Spacehship One wins the X-Prize

[Kguku]

368,000 feet today.

The story would have been much more interesting if Kim Jong-il shot it down.

[masteen]

The beginnings of public space flight is pretty interesting all by itself, IMO.

[Burke]

Anybody remember a short lives series on TV in the 80s called "Salvage" or "Salvage 1"?

[Xatrei]

Anybody remember a short lives series on TV in the 80s called "Salvage" or "Salvage 1"?

Next week on a very special "Space Ship One," Burt Ratan, Paul Allen and Richard Branson will fly Space Ship one into the arctic and tow an iceberg back to California to end a dangerous water shortage!!

[Hoarmurath]

Did they fix the roll problem?

Luckilly, I don't think the X-prize challenge had a provision such as "your craft must not spin around like it was shot out of a rifled barrel." Other than that, this is an awesome accomplishment.

[Forthe]

Did they fix the roll problem?

Luckilly, I don't think the X-prize challenge had a provision such as "your craft must not spin around like it was shot out of a rifled barrel." Other than that, this is an awesome accomplishment.

I agree. I haven't seen the 2nd flight yet but calling the 1st flight a success was pure spin (pun intended). Watching that first flight I had several disturbingly long seconds where I expected to see the ship disintegrate.

[Chmee]

Did they fix the roll problem?

Luckilly, I don't think the X-prize challenge had a provision such as "your craft must not spin around like it was shot out of a rifled barrel." Other than that, this is an awesome accomplishment.

I agree. I haven't seen the 2nd flight yet but calling the 1st flight a success was pure spin (pun intended). Watching that first flight I had several disturbingly long seconds where I expected to see the ship disintegrate.

Short article regarding the rolls of the first flight.

http://www.xprize.org/press_room/press_ ... icleID=126

The complex reason on why the rolling departure occurred will be described in a report we will post at a later date. What I am intending to do here is merely address some of the incorrect rumors about the rolls that have been seen in various news stories and web discussion groups.

While the first roll occurred at a high true speed, about 2.7 Mach, the aerodynamic loads were quite low (120 KEAS) and were decreasing rapidly, so the ship never saw any significant structural stresses. The reason that there were so many rolls was because shortly after they started, Mike was approaching the extremities of the atmosphere. Nearly all of the 29 rolls that followed the initial departure were basically at near-zero-q, thus they were a continuous rolling motion without aerodynamic damping, rather than the airplane-like aerodynamic rolls seen by an aerobatic airplane. In other words, they were more like space flight than they were like airplane flight. Thus, Mike could not damp the motions with his aerodynamic flight controls.

Mike elected to wait until he feathered the boom-tail in space, before using the reaction control system thrusters (RCS) to damp the roll rate. When he finally started to damp the rates he did so successfully and promptly. The RCS damping, to a stable attitude without significant angular rates was complete well before the ship reached apogee (337,600 feet, or 103 Km). That gave mike time to relax, note his peak altitude, and then pick up a digital high-resolution camera and take some great photos out the windows. Those photos are now being considered for publication by a major magazine.

While we did not plan the rolls, we did get valuable engineering data on how well our RCS system works in space to damp high angular rates. We also got a further evaluation of our "Care-free Reentry" capability, under a challenging test condition. As seen on the videos of the flight, the ship righted itself quickly and accurately without pilot input as it fell straight into the atmosphere. No other winged, horizontal-landing spaceship (X-15, Buran, SpaceShuttle) has this capability.

Nice work overall by the Scaled Composites team on winning the prize. Great accomplishment, hope to see much more from them.

[Hoarmurath]

Nice explanation on the roll issue. Looks like I was suckered into thinking it was a huge deal by TEH LIBERAL MEDIA SPIN MACIHINE. </derail>

[Kaldaur]

Don't let the liberal spin lie to you about the reasons behind the spin.

[Chmee]

I saw some of the press conference (unfortunately I didn't get to see the flight today) and the pilot of the first run did joke that he had the record for victory rolls out of the atmosphere (or something like that) .

[Kguku]

There was no rolling on the second flight. They did set a new record though for height in an aircraft, the old record was 358,000 set by the X15.