From Discovery documentary: Tier Two and beyond

The other day I was watching the first part of "Black Sky: The Race for Space," the Discovery Channel documentary on SpaceShipOne and the X Prize.

There was a great segment where Rutan discussed some of his future plans. The first thing he showed was an orbital variant of SS1, which had a huge rocket roughly twice SpaceShipOne's length mounted to the ship's rear.

During the segment he said that Tier One is the name for the program for suborbital flights, Tier Two will cover orbital flights, and Tier Three will cover flights beyond Earth's orbit (including flights to the moon and other planets).

Rutan showed designs for space hotels, which included a dome for "sitting back and contemplating in zero-g," and exercise rings. He also mentioned that he had been contacted by someone with the New Horizons program, to put a 100g piece of SpaceShipOne on the probe to Pluto -- he actually started shedding tears of joy at this point, which was quite moving.

(He said that New Horizons was a private flight though, which confused me a little, as I'm fairly certain it's NASA-funded.)

-- Neil

[pasted earlier to the sci.space.policy newsgroup]

Does anyone have the clip or screenshot of the vehicle? I have Discovery but did not the program.

does anyone know when this docu about rutan will be showed in the netherlands/europe?..guess it has only be on in US

much to my displeasure, i missed it. i don't suppose anyone taped it or knows somewhere you can download/stream it at?

Man, that guy is ambitious! One really heartening thing for me about his plans is that if he is successful, there will be manned flights to other planets in my lifetime (being a bit younger than Mr. Rutan). I'm also delighted with his idea of sending thousands of space probes around the solar system within 25 years. There is so much to learn!

Did he give a timeframe for orbital?

In in England, and I saw it on Discovery last monday night. I'm not sure what the schedule for the rest of Europe is, but I would imagine it has been aired there also.

I also noticed the clip you are talking about (in fact, it was by far the most interesting part of the whole documetary, which was all extremely good). Some points I picked up on:

SpaceShipTwo will be the craft that Branson uses for Virgin Galactic, but is still a SpaceShipOne derivative. On the outside it appears to look much the same, but they showed an internal schematic which shows that it is larger, with 7(or maybe 5?) seats inside. The other thing I noticed was that it had two seperate hybrid engines, with the nozzles mounted in a line vertically (ie, one above the other). From this I would imagine they share a common oxidizer tank, but it gets split amongst the two fuel grains to give an increased amount of thrust.

The other thing he did show, while talking about going to orbit, was another craft which looked very much like SpaceShipOne mounted on the end of a long cylindrical booster stage, although there were no details disclosed about how it worked. There were also pictures of some space-habitation, although that is almost definitely just Rutan dreaming

Keep in mind that all of these were just pictures and sketches on the computer, although the SpaceShipTwo plans looked quite well thought out. So, expect something which looks like SpaceShipOne but with two nozzles at the back to appear on a TV screen near you

He also mentioned that they were thinking of building a larger White Knight, although I've also heard that the existing one can have it's wing-span extended. However, my expectation is the current one, with an extended wing-span, will be used for testing, but when they sell the proper new versions they will just sell an enlarged version of White Knight.

Quite a lot of info to glean from a 45 second clip

I recorded the programs on my DVD recorder. They are also available from Discovery on DVD format.

Javman

Sev:

Right now, I'd take Rutan's "dreaming" over most people's "reality".

So you mean that these documentaries can be ordered? From where if i may ask?

Just follow the link in the first post of this thread. However, it's not worldwide available.

Scaled has posted test logs for both X-prize flights:
http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/logs-WK-SS1.htm
It sounds like there will be no more SS1 flights.

Quote:
"...thus closing the book on our Tier One program."

I guess he will be concentrating on SS2 and Tier 2 from now on.

There is also an interesting explanation of the rolls in the first X-prize flight, and how they avoided them in the second.

ough, thanx, but then again, it sucks. They cant even ship it across the Canal, who made this up....? Lol, its even in NTSC and R2.

Thats nice, i doubt they realize that europe is a big market.....

man that Program was amazing, i just watched it.

It gave you a sense of how MUCH this really meant to them, Especially burt rutan When he shows his Designs and tell us about the future of space travel and the pluto thing. I feel So happy that he won the Xprize. i didnt Realize how emotional he is about space.

hes brilliant, also he IS the kind of person we need as a leader in Space Travel. we need a few thousand more people like burt rutan !.

There is simply no one like Burt Rutan. No one has his expertise or list of achievements to simply get investors to him and not the other way around.
I'm sure there are a lot of geniuses out there, but no one with achievements or the capability to get money drawn into the game. And its still a game about money unfortunately.