It’s about engineering at Rocketplane

The Space Review ^ | 03/21/05 | Sam Dinkin

[KevinDavis]

Rocketplane has modest goals to achieve passenger service in a flight envelope that was tested 45 years ago with X-15. This will be risky, but the bulk of the challenge will be engineering and economics and no longer science.

[KevinDavis]

[Steely Tom]

Will they use anhydrous ammonia / LOX as fuel-oxydizer system, as X-15 did?

(steely)

[KevinDavis]

I don't know

[SpaceBar]

The X-15 is nothing but remarkable. Google some photos of it, sit back, and realize that the people who designed it used little more than sliderules and pencils. It represents a level of engineering unsurpassed.

[KevinDavis]

Too bad we stopped the x-15 project. We could have gone a lot futher with the x-15 route...

[Dominick]

Will they use anhydrous ammonia / LOX as fuel-oxydizer system, as X-15 did?

I think not! The nitrous and rubber propellant wont be practical, ala Rutan, but, I bet there are alternatives. Perhaps some liquid nitrous-polymer mix?

The LOX makes me the most nervous on a commercial flight.

[FReepaholic]

Fascinating

[glorgau]

I the market for this could exist. If a company paid $100,000 to rush somebody to the other side of the world to talk business, it would be clear that they want to talk now! :-)

[Paradox]

X-15 was well ahead of her time. I'd put the SR-71 in that category as well. Designed the old fashioned way, and it worked!

[SpaceBar]

X-15 was well ahead of her time. I'd put the SR-71 in that category as well. Designed the old fashioned way, and it worked!

There is a generation of engineers who have either passed or are living in gated senior communities in sunny Florida and Arizona that are owed a great debt from the engineering community for showing us how the old school folks did it before CAD workstations with integrated finite-element analysis capabilities. They are imho the real heroes or our culture. And yes, the SR-71 is a thing of beauty. Its concave shape evidently allows it to thermodynamically go supersonic and remain that way with a minimum expenditure of energy. Way neat.

[af_vet_rr]

The X-15 is nothing but remarkable. Google some photos of it, sit back, and realize that the people who designed it used little more than sliderules and pencils. It represents a level of engineering unsurpassed.

I'll go you one further - if we hadn't been stuck in Vietnam, Chuck Yeager's little school he was putting together would have been churning out pilots to fly into and out of space. The designs were being developed in the '60s, and the Air Force was going to be flying into and out of space, and none of this Space Shuttle boondoggle either. The money for the school (I believe it became the USAF Test Pilot school or something along those lines) and the air/spacecraft/rocketplanes/whatever was cut down to nothing because Vietnam was taking up so much.

Little bit of trivia, I believe the crash that Yeager goes through in the 104 in 'The Right Stuff' was during the time he was setting up the school (the heavily modified F-104, I believe it was called an NF-104, was going to be one of the "trainers" for the pilots while the real spacecraft were being built. Yeager happened to find a problem with it, and somehow walked away from it).

Imagine where we'd be if General Yeager hadn't had his funding cut, and we hadn't had to suffer through using the Shuttle (which wasted a lot of resources, both materials and manpower, as well as money, and which cost a lot of unnecessary lives).

We'd literally have been flying into and out of space for over 30 years, rather than going the rocket route (although, to be honest, the Saturns were incredible rockets, and with modern materials and technlogy, would still have a place in our space program, even today).

[af_vet_rr]

To further expand a little about something I mentioned above (about the Saturn), I went to a seminar/lecture that Burt Rutan gave last fall. He mentioned something that I never really thought about - that as soon as NASA has a new toy (i.e. launch vehicle), they immediately discard the previous vehicle, regardless of how safe and/or useful it was.

For a few minutes, he spoke how NASA should have kept on using the Saturn, and just kept on improving upon the design, and how useful it could have been, and how many missions (and money) it could have saved, in using it for things that we didn't need the Shuttle for.

He threw out some figures about if the Saturn had been improved upon (with newer engines, computers/guidance, materials, and fuels). It was pretty staggering how much more efficient a "modern" Saturn would have been over a Saturn used in '69 or '70.

He made a quick comment about how NASA and Congress couldn't have kept the Saturn around, because people would have seen how expensive/wasteful the Shuttle was, and NASA and the pork-barrelers in Congress couldn't allow that to happen.