Here’s the Twitter hash tag. I’m getting ready for a talk I’m giving this afternoon.
[Update a few minutes later]
Doug Messier, who is sitting next to me, has been doing quite a bit of posting at Parabolic Arc.
Category Archives: Space
Neil Armstrong Speaks
Neil Armstrong is the keynote speaker at the suborbital conference, which has just started in Palo Alto. I’ll be live blogging his speech. Alan Stern is introing him, describing him as a pioneer in suborbital spaceflight with the X-15.
[Standing ovation]
Thanks for the warm welcome, and appreciate the opportunity to describe suborbital flight generations back. As a boy was an admirer of great aircraft designers, and in recent decades, Burt Rutan has earned a place on that list. Burt occasionally ribs the government for spending hundred of millions to attain same altitude as he did with SS1. Back in his day the hot aerodynamics field was transonic flight. Transonic wind tunnels were unreliable with shock waves bouncing off the walls giving poor results. Interest grew in a special aircraft for investigating transonics, a purely research airplane. Research aircraft weren’t new — the Wrights’ first plane was one, but the government did do it until the forties, when they started the X series with the X-1 (first to break the sound barrier in level flight) in 1947. Other aircraft were tailless, swept-wing, delta wing, etc. These led to the Century-series fighters.
(Navy) Skyrocket in particular taught us a lot in the early fifties, setting altitude records and first aircraft to reach Mach 2. Air Force decided to recapture record, and achieved it with Mach 2.44, but lost the aircraft with pilot recovery. X-2 was made of stainless steel, first flight in 1955, new speed record of almost Mach 3, and new altitude record of over 130,000 feet. Final flight hit exceeded Mach 3, losing both aircraft and pilot, due to flying into region of steadily decreasing stability, due to high altitudes where conventional aircraft controls were ineffective. Hydrogen peroxide thrusters were added to the X-1B, which Armstrong flew, but it was retired due to fatigue cracks with limited RCS control results.
Then came Sputnik, and the NACA became NASA. NACA, Navy and Air Force had decided earlier in the decade that they needed a faster airplane capable of higher altitude. Heat could be handled by hot, insulated, or cooled or ablatively cooled structure. Highest temperatures could be handled by nickel alloys. New research aircraft would be hot structure and fly to highest operating temperature of those metals, which was about Mach 7, which was audacious, because no aircraft had flown past Mach 2 without going unstable. So that was the X-15, whose purpose was to fly fast and hot, not to fly high. But an aircraft that could reach those kind of speeds would have enough energy to achieve a hundred miles altitude, though that wasn’t the goal. But since it could do it, the NACA decided to utilize a peroxide RCS system, testing it first in the NF-104, which Armstrong flew to 90,000 feet, where the aerosurfaces were completely ineffective. Used yaw motion induced by spinning turbines to do control tests.
X-15 designed to hold one human and enough propellant to get to Mach 7. X-15 had 22-foot wing with low aspect ratio and no ailerons. Roll control by differential elevators. High-Mach directional stability provided by upper and lower fins which were both flying rudders. Lower tail was jettisoned for landing, and if it didn’t jettison, Joe Walker said it would be the “fastest plow in the world.”
Rocket engine was 57,000 lbf thrust, with anhydrous ammonia and LOX. In first flight some parts got to 1500 deg F, cherry red. Velocities and altitudes above the atmosphere used an inertial measurement unit, doing analog single integrations (digital far too slow then to do real-time position and velocity). Did a lot of research, including flow studies, astronomy, heat transfer, etc. Had a remarkable record. Three aircraft, many tens of flights over a period of years. Showing a short film of a mission profile while taking questions.
Q: What does he think about commercial/government collaboration?
A: NACA’s job was to “investigate problems of flight and potential solutions,” which they did, making results available to industry in general, and was very successful for aviation. We’re in a new environment now with different objectives, participants and goals. Certainly in the suborbital area a lot of things to be done. Has been absent for four decades since the end of the X-15 program, a lot of work to be done and a lot of opportunity. Hope that some of the approaches now being provide will be profitable and useful.
Q (Alan Stern): Did you foresee the kind of commercialism and tourism applications fifty years ago that we’re starting to see today?
A: We had a lot of vision, and thought we were making a roadmap for people to follow, and whether they did or not was up to them. We weren’t any better at looking ahead than anyone else.
A New Space Video Series
Ed Wright points out some cut-rate science fiction. I haven’t looked at it, so can’t vouch, but you might want to check it out.
Space-Policy Stupidity On Stilts
Doug Mohney wonders why the Texas congressional delegation seems to have its collective head up its fundament:
Two problems exist for the Congressional delegation from Texas if they continue to push SLS funding at the expense of fully funding NASA Commercial Crew program. First, it would appear that they advocate a policy that has the United States continue to purchase transport to ISS from Russia until SLS is built — rather than “insourcing” the dollars and work to American companies.
Second, if Russia’s spotty track record with the pieces to its manned launch system continues, a Soyuz failure leaving the $100 billion space station unmanned and untended — or worse, deorbited — could have a significant impact on the 15,000 employees employed at Houston’s Johnson Space Flight Center (JSC). If ISS goes down, there’s no need to have a Mission Control Center for its operations or the many other NASA employees and contractors supporting space station operations.
SLS mostly benefits Alabama, Florida and Utah — there is very little in it for Texas, which just makes this all the more stupid.
Don’t Know Much About Launch Technology
Jonathan Coopersmith says that both Romney and Gingrich get it wrong on space policy. But he’s a little confused himself:
Rockets cost so much because most of their weight is fuel. Usually 1 percent or less of launch weight is the actual payload. Nor are rockets fully reliable. To launch a communications satellite into geosynchronous orbit demands an insurance premium of 10 percent or more for a single one-way trip! Contrast that to the premium for your car insurance.
Yet rockets have launched every satellite and space probe since Sputnik in 1957. The entire space infrastructure, governmental and private, has grown around building and launching rockets. What rockets have not and cannot do is make the cost of reaching orbit low enough that Gingrich’s lunar base could pass Romney’s financial test.
To truly encourage private enterprise in space a radical reduction of the cost to reach orbit must become a national priority. Several promising technologies, such as beamed energy propulsion and space elevators, could reduce the cost of entering space from $10,000 to as low as $100 a pound, radically changing the economics of spaceflight.
Ummmm…no. Rockets don’t cost so much because most of their weight is fuel. As Elon notes, the propellant costs for a Falcon 9 are less than half a percent of the total flight costs, and he expects to be able to get to a hundred dollars a pound of payload with the Falcon Heavy if he can get the flight rate up.
Coopersmith is right that we need to get launch costs down, and it’s probably worth spending some R&D on advanced technologies, but we don’t need them to get to a hundred dollars a pound. All we need are reusable vehicles operating at high flight rates.
Half A Century Of Americans In Orbit
Started today, on February 20th, 1962. Amy Teitel has the story (though the URL is wrong — it’s fifty, not sixty years), and Clark Lindsey has some other links. I’ve written a piece that I hope will go up at PJMedia, but if not, I’ll post it here later.
[Late morning update]
My piece is up now.
Space Access 2012
The preliminary agenda is out. Looks interesting, but there will no doubt be changes leading up to it. For one thing, I’ll probably be on the program.
“Progressive” Bioconservatives
Thoughts on the strange political bedfellows of bioethics, from Ron Bailey:
These progressive bioconservatives fear that the rich and powerful will use technology, especially biotech, to outcompete and oppress the poor and weak. In their view, human dignity depends on human equality. It turns out that “the party of science” really is just the old-fashioned “party of equality,” science be damned (unless its findings conform to egalitarian ideology). Left-wing biocons seem to believe that protecting human dignity requires the rich and poor to remain equally diseased, disabled, and dead.
It’s always amazing to me to see the people who claim to be the “party of science” so fundamentally in denial of human nature. But of course, if they recognized it, their entire ideology falls apart. But this conflict is one more reason we need to expand off planet.
Obama Wrecks The Mars Program
I agree with Bob Zubrin, and I don’t disagree with his speculation about the motives behind it.
Free Divers
For the record, I think that these people are nuts. But it’s a good example of a recreation that is very hazardous, but that people are allowed to engage in without federal regulators looking over their shoulders. Why shouldn’t the same be true for spaceflight at this stage of the technology? I think that any of the serious vehicles currently under development (i.e., SS2, Lynx, Armadillo whatever) will be far safer than free diving or extreme mountain climbing.
[Late evening update]
Bad link, fixed now, sorry…