A cheap and easy way to space.

[Valcan]

Here i found this interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_C-1 ... master_III

So 85tons of payload.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

A little over 5 tons with a payload of 500 lbs.

Dream chaser is only 19,000lbs.

Im betting we could do it. I guarentee you could do it. Rockets from SpaceX. Boeing does the carrier aircraft. And a joint team between Boeing (who does both the C-17III and the X-37b) and the dream chaser crew does the orbiter "aka space taxi"
It can be done.

 

[frodo1008]

There is also another alternative for a carrier craft easily large enough with enough carrying capacity. And that is the carrier Boeing 747 craft that NASA uses to ferry the space shuttle orbiters, which weight in at some 150,000 lbs even empty.

And with the end of the shuttle program they will become available at a minimal cost from NASA I would think.

Of course if true point to point hypersonic travel is to become a reality then at least dozens of these craft would be needed. But hey, there are already many such older 747 craft at such airports as Mojave that could be so modified at far less cost than actually having to make new ones!

So, at very little cost just about any heavy lift aircraft could be modified for such use!

All that such as Rutan and company need to concentrate on are the point to point hypersonic (and eventually orbital) craft themselves!

And if there is one thing that I am relatively certain of it is that there is an advanced unit at Scaled Composites that is already doing design work on just such a craft. This along with the propulsion efforts of such as Rocketdyne and others gives me much hope for the future.

And in the meantime there is absolutely nothing wrong with NASA funding such as COTS to get capsule types of craft relatively inexpensively up to not only the ISS, but also future other research space stations by such as Bigelow Aerospace!

That is as long as Congress does not start acting up!!

 

[EarthlingX]

www.nasa.gov : NASA Announces New Hypersonic Research Opportunities

Nov. 02, 2010

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate has amended its announcement, "Research Opportunities in Aeronautics 2010," to solicit additional proposals. The announcement has been modified to include new topics in support of the agency's Hypersonics Project.

With the amendment, the Hypersonics Project of the Fundamental Aeronautics Program calls for proposals about enabling technologies and development of a new pool of expertise in two primary areas of interest. These include air-breathing access to space and entry, descent and landing of high-mass vehicles in planetary atmospheres.

...


www.aeronautics.nasa.gov : Hypersonics - Research Overview

Research in the Hypersonics Project focuses on solving some of the most difficult challenges in hypersonic flight, such as the development of materials for airframe and airbreathing propulsion applications that can withstand severe temperatures; the development of predictive models for compressible flow, turbulence, heating, ablation, and combustion; the creation of advanced control techniques for vehicles that fly in the hypersonic flow regime; and the generation of new experimental techniques that can be used to validate our theoretical and computational models. In addition, the Project will work toward airbreathing propulsion systems that integrate high-speed turbine engines and scramjets, and develop integrated physics-based design tools that simultaneously design the airframe and propulsion systems. Technology developed under the Hypersonics Project may also help the Department of Defense achieve its goal of global range at high speeds with persistence and significant payload.

The Hypersonics Project focuses on the development and validation of enabling foundational tools and technologies for two hypersonic system classes: Reusable Airbreathing Launch Vehicles (RALV), and Planetary Atmospheric Entry Systems (PAES), a large vehicle focused on transporting humans and scientific payloads to and from Mars. There is a critical need for dramatic improvements in our current capability to enable the landing of large payloads with or without humans safely on Mars as part of NASA’s Space Exploration Initiative.

...

 

[frodo1008]

Thank you, I am very glad to see NASA as well as the military taking a great interest in this vital area. I also believe that this is the eventual true path towards inexpensive and safe flight into space from the Earth.

And I also think that we are within some ten years of the beginnings of the reality of such flight.

One thing that does not ever seem to be discussed in such travel in most places where such travel is discussed at all, is the need for some degree of comfort in such travel if we are ever to have relatively ordinary people going into space in large numbers. This is one reason why I like the efforts of Burt Rutan and Virgin Galactic so much. They do seem to be taking such comfort into account even for the relatively brief sub orbital flights that they are now making a reality.

Hopefully, they will be continuing with this attitude while eventually moving on to more challenging efforts!

 

[scottb50]

There is also another alternative for a carrier craft easily large enough with enough carrying capacity. And that is the carrier Boeing 747 craft that NASA uses to ferry the space shuttle orbiters, which weight in at some 150,000 lbs even empty.

And with the end of the shuttle program they will become available at a minimal cost from NASA I would think.

Of course if true point to point hypersonic travel is to become a reality then at least dozens of these craft would be needed. But hey, there are already many such older 747 craft at such airports as Mojave that could be so modified at far less cost than actually having to make new ones!

So, at very little cost just about any heavy lift aircraft could be modified for such use!

All that such as Rutan and company need to concentrate on are the point to point hypersonic (and eventually orbital) craft themselves!

And if there is one thing that I am relatively certain of it is that there is an advanced unit at Scaled Composites that is already doing design work on just such a craft. This along with the propulsion efforts of such as Rocketdyne and others gives me much hope for the future.

And in the meantime there is absolutely nothing wrong with NASA funding such as COTS to get capsule types of craft relatively inexpensively up to not only the ISS, but also future other research space stations by such as Bigelow Aerospace!

That is as long as Congress does not start acting up!!

The biggest problem I can see here is while you could take a Shuttle to a high altitude, though I think the carriers have to stay low as much for temperature control on the Shuttle as well as the weight, you would still need pretty close to the same amount of propellant to get to orbit once the Shuttle leaves the carrier. So with the propellant, tanks and such the 150,000 pounds would probably be closer to 4,000,000.

The ISP of your propellant defines how much energy is needed to reach a certain velocity, then you have to account for the propellant weight and the weight of the engines and the tanks to carry the propellant. Start at the ground at 0 velocity or at 50,000 feet at .80M you still have to get to orbital velocity. The Shuttle stack reaches Mach 1 in about 45 seconds so that much propellant would not be needed if you started at Mach 1 and the 50,000 feet would add a minuscule amount to that. Roughly 3/4 of the SRB power and 7/8 of the SME propellant would still be needed to reach orbit.

 

[frodo1008]

If they were to use the same method that they are going to use to get to sub orbital at a 3,000 mph velocity, and then do the same type of skip on the atmosphere that was originally proposed by Eugene Sanger in Germany in the 1940's, they could take such a ship all the way across the US for not much more weight than the sub 0rbital ship itself.

How much weight of fuel is it then going to take to get a true hypersonic vehicle up to mach 10 or even above?

And then there is the ability of such an air breathing hypersonic jet to use the atmosphere itself as its own oxidizer at least, and this should reduce the amount of propellant needed by a long way for at least point to point hypersonic travel.

If this were not true, then why would both the US Military and NASA be so interested in such hypersonic methodologies?

Once you are up to about mach 10 to 15 with the hypersonic jet(s) then it should not take anywhere near the same weight of propellants to get the rest of the way up to orbital velocity. After all, just how much propellant is left in the main tank of the space shuttle by the time it gets up to mach 15?

I personally do not know, but somebody here probably does. I would bet that it is probably far less that even 10% of the starting weight on the launch pad.

So, and I say this respectfully to you. If such as Burt Rutan and Virgin Galactic that just broke ground on a new production facility of some 68,000 square feet out at the Mojave Airport to build some three carrier aircraft and some five launched vehicles for their sub orbital efforts, could not carry this even further, then I am certain that Rutan and company would know.

But they state that eventually they WILL have a true point to point hypersonic vehicle that would eventually also be capable for getting all the way up to LEO, and Rutan seems to have a way of doing what a lot of others originally consider impossible, so I will stick with my original statements here.

By the way there is a truly terrific book on the entire history of the space shuttle that is called:

"SPACE SHUTTLE
The History of the National Space Transportation System
The First 100 Missions
"
By Dennis R. Jenkins

It is available at a very reasonable price on amazon.

I highly recommend anybody that is interested in reusable to orbit craft such as the shuttle get it and read it.

This is where I learned that almost ALL of the early shuttle designs were indeed horizontal take off and landing two stage to orbit designs, somewhat similar to what Rutan and Virgin Galactic want to accomplish.

However, they have the advantages now of some 40 years of advancements in aerospace and other technologies, and they are attempting to do this in a manner that will free up space travel to LEO for literally thousands of relatively wealthy but otherwise ordinary people. And so they have to make it as inexpensive as possible because unlike NASA they MUST make an eventual profit or go under.

So, I would kind of bet that they can and will do it!!

 

[csmyth3025]

...The biggest problem I can see here is while you could take a Shuttle to a high altitude, though I think the carriers have to stay low as much for temperature control on the Shuttle as well as the weight, you would still need pretty close to the same amount of propellant to get to orbit once the Shuttle leaves the carrier. So with the propellant, tanks and such the 150,000 pounds would probably be closer to 4,000,000.

The ISP of your propellant defines how much energy is needed to reach a certain velocity, then you have to account for the propellant weight and the weight of the engines and the tanks to carry the propellant. Start at the ground at 0 velocity or at 50,000 feet at .80M you still have to get to orbital velocity. The Shuttle stack reaches Mach 1 in about 45 seconds so that much propellant would not be needed if you started at Mach 1 and the 50,000 feet would add a minuscule amount to that. Roughly 3/4 of the SRB power and 7/8 of the SME propellant would still be needed to reach orbit.

Post-Shuttle there will certainly be a separation of crew-carrying spacecraft and payload-carrying spacecraft. The idea of a space bus that does it all has proven too costly. According to Wikipedia each Shuttle launch costs about $450 million and can deliver about 53,600 lb to LEO. By comparson, Space X is listing a $56 million per-launch cost to LEO using their Falcon 9 rocket (23,050 lb payload), which can be found here:http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php

I've posted this before, but it's worth repeating. I'm very much in favor of the marriage of a Russian Molniya-1000 Heracles type carrier aircraft (payload capacity=450 metric tons), which can be found here:http://www.buran.ru/htm/mol-1000.htm with a British Skylon type spaceplane (loaded weight=275 metric tons) having a payload capacity to LEO of 26,000 lb., which can be found here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon#Specifications. Although the Skylon is touted as being a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, I think in reality it will be better suited for air-launch. This spaceplane is supposed to be 100% reusable.

Chris

 

[frodo1008]

Hey, that is great also. In fact, I really do not care just who gets humanity off of this spaceship Earth and out into the solar system, just as long as somebody does it safely, inexpensively, and soon!

It could be NASA, or the pure private for profit outfits here in the US, or it could be the Europeans in a cooperative venture with the Russians, or it could also be the Japanese or the Chinese, it really does not matter just as long as it gets done by somebody.

Of course, being a relatively patriotic American I would prefer that the US led the way, but if our elected representatives are to short sided to see the incredible opportunity for the future this makes, then let it be somebody else that can see farther ahead!!

 

[Zi]

Hey, that is great also. In fact, I really do not care just who gets humanity off of this spaceship Earth and out into the solar system, just as long as somebody does it safely, inexpensively, and soon!

It could be NASA, or the pure private for profit outfits here in the US, or it could be the Europeans in a cooperative venture with the Russians, or it could also be the Japanese or the Chinese, it really does not matter just as long as it gets done by somebody.

Of course, being a relatively patriotic American I would prefer that the US led the way, but if our elected representatives are to short sided to see the incredible opportunity for the future this makes, then let it be somebody else that can see farther ahead!!

Actually it does matter and matter tremendously. The history of frontiers should tell you that if nothing else does. If most of those you listed ever get the 'high ground' solidly in their grasp beyond the capacity of Americans the freedom and prosperity you have taken for granted most of your life will disappear quickly. Not just for Americans but for everyone. I have spent a great deal of time beyond the borders of our nation and I can assure you that most of those people/nations would laugh themselves to sleep and feel vindicated that their opinion of Americans as stupid was entirely vindicated. They don't actually 'get' freedom and won't miss it... but you will.

 

[Valcan]

!

Actually it does matter and matter tremendously. The history of frontiers should tell you that if nothing else does. If most of those you listed ever get the 'high ground' solidly in their grasp beyond the capacity of Americans the freedom and prosperity you have taken for granted most of your life will disappear quickly. Not just for Americans but for everyone. I have spent a great deal of time beyond the borders of our nation and I can assure you that most of those people/nations would laugh themselves to sleep and feel vindicated that their opinion of Americans as stupid was entirely vindicated. They don't actually 'get' freedom and won't miss it... but you will.

Zi,
The sad truth of the matter is most people who live in western nations have no clue how truely horrible of a world we live in.

He who controls the Orbitals controls the world.

 

[frodo1008]

Hey that is great!!

Let us all get together and point out that NASA is really a program for defending our freedoms, then we can get the conservative Republican House to increase funding for NASA by more than 100%!!

Using exploration, science, and future human survival just does not cut it, so lets switch back to the same justification of the 1960's.

As LBJ said (at least in the movie "The Right Stuff", "I for one, do not intend to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon!"

Hey, whatever works people!!! :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:

 

[Valcan]

Hey that is great!!

Let us all get together and point out that NASA is really a program for defending our freedoms, then we can get the conservative Republican House to increase funding for NASA by more than 100%!!

Using exploration, science, and future human survival just does not cut it, so lets switch back to the same justification of the 1960's.

As LBJ said (at least in the movie "The Right Stuff", "I for one, do not intend to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon!"

Hey, whatever works people!!! :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:

Now your thinkin. We need rods from god.......lots of em.

 

[bdewoody]

Sooner or later we all have to face the fact there is no cheap and easy way into space, not now not ever.

 

[frodo1008]

bdewoody, while you are certainly correct for my lifetime at least (I am now 68 years old), forever is a very long time!

For instance (and I am not a writer of any type, including SC-FI) here is a hypothetical ditty from the year 2312.

"Yeah, I know Jo, but there is an important conference being held on the moon tomorrow, so I had better get off my duff and catch the 4:10 equatorial elevator to GEO. You know it is the one where they shoot you off the other end at some 50,000 mph.

No, no, Jo, it isn't dangerous to stop at the moon, not since they now have special magnetic nets that catch you at their elevator sites. Then you are let down gently to the surface where you can take a meglev to any colony base on the moon.

Well, it isn't too expensive since they cut the price by some 40% in a special to keep up the rate of business. to some $245.99 per one way trip!"

So have hope (bdewoody and all others here), we WILL have such a future, it is just going to take more time than most of us now alive have got.

Sorry about that, I truly am!

 

[jpishgar]

As this is a fantastic thread with continuing relevance, it is being re-opened for discussion.

 

[Ittiz]

I guess most threads will be necro threads on here for a while, lol. Anyone want to raise a thread that's older than your teenage children from the dead? ok lets do that...

 

[jpishgar]

Necromancy has it's benefits!