Almost a year after the loss of SpaceShipTwo, Doug Messier has some questions about their switch back to a rubber engine. The answers are unsatisfactory. And there’s this perennial bit:
Despite Richard Branson’s increasingly dire pronouncements (The Time for Climate Action is Now) about how rising global temperatures and sea levels threaten the planet (and his private island home), it looks as if Virgin Galactic will go back to using a carbon spewing rubber hybrid rocket engine to power SpaceShipTwo.
That’s the word from Virgin Galactic officials in Mojave, who say that the rubber/nitrous oxide engine they previously abandoned is now performing better than the supposedly superior nylon/nitrous oxide engine they abandoned it for in May 2014. It’s not entirely certain, but it looks that way.
Branson won’t lose any sleep over this further expansion of his carbon footprint. He never has. Anyone who can passionately advocate for the climate while flying around the world in a private jet, expanding his fuel-gulping airlines, launching three new massive cruise ships, and burning rubber in the upper atmosphere is clearly untroubled by irony or contradictions. Here’s a guy who urges billions in new public spending on climate change while living as a tax exile in the British Virgin Islands.
As Emerson said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
How is a switch between rubber and nylon fuel that big of deal when it was the nitrous oxide that went boom in the fatal ground test?
Superb article by Doug.
Branson’s stance on the Co2 of SS2 surprises me not at all; it’s just yet another manifestation of blatant hypocrisy by a man who has been an abject hypocrite on the issue for years.
Regarding the engine flip-flop-flip; my blatant speculation is that the flip back to rubber is, from VG’s POV, warranted because the nylon engine’s many kludges (complexity, plus the needed helium injection) made it a worse choice than the rubber engine they’d originally rejected due to performance issues. IMHO, this means that all the performance shortfalls they made the swap away from rubber to avoid are now baked into the cake.
From the comments on the article page, I learned that the NO2 tank is structural, so moving to liquid would take a major redesign. However, one of the thoughts raised in comments sounds interesting to me; go ahead and use the No2 tank as part of a liquid system. It doesn’t have to contain N02; they could build a liquid system based on their LOX/RP1 Newton engine (the one they are developing for their sat launcher).
My guess, if they use rubber, SS2 will never carry passengers to space on operational missions, because it will lack the performance to do so.
–My guess, if they use rubber, SS2 will never carry passengers to space on operational missions, because it will lack the performance to do so.–
It seems at this point that if it can only fly to say, 80 km, one flies to 80 km
and give discount on the seat price, and focus on flying a lot passengers to 80 km. Once you flying, then move forward on SS3 which will go further than 100 km.
If take Branson at his word, he said the plan was to go further than 100 km hop into space.
So instead of flying thousands to space with SS2, you fly hundreds and continue to improve the SpaceShipOne so not only goes 100 km but goes further and develop it so it can fly tens of thousands.
And whole point should be to get to level where millions have flown.
Or it should not be about a plane, it should be about a business, so SS2 is prototype plane for the future business..
Damn, I wish I could say what I know about this…
Since I can’t, let me respond to the hypocrisy part of it. Sir Richard has drunk the CAGW Cool-Aide by the cubic meter, but that doesn’t make his airlines a huge betrayer. He’s invested in biofuels for jets (a losing proposition, but an honest effort), but even if he hadn’t… A 747 gets 75 mpg per passenger, including that passenger’s luggage, making it one of the most efficient means of transportation around. The only more efficient one is the railroad train, and unless I’m very much mistaken, Virgin operates railroads in the UK. Spaceship 2 as a “carbon spewer” harks back to an article by an incompetent “scientist,” released the same day Spaceport America was dedicated. The “science” in that paper consisted of concatenating computer models (all of which were inaccurate), and the sole piece of “data” included was the “scientist’s” eyeballing of the exhaust plume of Spaceship 1 (from a picture on the Internet) to estimate it’s “black carbon” content. Combined with grossly overstated weights for Spaceship 2, and a flight rate of 1,000 flights per year, it was supposed to have a barely detectable but finite local effect on “climate.”
Doug, stop the criticism by envy. Maybe Branson has bought the CAGW bull, but he’s not a hypocrite.
A 747 gets 75 mpg per passenger, including that passenger’s luggage, making it one of the most efficient means of transportation around.
Uh, our SUV gets 90mpg per passenger on a good day on the highway, including that passenger’s luggage… even with only two of us in it. Fully-loaded, it could be getting over 200.
Besides which, one airline flight across the Atlantic and back is more miles than I drive in a year. Remove the airliners, and most of those flights go away.
“Remove the airliners, and most of those flights go away.”
Really? People are not going to want to cross the Atlantic anymore? And with airlines gone but runways still in place on both sides of the Atlantic, nobody would see an opportunity and rush in to fill a void left by Virgin?
BRB. I have to go patent a turbofan with a built-in coal gasifier.
Airliners, not airlines.
Most people have no real need to cross the Atlantic. They do it because they can. Take away the airliners, so the only option is a small jet or prop plane where the trip would cost as much as a business class ticket does today, and most of those flights would stop. The people who continued flying would be the ones who had little choice.
And they’re going away over the next few decades, anyway. The big threat to airliners from drones is not that they’ll crash into one, but that we’ll be able to hire a VR drone wherever we were thinking of traveling, and no longer need to actually go there.
Really? You always drive your SUV with 6 people in it? See, most people, including me, drive their big vehicles alone. Which is why my Toyota Tundra and I get 17 mpg. I get that with just me, or me and 5,000 pounds of stuff in the back, but that’s all I get.
Here in the DC area, there is a commuter term with which I am only recently becoming familiar: “slugs.” Slugs are people who hitch rides with commuters so that they can go in the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes. There is a plethora of HOV lanes in the DC area, and they are mostly empty, except for the commuters lucky enough to hook up with a slug. The vehicles in the HOV lane then get a whopping 45-60 mpg per passenger, while the overwhelming majority of the traffic is reduced to a stop-and-go city-mileage because the unclogged lanes are unavailable.
BTW, trains get something like 448,000 mpg per passenger. That’s what my MARC commuter train got. It also took me 6 hours a day to commute, which in turn cost me my marriage and almost my life. There are some trades that are not worth it.
And I base the 6 people on your saying it is an SUV, which typically get on the order of 15 mpg. If you really have one that gets 45 mpg, I’d love to know what kind it is.