Posted on 06/27/2004 9:43:09 PM PDT by anymouse
If there was a single word to describe how Burt Rutan and his team felt on the day before their historic flight, it would be confident. All the work preparing SpaceShipOne for its flight has been completed days earlier, and Rutan noted that on Saturday, two days before the planned flight, the hangar was dark all day long. Mike Melvill, the pilot selected to fly SpaceShipOne, could barely contain his enthusiasm during the preflight press conference. “I am ready to go, boy, I am ready to go!” he said in a manner not unlike an athlete revving up for a big game. “We are going to win the X Prize! Put your money on it!”
Given those statements, and Rutan’s record, it would be understandable to treat Monday’s flight as a fait accompli, virtually certain to succeed in reaching space provided the weather cooperated. After all, if a designer as accomplished as Rutan, and a pilot as experienced as Melvill, were as confident as they seemed, then flying SpaceShipOne to at least 100 kilometers should not be a problem. As it turned out, though, the flight was nowhere near as straightforward as planned, and while SpaceShipOne succeeded in crossing the imaginary boundary of space, it did so by only a matter of meters. An eyewitness account
Overnight, one might have wondered whether the flight would take place at all. The desert wind howled all night, easily gusting in excess of 70 kmph, rattling buildings and splashing water out of motel swimming pools. These conditions would certainly have prohibited the flight of SpaceShipOne if they persisted but, as predicted, the winds died down as dawn neared. By sunrise the winds were light and the skies clear, perfect conditions for flying to space.
Events then followed apace. By 6:45 am—about 15 minutes behind schedule—SpaceShipOne and its carrier aircraft, White Knight, taxied into position at the end of the runway. During the taxi Melvill stuck his hand out an open window on SpaceShipOne and waved to the cheering onlookers. With their preflight checks complete, the vehicles then sped down the runway and took off.
For the next hour the anticipation grew as White Knight and SpaceShipOne, monitored by several chase planes, flew into position. The crowd scanned the skies, trying to track the progress of the vehicles, while listening to reports broadcast on loudspeakers. (In many locations, though, including portions of the media area, the loudspeakers were inaudible.) KLOA, a local radio station providing live coverage of the flight, broke away several times for commercials, news, and country music, much to the aggravation of those listening for information about the flight.
Then the moment finally came. For those out of earshot of the loudspeakers, the first indication that SpaceShipOne has separated and fired its engine was the appearance of a contrail in the eastern sky, just below the Sun. The contrail went straight up, bisecting the Sun, forcing the crowd to squint and awkwardly block the Sun to see the contrail. The contrail streaked up for over a minute, giving the crowd every indication of a successful flight. Within a few minutes, the contrail had dispersed, leaving no evidence that a flight into space had taken place.
For about the next half hour, the crowd again scanned the skies, looking for SpaceShipOne and its chase planes. At the same time news and rumors spread about the flight: yes, it had reached space, barely, but there had been some unspecified “anomalies”. The problems didn’t seem serious at first, and SpaceShipOne glided to an uneventful landing at the airport, to the cheers of the crowd. A short time later SpaceShipOne was towed to a position directly in front of the media and VIP viewing areas; Melvill then exited the vehicle, thrusting his arms skyward, and was embraced by Rutan. In brief comments to the assembled media, Melvill noted that it had not been a trouble-free flight, but it was successful nonetheless. Only later, after Melvill climbed atop SpaceShipOne for another victory salute and a trip down to the public viewing area, did it become clear how close to failure the flight had been. Things that go bang in the flight
At a press conference about two hours after landing, Rutan and Melvill provided reporters with details about the flight and what went wrong. The first problem took place as soon as the engine was lit: SpaceShipOne rolled 90 degrees to the left. Melvill then “stomped” on the rudder pedals, and the vehicle then rolled 90 degrees to the right. “It’s never ever done that before,” he said. “At that point, I was kind of reaching for the switch to shut it down, because I was going to lose control.” However, he was able to right the vehicle and bring the nose up to the proper level of climb.
This “roll off” had been seen before to a much lesser degree on previous flights—Melvill said that he had about a 30-degree roll to the left on the previous flight last month—but the cause is uncertain. “I don’t think it was my inputs that caused that problem, but it is possible,” he said. “I might have stepped on the rudder pedal or caused a mistake that caused it to roll.” He did note that when the engine fired up he felt an acceleration of 3g “eyeballs in” and 4g “eyeballs down”, a combination that he described as “very, very disorienting.”
After that glitch, though, the powered flight went according to plan up until near the end. At that point, Melvill said, “I tried to trim the nose up a bit more to just get a little more height, and that’s when I had the anomaly with the trim system.” That problem caused the vehicle to roll, sending it over 30 kilometers off course in just five seconds. The problem also kept the vehicle from reaching its planned peak altitude of nearly 110 kilometers. Melvill said that he switched to an unspecified backup system and was able to restore control of the vehicle.
The “roll trim” problem appears to have been caused by the failure of an actuator that moves the stabilizers, according to Rutan. In supersonic flight, moving the elevons alone doesn’t provide enough control; in those conditions, Melvill said, “you can no longer move the stick, it’s like it’s welded to the airplane.” In that environment, the entire stabilizer is trimmed using actuators. If the two stabilizers get out of sync, Rutan said, “you’re out of control in roll.” That suggests to Rutan that one of the actuators failed during the flight. “We believe we lost one of those trim actuators, like it became inoperative, which means that when we tried to trim and pitch, we got a lot of roll going.”
Then there is the issue of the mysterious bang. During his brief comments shortly after landing Melvill reported hearing an odd, disconcerting bang during the flight, but was uncertain as to its nature. At the same time a large dent—perhaps 30 centimeters across—was visible on the underside of the fuselage, near the rocket nozzle in the rear of the vehicle. The buckling of that piece of the fuselage appears to be the source of the noise heard by Melvill.
Rutan explained that the piece that failed is a fairing that covers the underside of the motor. “This fairing had never flown before,” he said, because this was the first flight of a larger nozzle designed for operation at higher altitudes. He emphasized that the piece was not critical to the flight. “It wouldn’t put the ship in jeopardy if the whole thing fell off,” he said. “It’s there to give us a little less drag, and the ship looks a lot nicer, too, with that fairing on.” What caused the fairing to buckle remains unclear, but Rutan said it had nothing to do with the other problems experienced during the flight.
Success and future plans
Despite the problems experienced during the flight, SpaceShipOne succeeded in what Rutan and financial backer Paul Allen set out to do: be the first privately-developed manned vehicle to fly into space. At the press conference Rutan clutched a printout of data from the vehicle’s internal navigation system, showing it had reached a peak altitude of 328,491 feet—just 124 meters over the 100-kilometer threshold. The altitude needed to be confirmed by radar tracking from nearby Edwards Air Force Base; as of late Wednesday that information had not been posted on the Scaled Composites web site.
With that success came some pomp and circumstance. Patti Grace Smith, the FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, awarded Melvill with astronaut wings, the first ever given out by the FAA. “The flight today opens a new chapter in history, making space access within the reach of ordinary citizens, like you and me,” she said. Later, a representative of Guinness World Records awarded Scaled Composites a certificate for their history-making flight.
However, the problems experienced during the flight, most notably the roll trim issue, made it clear that there were still some obstacles standing between Scaled and the $10-million Ansari X Prize. “There is no way we would fly again without knowing the cause [of the roll trim problem] and without assuring that we have totally fixed it, because it’s a very critical system,” Rutan said. “The anomaly we had today is the most serious flight safety problem we have had in the entire program.”
Rutan suggested that SpaceShipOne may fly one or more additional test flights before making its run at the prize. “If this flight today had been perfect, we had planned for the very next flight to be first X Prize flight,” he said. Given the anomalies, he said he wasn’t sure yet whether additional flights were needed. “In the next several days we will make a decision and then announce to X Prize.” The real power of imaginary lines
The fact that Scaled can claim some success with the flight involved some degree of luck. SpaceShipOne made it into “space”—that is, beyond 100 km—by less than 125 meters, barely more than the length of a football field. Had the roll trim problem started an instant earlier, or taken a split-second longer to correct, SpaceShipOne might well have come up a similar distance shy of 100 km, and that could have made all the difference in the perception of the flight.
For that, we have an arbitrary definition to blame. In the 1950s an informal group of aeronautical scientists, led by Theodore von Karman, sought to define an altitude at which space began for the purposes of, among other things, ensuring that existing aviation records for speed and altitude would not be shattered by spacecraft. That group calculated an altitude below which “significant” thrust would be required to keep an object in orbit. Those calculations were done in units of nautical miles, and the resulting figure was, according to one scientist, a “very uneasy number to remember.” Von Karman then suggested a nice round number, 100 kilometers, which was near the number they calculated, as an alternative. This was eventually accepted by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, and is sometimes called the Karman Line in his honor. The X Prize later accepted this figure for its competition; prize founder Peter Diamandis noted that they had considered setting an altitude requirement of 100 miles, but rejected that after potential contenders noted that this higher altitude would be much more difficult to achieve.
There is nothing that significant about 100 km; conditions there are little different than at 95 or 105 km. Indeed, it is not the only definition for space: the Air Force (and now the FAA) award astronaut wings for those who exceed an altitude of 50 miles (80.5 km). However, thanks in large part to the X Prize, 100 km is now perceived by the media and the public as the boundary of space, an imaginary line where the final frontier begins.
While we can dismiss this boundary as having little scientific merit, it does have real significance. People are often fascinated by these arbitrary boundaries, drawn up by people rather than geography or science; they love, for example, to have pictures of them taken straddling such a state or national border. Of course, the positions of those arbitrary borders can have far more serious geopolitical implications as well. So, like it or not, we are most likely stuck with 100 km as being the “boundary” of space.
This makes SpaceShipOne’s flight Monday very fortunate. Had it fallen a bit short—say, 99.9 km altitude instead of 100.1 km—the flight might well have been perceived as something of a failure. After all, this was the flight that was supposed to go to space, and that arbitrary boundary of space is 100 km. From an engineering standpoint the difference would have been trivial, but in the media we might have read articles about how SpaceShipOne came up short in its bid to reach space. Close, but no cigar.
So, Rutan and company should feel at least a little bit lucky. Lucky that the problems experienced during the flight could be corrected to allow SpaceShipOne and Mike Melvill to return safely, and lucky that the problems took place, and were corrected, when they did. They should also perhaps feel lucky that Theodore von Karman liked nice, round numbers and the metric system.
Space ping
SpaceShipOne makes history — barely
BARELY ???
Sounds like a leftist crap reporter complaining that this was done by AMERICAN Private Enterprise!
Or they have one very jealous headline writer or editor!
How was the 100.1 kilometer altitude, measured?
BARELY
Could be said of Chuck and the X-1.
I want to know how far south it traveled....it sounded like they were pretty far off course.
I know the aircraft over LA were talking about it.
This is like barely pregnant!
I met with a friend Friday night that was at the event, he is an aviation writer and will be publishing an article on this, he had some pretty amazing pictures, along with some amazing stories from the aviation world. I love this stuff, anything with wings is fine with me!
Kick ass! 100 km may just be a nice round number, but it's higher in the sky than most of us have ever been.
Geez. So if you win a ballgame by a point it is a failure because you didn't win by 20? If you win a race by a nose you are a failure because it wasn't by 50 meters? If you pass a test with a perfect score you are a failure because you didn't get the extra credit points? Why bother writing this stupid, meaningless article?
Jealous can be a real bitch to bear. Anyway, saying that this barely made history is like saying well gee I got one foot and not two on Mars so guess we didn't do anything *LOL*
Will they award him astronaut wings? I read they are awarded if you exceed a height of 50 miles or is this reserved for military attached(as in the case of most NASA astronauts)?
Try everyone but a few of us on this planet.
Hmmm.....the local paper did not talk about all these problems.
Perhaps because THREE people who came from my hometown are working on the project.
But, even the mainstream news media did not mention all these problems as a big deal.
This article is trying to make it sound like it was a big deal. No, it wasn't.
You will naturally have some glitches here and there, but you know what, they made it.
This article is much ado about nothing.
I'm a private pilot and I am very excited about this too!, I believe that we may be decades away now from a schmuck like me being able to take myself to orbit by my own hand. They were laughing once at that, the laughter is dying down after the SpaceShipOne flight. May take a big chunk of my 401K but whats a dream worth right? Only live once.
No kidding. I can't figure out if the author is just jealous or wanted them to fail.
I believe Butan thinks he can have tickets as low as 10,000 to 15,000 bucks once things get going.
Amazing. It will take a lot of years of saving money specifically for such a ride, but it would be worth it.
And...at least it would be a reachable goal, unlike the million dollars you have to pay the Russians to get on there......:)
> How was the 100.1 kilometer altitude, measured?
Extremely accurate triangulating tracking radar,
courtesy of Edwards AFB next door.
The thing I don't understand is why Mike didn't hit the
kill switch after uncommanded the post-ignition roll.
Possibly it was pilot's choice whether to burn off
fuel or attempt a precautionary landing with nearly
full fuel and a latent roll problem during landing.
He made it to 100km. He was awarded astronaut wings.
The writer, however...
"Sounds like a leftist crap reporter..."
Yep. When the government first attempted space flight, the would-be astronauts died in an explosion. This more simple space vehicle [apparently] probably will blow up a lot less. KISS, 'Keep It Simple, Stupid.' And, with more corporate backing, it will get more powerful. FReegards....
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