Instapundit links to this story on the successful scramjet test Down Under, which (as usual) overhypes the application:

Butler said they could also slash the cost of sending satellites into space, because their potential payload was much larger than a rocket carrying its own fuel.

Even ignoring the fact (probably attributable to an ignorant reporter) that scramjets still have to carry their own “fuel” (it’s the oxidizer that they can leave at home), he shouldn’t buy it. The laws of physics haven’t changed in the three years since I wrote this piece debunking claims that this would revolutionize space lift:

Proponents claim that by allowing airbreathing up to high Mach numbers, there is no need to take along as much oxygen for the rocket engines, because they can gather it for “free.” This argument assumes that space transportation is expensive because propellants are, but those aren’t the cost driver. If they were, space would already be affordable, because liquid oxygen is actually about as cheap as milk. Propellant costs are such a tiny fraction of launch costs that they’re down in the noise. If we ever get to the point where they become a real issue (as they are for airlines), we’ll have solved the problem.

Their argument also fails on the grounds that collecting oxygen isn’t really “free.” As the old joke goes, there’s no free launch.

If your space transport were to be single stage, you’d now need three propulsion systems — conventional jet, scramjet, and rocket for when you left the atmosphere (which you must do by definition to go into space). It may be possible to have a scramjet lower stage and a rocket upper stage, but the bottom line is that time spent in the atmosphere (necessary to utilize the scramjet) is time spent fighting drag, defeating the purpose. Rockets want to spend as little time as possible in the atmosphere, and carrying two other kinds of engines along and spending enough time in the air to utilize them, just to save on a propellant as cheap as oxygen, just doesn’t make design sense.

In addition, a scramjet engine is designed to operate at a specific vehicle speed, and has poor performance in “off design” conditions, rendering it a poor propulsion choice for an accelerating vehicle.

It’s been said that there are three basic rules to aerospace vehicle design, that many designers continue to forget to their peril:

1. If you want to cruise, use an airbreather.
2. If you want to turn, use a wing.
3. If you want to accelerate, use a rocket.

Even with all of the improvements in jet engines over the years, you can’t beat a rocket engine for thrust/weight ratio, and it doesn’t care much how fast the vehicle is going. Chasing after solutions-looking-for-problems like this distracts us from solving the real problem–getting enough market and enough activity to get operational economies of scale, the lack of which is the real cause of the high cost of space access. And the near-term solution to that problem, despite the class-warfare whines of Eurocrats, is commercial space travel.

[Update]

I should probably add my usual disclaimer (as I did in the TCSDaily piece). I’m not saying that scramjets aren’t useful, or that they shouldn’t be researched and developed. The military definitely needs them for atmospheric cruise applications. I’m just saying that space launch will probably not be one of their applications any time soon, and they’re irrelevant to reducing launch costs in the near term (i.e, over the next two or three decades).

[Afternoon update]

One more thought. I’m not completely down on air breathers in general. I do think that concepts for collecting oxygen in the atmosphere are interesting, if it allows you to get the gross takeoff weight of a vehicle down to the point at which it can take off from a runway. It would be nice to have a system that still had LOX tanks, but took off with them empty, and then collected and separated the air (subsonically) until they were full. At that point, it could rocket to orbit. Andrews Aerospace is looking at a concept like this. But that’s not a scramjet, and scramjet technology doesn’t help with it.

[Update late afternoon]

Well, as usually happens in these theological discussions about technical methods of getting to orbit, some of the comments would indicate that I’m a heretic.

I haven’t read SpaceX’s post mortem on their second Falcon 1 flight yet, but Jon Goff has.

It’s an interesting example of a complex system failure, in which a small problem in a complex, highly-coupled system can spiral out of control. As to the question of why put in slosh baffles when the problem wouldn’t have happened with the right software, it’s belt and suspenders. Even with the software problem, slosh baffles may have saved the day, and the additional weight is probably worth the increase in robustness of the system.

Then again, maybe they just added them before they figured out what had really happened…

Of course, the real lesson for SpaceX (and despite the long history of such things, people often have to learn the hard way) is that good configuration management is critical to success.

Gene Kranz has an editorial up decrying the “gap.” Can anyone tell me what’s missing from this piece? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Here’s a hint, from the last two paragraphs:

Shifts in the world

Pamela Gay hosts it this week, with an emphasis (but not exclusively) on space science.

I just got the following (registration required) from an aviation mailing list. There’s certainly nothing hard to believe about it (though it would also be possible to do the same thing as a parody, I suppose).

The European Union’s industry commissioner on Thursday blasted companies’ plans to offer space flights to tourists, calling them a gimmick for the
privileged elite.

“It’s only for the super rich, which is against my social convictions,” European Commission Vice President Guenter Verheugen said.

EADS Astrium, the space division of the European aerospace consortium, said this week it planned to build a craft that would be able to carry a handful of tourists on brief forays outside the earth’s atmosphere from 2012.

Other groups are considering similar ventures including British entrepreneur Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic service expects to make its first commercial flight next year.

The EADS aircraft, about the size of an executive jet, would be able to carry four passengers around 100 kilometres from the earth, where they would be able to experience about three minutes of weightlessness and see the curve of the earth.

At a price of EUR150,000 to EUR200,000 euros ($200,000-$265,000), the experience would be reserved for a small number of rich sensation-seekers, although as many as 15,000 passengers a year are expected to be ready to pay for a trip by 2020, according to consultants Futron.

That would represent a considerable expansion from the tiny number of truly rich adventurers so far who have been willing to pay as much as USD$20 million for a place on a Russian Soyuz rocket to see space.

Verheugen, a German center-left politician who holds the industry and enterprise portfolio within the EU Commission, said the new space race left him uneasy.

“I have strong reservations,” he said. “It will always be a very privileged type of tourism.”

EADS Astrium expects to build about five craft a year and thinks it can capture about 30 percent of the market.

The EADS Astrium project will be mainly privately financed, and Astrium will not operate flights itself, but Verheugen made it clear that he did not believe it deserved assistance from governments or the European Union.

“I have no sympathy for this. It deserves no support.”

Verheugen was speaking at the margins of an awards ceremony to commend EADS’s Airbus unit for its efforts to reduce carbon emissions from its aircraft, a coincidence that underlined another potential concern about space tourism.

At the same ceremony, Louis Gallois, head of Airbus and co-head of EADS, declined to answer a question on the apparent paradox of a company trying to cut emissions in one area while investing in a project to blast rich travellers into space.

Airbus recently announced a 25 percent increase in its EUR350 million budget to research the cutting of emissions, a figure dwarfed by the estimated EUR1 billion in expected development costs for the new spacecraft.

Emphasis mine. With morons like this in charge of “Industry and Enterprise” in the EU, is it any wonder the place is such a stagnant economic mess?

This is so stupid and stereotypical, that one hardly even knows where to begin, and the arguments have been made (many times) before.

Yes, of course, at first, only the “privileged” will use the service. That’s how one gets the price to drop so that the “non-privileged” can eventually afford it. But the point isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about subsidizing rides for the rich (assuming that subsidies are involved at all–this economic illiterate seems to think that even private funds shouldn’t be spent on it–he knows better how to spend other peoples’ money than they do, of course). The point is that by developing these kinds of vehicles, we can ultimately reduce the costs of getting into space for everybody and everything, including many things that presumably even our socialist bureaucrat might find to his liking, such as remote sensing satellites for environmental monitoring, etc.

As for the environmental issues, the amount of environmental damage caused by rocket planes, even if they burn hydrocarbons, is spitting in a hurricane compared to commercial and other jet traffic at any reasonable expected flight rate in the near future. In the far future, they may go to LOX/hydrogen, which will of course pollute the atmosphere with that deadly dihydrogen monoxide, which many think should be banned completely. But again, when it comes to the environmental effects, one has to look at the benefits as well as the costs. Most sensible environmentalists should want us to move as much polluting industry off the planet as soon as possible, and the only way to make this happen is to reduce costs of space access, which is only likely to happen from the competitive environment and economies of scale that a space travel industry will provide.

But then, “sensible” is not the first adjective that comes to mind in reference to people like Herr Verheugen. In fact, it’s not even on the list. I have no fear of the EU as long as his type remain in charge.

They scrubbed yesterday, but they’re going to attempt to launch those evil spy satellites to watch over innocent Iranian peace ships again today at 11:04 AM EDT.

The sky is clear right now, and if it’s like this in three hours, I’ll have a good view. But if it’s anything like yesterday, by 11 the sky will have clouded up. Of course, they’ve been warning us for the last two days about heavy afternoon thunderstorms that never arrived. Anyway, we’ll see, won’t we?

[Update at 9:50 AM EDT]

It had clouded up to the north earlier, but now they’ve cleared, and an hour and a quarter before scheduled launch, it’s looking good if it holds up. The Cape is north-northwest of me, and I have a pretty good view of that direction from my yard, at least once it gets to altitude.

[Update about an hour before scheduled launch]

I just got a text message from Florida Today that range issues are once again threatening the launch.

We really need to break out of this antiquated “range” paradigm, but it will take radically new vehicle designs to do so.

[Update about 10:30]

Looks like they resolved the range issue, and are go for launch in a little over half an hour. Skies to the north still clear.

[Update about five minutes until original launch schedule]

It’s always something. Now there’s an eight-minute delay due to a technical glitch. Listening to USA ground chatter, it sounds like a problem with a propellant fill/drain valve on the Centaur (the upper stage). New launch time: 11:12 AM. Polling at 11:05 (in about five minutes).

[Update after launch]

Well, it seems to have gone successfully, but I couldn’t see a thing. I wonder if the Atlas just burns too cleanly to be seen from a distance in the daylight?

[Update just after first Centaur burn]

I see over that The Flame Trench that they’re pointing out that this week is the fiftieth anniversary of the first Atlas launch. It’s not as significant as it seems. There’s almost nothing in common between this vehicle and that first ICBM except the name, and the fact that it’s an expendable rocket. Different fuel, different engines, different type of structure, different everything. It’s really an all-new design that came out of the EELV program.

[Update in the afternoon]

As noted in comments, it doesn’t use a different fuel. I was thinking Delta 4 when I wrote that, not Atlas V.

As Clark notes, the time grows short to register for the Heinlein Centennial Celebration next month. As someone strongly influenced by him in my youth, I’d love to attend, but it’s hard to justify the time or money right now.

There’s an Atlas V launch this morning, scheduled for 11:18 AM EDT. I may go out and look if it hasn’t clouded up down here–we’re expecting a lot of rain in south Florida this afternoon (and tomorrow, and into the weekend).

[Update a few minutes before scheduled launch]

Flight’s been delayed four minutes, to 11:22, to resolve some (almost literally) last-minute issues. Unfortunately it’s clouding up here, so I don’t think I’ll see it.

[Update at 11:19 AM]

Range just went red. Launch has been rescheduled for 11:45. I guess they don’t have a tight window on it. There’s not much info available on the orbit or constraints–the payloads are classified.

[Update at 11:38 AM]

Apparently, they have until noon, and then they’ll have to push it to tomorrow. The weather’s supposed to be even worse tomorrow, at least down here, though it may be all right up at the Cape.

[Update a minute later]

Scrubbed for today.

There’s an Atlas V launch this morning, scheduled for 11:18 AM EDT. I may go out and look if it hasn’t clouded up down here–we’re expecting a lot of rain in south Florida this afternoon (and tomorrow, and into the weekend).

[Update a few minutes before scheduled launch]

Flight’s been delayed four minutes, to 11:22, to resolve some (almost literally) last-minute issues. Unfortunately it’s clouding up here, so I don’t think I’ll see it.

[Update at 11:19 AM]

Range just went red. Launch has been rescheduled for 11:45. I guess they don’t have a tight window on it. There’s not much info available on the orbit or constraints–the payloads are classified.

[Update at 11:38 AM]

Apparently, they have until noon, and then they’ll have to push it to tomorrow. The weather’s supposed to be even worse tomorrow, at least down here, though it may be all right up at the Cape.

[Update a minute later]

Scrubbed for today.

There’s an Atlas V launch this morning, scheduled for 11:18 AM EDT. I may go out and look if it hasn’t clouded up down here–we’re expecting a lot of rain in south Florida this afternoon (and tomorrow, and into the weekend).

[Update a few minutes before scheduled launch]

Flight’s been delayed four minutes, to 11:22, to resolve some (almost literally) last-minute issues. Unfortunately it’s clouding up here, so I don’t think I’ll see it.

[Update at 11:19 AM]

Range just went red. Launch has been rescheduled for 11:45. I guess they don’t have a tight window on it. There’s not much info available on the orbit or constraints–the payloads are classified.

[Update at 11:38 AM]

Apparently, they have until noon, and then they’ll have to push it to tomorrow. The weather’s supposed to be even worse tomorrow, at least down here, though it may be all right up at the Cape.

[Update a minute later]

Scrubbed for today.