Ruediger Klaehn writes:

I would expect maybe 20 or 30 teams to show up for the airplane drop tests.
Since they will probably have done some airplane drop tests on their own,
most reentry vehicles will survive this. But the high altitude drop tests
where the vehicles will reach supersonic speed will result in many craters
in the ground and only a few remaining teams.

I feel the problem with your scheme is that the competitors don't have
to pay for the launch. So why not go and try something. You would
probably have thousands of teams. So you have the competitors make to
pay for the launch. But now you have to make sure that their vehicles
actually get a chance to accomplish their mission, which at least means
testing *all* vehicles on the laucher to be launch-, space- and
separation-ready. Which means vibration-, vacuum-, temperature-,
outgassing- and whatnot tests.

The drop tests seem useless, too. The first problem with building such a
reentry vehicle is to build one that a) does survive launch, b) does not
endanger the launcher and the other vehicles on the same laucher even
when it fails and c) is able to separate from the launcher without
shredding itself and the competiting vehicles into tiny
pieces. Everything you can test with a drop test is the easiest part of
all.

Furthermore, being able to build a 100kg/1m^3 vehicle with no (or very
little) actual payload is irrelevant to the problem at hand. Building a
vehicle that has an order of magnitude more mass for heatshield and
landing mechamisms than for payload is certainly not helping in
developing *useful* new ways of reentry. The hard part in reentry is to
do it with a large payload fraction.

If you'd say "80kg of the 100kg has to be payload" this gets more
useful. After all noone is keen on new ways to build a craft that has,
say, 3 tons of capsule wrapped in 300 tons of heatshield.

Anyway, I think your idea is not bad, but alone the launch looks like a
major and expensive mission -- deploying a bunch of vehicles from a
launcher, all prototypes, all different actually is a nightmare from a
planning point of view.


Jochem

--
"A designer knows he has arrived at perfection not when there is no
longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take
away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery