What Scaled are up to now!

If designing, building and flying suborbital ships is trolling... well, troll me more!

Here's an interesting article which appears to have escaped Sigurd's posting on Latest News:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/422/1

...I thought Paul Allen's remarks (or non-remarks) were intruiging.

Thanks, I receive email updates from the Space Review... but I've been very bussy lately.
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just great, what a great article

I was disturbed by this quote:

While Allen was happy to talk about some of his other interests—when asked about this season’s prospects for his NFL team, the Seattle Seahawks, he said “The defense will be better”—he was reticent to talk about future space-related investments. I asked him, “Michael Griffin said that NASA is interested in contracting delivery of cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. Is that a market you’re interested in?” His response was, “I can’t answer that question.” The only thing I’m reading into that answer is that he’s a smart business man.

That or he really cares more about football than spaceflight. Let's hope it's the former.

They cancelled the planned white knight/X-37 flight on friday after they had some problems with a data link. I'd forgotten all about this. They havent set a new date yet but hopefully we should see something pretty soon if it was only a minor problem.

http://www.dailynews.com/antelopevalley/ci_3637266

It ran off the runway:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3217961/

All kinds of problems:
http://starshipmodeler.net/cgi-bin/phpB ... hp?t=36508

Here's an article giving a few details on SS2.

http://www.flightglobal.com/Articles/20 ... ealed.html

I cant believe that virgin would want to go for the 7G reentry force quoted because it sounds a bit much for most people to deal with.

The 7G reentry is a direct consequence of the higher flight (140 km). The farther the space craft falls before encountering the atmosphere, the harder it hits.

Not necessarily... it's a function of the ballistic coefficient and reentry angle. For example, the reentry load on the shuttle is closer to 3 gs, and it's coming from orbit... it's due to their shallow reentry angle.

The low L/D of the feathered configuration and low kinetic energy precludes a shallow reentry angle and that is the direct cause of the high loads. On the other hand, shallow angles usually result in a stability/control issues.

The interesting thing is that the article gave enough technical information that one can start academically sizing the SS2 vehicle; it would only take a few assumptions to a WK2 sizing exercise... I wouldn't be surprised if some professors don't give this information to students as an exercise this fall! Has anyone started yet?

You are absolutely right galantz. I wonder what reentry load rocketplane is expecting, since they have a better L/D. I know there has been some disagreement between Rutan and others about reentry safety. Rutan firmly believes in his care free feather, but it does impose higher G loads when falling back to the atmosphere vertically.

Why do I keep thinking WK2 will turn out to be the same vehicle as T-Space's VLA?

Hello, bad-astra,

I too am interested to find out if that's the case like I said in the Financial Barriers section.

Ass far as I remeber the White Knight 2 will be unveiled this year. Perhaps then there will be informations about maximum payload and the like.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

For quite another reason I had a look to t/Space's website today. In the list of partners Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. is to be found.

Ball's task but I find this interesting for another reason - Ball is the developer of ballutes whose work NASA has been reported to be interested in 2004. There is a thread about Ball's technology in the Technology section.

So there is a business relationship between Ball and t/Space and thus between Ball and Scaled Composites as the developer of the CXV itself and the VLA.

Perhaps this ends up in Scaled Composites-developed vehicle using Ball's ballutes in the future(?)... I remember already having posted somewhere the possibility that Ball' s ballute-technology might be integrated into an orbital Scaled Composites-vehicle.

...





Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

Virgin Galactic have said that the interior of SS2 will be unveiled on 28th September.

http://www.flightglobal.com/Articles/20 ... splay.html

The article also gives a few more details on WK2.