FedEx, UPS air, and the other commercial overnight services do, currently, offer a service where they essentialy send someone out to pick up your Precious Package, drive it to the airport, and put it on the next airplane out - my office was once the recipient of just such a package, Boston to Chicago in under four hours for under $200. (Also a total waste of money in my opinion - someone was trying very hard to impress and it totally did not succeed).
The thing is, SS1 took off and landed from Mojave - you don’t get a sense of just how fast sub-orbital trans-sonic tranportation can be from that event (although if you were perceptive enough to notice that SS1 landed before White Knight it might be a clue). Will everyone need to get from New York City to Tokyo at Mach 3? No. Are there people with either pressing need or incredible ego willing to pay the cost of such a trip? Yes. The only real question here is whether or not you can break even or better selling seats. Can it be done? No one will really know until it’s tried.
Sure, WK/SS1 took $27 to develop - building an exact replica of the two aircraft would not cost as much because the research is done, the mistakes corrected, etc. Of course, Rutan doesn’t want an exact replica, he wants something better, which will require some more research dollars. A production model, however, usually costs significantly less per unit than a research and development platform.
Brian Binnie was on Letterman tonight and he claimed that the rolls that Melvill was doing was just Melvill showing off. Claimed that Rutan came out and told him not to show off like Melvill did because it might spook the “customers”. He also said that if you don’t think that the world has changed because of the flight, then wait until the end of the week.
xt: *[ I guess at Kitty Hawk people said ‘well, not to be cynical, but I think its just a high priced amusement rid for the ultra-rich…’. *
Considering that the cost of the Kitty Hawk plane was less than $1,000, which means less than $20,000 in terms of today’s purchasing power, I doubt it.
Private space flight may have a profitable future out there somewhere, but it is definitely not in the same league, affordability-wise, as the early development of aircraft.
No idea, but Binnie did say “customers” so it’s possible that Rutan’s going to be announcing new buyers, or unveiling a new craft or perhaps he’s talking about this.
Oh, yeah, the other thing that Binnie said which has stuck in my brain is, “You shut down the rocket engine…” (emphasis mine) Now, I realize that SS1’s engine is pretty neat, and that it can be shut down at any point in the flight, but Binnie was talking about shutting it down when you got to space. How much fuel is left in the rocket engine at that point? Why wouldn’t you simply let it burn out and use it to go even higher? I mean, if you’re going to set a record, why not go all out? The only reasons I can think of are: 1.) You’re keeping it as a “reserve” in case something goes wrong later and you need the engine to avoid danger. 2.) There’s a problem with running the engine completely out of fuel, and it could be damaged if you let this happen (doesn’t strike me as the kind of design Rutan would use, though). 3.) You’re keeping the capability of the engine secret in order to keep an edge on the competition.
They are still experimenting with the ‘feather’ re-entry device I think Tuckerfan. Its not a matter (afaik) how HIGH they can go, but can they come back afterwards without becoming a huge fireball in the sky. I don’t think anyone every TRIED a full test of the ‘feather’, so they are still feeling their way through it and what its capabilities are.
The point was, when the first plane was tried out at Kitty Hawk it went something like 100 yards. At the time no one really envisioned city to city flights, let alone passenger travel. Thats the point I was getting at. We know NOW what the potential of the airplane is…but at the time it was considered a novelty…just a rich persons ‘toy’, nothing to get excited about. This thing has the same potential that the early airplane did, if they can pull it off. Space COULD be extremely profitable with a cheap(er) manned orbiter.
To your point though, how many people at the time of the first Wright flight could afford $1000? Probably slightly more than could afford $20 million today…but not a LOT more. There are a lot of millionares now-a-days…a lot more than there were at the turn of the century. However, thats neither here nor there. I think this would be more comparable to people who could afford a transatlantic ship during the age sail.
I think you’re missing the real reason - because this is still a test aircraft, and they are still expanding the envelope. Responsible flight test means you expand the envelope slowly. The higher that craft goes, the more speed it is going to build up before it hits the thick atmosphere again. If it were dropped from an infinite height, it would be going escape velocity when it hit the atmosphere, and it would burn up.
So, you go as high as you need to win the prize, and a little higher to expand the flight envelope from the last flight, so you can gather more data and make the flight more useful. And that’s as high as you go.
It’s almost certain that you’re going to shut down the engine with fuel left, because you carry extra fuel for contingencies.
The only good reason I can think of to burn all the fuel is to make sure the tanks are empty when you land, in case the landing goes bad. But this particular rocket fuel they are using is extremely safe, and they may have felt that it simply wasn’t necessary.
Let’s face it: Low earth orbit has been done. To death. I see little reason for NASA to keep blowing money on it since they get so little bang for the buck. With the exception of our orbiting observatories, our LOE efforts have amounted to massively expensive boondoggles that efficiently kill astronauts with taxpayer money or leave multi-billion-dollar white elephants to circle uselessly above, rotting away with a skeleton crew.
Purportedly wonderful new materials can be manufactured in microgravity, but if that’s the case, I see no reason why for-profit ventures shouldn’t be going after them. If there’s a need, they’ll find, it, and if there isn’t, I can’t think of much justification for pursuing it from the public coffers. Space tourists on the ISS? Come on. Leave the tourism to Carnival Cruises. If they want a spaceliner, let Carnival or Virgin build it.
NASA needs to do more like Cassini, or the Martian Rovers. We need big and powerful space telescopes to look at exoplanets and unravel the mysteries of the Big Bang. We don’t need glorified and obsolescent space trucks that do little but go round and round and cost more than double/kg payload to launch satellites than unmanned, disposable rockets.
Bring on the space privateers. They make LOE into something inspiring again, not to mention sensible, as it’s discretionary private funding making it happen. If we must reinvent the wheel, the free market is the place to do it. The wheel will most assuredly be more affordable and innovative, necessity being the mother of invention.
Meanwhile, if NASA can get out of its holding patter, ditch the Shuttle and the ISS, maybe it can turn its budget and direction over to fully exploring real science and our future beyond LOE, instead of putting dirty band-aids on terminal programs that are trapped in it forever.
I think they do vent the extra nitrous oxide at apogee… no oxidizer, no burn. Probably because it’s easier to dump the liquid rather than solid fuel component.
When I hear how difficult it will be to “scale up” SpaceShipOne, I am reminded of an Arthur C. Clarke quote…
“If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
I think Bert Rutan & co. are brilliant, and in five years people will be looking at SpaceShipTwo and saying “I’d never thought of doing it that way, but it will be difficult to “scale up” to reach the moon…”
Um…afaik they aren’t TRYING to scale it up to reach the moon at this point. They are trying to scale it up to reach orbit. Could you perhaps go into these insurmountable difficulties in scaling up to THAT goal? Because as an X-aerospace engineer I’m unaware of any show stoppers…just difficult engineering.
Richard Branson has signed a deal to have Rutan build larger five passenger versions of Space Ship One for his company Virgin Galactic. Construction is supposed to start next year, with passenger flights expected to begin in 2007.
Rutan is also working on a seven place orbital version.
On the show Black Sky: The Race for Space that ran on the Discovery channel, Rutan showed some images of the planned vehicles. Here are some screen captures.
Fair enough though…like the government did in the latter half of the LAST century.
What’s supposed to happen by the end of next week?