X PRIZE Cup Press Conference - Part 3 [Update]

Rocketplane Global
- John Herrington
- Dave Faulkner - program manager for XP

Herrington:
- Attention has been on RpK but meanwhile another group was focusing on the suborbital program and the XP design.
- Faulkner led revamp of design.

Faulkner:
- spent a year and half very busy on making suborbital vehicle better.
- spent 200k man-hours on new design
- Cover Launch Magazine unveiling
- Drop Lear Jet conversion - use whole new body.
- Lighter structure, all aluminum
- New afterburning jet engines and landing gear (F-5 fighter derived)
- Matured subsystems
- Frank Nuovo - interior design
-- was chief of design at Nokia. Design director at BMW, etc.
- Sketches of interior.
- 1 pilot + 5 passengers
- Manufacturing engine parts and near to first test in next 6 months
- Climb to 40kft and then to slightly above 100km
- Triply redundant fly-by-wire system
- Don't need to protect inlets during reentry.
- Impact of layoffs had some effect but the core team able to continue with this project
- Looking for next round of investment to ramp up developing.
- Paragon is doing the life support system.
- Test flights in 2010. No funding amount given.
- Engine based on Atlas sustainer engine - LOX/Kerosene
-- Scaled down version of that.
- Expect lower price point than SS2 type of two vehicle system.
- Trade studies showed Al cheaper and even lighter than a composite approach.
- Can take out 2 seats and do free float
- Herrington : initially for safety reasons prefer to keep people in their seats. Later will consider taking out seats to allow for free float.
- Four day training plan.

[Update: Leonard David has posted a report with picts: Rocketplane Global Overhauls Suborbital Craft
]

Posted 10/26/07 | 11:19:27 by TopSpacer | Filed under: Events

Comments

What a joke.

They said they spent 200,000 man hours doing this?
And it was done over 18 months?

That's 60 people full time.

That's $50M in labor charges.

Rocketplane doens't have that kind of money, I sure
hope they didn't steal money off the COTS contract.
Otherwise NASA and the RpK investors will be pissed

Posted by anonymous at 10/26/07 12:02:10

Assuming $50/hr average wage (over $100K/yr), 200K hours only works out to $10M over 18 months. A lot but not unreasonable. Of course that doesn't include overhead (offices, supplies, etc.) Dedicated people will end up working a lot more than 8 hours/day reducing the overall cost.

Posted by Andrew Platzer at 10/26/07 13:06:04

Assuming $50/HR avg wage.

Okay, Add 33% for fringes
and you better add 25% for SG&A if it's a small firm.
then add in computers, tools, everything else and
you easily double it again.

Now RpK hasn't had tht many employees, but has had
lots of contractors, lots of subcontractors, and
all that gets real expensive real fast.

The norm for engineering is 150-250/hr.
Considering lawyers make $300/hr it's
reasonable to load engineers at this rate

Posted by anonymous at 10/26/07 14:23:11

What, pray tell, made them doubt all the numbers and designs from the last ... yegods ... 14 years since the first study was done?

No, not the May, 1993 back-of-envelope study but the winter/spring '93/'94 study and the Spacecast 2020 study where real money was spent on design work and flight number crunching.

Adding 18 months and 200,000 man-hours of design work to all that has been done before is not something you brag about after 14 years of press releases and computer graphics (with hardware coming *real soon now*). It's something you down play to the point just shy of lying.

Never. Ever. Do. That. Fastest way to have investers walk ... and yes, that chilly, breezey feeling is from them grabing everything not nailed down. The lawyers will be around in an hour or so with crowbars to get the nailed down stuff.

Posted by Michael Antoniewicz II at 10/26/07 19:37:07

J85 is the same engine used on White Knight, about which Burt said "about the worst engine possible for the application, but it was CHEAP". Dunno what to think. The devil is in the details certainly...

Posted by Pete Zaitcev at 10/26/07 22:51:09

The really pathetic part is that for 4 years Rp went around claiming that
the learjet would save them a fortune.
now here they are 4 years later
saying the learjet saved them nothing
wasted years of effort but now they know
how to compete against virgin and EADS.

everyone knew the learjet was a futile
excercise, and All of them were mouthing the party line for years.

Rp will go down as another destruction
of capital

Posted by anon at 10/27/07 08:41:09

Michael A, do you really think a design study for a peroxide/JP8 rocket-only SSTO vehicle provides a design for a jet/rocket hybrid suborbital one?

Posted by Karl Gallagher at 10/27/07 08:51:09

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