SpaceShipTwo

[RicharD]

http://www.virgingalactic.com/

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/07/spaceshiptwo-unveili.html

A friend of mine was working as a caterer for the unveiling last night..... right up until 80MPH winds wrecked the event.  Fortunately everybody was safely evacuated and nobody got hurt when the tent (for lack of a better word) got blown 60 feet in the air.

Pretty cool machine these guys have developed.  Sub-orbital space flight will soon be available for a mere $200,000.00 / head.

[Frankenamp]

Where is Delos David Harriman when we need him?

[tubeswell]

Hmmm... $200,000/head aye?

... maybe not this Christmas.

Looks like there could be a booming line of work for handling wealthy deceased estates on the horizon tho'.

[G._Hoffman]

I know one of Burt Rutan's test pilots a bit (his wife wouldn't let him be one of the Space Ship one test pilots, though, mores the pity - but he did fly the first test flight of the mothership that lifted it off the ground!)  Their basic idea on Space Ship Two was to have something at least 50 times (or there about) safer than anything else ever to fly in space.   I wouldn't be too worried about the safety of the customers.

I'm saddend, though, that they raised the price from the first time they discussed it.  Not that $100,000 is any more affordable to ME, but it sure is something I would love to do!


Gabriel

[PRR]

> nobody got hurt when the tent ...got blown 60 feet in the air.

Safety is important.... so they hold a party in a hurricane ? ? ?

And it isn't like they are ignorant about aerodynamic lift....

> a mere $200,000.00 / head.

It ain't cheap.

Pretend you had a road that went straight up 100 miles.

Pretend you had a tire which could grip a straight-up road.

Now you need a car which can pull itself straight up.

The average car in Low gear can pull 0.3-0.4 Gee. We need a full 1 Gee plus a bit to spare.

The Low gear can be changed 3 times lower and pull 1 Gee. But top speed in low gear drops by a factor of 3. In my car, to about 12 MPH.

So 100 miles straight up is eight hours of FULL POWER.

My car gets 25 MPG at 65MPH or about 2.6 gallons per hour. But it does 65MPH with a small fraction of FULL POWER. It would burn at least 6 times more fuel flat-out. Like 16 gallons per hour, or 128 gallons to climb 100 miles.

We could gear-down more and go slower. Just less gallons per hour for more hours. Same general result. Way over 100 gallons.

My car does not hold 128 gallons. And that half-ton weight would require more power or more gear-down and longer climb. Say the car went from 3,000 pounds street to 4,000 pounds fueled for a long climb. The fuel or the time increases by a factor 4000/3000. Now we need 170 gallons. Which weighs 1,200 pounds. More than we calculated, so figure again.

After the first few miles, air is too thin for humans, so we have to carry air. Going by SCUBA tanks, that could be some more hundreds of pounds.

After the first few miles, air is too thin for engines. The weight of air an engine eats is much greater than the fuel. 80% of air is useless Nitrogen, but the Oxygen alone greatly increases our total weight. Which increases our fuel demand.

It's pretty easy to need more fuel than vehicle.

(We see why low-tech high-fliers from X-15 to SS2 like to use an air-breathing first stage. It is an enormous complication, but existing technology, and the less oxygen we finally have to lift the better.)

Since there is no straight-up road, Rutan had to add wings and such. The seating is similar to my car (6 instead of 5), but since this is a joy-ride, he had to supply enough room for joy. And then enough fuel to lift all that. I reckon the airframe runs 10,000 pounds, and it carries 20,000 pounds of assorted fuels (rubber, fertilizer, Virgin-brand bottled air for people, plus champagne).

20,000 pounds of rocket fuel must cost $100,000. (It may be rubber, but it is extra-Virgin over-tested rubber.) The jet lifter may drink $2.30/gallon oil but a LOT of it.  Apparently they give some pre-shoot training in the jet-lifter, so nobody freaks in free-fall. The two fliers will cost many times more than the fuel they use in a dozen flights.Then there is hanger rental, insurance, pilots, rubber-stuffers.....  It can't cost less than $400K to take four folks up and back, and sure could be over a million per trip even if the thing (both the aircraft and the business) holds together for a dozen trips.

$200K/seat may be low.

It's still orders of magnitude lower than other human-safe near-space transport, and I think $1K/pound may be low for space-junk delivery.

[G._Hoffman]

After the first few miles, air is too thin for engines. The weight of air an engine eats is much greater than the fuel. 80% of air is useless Nitrogen, but the Oxygen alone greatly increases our total weight. Which increases our fuel demand.

I think you'd be better off putting in a hydrogen peroxide tank than trying to carry pressurized oxygen, but I'm not sure about the weight trade off.

Given who is putting this thing together, I'd say they are pretty sure about the cost being profitable.


This all reminds me of one of my major frustrations with NASA at the moment.  

Granted that the Shuttle was pretty much a total bust, in both PR and practicality.  (Note, I didn't say safety.  Anyone who thinks space exploration is safe is an idiot, but compared to most voyages of exploration, NASA has an astounding safety record.  I mean, how many men did Magellen loose?  75-85%?)  They were pretty foolish to believe they could make the, what was it, 25 flights a year they originally wanted to make.  And Launching the Challenger in that weather was incredibly stupid since they had any number of engineers saying, "this is stupid!"  I will grant all of that.

But why is it that, when they got to designing Orion, they went back to the same old Ballistic capsule design?  I suppose it is a "tried and true" technology, except that Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Sky Lab, and Apollo-Soyuz didn't come close to having as many flights as the Shuttle.  I suppose all the Soyuz flights add to the technologies maturity, except I don't think the Russians have changed the Soyuz design since like 1970!  Surely we can do better than that today.  

And NASA first unveiled the concept designs for Orion shortly after Space Ship One proved a completely new, VASTLY safer form of reentry.  I understand that it is tough for a government agency that large to change directions on a dime, but it just seems to me that, given the likely life span of the Orion platform, and the huge safety benefit of Rutan's Feather seems to me to have merited, at the very least, a serious reconsidering of the Orion Design.  I fully understand that NASA is terrified of another Shuttle-like PR disaster, but come on!  A properly implemented Feather design could save millions of dollars while making the whole thing several orders of magnitude safer.  Shouldn't there at least be a serious debate on the matter?


Gabriel

[Bassmanster]

The Shuttle was a full-on triumph, not a bust.  In its own way.  Nothing is perfect.

SS1 reenty is not like the Shuttle's.  Give it a little thought.

PRR's analysis is good, but he needs to add kinetic energy, especially for orbital cases.  1/2mv^2.

--Gorn - "space traveler" from Merritt Island, FL, fed and clothed as a child by the US Space Program.

[G._Hoffman]

The Shuttle was a full-on triumph, not a bust.  In its own way.  Nothing is perfect.

I think the Shuttle is a great vehicle, but from congresses point of view, it doesn't do half of what NASA promised.  It takes FAR longer to turn around, it is anything but cheap, and while it may seem safe by exploration and experimental aerospace standards, to the general public even one person dying was too much.  And even as someone who loves the Shuttle, I can't call it a full-on triumph.  In order to be that, it would have had to fulfill it's mission objectives completely.  And sadly, it didn't. 


Gabriel

[Ritchie200]

Having grown up in the 60's wanting (still!) to be an astronaut and collecting anything and everything related to the space program, I too am a little disappointed.  Heck, lifting bodies have been around since before Soyuz A with the a working X20 in the early 60's.  I would have thought we would have something a little more advanced by now.  But then again, back in the 70's I thought we would have people living on the moon by now and been to Mars a few times.  I think NASA has become just another government behemoth, too big to get out of its own way.  Its interesting to note that at its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.  I don't think the Shuttle or the Orion had or has this kind of input (I may be wrong, but...).  Also, the real movers and shakers of the past are gone - like Harrison Storms and James McDonnell.  It's also a diferent world these days.  There is no race against the Commies.  Remember that after just a few visits, the moon shots were considered a bore.  And even though travel in any machine, be it terrestrial or space, is risky business that increases exponentially with complexity - loss of life is now considered unacceptable.  Consider the lawsuits stemming from Challenger.  Then consider that the Mercury 7 were all test pilots fully aware that their time in this world may be cut short.  Tragedy will sometimes be the cost of great achievement - a concept lost in this pc world.

I also agree that anything Burt Rutan is involved with has been through the think tank many times and should be a safe bet.  He does not need the money and would not want to be remembered as another Jim Bede with a silly falure.

Valentina Tereshkova is 72.  I'll bet she thought we would be a little further along than what we are.  At 70 she said she would be glad to pilot a ship to Mars - even if it was a one way trip.

Here is a pic I took while at EPCOT of a shuttle launch a few years ago.  I thought it was cool with the flag.  A total of about two people watched it.

Jim

[RicharD]

It's too bad space ship two isn't capable of reaching orbit.  A casino in space would be fun... except for the roulette table.  I guess rolling dice would be quite different too. 

I've always wondered why re-entry is done at such a high speed.  Several years ago, we watched the shuttle streak across the night sky from atop our roof in Austin, TX.  By the time we got off the roof and back inside, the shuttle was on the ground in Florida.  that's haulin ass and the tang had already slowed way down before it reached the Texas skies.

[Bassmanster]

Reentry is speedy because you have to go about 20,000 mph to orbit.  There's no other way to stop, unless you bring an entire other fuel tank up w/ you for retro rockets.

That's the difference btw the shuttle and SS1.

Burt Rutan is awesome.  Been following him since I was a kid.

[bnwitt]

I think NASA has become just another government behemoth, too big to get out of its own way.  Its interesting to note that at its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.  I don't think the Shuttle or the Orion had or has this kind of input (I may be wrong, but...).  Also, the real movers and shakers of the past are gone - like Harrison Storms and James McDonnell.  It's also a diferent world these days.  

I don't think you're being fair to the folks at NASA.  There are still lot's of brilliant engineers at the agency.  The problem is a lack of interest and funding by the American people and congress.  They have to get things done now a days with half of nothing.  The Mars rover projects were phenomenal as have been many of their other efforts that were pulled off with poor funding.

[PRR]

> why re-entry is done at such a high speed.

Above I took your Toyota up a 100 mile high road. Bassmanster thinks I should have included kinetic energy, but I wanted to keep it down to everyday concepts. And considerable kinetic energy IS included (albeit hidden as potential energy).

OK, you got to the top of the 100 mile tower. How do you come back? Easy: step off and you WILL return to earth. (Additional energy is needed to stay up "orbiting" at 100 miles.) What is your speed when you hit the ground? Roughly the speed it would have took if, instead of crawling in a Toyota, we shot you from a canon.

Ignoring air drag, the trip back would be fine until the last instant.

Potential energy (height) turned to kinetic energy (speed) which turned into disruption of flesh and dirt and fading heat in the soil. (Meteors no larger than you can melt sand to glass.) Counting air-drag, the energy dissipates in the stratosphere as an air/blood plasma.

Suppose you do not want to become a dot in the dirt or a shooting-star.

You don't (in this case) need to input additional energy to get down, you need to output energy. Roughly comparable to all the energy it took to get up. The trick is in not getting burned.

With a Toyota on a tower, you'd come down on the brakes. Some practical details: car brakes won't absorb continuous power equal to the engine, so you must come down slower. Car brakes are air-cooled and air is thin up there... practical problems which might be solved other ways.

In fact the usual way is "air-cooled brakes", but when you have no tower and have high flight speed you can simply air-brake. Much of the excess energy is carried away in the airstream (the hot tiles are actually a minor loss). From 100 miles you come a long way down before there is enough air to do much braking. The Shuttle may do 90+% of braking in the last 10% of altitude and maybe 5% of distance. i.e. from Texas to Florida. It may pass you at 15,000MPH, it must be below 1,000MPH at the turn off the FLA coast, 1,500 miles at average 7,500MPH, about 12 minutes. It loses 10MPH every second. This is like your Toyota doing 60-0 in 6 seconds, which is about what it can do (once). So you can take the decel on shoulder-straps.

The Mercury capsules came down faster, more decel. Those guys had to take it on their backs.

Ah. The faster you come down, the less time for heat to soak through. The little Mercury had to get down before the pilot's backside cooked. The Shuttle is bigger and the pilots are not laying on the airbrake.

In the Toyota: IF you had infinite air, you could drag-brake for maybe 3 days, quicker if you replaced 9" brakes with several-foot brakes, and arrive with brakes at normal max temperature. Or you could come down quicker, let the brakes get HOT, and try to reach ground before the iron vaporized... you don't care how hot they are after you are parked. However that would take a lot of thermal mass, which tends to be MASS-mass, which increases the energy you must handle.

Rutan has this far-out idea. A very large wing area. If you can come down VERY slowly, the heat will blow-off as fast as it is generated. This takes huge area. Maybe it could only have come from the guy who did other machines with very light wing-loading based on modern materials.

BTW: you can climb a Toyota into true orbit. Make a 24,000 mile tower near the equator and climb up. It gets easier the further you go; still this will take a lot more fuel than a mere 100 mile tower. At the top you step-off and you orbit. This works because the Earth spins: we (most of us) are born with a "free" 500MPH-1000MPH velocity and if we lever this right we can make a self-sustaining orbit. To come back, you must lose some energy. If you are in touch with your tower, you jump sideways to the west. A leg-jump makes a spiral which could take weeks to get into significant air; it may be expedient to use a bigger bang and get down sooner. That hardly changes how you will lose energy to touch-down without meteor-like impact.

[PRR]

Some famous crip is riding the Vomit Comet, in preparation for a free ride on SpaceShipTwo.

How'd you like to be responsible for that passenger?? He knows the physics and the risks, but can't raise a finger to save himself.

[tubesornothing]

Gee, only $6,800 to fly zero-G.  Suddenly the price tag on my amps doesn't seem so much.  I should start marketing to the zero-G crowd.

[PRR]

> only $6,800 to fly zero-G.

Sure, for a dozen seconds at a time. It's just a 707-type airplane, and not a long ride, but LOTS of insurance, and it must drink a lot of fuel between bouts of zero-G, and as many Flight Attendants as passengers. Oh, and barf-bags.

[FYL]

Oh, and barf-bags.

No peanuts?

[G._Hoffman]

Gee, only $6,800 to fly zero-G.  Suddenly the price tag on my amps doesn't seem so much.  I should start marketing to the zero-G crowd.

You have no idea.


I've got a couple friends who sell guitars to that crowd.  We've landed one of them, but only once, and it was kind of a favor for a (famous) friend of his who couldn't afford to buy the guitar, but really wanted it.

Some of those guys, though, if you really land them can make your career.  And how would you like to have someone pay for you to deliver one of your amps in person on an all expense paid two week vacation to Italy, where you are staying in private villas, friends vacation home castles, and various other 6-star accommodations?  (5-stars isn't enough for these guys)  Or have them come pick it up in their private jet? 

It's a really nice way to make a living if you can (I wish I could), but they can be hard to please, and their business can be picky.  Most of them don't actually know if your product is any good, and are just going by 1) what somebody on the internet told them about your (insert widget here), and 2) how much it costs.  Which brings up the other side of the coin. 

A few years back, at the Heldsburg guitar festival, someone came in, got up on a chair, and announced to the room, "I'm going to buy the most expensive guitar in the room!"  He proceeded to buy TWO $15,000 guitars.  Sounds good, right?  But if you have anything in your line that ISN'T in that price range, they won't have anything to do with you.  So, if you can get in, you'll make a living, but no working musician will ever be able to afford one of your amps again.  And of course, for amps all those guys are going to want Dumbles anyway.  They are not only expensive, but hard to get, so they must be the best, right?  Yeah, right!  (On a side note, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to divorce one of these guys from some false piece of info they have gleaned from the internet.  It will never happen, so just smile and say, "interesting" a lot!)  (Oh, and no, I don't do a lot of business with these - well, in the casino industry they are called Whales.  I just have a couple of friends who do!  Which is not to say I wouldn't, but I don't much feel like trying to court them, you know?)


Gabriel

[Shrapnel]

Gee, only $6,800 to fly zero-G.  Suddenly the price tag on my amps doesn't seem so much.  I should start marketing to the zero-G crowd.

You have no idea.
{...}
buy the most expensive guitar in the room!"  He proceeded to buy TWO $15,000 guitars.  Sounds good, right?  But if you have anything in your line that ISN'T in that price range, they won't have anything to do with you.  So, if you can get in, you'll make a living, but no working musician will ever be able to afford one of your amps again.  {...}

Gabriel

Sounds like a deal for the old Marshall & Park deal. "Marshall" for the Whales and "Park" for the Commoner. I know the stories have it as Jim wanted to produce a higher gain amp, but the distributor at that time had a locked in exclusive distributorship and would have nothing to do with it, so they were made and sold under his wife's maiden name, Park. So why not adapt to the same strategy if you can land a whale or two... your one brand name just for them, and their exclusivity price bracket, and the other for the working man.

Now... where can I find someone to tickle the ears of whales... :evil6: