The test pilot of Burt Rutan's suicide machine should keep an image in his mind of his space ship approaching the earth at a random angle of attack and a whole cluster of problems arising from the fact that he will be able to do nothing about it because in order to save weight Burt Rutan did not put attitude control jets on his space ship. Burt's test pilot, passengers, had better be strapped in pretty good, the fuel tanks near empty when that bird gets to the high point of its sub-orbit because if it starts to tumble for any reason the pilot will not be able to do anything about the situation until he starts to hit real air very fast, and by that point there may not be any set of stick and rudder maneuvers that will have any positive effect on restoring the pilots control of the bird.
If SpaceShipOne starts to tumble at the high point of its sub-orbit, the ship, the pilot, and the passengers are going to become an incinerated meat byproduct.
Burt is a great Aeronautical engineer, but from what I have seen of his space ship he does not understand what it is going to take to put living meat in earth orbit and bring it back down on a re-usable space ship.
The space shuttle is little more than an expensive aging suicide machine. The Federal government has spent billions of dollars on the program, and it is time to shut the space shuttle and the space station down.
Burt Rutan has not really shown that he has a better solution for getting living meat into orbit and brining it back down on a cost effective basis.
Burt Rutan's company will either run out of money or kill a few want to be astronauts or both. He may launch a very nice sub-orbital flight and crash his spaceship in the ocean, but there is at lease one thing on the following list things Burt Rutan's company is never going to do.
America has flown living meat in space on around 200 times and we have created 17 incinerated corpses to prove it.
All of the real science and technology of the space program comes from unmanned launches and the manned space program has never been anything but a high-flying white elephant heavily subsidized by the US Federal Government.
The USA has two working space shuttles, a partially complete and nearly useless space station, some Russian space partners we massively subsidize with our tax dollars, and very little to show for our efforts except some neat pictures from the seventy's some nifty moon rocks, and the national pride that comes with these very impressive accomplishments.
The USA needs a space program for the 21st century and not the 20th century.
The fact is that space is a really big cold dark place and not many humans are not going to be traveling very far into it anytime in the next few decades.
I wish Burt Rutan well, but as a man who has seen a Titan IV blow up on the pad up close enough to make my ears ring I can only repeat what Von Braun keep shouting at the NASA engineers 35 years ago, "Rocketry is not aviation". Burt Rutan's vehicle does not have the lift to put three people in orbit, and it does not have the protection to bring them down.
He has dispensed with attitude control jets and opted for a high-drag reentry shuttlecock configuration. He's only going to be weightless for one minute. He's not going to get anywhere near the ocean (It'll all happen between the Edwards Flight Test Range and Mojave Airport.).
Actually, it does have them. There is a good article about SpaceShipOne in Popular Science this month. Rutan has designed a novel way to handle reentry that will, if it works as planned, make for a very easy flight.
In any case, he's not in this to make money carrying passengers. Sure, he wants the $10 million, but SpaceShipOne is no more than a technology demonstrator.
1. Rutan has never lost a pilot on any of his vehicles.
2. the craft in question is designed for reaching sub-orbital; that is it. The idea is that this serves as a baby step towards greater things. It is a "hard enough" goal, tough to reach but not impossible.
3. Since it is not his goal to put folks into orbit (at this point), the rest of your points might be valid but are not really addressing what he is doing.
Burt Rutan isn't trying to put "meat" into orbit. The X prize is very specific. Put 3 people up to the edge of space (100,000 KM) and return them safely, then do it again within 2 weeks. He designed Space Ship One to do that job and to gather data for future projects, nothing more. He succeeds and the world will change. Instantly.
Rutan puts his floating wing design forward specifically to deal with the random attitude problem that you envision. I'm sorry, but I'll put more faith in Mr. Rutan's understanding of experimental aircraft than in yours. I would gladly climb into a Burt Rutan experimental craft any day of the week. Not because I think it's fool proof, but because I think the best mind on the planet is working on it and I'd be honored to die in one of his experiments, if it added to the forward movement. Pretty bizarre for a pesimist, huh?
Burt is a great Aeronautical engineer, but from what I have seen of his space ship he does not understand what it is going to take to put living meat in earth orbit and bring it back down on a re-usable space ship.
This is the crux of the problem I have with your post. You ignore what the X Prize is and what Rutan is doing. HE'S NOT PUTTING SOMEONE IN ORBIT. End of argument. If he were he'd design a different craft. More likely he'd have something derived from the DC-X (he built the aerodynamic body for that craft).
All of the real science and technology of the space program comes from unmanned launches and the manned space program has never been anything but a high-flying white elephant heavily subsidized by the US Federal Government.
This is so wrong that it is off of the scale of wrong. Count how many robot craft have failed (2/3 of mars missions, for example). Now, do a little research and figure out how many "failed" missions astronauts have salvaged. It doesn't work without people in the loop. It's not worth doing, ultimately, without people in the loop.
The USA has two working space shuttles, a partially complete and nearly useless space station, some Russian space partners we massively subsidize with our tax dollars, and very little to show for our efforts except some neat pictures from the seventy's some nifty moon rocks
Actually, the USA has three working shuttles in the fleet, Atlantis (OV-104), Endeavor (OV-105) and Discovery (OV-103). Your apparent ignorance of this fact speaks volumes about your credibility on this subject. However, I'll assume that you just "slipped a groove." We all do that. The rest of that paragraph, however, is offensive.
Yep. The ISS is partially complete, but not nearly useless. If we could get rid of mini-minds like you exhibit and the Proxmires of the world we'd be doing OK. Would I like something other than Clinton's ISS? Yep. Will I trash ISS because it's not perfect? Nope. People died to put that craft up there. Don't dismiss what they've done so flippantly. It's offensive.
The most offensive statement is "very little to show for it." OK. You use a home computer, don't you? Chalk that up to Appollo. Do you have high blood preassure or any other modern medical ailment? The diagnosis and treament is almost certainly directly derived from the the bio-med work done by NASA. You fly on planes in the last 20 years? Apollo derived systems. GPS, JDAM, weather satellites, cell phones... shall I go on?
You want to crawl into a shell, go ahead. Don't try to drag the rest of us with you. Mr. Rutan's "guinea pigs" will do as well or better than their spiritual forebears. Ask the hundreds who died in the early days of flight if their sacrifice was a waste. Their spirits will rise up and shout you down. Grissom, White and Chaffee would simply punch you out. No, you haven't touched a nerve.