DailyDirt: Another Golden Era Of Spaceflight Ahead..?
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Successfully re-using a rocket seems to be on the cusp of being an economically practical technology. The traditional aerospace industry is going to see a bit more competition from cheaper rockets that can still launch satellites into high orbit. Private space companies are starting to catch up with NASA’s experience, but the business is still tricky because there’s always a chance a very expensive rocket will just explode on the launchpad.
- Being a test pilot for a private space flight company requires flying skills most pilots don’t pick up flying a Cessna. Military pilots know how to fly in a tight formation and might have experience flying upside down or in other extreme situations. More civilian pilots are going to need to train to get the “right stuff” in order to fly spaceships. [url]
- At the 32nd Space Symposium, plenty of aerospace companies were present, competing to build next generation rockets to get into orbit and beyond. SpaceX, Blue Origin and others are trying new fuels and 3D printing techniques to make rockets cheaper and more quickly, so that rockets can be re-used or replaced within weeks, instead of months. [url]
- A crowdfunded Russian satellite could become the brightest “star” in the sky soon. The Mayak (Beacon) satellite project is planning to put a 16-square-meter tetrahedron-shaped reflector in orbit, and it could be launched before the end of the year. Larger versions of such a reflector could do some crazy things like direct sunlight to parts of the earth — for longer days or other Bond-villain-esque schemes. [url]
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Filed Under: crowdfunding, leo, manned missions, mayak, rockets, satellite, space, space exploration
Companies: blue origin, nasa, spacex
Comments on “DailyDirt: Another Golden Era Of Spaceflight Ahead..?”
Steely-Eyed Missile Men and Women
Human space flight is still in it’s infancy.
In order for humanity to achieve the ability to make space flight as mundane as traveling by jet there need be a giant technological leap forward away from giant flaming missiles with their myriad of parts undergoing tremendous vibrations/stresses which make them very dangerous for any persons (or animals) to “fly” (ride atop).
Steely-eyed missile men and women indeed.
The whole space shuttle era should serve as evidence that making space craft “reusable” doesn’t necessarily make it cheaper. I do realize that the space shuttle itself was not the whole banana – it had to ride into orbit on booster rockets which themselves were disposable. But the space shuttle program was sold to Congress as a way of making space travel cheaper because the shuttle component could be reused.
Meanwhile, the vastly cheaper Russian disposable space capsules now provide the only way for humans to reach the ISS. However, supplies are occasionally sent up on disposable unmanned rockets.
Thanks to Star Wars and similar movies, we’re conditioned to seeing flying “space airplanes” with wings and wheels that can take off and land under their own power. As a practical matter, this just doesn’t work. One lesson we ought to have learned by now: bringing wings and wheels into space makes no sense.
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Yeah, because reusable rockets are totally the same thing as reusable capsules…
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One of the main problems with the Shuttle was that it was designed for launching and recovering large payloads for the military. Missions which largely didn’t materialize.
It was much larger, more complicated and required more support personnel than should have been required for most of its missions.
So I wouldn’t use the Shuttle as proof that winged shuttles are generally more expensive to develop and require a high launch rate to amortize costs.
The X-37 is an example of cheaper, more conservatively designed, although admittedly unmanned, space plane.
And the Dream Chaser is an example of a promising manned space plane design.
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Re: Space Shuttle...
Actually, the Shuttle program re-used its solid rocket boosters…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Booster
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…At greater cost than not reusing them.
Still, as an X-vehicle for testing new technologies and tweaking them until they matured (like multiple generations of SRBs and main tanks), the Shuttle was an enormous success. But it should have been replaced by a more mature design from lessons learned 15 or so years earlier.
DARPA Space Plane Challenge
DARPA recently announced Phase-2 of it’s Space Plane Challenge.
The two primary goals of the challenge (as I see it) are to “fly 10 times in a 10-day period (not including weather, range and emergency delays) to demonstrate aircraft-like access to space” and “launch a 900- to 1,500-pound representative payload to demonstrate an immediate responsive launch capability”.
It’s a shame that NASA killed the McDonnell Douglas DC-X project back in the ’90s, otherwise we’d already have achieved this.