Rutan's RASCAL

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...
I'm a little concerned about SpaceShipOne, RASCAL, and the Ansari prize
though one gets the feeling that part of the reason the White
Knight/SpaceShipOne combo was built was as a proof of concept vehicle
for RASCAL, and that IMHO violates the spirit of the Ansari prize and no
government funding...if you know that you have a government contract
pretty well sewn up if something you are building works, is what you are
then doing really private?

If you've seen some of the recent documentaries on SS1, you'd see that Rutan
had been working on the concept for SS1 for such a long time that it is
highly unlikely that RASCAL influenced the design of Wight Knight much. In
particular, things like the pressurized cabin being structurally identical
to SS1 (to save cost) seems to have more influence over the design of White
Knight.

NASA's B-52 has dropped a seemingly endless number of aircraft and rockets,
so why can't Rutan reuse White Knight in the same way? Once an aircraft is
designed and built, it seems silly to charge the government to design and
build another aircraft with essentially the same specifications.

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

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

But the article stated that DARPA took SpaceShipOne's successful flights
as a confidence-building event in relation to Rutan's involvement in the
RASCAL project.

Wouldn't you? White Knight and SS1's flight profile, up to the point that
White Knight drops SS1, is surely very similar to what DARPA wants for
RASCAL.

This isn't much different than picking NASA's B-52 to drop yet another
aircraft/rocket design based on its past successes in dropping similar
aircraft/rockets. Certainly it builds confidence, because it's a
successfully tested design.

You're getting way too paranoid on this one Pat. I thought I saw that the
X-Prize was recently given to Rutan, so there doesn't seem to be an issue
here.

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

Pat Flannery wrote in message ...
Len wrote:


The RA-5 Vigilante also looked interesting, but none are
available. There's lots of F-14As available.


Yeah, the center tubuler bomb bay would have been perfect for putting
the rocket and it's fuel in.
With an expendable rocket you could have jettisoned the motor assembly,
then slid the orbital booster out after it.
Did you ever see the proposed interceptor varint that carried a third
engine in there?:
http://www.vectorsite.net/ava56.jpg
Did you consider the Sukhoi Flanker? Its underbelly is also of the right
shape, and it already is designed to carry the big "Sunburn" missile
down the http://home19.inet.tele.dk/airwing/a...oskit-su33.jpg

Pat


Yes, we considered the Sukhoi--but acquiring them
is complicated. And, to meet DARPA's technology
desirements, we would have had to make just as many
modifications as we would have with the F-14D.
Without a requirement to use MIPCC and zoom climb,
adding a rocket system to the F-14A works just fine.

There was a time when technolgy got short-changed.
But for the past four decades, innovative, conceptual
system design has been short-changed. One would think
that high-payoff, low-risk systems that are innovative
without using risky technology would be in great demand.
However, no one in government seems to ask for that type
of system. Not since a hush-hush group with only five
government staffers produced the first recon satellites,
the U-2, the A-11/12, etc., has there been a group
dedicated to low-risk, high-payoff systems.

Len

Not since a hush-hush group with only five
government staffers produced the first recon satellites,
the U-2, the A-11/12, etc., has there been a group
dedicated to low-risk, high-payoff systems.

Len,

It's a bit hard to think of any of those as "low-risk." The U-2 was
revolutionary in design and endurance: the A-11/12 went into high-mach flight
regimes heretofore unknown using radical engine designs: and spy satellites
used almost entirely new technology, suffering 12 failures in a row before a
success.

Regards,


Matt Bille
)
OPINIONS IN ALL POSTS ARE SOLELY THOSE OF THE AUTHOR

Pat Flannery wrote:

I'm a little concerned about SpaceShipOne, RASCAL, and the Ansari prize
though one gets the feeling that part of the reason the White
Knight/SpaceShipOne combo was built was as a proof of concept vehicle
for RASCAL, and that IMHO violates the spirit of the Ansari prize and no
government funding...if you know that you have a government contract
pretty well sewn up if something you are building works, is what you are
then doing really private?

Do they know that?

If no government money went into the development, it's private, even
if you thought there might be government interest later. The DoD could
still say 'sorry, not interested after all,' at no loss to themselves.
It's happened before.

But if they're interested, *after* the fact, why not?

--

You know what to remove, to reply....

In article ,
Pat Flannery writes:
Peter Stickney wrote:

the need to
keep track of it on the way up, and have it fall somewhere other than,
say, a Junior Jugh School in New Jersey if things go wrong


They aren't going to live that down for a while, are they? Could have
been worse...could have hit a ski-lift in the Italian Alps...

The part that they didn't tell you about that one is that the Armee de
l'Air has accounted for at least 3 tramways in the past 20 years.
I don't know what the German record is.

A coupe of apropos tales, though, with happy endings.
Bill Stealy, the guy who launched MicroProse with Sid Meier, was in
the NY Air National Guard. As he put it, he spent his military carrer
bombing and strafing New Jersey - adn couldn't have done a very good
job, 'cause its still there.

Story the Second:L When Tank Boy, my youngets brother, was going
through the Armor School at Ft. Knox, one of the Bright Young Recruits
during Gunnery Practice got his switchology mixed up, and was firing
Sabot (APFSDS - Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot) rounds
using the HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) settings in the Fire Control
System. Now Sabot rounds move out at about a mile/second - they've
got, needless to say, a flat trajectory. (And it's kinda eerie to
observe a tank firing from 100 meters away, and seeing the round
impact onthe target before the noise of teh firing reaches you.)
HEAT desn't like to travel fast - a fast-moxing shell doesn't give the
penetrating jet of the shaped charge in teh shell time to form - so it
bloop out at a mere 2000 ft/sec or so.
The rounds weere scored as clean misses - especially when a Little Old
Lady outside of Louisvile called the post to see if the Army could
come and pick up the 5 Lawn Darts that showed up in here back yard.


have made
that inherent flexibility moot.


It's going to use _Soundless Rocket Engines_?!
Oh, excuse me...I thought you wrote "Mook" for a second there. ;-)

Careful there, Pat, them's Fightin' Words!

Is there any reason to believe that those artificial requirements
would be modified or lifted for Rascal? I rather doubt it, myself.


In times of crisis, the launch restrictions would be put aside, as long
as the booster stages came down over open ocean; it would be a lot
easier (and cheaper) to keep some of these things loaded and ready to go
than a fleet of Lockheed Tristars or B-52's, like Pegasus uses.
Considering the price that Rutan built White Knight/SpaceShipOne at, he
probably will be able to turn RASCAL out at a bargain basement
price...if only the bureaucracy will leave him alone- and not drown him
in paperwork, like the B-2 Stealth Bomber project was.

The same would hold true for Pegasus. The gating itemis getting the
proper payload selected, figuring out just what trajectory you want to
use, and getting the payload and the booster mated and ready to go.
That's a People Thing, and it's hard to reduce it.Oh, and there was
plenty of paperwork on the B-2. You can't go ordering all that stuff
and not generate paperwork. (Unless you're ordering by Interocitor,
from Exeter Enterprises) If I were of a Nasty adn Suspicious Mind, I'd
say that the B-2 required more than the usual paperwork - it takes a
lot of overhead to build and maintain the necessary blinds, covers,
and cut-outs. (Not that I'd know anything about that)

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

Jeff Findley wrote:

You're getting way too paranoid on this one Pat. I thought I saw that the
X-Prize was recently given to Rutan, so there doesn't seem to be an issue
here.



Given that Rutan has done both white world and black world (remember the
subscale B-2 he made to test a unknown factor of its design) work for
the government before, if I were the Ansari Prize commettee I'd have a
look at all this to make sure what we're seeing isn't the old
Discoverer/Corona "Hide In Plain Sight" concept.

Pat

Len wrote:


Yes, we considered the Sukhoi--but acquiring them
is complicated.


You can get a Chinese-made one at your local Wal-Mart. :-)


Pat

In sci.space.history Peter Stickney wrote:
In article ,
Pat Flannery writes:

In times of crisis, the launch restrictions would be put aside, as long
as the booster stages came down over open ocean; it would be a lot
easier (and cheaper) to keep some of these things loaded and ready to go
than a fleet of Lockheed Tristars or B-52's, like Pegasus uses.

The same would hold true for Pegasus.
...

Well, Pegasus has a lot more unmanned explosive solid rocket mass
(19 tons). Considering the RASCAL is smaller and the manned first
stage gives a more significant portion of the energy, the whole
expendable should be about 3 tons, most of which is the
non-explosive hybrid stage. (Ok, still wouldn't want to be
hit by that.) And it's flying more predictably, outside the atmosphere
to start with.

The old Preston Carter pdf also says the release from the aircraft
stage is at about 60 km height. If there's some performance margin,
you can get a few tens of kilometers lateral distance from the
launch site too, doesn't that help enough to get over the ocean for
care-free release?

I understand that the NF-104 rocket-augmented Starfighter was very
hard to control when coming down from ~40 km (reason for SS1's
shuttlecock), how is RASCAL going to solve these problems, if it's
supposed to operate routinely?

The gating itemis getting the
proper payload selected, figuring out just what trajectory you want to
use, and getting the payload and the booster mated and ready to go.
That's a People Thing, and it's hard to reduce it.

Couldn't one design standard quick-to-configure spysat payloads, or is
75 kg so small that you have to have specialized ones because of
instrument tradeoffs? Computers can anyway determine the needed
trajectory (if/when it's possible with launch constraints) parameters
in seconds.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster


--
meiza:
tmaja at cc hut fi

(MattWriter) wrote in message ...
Not since a hush-hush group with only five
government staffers produced the first recon satellites,
the U-2, the A-11/12, etc., has there been a group
dedicated to low-risk, high-payoff systems.

Len,

It's a bit hard to think of any of those as "low-risk." The U-2 was
revolutionary in design and endurance: the A-11/12 went into high-mach flight
regimes heretofore unknown using radical engine designs: and spy satellites
used almost entirely new technology, suffering 12 failures in a row before a
success.

Regards,


Matt Bille
)
OPINIONS IN ALL POSTS ARE SOLELY THOSE OF THE AUTHOR

You're right, Matt. The first six months or the A-11/12
program was spent trying to work with uncharacterized
titanium. However, the U-2 may be a better example of
new conceptual system design based upon technology that
wasn't that far out.

I guess I get a little carried away with the lack of
interest in novel concepts that do not depend upon new
technology. In particular, I feel that the DARPA
interest in high-risk, high-payoff technoloty should be
accompanied by at least as much attention to low/medium-risk,
high-payoff systems--in particular novel systems that package
existing know-how in a new way that has potential for
revolutionary improvement in operational capability.

I also wish the procurement types would pay more attention
to OMB A-109 which directs procurement people to address mission
needs without preconceived solutions or specific technology.

Len (Cormier)
PanAero, Inc.
(change x to len)
http://www.tour2space.com