04.22.03

Space Flight for a Low $10 Mil

Posted in forum archive at 3:34 pm by

There is an interesting article about a new breed of consumer spacecraft

The Tier One programme was unveiled at the headquarters of Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, in California on Friday. It consists of two entirely new flight vehicles, rocket motors, a mobile ground station and a flight simulator. “It is a complete manned space programme, with all its support elements,” says Rutan.

The mother ship is twin turbojet aircraft with a 25-metre wing span, called White Knight. The eight-metre spacecraft, called SpaceShipOne (SS1), has a crew of three and is slung under the belly of White Knight, which carries it up to 15,000 metres.

At that point, the SS1 separates and its rocket engine ignites, powering it into a steep climb at speeds of up to 3.5 times the speed of sound. SS1 will peak at an altitude of 100 kilometres. A long free fall back to Earth follows during which SS1’s three astronauts will experience about 3.5 minutes of micro-gravity in a “shirt sleeves environment”.

The question becomes not whether the thing will work but who the heck was in charge of design:
http://www.newscientist.com/ns_images/9999/99993645F1.JPG