Thoughts from Cecil Adams. I think he’s far too pessimistic about the prospects for personal spaceflight. Also, he seems to have forgotten about the X-15.
10 thoughts on “Building Your Own Spaceship”
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Thoughts from Cecil Adams. I think he’s far too pessimistic about the prospects for personal spaceflight. Also, he seems to have forgotten about the X-15.
Comments are closed.
Also this: http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/03/6781157-homemade-rocket-launched-in-denmark-part-of-human-spaceflight-plans
Cost to date, $70,000 according to some reports.
The other variable he left out was what degree of risk the flight participants are willing to accept.
He mentions the X-15…
The other possibility is suborbital human space flight, which so far has been accomplished by one craft: SpaceShipOne, a rocket plane akin to the old X-15, built by aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan and funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Cost: $28 million.
…although I question the “akin”. The X-15 was capable of hypersonic speeds, far beyond the capabilities of SS1. The X-15 altitude flights were just one test of many; only two of the X-15 flights were above 100 km, consecutive flights by the same pilot.
JP Aerospace is trying to get to space on an airship. I don’t have any price estimates handy, but it is bound to be much less than one would think. But, he has yet to demonstrate that he can do it. And that’s the trick isn’t it?
If we did the X-15 today, wouldn’t we be able to do it with much lighter materials? I seem to recall reading that the X-15 was quite heavy.
Pro Libertate, if we were to do the X-15 today, we’d have to make sure it was more controllable, perhaps by making a movable wing to re-enter the atmosphere like a badminton shuttlecock. We’d probably also have a purpose-built carrier aircraft with identical cockpit to the spacecraft. We’d probably also use lots of composite materials in the construction to make it lighter.
heh.
The X-15 was built out of Inconel and titanium and the skin was very thick so it could act as a heat sink. It also used ammonia/LOX with an ISP of 279 secs.
I think a much better comparison to SS1 is the Bell X-2, which has almost exactly the same delta V capability and was built out of stainless steel. As I recall that contract was started during WW-II or just a year or two after.
I think an amateur with a few thousand dollars a month could buy off-the-shelf rocket engines and build an aluminum vehicle that could achieve orbit. Ironically, I expect SSTO would be cheaper than a two-stage vehicle.
Why do I think this? Because I’ve seen amateurs like Paul Breed and the early Armadillo Aerospace efforts, and they were starting with rocket development.
Ed Minchau: You don’t need the moveable wing. Just have the horizontal stab go leading edge down, trailing up to around 60 degrees or more. This was one early shuttle concept with straight wings IIRC.
I wonder if maybe it could be done by attaching a few big solid rockets onto an old free-to-a-good-home supersonic fighter, maybe an F105.
Looking around, I see there already did that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_NF-104A
Just a question of how high they could have gone if they’d installed more rocket power.