The 17ft (~5.2m) 511lb (~232kg) rocket will reach "Mach 5 in just 15 seconds -- breaking CSXT's previous speed record of 3,205 MPH" and go to 60 miles (~100km) if things go as planned. A previous launch window in June was missed due to bad weather.

** TransOrbital (a HobbySpace advertiser) has announced that it also has recieved approvals from the US Government, in this case for sending its Trailblazer spacecraft to orbit the Moon:

August 28, 2002

Orbital Pessimism... A high level manager at Orbital Sciences, Antonio Elias, wrote an editorial piece in this week's SpaceNews (Aug.26.02 issue, p.13) called "No Time for RLVs". He claims that a second generation RLV is "neither justifiable nor fundable" without "dramatic improvements in propulsion, materials, launch demand or the NASA budget".

Instead, he argues for development of a reusable 4 or 5 seat crew transfer-rescue vehicle (CTRV) that would launch on an enhanced EELV - Atlas V or Delta IV. A 2nd Gen RLV would require $3-5 billion per year "during the peak development years" (he doesn't give an estimated total cost), which isn't likely considering NASA's budget prospects. The CTRV, on the other hand, could be developed within a $1-2 billion a year budget for a total of $5-6 billion.

He claims that ELVs are "inherently more reliable than RLVs" because they are less complex (no deorbit, reentry, landing, etc. systems) and have higher payload fractions that allow for greater design margins.

He expects the yearly flight rate for both government and commercial launches to be less than "30 to 40 shuttle equivalent launches per year over the next 20 or so years." So a 2nd Gen RLV can not provide a payback on the investment in less than 15-25 years at best.

While he makes some reasonable points, they are mostly valid only within the warped space of the DC Beltway. Here is some counterpoint:

August 24, 2002

Trusting Rockets ... Rockets don't have a great reputation for safety, to say the least. Virtually every popular article I've read about space tourism, for example, makes a point of rockets being inherently dangerous, prone to explosion. At a SLI news conference last Spring a reporter questioned whether NASA's goal for a future RLV to reach a reliablity level of 1 in 10,000 chance of failure was plausible considering that the vehicle would use rocket engines.

In a thread at sci.space.policy on Rand Simberg's Rockets Are Good Enough article, Jeff Greason of XCOR gives a firm rebuttal to the claim of a poster that "rockets are dangerous devices" that will never "attain the level of reliabillity, cost effectiveness and safety of a (scram)jet engine."

Greason argues that rockets are "fundamentally quite simple devices" that can be safe and reliable when those features are given high priority.

He believes the public perception of rockets as dangerous devices comes from ELV's that were blown up by range officers at the first sign of trouble. [Note that often the trouble is a malfunction in some other system than the rocket engine such as the navigation control]. "If jet aircraft were designed with self destruct, they would, especially in the early years, have generated similar hard-to-forget fireballs."

Also, most rockets have not been designed with safety and reliablity as a priority. An ELV is only used once so cost considerations have a very high priority.

In the cases where rockets have needed to be reliable, they have in fact served quite well. The examples that Greason mentions include:

August 23, 2002

Rockets vs Air Breathers... Rand Simberg examines the arguments for scramjets in his latest Fox News blog - Rockets Are Good Enough - FOXNews.com - Aug.22.02. See the Hypersonics section and this earlier Hypersonic Air Breather - The Solution or a Detour? article for background materials to this debate.

August 21, 2002

News briefs...The latest Aviation Week (Aug.19.02 issue, p.26) reports that the Japanese government is getting jealous of the Chinese manned space program and may start one of its own. If so, it probably will just mean trying to pop more pods into space rather than doing something exciting like flying HOPEs or, even better, KANKOH-MARUs. (Perhaps it could mean, at least, some scraps thrown to the RVT, more photos.) ...

..There is a rumor that Elon Musk, founder of Paypal and funder of Translife, is considering an orbital RLV project. Perhaps this was what he was referring to in a Space News article (June.17.02, p. 16) when he said his new company Space Exploration Technologies (I can't find a web site for it yet) would "compete with markets now dominated by Boeing [and] Lockheed Martin" ... "They have launch vehicles and spacecraft and we would be doing something along that line". He would not elaborate further....

...NASA Watch is reporting that an X-34 vehicle (without an engine) has arrived at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Also, the Air Force and NASA may soon be announcing enhanced cooperation.

August 19, 2002

RLV Industry Looking "a little healthier"... The recent issues of SpaceEquity.com offer several RLV related articles:

(Ed: Thanks go to a RLV News reader for pointing me to these articles.)

August 16, 2002

News brief... XCOR's Aleta Jackson is interviewed at the Objective American Daily - SPACE: XCOR for the Final Frontier - The Objective American Daily - Aug.16.02.

HyShot Went Hypersonic... HyShot project leader Dr Allan Paull, of the University of Queenslands Centre for Hypersonics, says that preliminary analysis of data from the flight on July 30th shows that the test engine did in fact achieve supersonic combustion:

HyShot program secures place in flight history - Univ. of Queensland - 16-Aug-2002

This would be the first successful demonstration of supersonic combustion in a full scale engine in an atmospheric test.

A Russian/US rocket launch of a scramjet engine in 1998 did not achieve combustion at supersonic flow rates. The Air Force did achieve postive thrust in a scale model scramjet using a gun launch system to accelerate the projectile to Mach 7.1.

Dr Paull hopes to continue with six more flights over five years with the goal of developing a free flying scramjet powered vehicle. Eventually they hope to develop a launcher for small satellites.

August 15, 2002

Space Commander Wants RLV Money - NOW... Space News (Aug.12.02 issue) reports that General Lance Lord of the Air Force Space Command is trying to persuade the senior staff to include funding for RLV development in the next yearly budget rather than in the 2007-2009 time frame as currently planned. (Such long term funds seldom actually appear.)

He would like to see some demonstrators built including a VTHL "X-vehicle" that would reach Mach 10 with a LOX/Kerosene engine. This could then be followed with a "Y-Vehicle" that would show enhanced capabilities and perhaps even achieve orbit.

Armadillo Status... John Carmack recently posted to a sci.space.policy thread about the X Prize - Aug.12.02 and included some info on the status of his projects. Comments included:

August 10, 2002

 

August 8, 2002

SLI Hacked... Someone broke into a NASA database and stole 45MB of SLI related data, including detailed diagrams of rocket engines under development: NASA investigating hacker theft of sensitive documents - Computerworld - Aug.8.02 (got this link via Spacetoday.net).

Not sure if this is a disastrous loss of national secrets or a clever counter-intelligence coup designed to ensure that our enemies also don't develop a RLV before 2020.

August 7, 2002

August 3, 2002

August 1, 2002

July 23, 2002

XCOR's Suborbital Plans...XCOR offers its own press release about the Xerus and the contract with Space Adventures. It also offers some more information about its approach to building a suborbital vehicle, stressing that the design shown in the graphics is just one possible configuration and the design may change significantly.

In addition to passenger rides, they plan to use the vehicle for other applications such as carrying science payloads, e.g. to test equipment and microgravity experiments intended for the ISS, and to provide a first stage for launching microsats to orbit.

More Xerus... Race to launch first "spaceplane" hots up - New Scientist - July.23.02 ...Plane designed for space tourists - MSNBC - July.22.02 ... ['Cheap' space trips offered for the rest of us - CNN.com - July.24.02]

News Brief... NASA developing hypersonic technologies for future - Spaceflight Now - July.23.02

July 22, 2002

Image- Space Adventures
Artist's vision of XCOR's Xerus suborbital vehicle, which will initially
be dedicated to space tourism flights for Space Adventures.

XCOR & Space Adventures Announce Xerus Suborbital Spacecraft...XCOR has begun preliminary design of a resuable suborbital spacecraft that can take 1 pilot and 1 passenger to 100km (62 miles) in altitude:

XCOR and Space Adventures signed a marketing agreement in which the craft will be dedicated to SA's space tourism passengers for the first 600 flights.

Similar to the earlier SA announcement on the use of the Russian suborbital Cosmopolis 21 for space tourism flights, the vehicle development is contingent on XCOR securing the financing.

Once funding is available, "XCOR expects that it will take eighteen months to begin flight tests and three years before entering revenue service."

Space Adventures Teams with XCOR Aerospace To Develop Sub-Orbital Vehicle - Space.com - July.22.02

News Briefs... Andrews describes their recent SLI Alternate Access grant (see below) : Andrews Space and Technology Wins $2.9 Million Contract from NASA - SpaceRef - July.22.02...

...Air Force recently awarded Boeing a grant to develop hydrocarbon engines for its reusable Space Operations Vehicle, or SOV, which will launch the Space Maneuver Vehicle (SMV): Boeing Rocketdyne Awarded Air Force Hydrocarbon Study Contract - Boeing PR - July.10.02

July 17, 2002

RSTARS for SLI?...An AvWeek article recently discussed here reported that NASA was considering the development by 2008 of a Crew Rescue Vehicle for the ISS that could ride to orbit on an expendable, e.g. an Atlas 5 or Delta IV, or in the shuttle bay. Gradually it would develop into a full-fledged space taxi.

The July 8, 2002 issue of Space News gives a similar report about this design concept. The project has been given the name Reusable Space Transportation and Recovery System or RSTARS. The cost estimates range from $1.5-4.5 billion.

The Space News article says this would cause a major revamping of SLI since it is believed that diverting resources for RSTARS would mean that the current goal of a reusable two stage system by 2012 to replace the shuttle could not be achieved. Instead SLI would concentrate on "third generation" RLV technologies that could lead to a shuttle replacement in the 2020 time frame.

July 15, 2002

CSI Announces NASA Contract... "Constellation Services International, Inc. (CSI) announced today that it has been awarded a $2.3 million prime contract to study its LEO Express(SM) Space Cargo System for launching supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). The award was made by NASA Marshall Space Flight Center as part of the Alternate Access to Station (AAS) program, a multi-year effort enabling commercial ISS resupply services to supplement the Space Shuttle and other nations' ISS delivery vehicles"...continue press release

Airbreathers & Rockets Just Can't Get Along...First it was a haywire Pegasus that destroyed the first X-43 hypersonic test vehicle. Then the Australian Hyshot scramjet crashed due to the failure of its first stage rocket booser.

Now a subscale Japanese supersonic test vehicle has crashed spectacularly after a premature demating with its rocket booster: Bolts blamed for rocket crash - New Scientist - July.15.02 (Most of the press had fun portraying the event as another Concorde type disaster but the flight actually didn't last long enough to test the supersonic design.)

Obviously, it's harder than expected for an airbreather to get a safe ride on an expendable rocket.

Inflatables Re-Enter and Hide... In an odd repeat of a previous test of an inflatable re-entry system, the recent flight of the Demonstrator 2 (see below) seemed to succeed only to disappear: CNN.com - Experimental Russian spacecraft is missing - July 15, 2002. Some parts of the earlier IRDT system were apparently never found. [See also Inflatable Spacecraft Missing - New Scientist - July.16.02]

July 13, 2002

XCOR Readies for Oshkosh... As noted below, XCOR flew the EZ-Rocket twice on Thursday. A press release now offers some nice photos (see above) and videos of the flights: Another XCOR Milestone for EZ-Rocket: two flights in one day - XCOR PR - July.12.02

The second flight occurred within about 6 hours after the first. The refueling was accelerated by cryogenically chilling the helium used to pressurize the propellant tanks. Doug Jones of XCOR says that "Typically, as we load helium, its temperature rises through compression heating. Chilling the helium during loading negates this heating and allows us to get a full load onto the EZ-Rocket quickly."

Rapid turnaround and multiple flights per day with a small ground are important goals for XCOR, which wants to demonstrate that a rocket powered vehicle can provide robust, low cost operations similar to those of a jet aircraft. Next generation rocketplanes intended for markets like sub-orbital space tourism and fast cargo delivery will need such operational capabilities to be economical.

July 12, 2002

NASA Announces ISS Alternate Access Awards... SLI will spread $10.8 million, among Andrews Space & Tech, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Constellation Services International for a 12 month study into ways to deliver cargo to the Space Station other than with the Shuttle and the Russian Progress modules.

NASA awards contracts to investigate commercial services to supply International Space Station - NASA PR - July.12.02

They will look at "cargo vehicle concepts for rendezvous and docking with the Space Station, and the technology requirements needed to accomplish an automated approach by NASA and industry."

Ironically, the announcement comes the same day that NASA said the Shuttle fleet would be grounded for two months to investigate cracks in the main engine fuel lines - Space Shuttle Fleet Grounded Until September - Space.com - July.12.02.

Note that CSI includes several space activists including Charles E. Miller, founder of ProSpace and David W. Anderman, a director of Space Frontier Foundation. Walt Anderson is also an advisor.

Inflatable Re-entry Shield Test... A sub-orbital Volna rocket launched from a submarine today and released a capsule that re-entered with an inflatable thermal shield. The project follows the previous flight of the IRDT system tested with a Fregat upper stage of a Soyuz rocket in February of 2000:

Volna Launches Mini-Shuttle Demonstrator From Submarine - Andrews Space&Tech - July.12.02

July 11, 2002

7:00pm ET: Second XCOR flight also a success. Aleta says Dick got to show off to brother Burt who came by to watch.

3:00pm ET: First of two XCOR flights goes well according to Aleta Jackson of XCOR. Dick Rutan said the flight had "zero defects". They are currently awaiting a new dewar of LOX before flying a second time today.

July 10, 2002

XCOR Rocketplane To Fly Twice on Same Day...If weather permits, XCOR will first fly the EZ-Rocket at the Mojave Civilian Flight Test Center on Thursday, July 11 at 7am. Then they will "refuel as quickly as possible and fly again later in the morning, wind cooperating".

The goal of the two flights is "to show rapid re-usability and to prepare for The Oshkosh air show."

If successful, I believe this will easily be the fastest turnaround for a large rocket powered flying vehicle since the DC-XA flew twice within 26 hours in June 1996 and one of the fastest in history.

[July.11.02: Aleta Jackson of XCOR tells me that "the Germans could turn around a Me163b in about an hour. We've a long way to go to match that! " I expect they will eventually get there. ]

July 8, 2002

News brief...NASA & Boeing complete a design review of a prototype Rocket Based Combined Cycle engine (an integrated rocket - ramjet system): Revolutionary Air-Breathing Engine Rockets Past Key Milestone Ahead of Schedule - July.8.02.

July 3, 2002

Early CTRV Becomes 2nd Gen RLV Crew module...NASA is considering the development of a crew transfer/return vehicle (CTRV) that could be docked to the ISS by 2009 for emergency crew rescue. It could be launched atop a Atlas V or Delta 4 or taken inside a shuttle.

Then when the 2nd Gen RLV is developed by SLI, it would become the second stage crew vehicle for that system. (In all current SLI designs, the crew and cargo go in separate modules.)

More info at Two-Step Crew Vehicle Option Under Study for Space Station Aviation Week - July.2.02

Full scale HyFly scramjet engine at NASA Langley wind chamber.

Hypersonic Air Breather - The Solution or a Detour? Hypersonic air breathing propulsion, e.g. ramjets and scramjets, is often cited as the best way to lower the costs to reach orbit. It seems obvious that it is far more efficient to use oxygen from the atmosphere than to carry it in LOX tanks.

However, there is a tradeoff in higher fuel consumption since an air breathing vehicle must use up lots of energy to push through the atmosphere as it builds up speed. A rocket, on the other, zips up and out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible.

It can also mean higher complexity and operational costs since two propulsion systems must be maintained. A rocket engine is still required to reach orbit and in some systems is required to provide the initial boost to reach speeds where the ramjet/scramjet engine can function. (Catapult systems, e.g. maglev or tube launcher, offer another way to get an initial boost.)

Hybrid air breather/rocket systems (e.g. RBCC - rocket based combined cycle) could provide SSTO capabilities but need many more years of development to prove they can provide the necessary performance and also operate in a robust and reliable manner.

Ramjets do offer an elegant, no moving parts approach in which intake air is slowed and compressed by the shape of the inlet. Injection of fuel and combustion provides a net positive thrust.

Scramjets are similiar except that the air continues to move at supersonic speed through the engine. This requires a fast burning fuel like hydrogen.

Note that ramjets can function on vehicles moving at supersonic speeds but that the air is slowed internally to subsonic velocity. This allows for easier handling of hydrocarbon fuels, e.g. jet fuel.

The first ramjet engines were built and flown many decades ago (e.g. see the Leduc test flights, the F-23, and the Bomarc) but no scramjet has flown successfully outside of a wind chamber. Both engines have the problem of not producing thrust at takeoff and slow speeds so either a turbojet or rocket must be used initially. (Or employ hybrid designs that integrate ramjets with turbojet or rocket action.)

The X-30 program in the 1980's used up a billion or so dollars to develop a SSTO scramjet but never got past the computer simulation stage. The NASA X-43 program has developed vehicles to test scramjets at Mach 7 and Mach 10. However, the Pegasus booster failed on the first test flight. A second attempt should take place this year.

The Australian Hyshot scramjet is a similar but much lower cost program. Its first flight also failed due to a first stage booster failure. A second test is coming up this summer.

Recently, there have been reports of progress in developing scramjet engines for the US military. There are two projects - HyFly and HyTech - that aim to use hydrocarbon fuels. To do this the fuels must be "cracked" to shorter molecular chains to attain the fast burning rates needed at supersonic air flow speeds. This is done using high pressure and excess heat from the engine before the fuel is injected.

Here is a brief summary of each program:

July 2, 2002

News briefs...Collapse of the fins on the first stage of the Hyshot launcher is deemed the most likely cause of the test flight failure last fall: Final Report into Hyshot Scramjet [Test Failure] Released - Australian Minister of Industry - June.20.02 * UQ welcomes report into Hyshot scramjet flight anomaly - Univ. Queensland - 20-Jun-2002...

...Next HyShot test planned for July 29, 2002.

July 1, 2002

News brief...SLI is funding several rocket engine projects (e.g. see previous note on hydrocarbon engine development) , which will certainly invigorate the US propulsion companies: SLI May Be Boon For U.S. Propulsion Industry - Space.com - July.1.02