Clark Lindsey has some links to stories and pics about their record-setting rocket flight. Here's hoping that it's broken soon, and repeatedly.

"Maximum speed of the rocket plane was estimated at 200 mph, climbing upwards to some 8,500 feet."

Call me when they achieve Mach 20.

I suspect you'll hear about it without me calling you.

One has to crawl before walking, or running. They're trying to learn how to do things affordably and reliably, and for that, you start with low-performance activities, and work your way up.

Congratulation to Burt once again! Having duplicated the flight of the X-15 he steps back in time and duplicates the flight of the Me 163, well almost. The Me 163 had more endurance, speed and distance, but that’s ok Burt keep trying. I wonder if he’ll try to pretend that the Me 163 didn’t exist just like he did with the X-15. What next? Duplicate Flyer I, oh wait, that has already been done.

Sorry my bad, I saw Rutan and assumed it was Burt, but it was Dick. Guess he's getting in on the act too.

Ignoring your ignorance about who's doing what (it's not Dick, either--he was just the pilot), way to completely miss the point, Brian.

By the way, the Me-163 killed a lot of pilots (and not just in combat). This rocketplane is safe, and affordable.

Rand,

I think it would be wrong to make any safety comparison between the 2 because combat aircraft are always less safe than commercial aircraft, and the ME 163 was so much higher performance (top speed 600+mph). I’d like to see that stunt plane that Dick is flying come anywhere near 600mph. As far as affordable, I would have to believe that the Me163 was way cheaper, by any measure, than the current duplicate. A good portion of it was made out of wood!

Spaceship 1 and whatever this thing is called are toys for the ultra rich desperate to be famous like the real pioneers of flight like Chuck Yager, et. al. They are duplicating the past with technology that is 50 years advanced and pretending they’ve done something special. CFD was a slide rule when real history was being made.

bpd

Brian, many Me-163 pilots died due to engine failures (due to having to mix their own hypergolics), not combat, and not airspeed.

Many "toys for the ultra rich" eventually (and "eventually" in this case is much faster than for government programs) become useful products for the masses. And they improve in performance and drop in cost quite rapidly.

But once again, as I already pointed out, you completely miss the point.

> Brian, many Me-163 pilots died due to engine failures (due to having
> to mix their own hypergolics), not combat, and not airspeed.

Or being dissolved in their own propellant or having the landing gear (which was dropped on takeoff) bounce back up and hit them. Those are hardly common characteristics of combat aircraft.

I'm sure Brian saw no value in "toy" computers like the Apple II, which merely "repeated what IBM did decades ago."

I guess I do miss the point. Why would the government (or anyone else) want a 200mph rocket plane? Been there, done that, X1-15. Don’t tell me that it’s a step towards flying into space. They’ll find out what I already know, you need a more energetic reaction to achieve orbit, SSTO won’t work, reentry is hard (Rutan’s carbon composites will burn). And besides almost nobody wants to risk their life and at least $1M (or $100k) to go into space anyway, there's nothing there.

And just to keep history in perspective the Germans were perfectly capable of making a (safe?) LOX-IPA rocket (V2), but a 200mph fighter would have been the most dangerous plane in the skies over Europe. They needed a more energetic (dangerous) reaction (N2H4+H2O2?). So they traded being shot down every time for getting blown up once in a while, seems reasonable.

Thanks for the posts, history of aviation makes for a fun discussion

The funny thing is that XCOR and Scaled already know the things you think they'll eventually learn. But in the meantime they're out to learn things that you (and NASA) *don't* know. Such as how to fly dozens of flights with no maintainance, fly several times in a day, do touch and goes so you don't have to shut down airspace for a landing.

Personally, I think they should have had the fuel truck waiting at Cal City and topped up the tanks and sent it right back to Mojave an hour later. They're perfectly capable of doing that.

The Ez-Rocket is a 200 mph rocket plane, not a 600 mph rocket plane, for the simple reason that it is not intended as airframe development and they happened to have a 200 mph airframe already hanging from the rafters when they were wondering what to put their engines in to demonstrate them. The reusable, restartable, reliable, low maintainance engines -- which are the point of the exercise -- are perfectly capable of 600++ mph with an appropriate airframe. As it is, they have to keep the Ez-Rocket in at least a 30 - 40 degree climb to avoid overspeeding the airframe.

Nothing to add. Just saying that you guys talking like that about a thing like this is just cool.