CEV PDQ

Pat Flannery wrote:
Herb Schaltegger wrote:

Mostly because they're vehicle kept crashing, exploding and
otherwise
failing in spectacular fashion. The footage of that tank bouncing,
however, really ought to be included as an Easter Egg in Doom 4.



Yeah- the rocket design had problems, but that was the toughest damn

hydrogen peroxide tank that you ever laid eyes on! :-)
Here, Armadillo Aerospace puts hydrogen peroxide on various items of
clothing to see what will happen:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/...terialTest.mpg
One should not shine one's leather shoes with hydrogen peroxide...
;-)

There are some bits of film of what used to happen in the British space
programme when they had Hydrogen Peroxide accidents. Not sure if
they've ever been put on line, I've only ever seen them
indocumentaries.

They had some high tech chemical protection equipment in the fueling
room - like a large bath tub.

Dave

Michael P. Walsh wrote:

I am somewhat concerned that Canadian Arrow's approach will lead
to some kind of disaster that will put a black mark on small scale
private space efforts.



The technology is very straight-forward; the use of a pressure-fed
engine eliminates the turbopump reliability concerns, and the vehicle
has a built in escape system that is usable at any point from on the pad
through the completion of first stage burn.

Thank you for your reference. I see that they have done some significant
engine firing tests. However, they need a lot more effort and testing on
that escape capsule. Dropping it from a helicopter is a good first step,
but testing the escape capsule should be regarded as essential by them
before they commit to a manned launch.



I wouldn't be at all surprised if they do one or more unmanned abort
tests, and a couple of unmanned total flight tests before putting anyone
on board, and then get quite a few manned launches done before a paying
passenger gets on board.
Then of course it will be time to build the upscaled one with the wings
and nuclear engine and head for the Moon:
http://www.dreamstone.com.au/artists...of%20space.jpg

Pat

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...


Michael P. Walsh wrote:

I am somewhat concerned that Canadian Arrow's approach will lead
to some kind of disaster that will put a black mark on small scale
private space efforts.


The technology is very straight-forward; the use of a pressure-fed engine
eliminates the turbopump reliability concerns, and the vehicle has a built
in escape system that is usable at any point from on the pad through the
completion of first stage burn.

Thank you for your reference. I see that they have done some significant
engine firing tests. However, they need a lot more effort and testing on
that escape capsule. Dropping it from a helicopter is a good first step,
but testing the escape capsule should be regarded as essential by them
before they commit to a manned launch.


I wouldn't be at all surprised if they do one or more unmanned abort
tests, and a couple of unmanned total flight tests before putting anyone
on board, and then get quite a few manned launches done before a paying
passenger gets on board.
Then of course it will be time to build the upscaled one with the wings
and nuclear engine and head for the Moon:
http://www.dreamstone.com.au/artists...of%20space.jpg

Pat

Your remark brought "Destination Moon" to mind.

Mike Walsh

Michael P. Walsh wrote:

Then of course it will be time to build the upscaled one with the wings
and nuclear engine and head for the Moon:
http://www.dreamstone.com.au/artists...of%20space.jpg

Pat



Your remark brought "Destination Moon" to mind.



The "Luna" from the movie was Bonestell designed; many of the science
fiction rocket designs in the 1945-1955 period owed a lot to the German
A-4b winged derivative of the V-2, as it was aesthetically appealing
and looked like a cross between a jet plane and a rocket; therefore
fitting into what people expected a reusable rocketship to look like:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/a4b.htm
Von Braun proposed a manned reconnaissance derivative of the design to
the Luftwaffe using a undertail ramjet to increase the range while it
was cruising horizontally, this in turn became the inspiration for the
both the Buran and Navaho missiles:
http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/n/navvsbur.gif

* I made a 1/35 scale model of this derivative.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:


Michael P. Walsh wrote:

I am somewhat concerned that Canadian Arrow's approach will lead
to some kind of disaster that will put a black mark on small scale
private space efforts.



The technology is very straight-forward; the use of a pressure-fed
engine eliminates the turbopump reliability concerns, and the vehicle
has a built in escape system that is usable at any point from on the pad
through the completion of first stage burn.

Thank you for your reference. I see that they have done some significant
engine firing tests. However, they need a lot more effort and testing on
that escape capsule. Dropping it from a helicopter is a good first step,
but testing the escape capsule should be regarded as essential by them
before they commit to a manned launch.



I wouldn't be at all surprised if they do one or more unmanned abort
tests, and a couple of unmanned total flight tests before putting anyone
on board, and then get quite a few manned launches done before a paying
passenger gets on board.

OK, but let's hope they do a lot of testing before they try this:

http://www.canadianarrow.com/spacediving.htm

This is probably what makes some people think these guys aren't playing
with a full deck. But, more power to 'em. (maybe) There are hundreds of
people lining up every year to climb Mount Everest. Several rich
idiots/thrillseekers die every year.

http://www.canadianarrow.com/spacediving.htm

Rand Simberg wrote:
On Tue, 17 May 2005 08:09:07 -0500, in a place far, far away, Herb
Schaltegger made the
phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

On Mon, 16 May 2005 21:59:34 -0500, Scott Hedrick wrote
(in article ):


"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...

Money was not the incentive, obviously.

Then it's not really relevant as a prize, is it? Do you think that
Rutan
would have made the attempt if the prize was a nice plaque?


Rand is a hypocrite who takes whatever position he feels like merely
to
perpetuate the argument:

That's obvious nonsense. I don't have time to argue with everyone
about every thing. The vast majority of posts in this newsgroup go
unresponded to by me. If you're idiotic assertion were correct, that
wouldn't be the case.

Oh tosh! Rand, you LOVE arguing with people and there's many of us
who've quit ssp over it, even other people, like me, who love a good
Usenews ruck. The problem is arguing with you is like building on
sand. You may not respond to the "vast" (a word you like to use
without defining what it is btw) majority - but you respond to a huge
number and even a basic Google will demonstrate that.

You context strip, you duck, you dodge, you obfuscate until the
original topic is so lost and distorted the meaning is lost completely.

Pithy one liners are your speciality. People who argue with you lack
"comprehension abilities", "can't read", are "stupid" and a set of
other stock phrases you use over and over again.

Finally, you pull a little "Who? Me?" innocent routine and suggest that
only an idiot could possibly have misunderstood you.

The trouble is over the last 8 years or so it has happened more and
more regularly and Google News has made it much easier to go back and
watch historical trends.

I'm certainly not proud of my actions on this news group when I've had
a problem with your arrogant statements but this pious act is
reprehensible.

Dave

Rand Simberg wrote:
On Tue, 17 May 2005 08:09:07 -0500, in a place far, far away, Herb
Schaltegger made the
phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

On Mon, 16 May 2005 21:59:34 -0500, Scott Hedrick wrote
(in article ):


"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...

Money was not the incentive, obviously.

Then it's not really relevant as a prize, is it? Do you think that
Rutan
would have made the attempt if the prize was a nice plaque?


Rand is a hypocrite who takes whatever position he feels like merely
to
perpetuate the argument:

That's obvious nonsense. I don't have time to argue with everyone
about every thing. The vast majority of posts in this newsgroup go
unresponded to by me. If you're idiotic assertion were correct, that
wouldn't be the case.

While the results are highly suspect, I've been Google Newsing on this
just to see what the numbers say. Google News has somewhere around
160,000 archived sci.space.policy posts going back over the last few
years.

Looking just at the author true names, and these numbers could be low
if they've archieved different ones, but it does make interesting
reading for this stuff.

Rand, 16300 hits; Me, 496 (which seems far too low); Herb 235; Ed
Wright 3610; Henry Spencer, 6570; Eric Chomko, 2340; Scott Lowther,
3090.

I didn't bother doing any more. So while Rand has not responded to the
majority of posts - he is responsible, by himself, for something like
10% of the entire history of the news group.

Wow.

I wonder who is the all time top Usenews poster?

Dave

Andrew Gray wrote:

On 2005-05-10, Neil Gerace wrote:
"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...

Which is one of the several reasons that STS (to the surprise of
many) is not "human rated."

Well, it happens to airliners too. An abort (all engines out, no
control surfaces responding) is often not survivable. But they are
still allowed to fly.

The analogy isn't quite the same, though - this would be equivalent
to saying that there's a dead-zone during takeoff where you can't
try to do an emergency landing of the airliner, surely?

Indeed there are. Consider the case of the Air France Concorde crash
in Paris. When the tire burst, causing failure of the left wing fuel
tanks, and the subsequent fire, they were traveling too fast to
decelerate and stop on the runway, and were committed to take off.

Or the loss of a USAF E-3 (Basically a 707 carrying a big frisbee)
that was lost in Alaska about 10 years back or so - They encountered
a flock of geese just at liftoff, lost both engines on one side, and
it couldn't be controlled at that low airspeed.

It's less of an issue nowadays, with the proliferation of twin-engine
airliners. The FAA here in the U.S. has very strict rules for rate
of climb with one engine out in order to be certificated, so the
twins tend to be rather overpowered. But if you go back a bit,
engine-out performance got kinda marginal, especially on hot days
and/or at high altitude airports.

--
Pete Stickney
Java Man knew nothing about coffee.

David Lesher wrote:

"Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer)"
writes:


The airliner that iced up on the ground and hit the 14th St Bridge
over the Potomac, while taking off from National Airport, didn't
have enough airspeed for the "experimental" airfoil that the ice had
created, which is why it hit the bridge instead of flying away. Had
there not been ice on the wings, the accident wouldn't have
happened.

I thought the major cause was an iced pressure sensor...

http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/1982/AAR8208.htm

The pressure sensor in question was a contributing factor in that it
improperly indicated engine performance. Multi-spool jet engines use
the ratio of pressure in the tailpipe to ambient pressure as a
measure of performance, since, with the independent spools, it's
possible to have your RPM & temperature numbers look perfectly O.K.,
but still not be developing anything like full power.
That's just an indicator, though - the crew should have noted that
takeoff acceleration was much below what it should have been. If
they had, they could probably have aborted the takeoff.

--
Pete Stickney
Java Man knew nothing about coffee.

On Mon, 16 May 2005 19:10:23 -0400, "Scott Hedrick"
wrote:

What you're being intentionally obtuse about, of course, is that *in order
to get the prize money, -other- money had to be spent first*. Clearly, Rutan
did *not* get the prize money *first* in order to build his entry. Other
organizations also expended money on entries, and did not get the prize, so
clearly *they* were not spending prize money, either. *Rutan did not get his
construction money from the X-Prize*. You're welcome to provide verifiable
evidence to the contrary. Of course, since Rutan admitted spending more than
twice as much as the prize, that's further proof that he didn't get his
funding from the prize.

I don't agree with your argument here. What you describe is the
normal course of events in aviation. Charles Lindbergh got a pack of
St Louis businessmen to front him the money to win the prize for the
first solo east-bound crossing of the Atlantic. Paul McCready raised
a lot of money to build the human-powered airplane that flew across
the English Channel for that prize. In both cases, there were others
working to win the same prizes, and they, too, had raised funding
based on winning the prize.

I think it's more correct to say that they all got their funding in
anticipation of winning the prize. Had there been no prize, it's very
likely there would have been no funding.

Had the prize not
occurred, he probably wouldn't have gotten the investment.

A poor investment if the money was the incentive, since he spent far more
than he got.

There's more than just money; there's also winning the prize itself.
I'm sure Paul McCready and his team spent a lot more on the autonomous
Quetzalcoatlus northropi vehicle than they got back, too, but they
also had the joy of getting it to fly well.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer
We didn't just do weird stuff at Dryden, we wrote reports about it.
or