spaceship one

Matt Whiting wrote in message ...
Harry K wrote:

Matt Whiting wrote in message ...

Ron Wanttaja wrote:


It took about forty years from the date the first government-sponsored
manned aerospacecraft left the atmosphere and glided down to a safe landing
in the California desert to the successful flight of the first private one.
If the same timescale was used for conventional airplanes, the first
privately-owned aircraft would have flown in 1943.

I never knew that the Wright Flyer was gummint sponsored...


Matt


Looks like you (and others) missed the little "if" in Ron's post.

Harry K

No, I didn't miss it and I doubt the others did either. The comparison
was time delta of the first GOVERNMENT sponsored flight of a spacecraft
to the first private one. If the same timescale was applied to
conventional airplanes, you would be comparing the first GOVERNMENT
sponsored flight of a conventional airplane to the first private one.
Backing 40 years off of 1943 yields 1903, which is NOT when the first
GOVERNMENT sponsored airplane flew successfully, so the comparison is
completely invalid.

Matt

And if you re-read that one line starting with 'if' you will see that
he never claimed that. He was saying that if conventional flight had
been developed by the government it would have been 1943 before it
happened.

Harry K

ISTR that there was A1P a plan to orbit an X15, using iirc a Titan rocket,
reenter, and parachute the pilot to ground. What TPS would have been used?
Might such work be of value on SS2?

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 08:33:29 GMT, Richard Lamb
wrote:

Ron Wanttaja wrote:

Anyway, you do have it backwards...orbital velocity decreases with circular
orbit altitude. ~25,200 FPS at 200 nm, ~10,100 FPS at geosynchronous
altitude (~19320 NM).

You're right about the potential energy, though. Dropping from
geosynchronous altitude to ground level, you'll hit the atmosphere at over
23,000 miles per hour. And if you're an old-timer like BOb, you'll have
the turn-signal flashing the entire way....

So?
To catch up with the guy in front of you, you first slow down?

Precisely. Think of it in terms of angular rate. If you're both in the
same 90-minute equatorial orbit, you're traveling around the Earth at an
angular rate of four degrees of longitude per minute. To catch up to the
guy in front, you need to increase your angular rate, e.g., an orbit with a
shorter period.

The angular rate is inversely proportional to orbit altitude...LEO (Low
Earth Orbit) satellites are at a few hundred miles and go around the Earth
in 90 minutes or so, but Geosynchronous satellites are at ~19300 NM and
take a full 24 hours to orbit the Earth. The velocities needed to maintain
the orbit are lower, and the circumference of the orbits is longer...you're
not only flying slower to start with, but the distance you have to travel
for one orbit is longer.

So... if your buddy is a few hundred miles ahead of you in LEO, you slow
up. This lowers your average orbit altitude and decreases your orbit
period. You've now got a period, say, of 88 minutes and an angular rate of
4.1 degrees a minute. Every minute, you're 0.1 degrees (roughly 6 nautical
miles, in LEO) closer. You're also slightly below your buddy, but when you
catch up, you increase your speed, which raises your orbit.

Mind you, if your friend had been only a hundred feet in front of you, you
just would have popped your little thrusters and flown directly to him. It
will perturb your orbit, but would be minor compared to normal orbit
maintenance maneuvers. Compare it to having to climb 10 feet in an
airplane vs. 10,000 feet. You'll just tug the stick back slightly for the
first case, but add power for the second.

Otherwise, though, orbit mechanics is *definitely* non-intuitive to an
aircraft pilot. In an airplane, we're always concerned about how far we can
fly, and can easily change directions if we desire. The situation is
exactly opposite in orbit... the vehicle has nearly unlimited range, but a
change in compass course is prohibitively expensive.

Ron Wanttaja

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 02:01:07 +0000, B2431 wrote:


Date: 6/23/2004 8:40 PM Central Daylight Time
Message-id:


Matt

My computer bombed so this may go as a dup?

I have thousands of hours in jet fighters breathing 100% oxy.

We had all kinds of electrical stuff in cockpit(s) and aircraft. High
power Radar, Radio's, etc., etc.
.

Big John
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 18:28:37 -0400, Matt Whiting
wrote:

Richard Lamb wrote:


In the aftermath of the Apollo 1 fire, NASA took a year (and $75 mil)
to redesign the space craft, mature their mental attitudes, and yes,
did come back with a much safer vehicle.

Yes, but I still wonder how anyone in their right might would use a
nearly pure oxygen atmosphere in a vehicle full of humans and electrical
equipment...

Matt

The difference is Apollo 1 was flooded with pure O2 where jet fighters push O2
from a LOX converter to a face mask. Big difference.

Even then, Chuck Yeager get half his face burnt in a fire when he ejected,
IIRC.

AC

Harry K wrote:

And if you re-read that one line starting with 'if' you will see that
he never claimed that. He was saying that if conventional flight had
been developed by the government it would have been 1943 before it
happened.

Well, from Ron's later comments I don't think that is what he said or
meant, but whatever....


Matt

Ron,

No one's sneering at brilliant aerospace Columbus types like you guys
Ron. But the era of expensive government-only exploration is over.
Burt Rutan is Mayflower. He's trying to get the rest of us slobs over
to the New World for a new life. What Burt *has* always sneered at is
the lack of follow through by the government so that all this
fantastic technology will trickle down to the common man. The common
man is what Burt has always been about. And this always seems to lead
to hard feelings by people who are entrenched in doing things the same
expensive government slow-turtle way all the time that invariable
always leads to the ignorant masses clamoring for cancellation of all
those expensive unnecessary space missions to places we have already
been.

Burt Rutan is, if you like, our de facto Robin Hood of Aviation and
now, Space. Most of us have dreamed all our lives of the emergence
of a "Dutch East India" type company that would greatly supplant the
government's stranglehold of the high seas (or rather in this case:
the high altitudes.) I just didn't think I would be lucky enough to
see it in my lifetime.

The famed Dutch East India Company didn't invent the lateen sail or
the sternpost rudder either, but their improvement of those basic
concepts lead to the greatest commercial conquest the world had ever
seen of the known globe. Burt does the same thing with publicly
available NASA data, e.g. winglet on the vari ezie, lifting body data
on Space Ship One.

Enjoyed your post very much Ron, glad to see you aren't using Acme's
disappearing/reappearing ink anymore, aye "Dr a.a.com."

pacplyer



Ron Wanttaja wrote in message . ..
On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 01:06:23 -0400, Matt Whiting
wrote:


No, I didn't miss it and I doubt the others did either. The comparison
was time delta of the first GOVERNMENT sponsored flight of a spacecraft
to the first private one. If the same timescale was applied to
conventional airplanes, you would be comparing the first GOVERNMENT
sponsored flight of a conventional airplane to the first private one.
Backing 40 years off of 1943 yields 1903, which is NOT when the first
GOVERNMENT sponsored airplane flew successfully, so the comparison is
completely invalid.

The purpose of the comparison was merely to illustrate the time spans
involved, not to try to contrast the difference between government vs.
private efforts. A less controversial comparison would have been along the
lines of "...it was as if no else other than the Wright brothers had been
technically capable of building an airplane until 1943."

Rutan's achievement is tremendous, but let's not forget, he's standing on
the shoulders of giants. SpaceShipOne's success is due to Rutan's
brilliant combining of today's cutting-edge technology. He probably has
more computing power on his desktop than NASA had in 1960. There wasn't
any wind-tunnel testing done on SpaceShipOne; it was all done on a
computer.

Yet, barely ten years ago, the first flight of an improved launch vehicle
failed because the aerodynamic models used weren't accurate enough. That
company trusted the computer model and didn't do any wind tunnel testing.
The launch vehicle and satellite end up in the drink. Oops.

Burt Rutan was fully aware of this instance...after all, his company built
part of that rocket's structure (which was in *no* way involved in the
failure). Yet, in ten short years, modeling capabilities have improved to
the point where he felt confident in risking a manned flight on
computational data only.

Rutan did one heck of a job, but some folks in this newsgroup have used it
as an excuse to sneer at the people who developed some of the technologies
that made it possible. If suborbital space flight was so doggone easy, the
first private space launch would have been four years after the X-15, not
forty.

Ron Wanttaja

(pacplyer) wrote

I forgot to mention that due to the wild S-turns the vehicle's apogee
topped out only 400 feet above 100K! That was according to Edwards
preliminary telemetry. That's so close I wonder if the other
contenders for the X-prize will try to challenge the data?

I don't beleive this flight counts towards the X-prize. The two
X-Prize flights must both be made with either two passengers or the
equivalent weight on board. This was a test flight.

Rich

Ron Wanttaja wrote snip
Second...and, probably more-easily overcome...there's the G-load issue.
IIRC, Melville experienced about 5 Gs, maximum, during re-entry. 5 Gs from
a re-entry speed of Mach 3 vs. a re-entry speed of Mach 25. Hmmmm...think
we'll have to trim the size of shuttlecock tail. :-)

Actually it was 6 G's


Finally, we get to the heretical part of this posting: Why wings at all,
for an orbital mission?

Forty years ago, a few square feet of ablative heat shield was good enough
to handle most manned space missions. The Russian space program has flown
them continuously.

You have to keep in mind the objective of Burt's program. Hitting the
ground hard with frozen parachutes might be O.K. for a Ruskie
government pilot, but it's just too risky for common carriage
passengers; the Russians have thumped to death an otherwise successful
mission crew at the last few seconds more than once. Splashing down
at sea might be O.K for a U.S. military pilot, but the expense of
recovery (ships etc,) and possibility of drowning are increasing the
complexity of the mission. Again your government sanctioned solutions
are contrary to everything Burt stands for. On SS1 Burt has dispensed
with parachute heaters, window heat, heavy RCS, expensive launch
facilities, ground simulators, the list goes on and on. And Rutan's
endeavor cost in the ten's of millions, while the illustrious
government shuttle costs two billion just to build and an additional
one-hundred million per launch. Now I love the shuttle, but it's too
old and just too complex to operate commercially. Burt will
undoubtedly offer scaled up orbital versions that can handle
pax/commercial payloads if the gov weenies and corporate CEO idiots
leave him alone all the way to fruition. E.g. the Beech Starship that
failed commercially is not the same as the prototype we saw flying at
Mojave. Burt's is devoid of all the heavy crap that Beech loaded down
the production model with, which in turn with all the gov and
corporate interference ran the cost out of sight (up to bizjet
prices.)


Just because you want to re-use an orbital vehicle doesn't mean it has to
have wings. Unless the vehicle is able to reposition itself from its
landing location to launch location, you're still stuck with considerable
infrastructure to recover, service, and transport the vehicle. Wings on
your deorbit vehicle don't help those functions. They allow pin-point
precision landings...but if you're just going to land out in the desert,
does it really make a difference? If you're aloft for more than one orbit,
you are not going to be able to land at your departure point until about 12
hours later.


The base being in the desert is really immaterial. The purpose of a
winged vehicle is that it can deorbit burn and abort into any public
airport in the world. Again no recovery sites required. Again cost
is low. Mojave is not maintained by Scaled or Vulcan. It is a public
airport open to anyone. You do it any other way and now you have a
recovery range to prepare, maintain, pay for, and at all costs reach
with the vehicle. I know the purpose of a gov contractor is to run
costs out of sight so these cost-saving concepts will probably be
alien to you for a while. ;-)



For the most part, American capsule landings were within sight of the
recovery base. Isn't that accuracy enough?

In sight of a multi-billion dollar aircraft carrier? Do you have any
idea how much an old non-nuke recovery ship burns? What about the
cost of the crew alone? How is that efficient?


snip good aero stuff here


By the way, NASA has "Astronauts," Russia has "Cosmonauts." We need a name
for the ordinary folks who fly on SpaceShipOne:

I hereby suggest "Commonauts" for those lucky SOBs who get to ride Burt's
space bird.

Ron Wanttaja

Naa. These people are colonizing space in a much more efficient
manner than the government ever could. For the first time manned space
is going to be commercially viable. I would think "Colonaut" would
be a much better name for them.

Cheers "aye"

pacplyer

On 24 Jun 2004 10:11:45 -0700, (pacplyer) wrote:

Ron,

No one's sneering at brilliant aerospace Columbus types like you guys
Ron. But the era of expensive government-only exploration is over.
Burt Rutan is Mayflower. He's trying to get the rest of us slobs over
to the New World for a new life. What Burt *has* always sneered at is
the lack of follow through by the government so that all this
fantastic technology will trickle down to the common man. The common
man is what Burt has always been about.

Well, yabut, not everyone wants to go into space. Sure it's grand
what he's doing and he's being wonderfully unique about his approach,
but it's freakishly expensive to do and horrifyingly dangerous.

I wish he'd come back down to earth and help reduce the cost of
ordinary fixed wing flying, instead of spending millions on something
that incredibly few people will benefit from.

Corky Scott

In pacplyer wrote:
Ron Wanttaja wrote snip

By the way, NASA has "Astronauts," Russia has "Cosmonauts." We need
a name for the ordinary folks who fly on SpaceShipOne: I hereby
suggest "Commonauts" for those lucky SOBs who get to ride Burt's
space bird. Ron Wanttaja

Naa. These people are colonizing space in a much more efficient
manner than the government ever could. For the first time manned space
is going to be commercially viable. I would think "Colonaut" would
be a much better name for them.

That's appropriate, because just the thought of going up in one of those
things is enough to tie my colon in a knot.

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