Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Colonol Dekker on December 08, 2009, 01:25:28 am
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I saw it on the news this morning. Apparently it'll cost two hundred grand for six minutes flight, and could be in service as early as two thousand and eleven. . . . According to the beeb. I'm sure you can find it by Google :(
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I saw that on the BBC as well. It looked very interesting. Obviously much more expensive than the average person could afford, but $200,000 is a far cry from the huge price tag for a flight up with a shuttle crew. Of course you only get 6 minutes of weightless floating, but hey, it's a bargain. :P
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It's about time.
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Would make more sense for them to offer it as a long distance rapid transit for the upper crust folk who need to continent hop to manage their fortunes. That would push it main stream and allow for the development of larger vehicles.
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Hopefully the cost will be driven down overtime. Regular airtravel used to be prohibitively expensive for ordinary people until relatively recently.
One definate future application is using this type of technology to dramatically reduce international travel times.
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Would make more sense for them to offer it as a long distance rapid transit for the upper crust folk who need to continent hop to manage their fortunes. That would push it main stream and allow for the development of larger vehicles.
No value in it, thanks to the Internet. The amount of infrastructure you'd need would be prertty serious - after all, the business world's massively diversified since the Concorde got going, and even that didn't survive the advent ofg cheap high speed intercontinental information transfer. For this you'd need (minimum) spaceports on the east and west coast of America, One in Europe, one in China and possibly future ones in India, Moscow and the Middle East. And even then you'd need to have a jet there to get you from the city you're in to the spaceport (wqhich'd likely be in the desert), then from the next spaceport to the city you need to be in - you might be saving a few hours, but you'd be spending hundreds of thousands to do it and changing planes not once, not even twice, but three times or more. I just don't see it.
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Would make more sense for them to offer it as a long distance rapid transit for the upper crust folk who need to continent hop to manage their fortunes. That would push it main stream and allow for the development of larger vehicles.
No value in it, thanks to the Internet. The amount of infrastructure you'd need would be prertty serious - after all, the business world's massively diversified since the Concorde got going, and even that didn't survive the advent ofg cheap high speed intercontinental information transfer. For this you'd need (minimum) spaceports on the east and west coast of America, One in Europe, one in China and possibly future ones in India, Moscow and the Middle East. And even then you'd need to have a jet there to get you from the city you're in to the spaceport (wqhich'd likely be in the desert), then from the next spaceport to the city you need to be in - you might be saving a few hours, but you'd be spending hundreds of thousands to do it and changing planes not once, not even twice, but three times or more. I just don't see it.
International business trips are still a common occurence, and speaking from personal experience 13+ hour flights are not fun.
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International business trips are still a common occurence, and speaking from personal experience 13+ hour flights are not fun.
Yeah, they're common, but they're not going to be replaced by something that's vastly more expensive for only a relatively short amount of time saved.
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Got to agree with Black Wolf here, it's just not cost effective to use suborbital flight merely to traffic people around. Though it would be a nice ride. ;7
With 6 minutes of weightlessness, I wonder how far the flight actually takes you. Guess it depends on how far this thing glides on reentry, but I'm guessing a good few thousand miles.
Oh hey, here's their wobsite: http://www.virgingalactic.com/ (http://www.virgingalactic.com/)
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International business trips are still a common occurence, and speaking from personal experience 13+ hour flights are not fun.
Yeah, they're common, but they're not going to be replaced by something that's vastly more expensive for only a relatively short amount of time saved.
Short amount of time? Theoretically you could go across the pacific from the US to China in just a couple of hours. Compare that with what we have now that takes 13-15 hours. I would call 11-13 hour time savings to be pretty significant. Plus, there is also the potential for prices to go down.
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The time saved in crossing the ocean in the spaceship would be eaten into by the ime it'd take to get from your destination (say, New York) to New Mexico, and then from wherever China's theoretical spaceport might be (presumablythe south of the country, although near-equatorial launches might not be neccesaryfor spaceplanes the way they are for rockets) to where you want to go. Not to mention the inonvenience of changing planes twice or more. It'd all add up - even conservatively, giving yourself say, an hour and a half in the air for each sub trip, half an hour to board each plane and get takeoff clearance, you're looking at a 6 or 7 hour trip. Time's saved for sure, but is it enough to justify the presumably massive price tag for the individual flights and the facilitys to launch these vessels? (The new mexico one is costing 200 illion) I just don't see there being enough of a market for it, even if you're dual using facilities for tourism and travel.
20 or 30 years down the road, maybe we'll see it s cheap enough to justify, very similar to the way early aviation went from enthusiasts to the rich to the general public over a few decades, but not now, and not with this ship.
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SpaceShip Two certainly isn't designed to serve as any sort of regular commuter service, but that doesn't mean that such designs don't already exist. There's been a lot of talk in the past about the concept of something like a suborbital jetliner, a craft that can take off from a normal runway, achieve suborbital flight, and land again on another normal runway. At least as far as I'm aware, there's not a whole lot keeping us from building something like that right now, besides the non-cost-effectiveness and the issues with getting everything to mesh properly.
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space ship two is pretty much designed only to travel about 100 km, all be it straight up. what you need is an aurora type scramjet powered hypersonic aircraft. assuming ss2 is still using hybrid rocket engines (i dont see why not after spending so much money developing them). hybrid engines are essentially a safer alternative to solid rocket boosters, in that oxidizer flow may be cut off to stop combustion of solid fuel (though im not sure if they are re-ignitable). even the mythbusters managed to build one. nasa doesnt seem to want to touch hybrid rocket engines for some reason.
scram is really the only way to go for a hypersonic airliner, it can operate in very thin air, it can breathe air so no oxidizer needs to be kept onboard and they operate to a maximum theoretical speed of mach 7. scamjets do actually have to be brought up to altitude and about mach 3 to power up though. so it would either require dual propulsion or a carrier aircraft capable of reaching the minimum ignition requirements (were talking sr-71 type performance).
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SpaceShip Two certainly isn't designed to serve as any sort of regular commuter service, but that doesn't mean that such designs don't already exist. There's been a lot of talk in the past about the concept of something like a suborbital jetliner, a craft that can take off from a normal runway, achieve suborbital flight, and land again on another normal runway. At least as far as I'm aware, there's not a whole lot keeping us from building something like that right now, besides the non-cost-effectiveness and the issues with getting everything to mesh properly.
Concept is a concept. Practical applications are a different thing.
Cost-effectiveness and ability to actually build something are also quite important here on Earth.
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Cost affectiveness and time efficiency < bragging rights and exclusivity
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bragging rights and exclusivity ----> cost effectiveness and time efficiency.
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Didn't I just say that albeit backwards :wtf:
If I had a few million, i'd happily lose a chunk to go orbital without having to pass cosmonaut or astronaut basic training.
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Well, I meant "leads to," because eventually people will want to stop wasting exorbitant amounts of money when they can do it for cheaper.
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SpaceShip Two certainly isn't designed to serve as any sort of regular commuter service, but that doesn't mean that such designs don't already exist. There's been a lot of talk in the past about the concept of something like a suborbital jetliner, a craft that can take off from a normal runway, achieve suborbital flight, and land again on another normal runway. At least as far as I'm aware, there's not a whole lot keeping us from building something like that right now, besides the non-cost-effectiveness and the issues with getting everything to mesh properly.
Concept is a concept. Practical applications are a different thing.
Cost-effectiveness and ability to actually build something are also quite important here on Earth.
Obviously, but if you get a good proof-of-concept working and then give it twenty or thirty years of refinement and cost-cutting, you'll likely wind up with something that's pretty damn feasible in the end.
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Awesome. But $200,000 is a bit more than I can afford :p
Although... If they can make more than just the prototype, I wouldn't be surprised if the costs went down significantly.
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We need to hypnotise Gates somehow into funnelling his bank interest into this being mass produced.
On a semi related note (future-now etc) I saw at edenproject.com that you can buy a toy car with a tiny hydrogen fuel cell and a tiny solar hydrogen plant. For ninety quid.
Discuss take two. ;)
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I see these projects as first steps to attaining practical, economical, mass space operations. Regardless of whether or not the SpaceShipTwo project continues, the launch platform is undeniably a terriffic system for experiments or ferrying other launch vehicles... and it's stressed to carry a payload greater than the current launch vehicle... :yes:
The real prize is getting an air-launched vehicle to enter orbit with a useful/living payload. When we can do that, we'll be one step closer to expanding our presence in the solar system, and maybe just a hair closer to expanding in our galaxy. :D
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The time saved in crossing the ocean in the spaceship would be eaten into by the ime it'd take to get from your destination (say, New York) to New Mexico, and then from wherever China's theoretical spaceport might be (presumablythe south of the country, although near-equatorial launches might not be neccesaryfor spaceplanes the way they are for rockets) to where you want to go. Not to mention the inonvenience of changing planes twice or more. It'd all add up - even conservatively, giving yourself say, an hour and a half in the air for each sub trip, half an hour to board each plane and get takeoff clearance, you're looking at a 6 or 7 hour trip. Time's saved for sure, but is it enough to justify the presumably massive price tag for the individual flights and the facilitys to launch these vessels? (The new mexico one is costing 200 illion) I just don't see there being enough of a market for it, even if you're dual using facilities for tourism and travel.
That presumes a lot of things. You're assuming there would only be one spaceport per country, which may not neccisarily be the case. Spaceports also do not have to be near the equator, it makes things easier but it isn't a requirement. It just means they will take a smaller number of people.
Also I don't know about you, but if it takes 6-7 hours to go to say beijing from san francisco, that's still a 50% time savings, many people consider it significant. :p
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Awesome. But $200,000 is a bit more than I can afford :p
Although... If they can make more than just the prototype, I wouldn't be surprised if the costs went down significantly.
space ship one was the prototype, this is the actual production model.
Spaceports also do not have to be near the equator, it makes things easier but it isn't a requirement. It just means they will take a smaller number of people.
i was actually kinda shocked that i found out my icy state has a spaceport out on kodiak island. probibly for launching satellites into those trickey polar orbits. still it doesnt change the fact that space ship two's technology is not really suited to any kind of long range operation. realistically speaking if you wanted to save time flying id first eliminate all the stops. start by getting rid of the idea of a centralized hub. you could instead come up with a small jet aircraft with stol capability which can operate out of small airports and private airstrips with global range. then you think you can probibly charter a gulfstream 5 for a lot less than an ss2 ticket.
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The time saved in crossing the ocean in the spaceship would be eaten into by the ime it'd take to get from your destination (say, New York) to New Mexico, and then from wherever China's theoretical spaceport might be (presumablythe south of the country, although near-equatorial launches might not be neccesaryfor spaceplanes the way they are for rockets) to where you want to go. Not to mention the inonvenience of changing planes twice or more. It'd all add up - even conservatively, giving yourself say, an hour and a half in the air for each sub trip, half an hour to board each plane and get takeoff clearance, you're looking at a 6 or 7 hour trip. Time's saved for sure, but is it enough to justify the presumably massive price tag for the individual flights and the facilitys to launch these vessels? (The new mexico one is costing 200 illion) I just don't see there being enough of a market for it, even if you're dual using facilities for tourism and travel.
That presumes a lot of things. You're assuming there would only be one spaceport per country, which may not neccisarily be the case. Spaceports also do not have to be near the equator, it makes things easier but it isn't a requirement. It just means they will take a smaller number of people.
Also I don't know about you, but if it takes 6-7 hours to go to say beijing from san francisco, that's still a 50% time savings, many people consider it significant. :p
Do you consider time spent in airports in obligatory security bull**** etc. as a part of travel time?
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I was using his numbers, so I dont know.
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We'll still have to wait a while for practical space planes. These little tourism hops don't really have much practical range - they expend their energy going up, not in any particular lateral direction. That's why they're sub-orbital. They get to a high alt above the planet, but then they just come back down afterwards. They just don't have the capacity within them to travel farther or get into orbit.
So no, SpaceShipTwo does NOT have the potential to take you to china in two hours from a distant point. It just flies up, then glides down. :)
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like i said, charter a gulfstream 5, its cheaper (and they haul ass).
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100 years ago, when aviation enthusiasts said that some day planes would go across the Atlantic in a single day, many times faster than an ocean liner and even took over the role of shipping people from Europe to the USA and back, some people didn't believe, others said it would be too expensive, and everything else that was written in this thread was also said back then.
I won't be surprized if 20 years from now my flight flight from Poland to the US lasted 3 hours and reached 50-70 km above sea level.
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I don't think anyone's saying we won't have 3 hour flights from US to Poland someday. They're just saying it won't be with Spaceship Two.
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Yalp. SS2, like all these other little commercial tourism jobs, just goes up a little... It doesn't have the longitudal velocity to go any useful distance over land. It just flies up and comes down, as said before. However, it's a fantastic step forward. Now, if you could combine a light, cheap air-launched vehicle with the neccessary propulsion systems, you might just get a great orbital delivery vehicle.
Here's a cool thought: Manufacture a ramjet with what amounts to a solid propellant. The propellant is fairly light, it already has an oxidizer (the atmosphere), and all it needs is a little additional forward velocity and to be ignighted once at speed. You get the additional velocity you need via JATO/RATO, though the acronym is a little inaccurate as you're not taking off. Once at speed, the solid fuel in the ramjet is ignighted, burning off as the previous layer has been burned... you get the idea. Once at critical altitude, the ramjet drops off the ship and the main engine is engaged. Congratulations, now you've managed the velocity you need to get into orbit... ;7
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Well, there is an interesting project of single-stage to orbit spaceplane, which probably everyone knows about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon). I think that SS2 and following planes will be focused on small-scale personnel transport, with Skylon or similar designs as cargo hauler.
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i read about that a few months ago, the concept for the engines is brilliant and if they pull it off means Britain might actually have a notable contribution to space flight
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pretty impressive engine. looks way better than scram. also unlike scram you could fly the whole mission only on one set of engines.
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I almost forgot that I had this...
[attachment deleted by admin]
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whats witht he funky shape of the engine nacelles? is that to direct thrust downward or to allow the structure to generate aerodynamic lift?
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I can't say, Nuke.
This is an X-Plane model, and I believe the author of the model did his research to a fairly extensive degree with the available published materials. The nacelle design might have also been to angle the exhaust down a little, allowing the craft's AoA to remain at a more reasonable angle while still providing thrust at a greater degree upwards.
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that might be so. when you have high power at high altitude an aircraft can become rather lift happy. you may not want to rise up to high while you accelerate. flying scram engines in orbiter for example, you kinda have to stay in a certain sweet spot, which is not easy because all the ship wants to do is climb. this would allow the vehicle to keep its nose below zero aoa to keep it in the zone while it accelerates to the desired velocity. essentially you want to get as close to orbital velocity as you can while using the airbreathers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_SABRE
heres an article on the engine. it has a good cutaway image, but with the odd shape its kinda hard to tell if the engines are angled down or not. it might also be to better angle the shock cones into the airstream.
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Hmmm...
Well, as you are imaginably well aware, at high alts the atmosphere is quite thin, so your AoA might have more to due with the lift you're getting than anything else. Furthermore, most high-speed aircraft use symmetrical, close to symmetrical, or other types of "neutral" airfoils, so lift is generally closely related to your angle of attack, barring fuselage lift, of course. At extreme speeds and high altitudes, the rise the aircraft is experiencing might be due to (a.) the reduced gravitational attraction between the aircraft and the planet and (b.) the fact that the aircraft's speed is so great that it's starting to pull away from the planet - as you said, you're trying to attain extreme velocities while still remaining in the atmosphere. Condition (a.) is somewhat arbitrary, as you really need to get far out to have that as a factor, but I think (b.) is a likely case, especially when you're going like, oh, Mach 8 or greater...
The whole "lift-happy" thing is assumably just an incorrect assessment based on a reasonable observation.
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both airspeed (squared) and air density are proportional to the lift produced by the airfoil. the basic lift formula is pretty much Cl * V^2 * D * A * 0.5, where Cl is the coefficient of lift, V is the airspeed, D is the air desnity, and A is the wing area, so velocity plays a much larger role hin how much lift is produced than density. aoa increases the Cl by about 0.11 per degree over 0 (and inversely for negative aoa) until a stall occures. 0.11 is pretty much used as a slope constant for non-stall wing operation since all airfoils seem to have the same slope for some reason. as for gravity, it basically follows the inverse square law. gravity doesnt very by much within the atmosphere. still it is a factor. i learned all this stuff while working on my atmospheric flight script. most of it works but im sure theres some flaws in my understanding of the physics.
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I believe most of that is correct, however lift characteristics are also closely tied to the physical geometry of the airfoil itself. If you're dealing with a symmetrical cross-section airfoil, ideally you should not be generating any lift in direct forward flight. With a cambered airfoil, the foil itself has a sort of AoA already inherent in the foil itself, meaning that in forward flight, zero AoA, the foil will generate lift when accelerated/propelled through the air.
With extreme speeds and extreme altitudes, this is what I see happening with a symmetrical, neutral lift at zero AoA foil (on a spaceplane, of course):
Given such velocity (also aided by the fact that low atmospheric density provides little resistance for the craft in question, aiding in high speed flight) and such altitude, the craft, despite being at 0 AoA in relation to the planet, will climb as its rotational velocity/acceleration (in relation to Earth) is such that it pulls away from the downward force of gravity whose origin (in this case) of course is the planet.
I can't say truthfully that this is indeed the case, but I'm pretty sure it's a valid argument. Thus, to continue accelerating in a line (which is actually an arc - it is a planet, after all...), you'd need to have a negative AoA. This would be even more apparent in an aircraft with a cambered airfoil...
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As an aside, if your craft is within the atmosphere but has a velocity which is a large fraction of orbital velocity, then the amount of lift needed to remain at a given altitude will be less. This is because the vertical acceleration of your trajectory is much less. With a good lift/drag ratio, a craft can coast, unpowered, through the upper atmosphere at suborbital speed for a very long time.
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also some aircraft designs angled their wings angled in relation to the longitudinal axis. so that they have a slightly higher than normal aoa in level flight. neutral airfoils in this position would still produce some lift (.11 per degree). actual airfoil geometry is mostly represented in the Cl. when it comes right down to it, the only way to figure out what the Cl of an airfoil is, is to put it in a wind tunnel and test it.