Aerospace Plane Build IT To Replace Shuttle

Shouldn't the aerospace plane be brought back onto the drawing board
and seriously considered as a successor to the shuttle? The CEV is good
for going back to the Moon and Mars but it won't be a good replacement
for the shuttle. If we are are truly ever going to reach out into the
heavens we need an affordable way to lift heavy/large objects into LEO
and retreive them and mined materials from space put into LEO.

I know the Shuttle was plagued with problems but it had a few
fundamental problems as I see it:
1. It had stuff hanging off it (may work for fighters but not a good
idea for something going into space)
2. To bold at the time given lack of experience with anything at all
like it
3. Wrong take-off approach

Anytime you jettison an object off a plane you are taking on some risk
but thats not really the issue with the shuttle. Its what is on the
outside of that object - fuel tank=ice=ice aircraft impact risks. Why
did they not make a double hulled fuel tank - in between the two hulls
you have foam? I know the tank itself is not to heavy given its carried
most of the way to LEO and the shuttle was designed to carry 65,000lbs.
to LEO so even double weight of the tank should not be an issue given
that the shuttle has or rarely carries things that heavy up/down.

I know the aerospace plane project had lots of money pumped into it and
a lot of therotical work was done to solve problems but some they never
were able to deal with. I heard somewhere I think from a NASA or DARPA
site that a small fleet of aerospace planes would cost upwards of
twenty billion dollars for four or five vehicles. Now the average
shuttle missions cost around a $500 million? so say 17 more flights to
finish the space station which will probably be 90% inoperable by the
time its completed ... 17 x 500 = 8.5 billion 20,000 / 4 = 5,0000 thats
five billion per aerospace plane and that figuring 20B for a fleet of
four not five. This should account for inflation and cost-overs. So the
cost of 10 shuttle flights would pay for one aerospace plane and I
think whatever problems it may have would be less than the shuttle and
cheaper to deal with. We know a lot more about re-entry issues than we
did back when the shuttle was being designed and I see no reason why
the aerospace plane would not be able to fly far more often than any
one shuttle.

It would have taken off and landed like a plane and would not have had
external rocket boosters and fueld tanks to deal with.

The money saved by developing the aerospace plane could also give the
CEV concept a twist. An aerospace plane would not be able to leave LEO
but it could lift a rocket into orbit which then could fly to Mars or
the Moon. The rocket could be much smaller and use exotic propulsion
systems we don't want to use on Earth like nuclear rockets that have a
far higher specific impulse rating. Much more thrust for a given amount
of propellant.

Once a commerically viable aerospace plane exists we could launch
missions to small asteroids and use various means to bring one into
Earth orbit where it could be mined for rare minerals like platinum and
tran-shipped to Earth. I think the moon has platinum all over its
surface too. We have the tech. to do great things its just that gov't
won't fund it.

Jeff

I appreciate your sentiments. SPACEPLANES are the way to go!

My only disagreements are your prices are figured too high and you
haven't considered all the ramifications of SPACEPLANES yet.

First, the prices are just pulled out of thin air. You haven't built
those prices by accounting up everything that makes a spaceplane -- you
just grabbed numbers tossed around by other writers.

Carbon fiber is cheap, and it is one of the basic components of a
SPACEPLANE. You can't go with epoxy-carbon, even though SpaceShipOne
did, because hitting the atmosphere at 17,000 mph is far faster than
they peaked. The temps will melt the ship.

GEOPOLYMERS are too new that most people don't have any idea what you
are talking about -- but they are inorganic plastics, mineral plastics.
Look them up -- they will give you ideas.

Any spaceplane is basically one big fuel tank with wing shape, with a
small payload, small crew compartment, small machinery load including
rocket engines. The tank dominates everything. Most of the size is
hydrogen fuel, but most of the weight is oxygen oxidizer. If you can
make tanks light and strong, everything else is easy, and if you can
also make them cheap, that's most of the cost of the spaceplane.

My advice is not to bother with numbers and figure out how to build the
thing first, then figure out what that costs, and only then do you have
any meaningful numbers. Don't scare people talking about BILLIONS OF
DOALLRS when the thing might actually end up in the low millions, or
even the high hundred thousands.


The second thing is related to the first. A SPACEPLANE is a PLANE. It
can fly from an airport and land at an airport. That means that you can
fly into space and come right back down again, except on the other side
of the planet. Cheap spaceplanes would sell lots for FedEx, UPS,
airmail, high-value freight and travellers in a hurry. So cost can be
reduced by volume production.

Actually, cheap spaceplane fleets of five hundred, not five, means that
there can be enough cargo carried up to deposit the materials to make
the space drydocks to build interplanetary vehicles of designs that
can't go up in one piece. 500 spaceplanes going up and down every ten
days each is 1500 trips per month. If they each can drop off 40 ton
payloads (the maximum load for a highway semi-truck trailer), that is
60,000 tons lifted per month. You could make something bigger than an
aircraft carrier in space if you had 60,000 tons of parts, tools,
supplies delivered each and every month.


So watch those numbers and don't get suckered by inflated figures that
might be hiding CIA black budgets, manager's calls to phone-sex at
$4.99 a minute billed to the project, and graft and under the table
kickbacks. Do your own math on the costs.


And don't be shy about thinking big. They throw away more hardware on
each shuttle launch than is required to build a reusable spaceplane.
It's just a big wing shaped fuel tank with space for 10% non-fuel
stuff. The more of that non-fuel stuff you want to carry, the bigger
the fuel tank has to be, so think big.


One other thing. Don't tell everybody about the platinum on the moon
and asteroids. Everybody will be going and you know what kind of trashy
people I mean. Besides, there's diamonds as big as volkswagons under
the platinum, and why should we share that with those guys? Let 'em
think there's nothing but worthless rock out there, and enough
radiation to fry your eggs if you ever get caught unshielded.

"H2-PV NOW" wrote in message
oups.com...
Carbon fiber is cheap, and it is one of the basic components of a
SPACEPLANE. You can't go with epoxy-carbon, even though SpaceShipOne
did, because hitting the atmosphere at 17,000 mph is far faster than
they peaked. The temps will melt the ship.

Yet composite aircraft components aren't cheap. If they were, we'd likely
see more of them and less aluminum in conventional aircraft construction.

Want to tell us how you propose to turn cheap carbon fiber into a vehicle
without using the same technologies used today to build relatively expensive
composite aircraft components?

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.

Actually, cheap spaceplane fleets of five hundred, not five, means that
there can be enough cargo carried up to deposit the materials to make
the space drydocks to build interplanetary vehicles of designs that
can't go up in one piece. 500 spaceplanes going up and down every ten
days each is 1500 trips per month. If they each can drop off 40 ton
payloads (the maximum load for a highway semi-truck trailer), that is
60,000 tons lifted per month. You could make something bigger than an
aircraft carrier in space if you had 60,000 tons of parts, tools,
supplies delivered each and every month.

Thats exactly what I'm trying to get at. I'm just some poor schmuck who
would one day...hopefully in my lifetime see humanity truly reach out
into the heavens but I realize that won't happen till we have a
practical way of getting into orbit. I remember as a real little kid
seeing NASA booklets we got on vacation from the late 80's about NASA
plans to establish lunar bases by the mid 90's and be at Mars by the
year 2000. What a joke! I think I still have one or two of these
booklets. This is why I get ****ed off by Bush's new space vision and
the CEV. In a few years we went to the moon but its going to take us
another decade or so to go back??? Bull****. Maybe we need to find an
asteroid bearing down on us within a few years to get our asses in
gear. Its an if its 1492 but we know their there is a huge world out
there but won't go check it out.


So watch those numbers and don't get suckered by inflated figures that
might be hiding CIA black budgets, manager's calls to phone-sex at
$4.99 a minute billed to the project, and graft and under the table
kickbacks. Do your own math on the costs.

I'm sure you are right about that. I can only imagine the high tech
super weapons we have that are ultra top secret like hypersonic bombers
and Tesla death ray weapons. You know the SR-72 is the only plane that
the Air Force ever lobbied to have RETIRED but no apparent successor
unless but we all know there is one.

One other thing. Don't tell everybody about the platinum on the moon
and asteroids.

Yeah then there are the plans NASA claims to have to turn lunar soil
into rocket propellant and water.

A spaceplane wouldnt be hyped here by nasa workers as it would decimate
the KSC workforce and could be launched from nearly anywhere.

As a jobs program it will be a big loser

Well at least a spaceplan at first would operate out of KSC and maybe
some really large air force bases. You think KSC workforce will be
decimated by an aerospace plane what about when the shuttle is gone and
this stupid CEV (hyped Apollo) comes along? A large space plane would
likely need a very long runway for takeoff and landing due to it being
designed for sustained flight in the hyper-sonic range/space...orbital
re-entry or HS speeds at 200,00+' generate a lot of heat so the KSC
workforce could still have a job doing tile work. SP would have to have
highly swept back wings which means really high takeoff speeds with all
that fuel and high landing speeds even minus the fuel load. KSC has one
of the longest runways in the country at 15,000'

Bob Haller wrote:
A spaceplane wouldnt be hyped here by nasa workers as it would decimate
the KSC workforce and could be launched from nearly anywhere.

As a jobs program it will be a big loser

On 20 Mar 2006 17:37:02 -0800, "buff82driver"
wrote:

KSC has one
of the longest runways in the country at 15,000'

Were the SAC runways used for B-52s and loaded KC-135's 12,000' or
15,000' ? I grew up near a SAC base and those runways were HUGE! If
they're only 12,000' though, it might be pretty hard to extend them. I
know the base I lived near (Warner Robins) had a big problem with
finding unexploded conventional ordnance that planes jettisoned before
landing several decades ago (including WWII) when they went into the
woods at the end of the runway. There's plenty of room on the base,
it's thousands of acres. How wide are the SAC runways compared to the
KSC runway?

Speaking of B-52s, has anyone here ever seen the footage of a B-52
landing at Robins with hydraulic problems. They had the main gear
down, but not the landing gears on the end of the wings. IIRC, The
wings actually flapped and it bounced back up into the air. It's one
of the most amazing things I've ever seen. They gave the crew medals
for not just bailing out. I don't know if the video of the landing
ever made it beyond local news.

-- David