SpaceShipOne wins X-Prize

geekster · Post by **geekster** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 9:22 am

For those of you who haven't been following it, a $10 Million prize was posted for the first private piloted rocket that could get to space and then do it again within two weeks with a pilot and two passengers or dead weight representing passengers.

Burt Rutan designed the craft. He is the same guy that built the plane that travelled around the world without refueling several years ago. This guy needs to get a medal of some sort. His main investor, Paul Allen (yes, THAT Paul Allen) sunk over $20 Million into the project. Richard Branson got into the show and the craft sported the Virgin(tm) logo on its SECOND attempt. Kind of ironic.

My interest in the whole thing was secondary. When my daughter was born 6 years ago during the height of the dot-com bubble, I decided to seek out some stocks that were cheap but had the potential to be big by the time she was an adult. One of these was SpaceDev. SpaceDev is a private sector space company and built the engines that sent SpaceShipOne to space. When I learned of this, I was afraid the thing would fail and the company's stock would plummet because of its association with it. It is a small company and doesn't have a lot of high-value contracts. A failure of those engines could mean a serious setback.

Thanks Burt, and SpaceDev, for not screwing up!

Rabbi Dali Rick · Post by **Rabbi Dali Rick** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 9:26 am

Yeahhhhhh!!!!!!!!

Go Speed Space Ship One.......

the rebbi

geekster · Post by **geekster** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 9:28 am

Burt Rutan is a national treasure, though. We really need to give that guy an award from the entire country.

DVD Burner · Post by **DVD Burner** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 9:30 am

I dont know....I think it could be a little bit more stable.

But that could be because it has no computer controlled devices on board yet. It is after all a prototype. Hope they fix that. I'm sure they will.

Hats off to them just the same.

cowboyangel · Post by **cowboyangel** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:46 am

put Cheney in the ship with a one way ticket

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 7:15 pm

DVD Burner wrote:I dont know....I think it could be a little bit more stable.

But that could be because it has no computer controlled devices on board yet. It is after all a prototype. Hope they fix that. I'm sure they will.

Hats off to them just the same.

I think that simplicity is the answer, and they've got it just about right. Nothing fancy to break here. It's all controlled with cables. Yes cables break, yes redundant systems are nice to have, but this is a great start.

geekster · Post by **geekster** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 8:00 pm

The pilot thinks he caused the roll by bumping a control surface actuator. Once you get a roll started it can be hard/impossible to stop with control surfaces once the atmosphere thins out, you need reaction jets. My suspicion is that he had to wait until he got into a part of the flight profile where the reaction system was enabled and was then able to stop it. He said it wasnt uncomfortable and it wasn't getting any worse so he just rode with it. In other words, it seems like it looked scarier than it was to experiance.

Sensei · Post by **Sensei** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 4:51 pm

Sensei wrote:Ya know, with a thread title like FOX NEWS, I figured you crazy kids had started a thread in honor of me. How disappointing.

And I thought this thread - SPACESHIP ONE WINS X-PRIZE - was about my johnson. Again, how disappointing.

Woodrow · Post by **Woodrow** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 4:56 pm

Move over, pencil boy... I've taken more ladies to the moon than NASA... I think... Uh, how many have they taken?...

cookiepusss · Post by **cookiepusss** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 5:28 pm

Woodrow wrote:Move over, pencil boy... I've taken more ladies to the moon than NASA... I think... Uh, how many have they taken?...

There you are you little devil! How about you and me we take a walk?

Magikal · Post by **Magikal** » Sat Oct 09, 2004 8:35 pm

cowboyangel wrote:put Cheney in the ship with a one way ticket

No, the ship takes three. How about former (thank God) president Klintoon, her husband, and Teddy "I didn't know she was in the trunk" Kennedy?

But the EPA might have some objection to shooting toxic waste into space

Magikal · Post by **Magikal** » Sat Oct 09, 2004 8:46 pm

sputnik wrote:I think that simplicity is the answer, and they've got it just about right. Nothing fancy to break here. It's all controlled with cables. Yes cables break, yes redundant systems are nice to have, but this is a great start.

AMEN, BROTHER!!!! I absolutely DESPISE this geekster (no offense, geekster!) mentality that says we've got to have fragile, easily broken compukers controlling everything!

I disagreed strongly with making the stealth "fly-by-wire" (not that the engineers in charge exactly asked me

). Tho in that case it was apparently necessary, as the exterior skin design that made it stealthy also made it very aerodynamically unstable, such that no human being could possibly make all the corrections necessary to keep it in the air.

But at some point, somebody somewhere must have asked themselves, "Hey, what happens if we get a bullet thru our fancy compuker?" Or at least I suren'th'hell HOPE someone considered that!

geekster · Post by **geekster** » Sat Oct 09, 2004 9:17 pm

I think the first fly-by-wire was the F-16. It is a single engine aircraft. All the cables in the world wont do you any good if your only engine isn't running. There were several purposes to it ...

Running redundant control systems was as easy as running another electrical path. In a composite aircraft like Stealth, you can think of the fusalage as a multilayer printed circuit board. Electrical paths are lighter than mechanical paths.

There are several other reasons. Cables have not been used on high performance aircraft for decades. They have used hydraulics. The reason is that at high speed or under g-stress, the pilot can not apply enough force to move the control surfaces to the desired point. So now once you have the concept of hydraulics ... there is not much of a leap from a hydraulic motor operating the control surface than an electric motor.

Redundant electrical paths are easier to build in than redundant hydraulic paths. High current paths are run directly to the places the current is needed and low-current control signals are sent from the cockpit. If a path is shot out, another path carries the signal.

There are yet more reasons too. A computer can control the flight path in a very precise way. Military GPS has allowed the computer to know the exact position in X/Y/Z space within fractions of an inch. The flight profile can be programmed to exert G forces that a pilot can barely stand let alone be expected to stand AND fly the plane accurately. This also frees the pilot up to do other tasks such as watch his ass and look for fire coming up at him.

In a single-engine single-seat aircraft, you already have single points of failure. A FBW system eliminates one of those. It is POSSIBLE to complete the mission with a dead pilot in a flyable plane.

There is one additional advantage. Adaptive failure tolerance. If a control surface is inoperative or missing, the computer can compensate and allow the craft to be flown with normal control input. If the pilot wants to turn left, he performs the same control input he is used to and the computer "translates" this to control surface actuation that needs to happen in order to fulfil the pilot's "request".

NASA is working on such a system for computer controlled airliners. Several years ago an airliner lost all of its hydraulics but was landed using only throttle control with the help of an additional pilot who happened to be a passenger. NASA then started working on a program to translate control input to available working systems in order to control a crippled airliner that might otherwise be lost. Computers can think and act a lot faster than a human can and sometimes split seconds are the difference between life and death.

See this article:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articl ... 414B7F0000

You can't do that with a purely mechanical system.

There are advantages and disadvantages to just about any design.

Magikal · Post by **Magikal** » Sat Oct 09, 2004 9:30 pm

Wow! I stand chagrined.

geekster · Post by **geekster** » Sat Oct 09, 2004 9:38 pm

Oh, please don't be chagrined! You made a great post and if you read that article, got to see things from a slightly different perspective than you might have otherwise. As I said, just about any design has its advantages and disadvantages. There are a LOT of tools in the box and there is probably no one tool that is the best for EVERY job (not even perl).

On a glider ... cable control is the way to go just about every single time. Every technology has its place.

SpaceShipOne wins X-Prize

SpaceShipOne wins X-Prize

We all win..........