (those booster rockets, you know?). It’s overbuilt for the simple application of transporting people to and from orbit - why haul a huge payload bay when you don’t need it? The Russian system of rockets for people and unmanned rockets for payloads has its flaws, too, but currently it’s the only game in town because with the shuttle we put all our eggs in one basket and now the basket has a hole in it.
Not that the shuttle was a total waste of time, effort, and resources - but it’s time to move on.
Bah. Private enterprise will do what will bring financial return on an investment. If the return in dollars is unfavorable compared to other investments (in terms of amount of return, certainty of return, and time of return) then it just isn’t going to happen. Only governments can afford to make investments that may not pay off for a generation, if at all.
So a bunch of guys basically updated the X-15 program to put a person to the very threshold of space and return. Private enterprise has matched what NASA did over 40 years ago. Maybe their next step will be put a man in orbit. Then maybe two men in orbit. Been there, done that 40 years ago.
Yeah, tiny numbers of men did that. Do you know how many more would pay vast sums to repeat the same? Heck, first flight was achieved more than 100 years ago, and there’s still a thriving industry for private flight; thousands do it for fun. The fact that a government-built plane holds the air-speed record doesn’t stop anyone pootling around in their Cessna - why would space travel be different? Isn’t the key here that the barrier to achieving the feat has been lowered, opening up the possibility to many more people than before? I don’t see why just because something has already been achieved it must necessarily become unworthy of attention. Rutan has replicated what was already an amazing feat for what is essentially pocket change by comparison to the amounts spent originally. I don’t understand your pessimism regarding the possibility of further such achievements.
Hasn’t Paul Allen (who is not a government) done exactly this, though?
Nitpick: You’re forgetting the Montgolfier brothers, who flew their balloon in 1783.
It’s commonly thought that GA aircraft are too slow to be of any real use. Jets can carry hundreds of people at over 500 knots more cheaply. But there have been several “races” between scheduled airlines and light aircraft that show light aircraft can be quicker in a portal-to-portal race. Increased security is making GA more attractive. Sure, a GA aircraft may only go 1/3 or 1/4 the speed of a jet; but there are other factors.
Driving to a GA airport is often easier than going to a large commercial airport. The pilot goes to his aircraft, preflights it, and starts off. (He will have also checked the weather, which he can do by phone before he leaves, and may opt or need to file a flight plan.) Then he flies to an airport near his destination. Commercial travellers are usually advised to come to the airport one or two hours before departure. They frequently have baggage that needs to be checked. Then there are the security checkpoints. I’ve never been able to get through security and just get on the aircraft. I think the usual scenario involves cooling one’s heels at the gate for a while. The commercial jet lands at another large airport that may be quite a distance from the traveller’s destination, so there’s a drive involved that is often through a large city. With all of the delays of commercial travel, I’d guess that flying yourself in a GA aircraft gets you to your destination faster on trips of about 400 miles or less.
Personal experience: When I lived in Lancaster there were no direct flights to Las Vegas. You’d have to drive to Burbank about 45 minutes away so that you could make the 45 minute flight, and then go through all of the pre-boarding delays. Lancaster is about 230 miles from Las Vegas as the Cessna flies. Dad and I would drive nine miles on virtually deserted roads to Fox Field and hop in his plane. The Cessna 172 would land at LAS two hours later. The Cessna 182 was faster. A Mooney or a Beechcraft would cut the time even more.
So what’s my point?
Once upon a time people thought bigger was better. And for many trips, it is better to take a commercial flight. For many flights, it is virtually impossible for a small GA aircraft to make the flight. But small, privately flown aircraft have proven to be better for many flights. Want to get on the Shuttle for a ride? Stand in line. When more people emulate Rutan and his crew, more people will be able to go to the edge of space or beyond. So what if the government did the same thing 40 years ago? Do we expect Joe Homebuilder to build a better/higher/faster jet that carries a thousand people just because Boeing and the others have been building big jets for half a century?
The point is LEO can be taken over by private industry, allowing NASA to move outwards. Unless we want to go another 20-30 years going around in circles.
Yes, but the limit can’t be much higher. If you want to return to the same place you left, you either have to settle for a low lob like this, or with getting up to and down from orbital velocity.
I already pointed out that Paul Allen paid the $20 million cost of the Rutan project as a hobby. Few people can do that, and fewer can pay for a bigger, more advanced-technology program that could be seriously commercially viable. That takes big corporations or governments. Rutan puts a 10-15 year horizon on the beginning of a real passenger service, in his recent public statements, and hasn’t publicly said anything about it being done by him, either.
By analogy, the US commercial aviation industry never had a serious chance of making it on its own until 20+ years after the Wrights, no without all those surplus WW1 airplanes (government funded) and then guaranteed airmail contracts (government funded) to provide the, well, ROI and risk control etc. that a business requires. There were no passenger airlines that were also sound businesses until the late 1930’s (and it’s arguable how many there are today).
It was intended to be a delivery truck, with building the space station as its primary application. The payload bay was its purpose. It’s been used for inappropriate purposes because other vehicle project proposals have been consistently cancelled or never funded.
As long as we remain committed to the ISS, and to having the Hubble stay in service (which I suspect it will, given its broad public support), we’ll need a vehicle to perform the Shuttle’s function. If we have higher goals, we’ll need to plan the approach eitiher with other vehicles (which to exist) or from effectively scratch.
Large corporations routinely make investments that won’t pay off for a generation. Boeing was investing money in hypersonic plane research in the 1970’s. For that matter, the development cycle of a new large jet aircraft can easily be a decade, with profits not coming for a long time after the aircraft starts being sold. Boeing bet the entire company on the 747, at a time when there wasn’t even a market for a huge plane like that. They gambled that the 747 would create new markets - and they were right.
Today, Sony and Honda are investing very large amounts of money in humanoid robots that can walk and run and dance. No one expects that investment to turn a profit for a long time.
The Hilton chain has spent millions already studying the feasibility of space hotels, as have a couple of Japanese hotel companies.
Even companies like Microsoft invest large sums in basic R&D for new user interface and computing applications that will not be seen in the market for years or decades.
And in fact, it’s government that is lousy at multi-generational projects. How many can you name? It’s tough to keep any large project funded through multiple administrations with opposing philosophies. So you wind up with boondoggles like the Superconducting Supercollider, or fiascos like the ISS, made expensive by numerous changes in direction and philosophy which required many redesigns.
The SSC was not a boondoggle. In fact, even with cost overruns, its price tag was less than $10 billion (circa 1990 dollars). If finished, it would still be, today, more powerful than the LHC, and many of the questions the LHC is designed to answer starting 2007 would be old news by now. When it was killed, about 1/3 of the money to build it had been spent. And it was about 1/3 finished. The only innane aspect of the SSC program was the fact that it became a political football that myopic politicians with more pork in their bellies each than one SSC played for propaganda points. It’s easy to pick on a bunch of academic physicists. What kind of advocacy do they have. Fact is, the SSC was designed about as rationally as any big govt. project ever conceived, and once finished, it would do its job, which was clearly defined.
Contrast this with the ISS, and you get some idea of the true stupidity of govt. spending on science when it comes to the area of space exploration. The SSC may well have discovered (or ruled out) the Higgs boson, supersymmetry, the physical extent of extra dimensions…and probably a thousand other interesting things no one ever anticipated that would be keeping physicists busy for decades to come.
The ISS probably will cost about $100 billion by the time we let it burn up in the atomosphere. I cannot think of one significant scientific discovery that has been, or will be, made aboard it. We literally can’t afford to man it, much less do anything usefull with it. Some rather critical systems are failing (before schedule), and we don’t have a spacecraft in the sky that can fix it. Many American scientists think it’s too dangerous currently to keep people on it; the Russians, who tolerated fires on, leaks in, and collisions with Mir, seem to think it’s just fine. Unfortunately, the Russians, who now have the only means of getting a crew on or off of it, rely on US handouts and millionaire tourists to fund launching their 1970’s-era Soyuz dinghies into orbit. Look no further than NASA beaurocracy and the misguided association of “national prestige” with govt.-funded manned space flight. Talk about boondoggles. The ISS is a disaster of such proportions I don’t think our manned space program will ever recover from it. Couple this with the problem of the aging deathtrap that is the Space Shuttle Transport, and it’s pretty clear that NASA’s human space exploration efforts have gone so far astray from logic, reason, or even sanity, it baffles me that anyone still wants to support it.
I see modern success in NASA in its robotic missions, like Voyager, Gallileo, Cassini, the Mars Rovers, and so on. These marvelous spacecraft have done real, hard, beautiful science. They Voyager spacecraft still have power! The Mars rovers might last until next year if they can sleep-out the Martian winter, something like 5-10x their primary mission timeframe, at least. We already know for certain now that Mars had large bodies of water on its surface, a veritable Holy Grail of planetary research. I mean, the Rovers exceeded their baseline scientific goals within weeks of landing. How cool is that?
And how do we make sense of the fantastic success of the robotic missions with the spectacular and even deadly failures of our manned space program? The only thing I can figure is that, in its current iteration, our govt. manned space program is broken beyond repair, and must be destroyed, swept clean, and rebuilt from the ground up. I’d start with O’Keefe’s head and work my way down. Leave JPL alone completely. They do their job.
Hell, maybe private enterprise is the only answer. Could industry do much worse? Perhaps manned space flight for research has run its course. Sure, maybe you needed a Ferdinand and Isabella to get Columbus across the ocean blue, but what drove future exploration was largely commerce, be it backed by merchants or Conquistadors. I’m all for govt. funding of science, don’t get me wrong. But our manned space program does no science that comes even close to justifying the costs. Oh, and its killed about 14 astronauts in one vehicle alone (NASA = Need Another Seven Astronauts). The waste, mismanagement, and avoidable danger is astounding. I’m not sure if there is a portion of the Fed. Govt. that has failed so completely as our manned space program over the past three decades. The Shuttle: The definition of “mission creep”. Maybe the Feds are incapable of bringing us to the next level.
Much of Boeing research is done with NASA research grants. I could not locate a document relating to hypersonic planes, but I found other examples of Boeing research done with NASA money. I’m sure that large planes do indeed take over a decade to develop. I see this as a difference only in scale as what auto makers do. But undertake pure scientific research without government money? I don’t think so.
I rather doubt that Hilton has spent millions to study feasibility of space hotels. Sounds more like a PR stunt to me. Certainly they are not developing engineering drawings of space hotels, more likely they pulled numbers out of their butts as to how much it would cost to build and how much the room rate would be.
But, as Bob pointed out, the bulk of it was from NASA and USAF. When the plug was pulled on Reagan’s “Orient Express” National Aero Space Plane program, so did Boeing’s interest and investment.
True, but the low risk (there’s only a duopsony and a fairly predictable market future for the big planes) makes up for the poor payback period, and cycle times are down to three years or so now anyway. Revenue in the commercial business come from parts and service over a period of decades, not the original sale, though, as you correctly state.
More ideological revisionism. The 747 *had * a guaranteed market in Pan Am - the plane was Juan Trippe’s idea, and so was the SST that would have replaced it, for that matter. Trippe’s lobbying backed with his nearly-unsolicited launch order, combined with the sudden availabilty of an engineering force with Boeing’s loss of the C-5 contract (dere’s dat ol’ debbil gummint agin), created the 747.
Know what the Boeing/Pan Am partnership’s business plan was? Of course not, as you’ve just shown. Trippe wanted the 747 just as a stopgap to get more passengers over the Pond until his new SST’s took over the role. Then, he wanted to convert them into front-loading freighters. That’s why the cockpit is on top and not in front. Bill Allen thought that the combined Pan Am / TWA / BOAC / some others market for that approach made business sense, and so would the experience his workforce would gain for the government-subsidized (yes, I know it’s painful for you) SST program when the full product development program got under way. Given that the company was certainly going to fade away in favor of Douglas and Lockheed in the airliner market if the 747 *had * failed, it’s hard to call it a gamble, anyway.
As to 53…pshah! Thats nothing.
