-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
SpaceShipTwo is a civilian spaceship that offers trips to suborbital space and back for $200,000 a seat. I’ll wait for the Groupon.
Another video here.
24 thoughts on “SpaceShipTwo Lands at SFO”
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Anon: True about the suborbital. And while they did go straight up more or less, when it started back down, it achieved multiple Mach numbers. Give them time on the orbital speed thing. The high drag configuration should be able to skip in and out of the very thin portion of the atmosphere until it slows down to a more manageable four or five thousand miles per hour. The Space Shuttle just plows back into the atmosphere like a bulldozer. With Rutan, it is always about using finesse rather than brute strength.
I wish them all the best and wish I could join their crew, … or even just wash the damned plane.
Otteray Scribe:
“Bud, the ‘shuttlecock’ design of the Spaceship One was worthy of a Nobel Prize, if they awarded one in aeronautics. To create a dive brake/spoiler to make re-entry configuration no more complicated than putting out the flaps should go down as being right up there with the invention of ailerons and the rudder. Get the airplane back into the atmosphere without burning up, and do it without millions of dollars in heat shield tiles.”
Strictly speaking, I think you’re way off the mark. The shuttlecock was clever for the purpose, but they didn’t have to bleed off 17,000 miles per hour, but only … ZERO miles per hour.
They went straight up. They did not achieve orbit. They came straight down.
I would gladly chop off the limbs of my relatives and yours to get a flight on SpaceShipTwo, but there’s a good reason why it looks like an aircraft much more than what SpaceX, et. al., is doing.
Who says he used minimum standards?
Why did we beat the Soviets to the moon?
How come NASA dint come up with this?
How come Bert Rutan didn’t go to work for NASA? I don’t know the man, but probably because he did not want to be constrained by group think.
Yep, a free thinker with vision coupled with the vision and financial backing of an entrepreneur made this possible.
The 2 goals; to do it and to make money doing it. Ultimately it is a commercial endeavor. It is for the purpose of making money and ultimately the price will come down because that is what most always happens in a free market.
And I may be able to afford the cost in a few years. I would say their ultimate price goal is around $10,000. There are not enough people who can afford $200,000 to make that a long term fare price.
Rutan quote; “Rutan will also not interview with Scientific American, as he claimed that the magazine has “…improperly covered man-made global warming. They drink Kool-Aid instead of doing research. They parrot stuff from the IPCC and Al Gore.”[44]
Yep, he is big government kinda guy, yeah sure and I have a nice piece of property in New York for sale.
Buddha,
Plus all the knowledge they’d have to have used that came from government sponsored colleges. It’s almost like one of humanity’s major features is our ability to form groups and work in them to achieve goals that would be otherwise impossible.
None of which takes away from how frickin’ cool this is, or how much this particular private organization has contributed.
I do know they have some government projects. Those are not made public, and one can only speculate what they are up to. I do know that some of his designs are, shall we say, hard for radar to “see.” What else they have going, who knows?
As for the parts used in airplanes like the spacecraft, you can find most of those in the workshop of many advanced homebuilders. The same technology that goes into aircraft like the Glasair or Lancair goes into Rutan designs Technology that, by the way, Rutan and his associates invented or co-developed.
http://www.glasairaviation.com/
http://www.lancair.com/
A lot.
Rutan and Scaled Composites are truly innovators but they are standing on the shoulders of giants who were by in large government employees or working for other primarily government funded private R&D groups like Lockheed’s Skunk Works (formed at the request of the U.S. Army’s Air Tactical Service Command) given that for until recently space was the sole province of governments.
Buddha, OS, et al
For that matter how much tech. designed by\for a government do you think is in each of those?
Yup sez: “this is what free people can accomplish when government does not interfere in production.”
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Actually, all structures and design elements have to comply with Federal Aviation Regulations and NTSB standards. They are required by law to have a licensed and certified “Inspector, Aircraft” (IA) to check every component, every step of the way, things have to pass an inspection to make sure they meet or exceed standards set by the government. When they fly, they are under the control and direction of the Air Traffic Control system. As a pilot, I would not have it any other way.
What Burt Rutan and his team do, is to think outside the box for design elements. They are not only design geniuses, they are damn good engineers who built sturdy workable machines. As BIL wrote, for these guys it is not about money. It is about aviation and space travel. It is a labor of love.
Nope,
Yep.
Who says chasing a buck is evil? This sure isn’t. -Yep
Chasing a buck, isn’t evil. Nor is this. It’s greed that is evil.
The accomplishments of Burt Rutan and those at Scaled Composites are truly astounding, however, if anyone thinks they don’t have to comply with governmental regulations as an aerospace manufacturer then then they’ve obviously been clubbed in the head once too often with their hardback copy of “Atlas Shrugged”. What drives people like Rutan is not primarily money. Contrast with people like Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon who are driven solely by money. Burt’s a smart guy. He could have gone the Wall St. way if he’d wanted. But he didn’t. Something else drives people like Burt Rutan. It’s the challenge of doing a thing simply to see if it can be done. Rutan would have worked toward his ends of a surface to space single-stage craft even if he’d grown up in Soviet Russia for a reason much purer and simpler than profit motive:
Space calls to him.
this is what free people can accomplish when government does not interfere in production.
When man’s mind is free, the possibilities are limitless.
Who says chasing a buck is evil? This sure isn’t.
Nal’s video was of the Spaceship Two. This is the third flight of Spaceship One, when they first went supersonic with the ‘feather’ out. It worked, making space travel possible for ordinary folks! The average airplane manufacturer could build this thing.
I have no idea how long between trips. One would think they have to run pressure tests between flights to check the integrity of the cabin, given that it is going into pure space. Other than that, I suppose gas ‘n go.
OS,
To create a dive brake/spoiler to make re-entry configuration no more complicated than putting out the flaps should go down as being right up there with the invention of ailerons and the rudder.
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Shear brilliance.
And just think of how inexpensive (relatively) that it will be to maintain and return to service.
How long would it be between trips? any idea?
You mentioned that you’d like to fly it…
Well I have been thinking maybe I’ll fly it when they come out with a version with Lycomings or Continentals on the wings. It’s a little above my grade.
Bud, the ‘shuttlecock’ design of the Spaceship One was worthy of a Nobel Prize, if they awarded one in aeronautics. To create a dive brake/spoiler to make re-entry configuration no more complicated than putting out the flaps should go down as being right up there with the invention of ailerons and the rudder. Get the airplane back into the atmosphere without burning up, and do it without millions of dollars in heat shield tiles.
OS said
“Bert Rutan is one of the greatest aircraft designers and creative geniuses to have ever walked among us.”
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Hear hear!!!
I not only wish I could afford a ride, I wanna FLY that sucker. The test pilot for Spaceship One is a Senior Citizen (yay for the Geritol crowd). If anyone thinks the average pilot would not jump at that, they are sadly mistaken.
Bert Rutan is one of the greatest aircraft designers and creative geniuses to have ever walked among us.
nal,
I;ll just wait til the coupons on the back of Captain Crunch…
Nal,
Another small step for man — in a BIG way.