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Posted on 07/08/2003 9:43:15 PM PDT by Brett66
Burt Builds Your Ride to Space
Burt Rutan wants to fly into space every Tuesday for five months, to test a concept and prove a point. And he wants to do it soon: He may make the first flight before the December 17 Wright brothers centenary.
Chances are, he'll succeed.
That was the buzz in Mojave, California, when Rutan, one of the world's most innovative aircraft designers, recently unveiled what could become the first successful privately funded manned space program, a system composed of two startlingly original vehicles: the insect-like White Knight mother ship, and SpaceShipOne, a winged, rocket-propelled pod slung underneath. The pod will be carried by the airplane to 50,000 feet, then detach and rocket three occupants to suborbital altitude—more than 300,000 feet. There they will experience a brief period of weightlessness and some amazing views before heading back to Earth.
Rutan is best known as the designer of the Voyager, the aircraft that his brother, Dick, and Jeana Yeager flew nonstop around the world on a single tank of gas in 1986. If he can pull off this flight, he and his team could prove that the Holy Grail of reusable spaceship design—a low-cost spacecraft that can fly safely, frequently and on schedule—is within reach at a time when NASA's shuttle program is in a severe technical, administrative and fiscal crisis.
All the hardware built by Rutan so far is ready to go. "This isn't arm waving—this is the real thing," says Jim Benson, CEO of SpaceDev, which is developing a rocket engine for the project.
Rutan obviously has his eye on winning the X Prize, $10 million that will go to the first team to launch a three-person spacecraft to an altitude of 62.5 miles and do it again within two weeks using the same hardware. First announced in 1996 by a St. Louis-based foundation, the X Prize is funded only until the beginning of 2005. Yet Rutan is already looking beyond that money and that deadline: He believes cheap suborbital flight will spark a renaissance in aviation and aerospace design. "If I can do this with my little company," Rutan says of his 100-person firm, Scaled Composites, which is backed in the space venture by an unnamed partner, "there will be a lot more people who say, 'I can do that too.'"
The identity of Rutan's unnamed partner has generated ample speculation. Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is one likely suspect. Employees at Allen's company, Vulcan Ventures, won't comment, and Kay LeFebvre, vice president of Scaled Composites, says only that "the customer has asked us to be quiet." That the "customer" might be Allen, a known aerospace enthusiast, is plausible. "Paul and I had many late-night discussions about how cool space travel would be," says Vern Raburn, who helped build Lotus and later managed Allen's investments, and more recently founded Eclipse Aviation, a business-jet manufacturer. Raburn flew with Allen to Mojave in Allen's private Boeing 737 to discuss space exploration ideas with Rutan in 1996—the year Rutan now says his space-vehicle program was kicked off.
Part 2
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
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THE ROCKET Passengers aboard SpaceShipOne (above) will experience 3.5-G acceleration on the ride up to 62.5 miles—attributable to the vehicle's light weight (approximately 6,000 pounds) and fiercely powerful hybrid rocket engine. That will be an ordeal for even the heartiest adventurer: Late test pilot Milt Thompson said of the X-15, which offered a comparable ride, that it was the only airplane he ever flew in which he was "glad when the engine quit." The three-seat SpaceShipOne will be trundled up to space via the White Knight mother ship (below right). The passenger craft attaches to the White Knight's belly for the first 50,000 feet of the journey.
Courtesy Scaled Composites
THE LAUNCHER The White Knight (above), powered by two used jet engines culled from an Air Force trainer ("the cheapest engines I could find," says the designer), shares many parts with SpaceShipOne and can be used as a simulator for the smaller vehicle.
Photograph by Misha Gravenor
If a guy can build a double stage to orbit vehicle with spare parts then NASA should have the starship Enterprise by now with as much money as they have had to play with.
I would love to be on your ping list for stuff like this!
No, you don't, and it's always appropriate when you do. Thank you very much for the wonderful service you provide. I really do appreciate it. God bless you and yours.
/john
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