[extropy-chat] RE: SPACESHIP ONE WINS $10 Million Ansari X Prise

[Ody777 at comcast.net]

On SpaceShipOne and Bert Rutan, "Matus" wrote (4 Oct):

<<You don't have to know him for this to be a spectacular event!  To any
extropian this is wonderful news.  This is the guy who brought us home
built aircraft, give him ten, fifteen years and we will have home built
spacecraft, woo hoo!>>

 
For insight on the historic significance of SpaceShip One, see Rand Simberg’s excellent essay, “The Path Not Taken”: 
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/6/simberg.htm

Simberg argues that the U.S. space program took a disastrously wrong turn in the 60s when it abandoned ROCKET PLANE technology in favor of the BALLISTIC MISSILE approach.  In the rush win the “Space Race,” NASA opted for blasting people upward with what were essentially modified ICBMs--since they were already available “off the shelf.”  Meanwhile, rocket planes, which were promising but more experimental (the X-15 program), were stillborn:


“As Tom Wolfe chronicled in The Right Stuff , while Lyndon Johnson  was declaring that our nation wouldn’t go to bed by the light of a communist Moon, and while the German refugees from Hitler’s rocket  program were in Alabama developing the vehicles that would eventually take us to the Moon, there were rocket planes flying in the Mojave Desert, released from B-52 bombers. They sundered the skies, probing the upper reaches of the atmosphere and even  temporarily leaving it. These were the first, tentative space vehicles, and had they not been interrupted by the urgency of  beating the Soviets to the Moon, their successors might have continued. They might have flown higher, and faster, and faster yet, until at last they flew fast enough to defy the gravity of the Earth and reach orbit. 

“That might have been another road to space, a path not taken—one that might have provided a more incremental, affordable, and reliable approach, instead of one in which we put small capsules on unreliable and expensive munitions, and hoped for the best.”


SpaceShipOne is a rocket plane, a return to X-15 technology--and the beauty of that is the prospect of continuing, step-by-step improvement:


“The new private approach is... one with which  aviation enthusiasts will be familiar. It’s how aircraft technology advanced rapidly between the two world wars. And it’s the same  incremental approach used on the old experimental rocket planes out in the Mojave in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before the Moon-race mentality took over. In this approach, vehicles are tested incrementally, slowly expanding the envelope of performance. The emphasis is on low cost from the outset. As Jeff Greason, president  and co-founder of the private company XCOR Aerospace, has explained,  it’s easier to figure out how to do something reliably and  affordably and then get more performance out of it, than to focus on  the ultimate performance first and try to reduce its costs and  increase its reliability later. 

“Thus the suborbital spacecraft in private development today can be scaled up  to reach greater altitudes, extending the performance envelope  further with new vehicle designs, while still maintaining low costs  per flight. And if there are multiple companies building such  vehicles, they’ll be able to learn from each other’s mistakes and innovations as well. Mach 5 can become Mach 7,  Mach 7 can become Mach 12, Mach 12 can eventually become Mach 25 and orbit, as experience is gained and designs evolve.”


Simberg has a lot more to say about how the space program went off course, but the most exciting thing about reading the article is realizing that, by all indications, we’re now returning to an approach that really makes sense.

For more on SpaceShipOne, go to: 
http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/ 

For information on a company that already has near-term plans to use rocket planes for commercial spaceflights:
http://www.virgingalactic.com/index.html


Rob Masters