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After decades of dreams, a commercial spaceplane is almost ready to fly
- roughly 3y ago> almost
- viburnum 3y agoIs it really space when it’s only 200 miles up? You can bike that far in a day if you get up early.
- andrewljohnson 3y agoNo one can do 200 vertical miles in a day right? Pick your slope, still not gonna happen.
- orbital-decay 3y agoWell, it's possible if you pick -100%, at least for those pieces of yourself and the bike that survived the reentry.
- jameskilton 3y agoYes https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
- idiotsecant 3y agoThe part about the beats in the proclaimers song is startlingly good communication.
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoThis is a really great link! > Getting to space is easy. It's not, like, something you could do in your car, but it's not a huge challenge. You could get a person to space with a small sounding rocket the size of a telephone pole. The X-15 aircraft reached space just by going fast and then steering up. > But getting to space is easy. The problem is staying there. [...] To avoid falling back into the atmosphere, you have to go sideways really, really fast. This image accompanies the above excerpt: https://what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/58/orbit_x15.png https://what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/58/orbit_x15.png
- Denvercoder9 3y agoSpace is generally considered to start at either 100 km or 60 miles up, so 200 miles is squarely in space. Before the Space Shuttle was retired, the ISS orbited at just over 200 miles for years.
- ARandomerDude 3y ago> only 200 miles up Statements like this always cause me to reflect on the breathtaking achievements in powered flight over the past 100 years.
- imtringued 3y agoI think you forgot the part where you are supposed to go 200mph up and not sideways, but okay let's play this game and assume a 100% incline. Here you go: https://youtube.com/watch?v=n_cHSx7VM18 https://youtube.com/watch?v=n_cHSx7VM18
- SonicScrub 3y agoUnfortunately my maximum cycling speed is well short of 7-8 km/s
- BobaFloutist 3y agoThere's a lot less "up" and "down" in the world than there is "around" and "across". Incredibly difficult heights to achieve are very frequently quite commonplace distances to cover. It's weird, but it's just part of living on a planet dominated by gravity.
- wolf550e 3y agoVery much yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line
- ben_w 3y agoSpace[0] is easy, orbit[1] is hard. [0] The Kármán line, where aerodynamics are less important than orbital dynamics, is only 100 km up. [1] You're always falling. The trick is to go sideways so fast you keep missing the ground.
- LorenDB 3y agoI just want an SSTO like Skylon to become reality.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoI was hoping for a Skylon update as well
- mrlonglong 3y agoUnfortunately to get into orbit at least 90% of your mass has to be fuel. That means unless there's a breakthrough we will still need multistage rockets. Skylon's a good start but still needs to carry a lot of fuel.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoThey've nominally solved airbreathing rocket engines through to the edge of the atmosphere, have you looked into the SABRE engine?
- 7952 3y agoAnd even with a breakthrough that new technology may just make multi stage rockets better. Instead of SSTO spacex just get to launch more payload or fuel.
- Beached 3y agoslylon could facilitate airline like service to Leo. sure it is a lot of fuel, but not stacking required and smooth runway takeoff and landings. for human transport to Leo, a skylon like ship would likely be a more familiar service, and easier logistics for fast turn arounda
- wolf550e 3y agoSSTO is unlikely to happen, because every SSTO design becomes better when you modify it to be TSTO. See this video explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk16En1qqEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk16En1qqEY
- Animats 3y agoNice. They're going directly from helicopter drop tests of landing on a runway to a launch with docking at the ISS. No suborbital flight and landing first. No orbital flight without docking first. That's ambitious. If it works, that will be impressive. There's a "national security version" being planned. This looks much like the US Space Force's official painting.[1] [1] https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3566022/space-operations-command-reveals-futuristic-official-painting/ https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3566...
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- agluszak 3y ago> after decades of dreams I wonder who are the people that dream about commercial spaceplanes and not affordable housing and healthcare...
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- thriftwy 3y agoPeople who already have a home and can afford their healthcare?
- barney54 3y agoAffordable housing is a solved problem, but people don’t like the solution of allowing people to build housing all over the place.
- pstuart 3y agoAgreed in principle, but "all over the place" is worth debate. High density is the way to go versus suburban sprawl. I understand the appeal of a suburban home (been there, done that) but it comes at great cost.
- cryptoz 3y agoYeah you can only dream about 1 thing forever. Can’t have multiple things you dream about unfortunately :(
- ctoth 3y agoHi. I dream about commercial spaceplanes. Maybe I can help you understand it a little! What's holding us back from affordable healthcare and houses? Humans. What's holding us back from affordable spaceplanes and cool rockets? Physics! When I fight with humans, people get angry with me. When I fight with physics, cool stuff happens and physics doesn't (usually) get angry with me! So, for a conflict-averse nerd who likes to dream about cool stuff, spaceplanes > endless committee meetings. Any more questions?
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoWhat problem does this solve that justifies the big booster that's still required?
- ricardobeat 3y agoIt’s mentioned in the article: soft landing is much more comfortable for people, allows carrying animal and plant specimens back to earth, and can land close to actual facilities instead of kilometers out in the ocean. The booster would be used anyway to send cargo to the ISS, you just need a bit more fuel for the added spacecraft weight.
- modeless 3y ago> roughly half of the [NASA space] shuttle's habitable volume > it features an add-on cargo module that is not reusable. It's hard for me to get excited about this when Starship dominates it in size and (I'm guessing) cost per kg to orbit, on a similar time frame. It's only useful in a world where Starship fails its reusability goals. While Starship's success isn't certain, I wouldn't bet a company on its failure.
- avmich 3y agoAt least the landing mode of the Dream Chaser is different and allows landing on a runway, not to a Mechazilla installation.
- marcusverus 3y agoIt’s Super Heavy (the first stage) that requires stage 0/mechazilla. Starship (the second stage) will land on a concrete pad, similar to the Falcon 9.
- dotnet00 3y agoComparisons with Starship are not really warranted in this case since that's not the sort of thing this is meant to do in the first place. This is supposed to dock to the ISS, and these current versions aren't crew capable. Starship is more than likely simply too large and heavy to dock to the aging ISS, it'd stress the structure a lot and the ISS's attitude control likely couldn't handle it, so there would be all sorts of complexity involved to allow Starship to use its own hot gas thrusters to assist in attitude control. The value of current dreamchaser is in providing a more competitive alternative to Cargo Dragon in bringing stuff back down to the ground (compared to the embarrassment that is Starliner). In particular, Dreamchaser should offer a smoother descent with easier handling of time sensitive materials since it'd be down at a runway rather than needing to be fished out of the water and the material flown over with a helicopter.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y agoThe original space shuttle was built with the cold war in mind, a predecessor of sorts to the current hypersonic gliders and space planes. I am not sure what the dream chaser is trying to achieve. It really ought to be bigger if it wants to get a good return on investment.
- ruslan 3y agoThis Dream Chaser thing reminds me a rarely known USSR orbital "passanger" spaceplane MiG-105[1] from 70s codenamed "Spiral", as it shares same concept. It made a couple of successful suborbital flights, but then the programme was cancelled in favour of Buran[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
- smoyer 3y agoIt reminds me of the space craft that inspired the crash at the beginning of each episode of "The Six Million Dollar Man" - https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/crash-made-famous-tv https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/crash-made-famo...
- cubefox 3y agoThe Ars Technica piece mentions that the Dream Chaser design goes back to spy footage of the Soviet BOR-4, which is also mentioned in the first Wikipedia article.
- cubefox 3y agoIt's sobering how much less ambitious the Dream Chaser space plane is compared to the plans for the VentureStar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar It sometimes seems technology is going backwards.
- p1mrx 3y agoIf we're comparing against fictional vehicles, the Enterprise had interstellar warp drive in 1966.
- cubefox 3y agoThe VentureStar was very much possible technology, the reason for cancellation was fairly minor.
- wolf550e 3y agoThe inventor of the PICA heatshield does not think it was a very possible technology [1]. As evidence, nobody since has tried to revive it. 1 - https://youtu.be/g3gzwMJWa5w?t=460 https://youtu.be/g3gzwMJWa5w?t=460
- avmich 3y ago"Very much" is out of place here. X-33 had 5 risky technologies to prove, and any failure with them could ground the project. Formally they failed when the composite tank structure broke (the liquid gas evaporated and composite layers detached), but even with the proposed fix (a more conservative and less performant aluminum tank) they still had to clear the other problems. So, Venture Star probably was just "possible technology". Still risky at the time, at the beginning of the millennium.
- dotnet00 3y agoIt clearly wasn't all that minor, the story is always told as if it'd have been fine if Congress just allowed the alternate tanks, but it's worth considering that the work with the aerospikes was still so incomplete and risky, that even now, no serious company will risk attempting them, with the leaders by far in rocket engine tech, SpaceX, opting for the ridiculous complexity of Raptor over aerospikes. Then besides all that, VentureStar was never going to be able to overcome the issue of rocket SSTOs just not being efficient in Earth gravity. It's just way more efficient and not much more risky to have two stages.