July 06, 2006
Awesome, awesome...
Finally we find out something about the mysterious Blue Origins..
The public space travel business is picking up suborbital speed thanks to a variety of private rocket groups and their dream machines.
Joining the mix is Blue Origin's New Shepard Reusable Launch System. It is financially fueled by an outflow of dollars from the deep pockets of billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com...
Having these proud-as-Lucifer dot-commers competing with each other to get into orbit is just too utterly cool. "Last guy into space is a girl!" But what really interested me about Blue Origin is this:
...Blue Origin's spaceship is patterned after Department of Defense/NASA work on the single-stage vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X) and Delta Clipper Experimental Advanced (DC-XA). It was repeatedly flown in 1993-1996 at the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
Among a list of distinctions, a 26-hour turnaround was achieved between the DC-XA's second and third flights - a first for any rocket. The flight program ended in July 1996 with the DC-XA suffering severe damage due to a landing strut – one of four—that failed to extend. The unbalanced vehicle tipped over on its landing pad and caught fire. Due to lack of follow-up money, the program was ended....
Delta Clipper was one of those might-have-beens that just breaks your heart. The wretched Shuttle sucks up millions of dollars a day even when, as usual, it's not flying at all. DC cost nothing in comparison, but died for lack of funds. And lack of interest on the part of the commissars.
And now Delta clipper rises again! Yay!
Delta Clipper. Image from space.com
I worked on the Delta Clipper project at the Pentagon as the graphics and presentations guy for then Maj. Sponable.
Yes, the concept is a great one, and I'm delighted (and not surprised) that the DC concept is going to be used for sub-orbitals by Blue Origins. Keep in mind, though, that the key word here is SUB-orbital. Many proponents of the DC-type launch concept saw it as a genuine Single Stage To Orbit system. No way, fuhgidaboudit!
This doesn't mean that some variant of the sub-orbital vehicle can't be used in a two-stage to orbit system, and I'm looking forward to what Blue Origins will do in that area in the future.
Posted by: Roderick Reilly at July 6, 2006 02:03 PMMy suspicion has been that it was not close to SSTO, smply because if it had been we would have heard about it. For instance this book, Halfway to Anywhere : Achieving America's Destiny in Space was fascinating on DC and similar concepts. And it has provocative speculation on how various problems will be solved. But it drove me crazy because it's silent on the biggest problem of all, getting the weight of the spacecraft low enough in relation to the weight of the fuel...
Posted by: John Weidner at July 6, 2006 03:12 PM"""the biggest problem of all, getting the weight of the spacecraft low enough in relation to the weight of the fuel...""""
This is called a "Mass Fraction" problem, and it really can't be solved with conventional rocketry.
Using the DC-X concept as a reusable first stage will work great, however.
Posted by: Roderick Reilly at July 7, 2006 03:05 PM
