Posted on 06/29/2006 9:21:59 PM PDT by KevinDavis
Two years ago last Wednesday—June 21, 2004—the space world’s attention was focused on a small airport in the desolate high desert 150 kilometers from Los Angeles. Or, more precisely, in the skies above Mojave Airport, as a small winged spacecraft, built using lightweight composites and powered by an engine that effectively used laughing gas and rubber as propellants, became the first privately-developed manned vehicle to cross the 100-kilometer boundary that serves as the demarcation line for space.
From a technical standpoint, that achievement was not that impressive: governments have been sending people into orbit, and not just brief suborbital hops, for over four decades. What set SpaceShipOne’s flight, and the two that followed later in the year, apart was in part that the vehicle was developed privately by a renowned designer (Burt Rutan) for a renowned billionaire (Paul Allen), who spent on the order of $25 million on the project. More important, though, was the belief that SpaceShipOne had opened the door to spaceflight by a much wider portion of humanity: people for whom the “Right Stuff” referred to not their physical prowess, flying expertise, nor academic credentials, but instead primarily the size of their bank account.
(Excerpt) Read more at thespacereview.com ...
The whole story paints a kinda gloomy picture of the future of private space flight. Of course, I have no hope of ever flying into space anyway -- these systems are just toys of the very rich, and will remain so for quite some time. I think the main obstacle to it is that there's a limited number of people who will pay to do it once, hardly anyone who will (or can) pay to do it more than once, and significantly lowering costs is something that is very hard to do.
To orbit, a space craft needs to achieve a velocity of 7.75 Km/sec, or 27,900 Km/hr, or 44,900 MPH at an altitude of 250 Km or just over 150 mi.
Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne achieved a velocity of zero MPH at an altitude of 100 km, or just under 67 mi.
That is the difference between a space craft and a thrill ride.
Oops, math error:
27,900 Km/hr is correct, but should translate to 17,100 MPH, not 45,000! Main point still stands.
Further, the Space Shuttle has to re-enter the atmosphere and scrub off that 17,000 MPH, while SpaceShipOne re-entered the atmosphere at 0 MPH. That expains why SpaceShipOne didn't need very much heat shielding.
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