Truly incredible. Certainly more graceful than the shuttle.
cue Xzibit
I read about this in a magazine, looks fuckin' neato.
Damn. Hard to imagine that maybe one day in the not too distant future, we might all have access to one of these.
[QUOTE=MasterG;29925157]As a commercial airline, sure, but if you mean like everyone having their own one, i doubt it. Fantastic step forward for space travel technology though. Imagine how much more fuel efficient it'd be to just go into space for the journey to another country, and just drift along in space without expending any fuel at all.[/QUOTE]
Your probably right there
[QUOTE=MasterG;29925965]If they crack space travel, it could significantly reduce CO2 output and make airlines cheaper and more efficient (Obviously the planes would be much more expensive to make at first, but once lots of them are in circulation, the cost will plummet)[/QUOTE]
That was the aim of SpaceShip Three, but I think they cut down on that idea to focus on Spaceship two from now.
[QUOTE=Jmir 54;29923244]cue Xzibit[/QUOTE]
Grandchild of the [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-38]P-38.[/URL]
Holy shit I didn't imagine it'd do that.
I don't really understand what happened but it looked pretty cool.
How far into space are they?
They're not, yet.
This is the fucking future, Moon colonies Here our children come!
[QUOTE=MasterG;29925157]As a commercial airline, sure, but if you mean like everyone having their own one, i doubt it. Fantastic step forward for space travel technology though. Imagine how much more fuel efficient it'd be to just go into space for the journey to another country, and just drift along in space without expending any fuel at all.[/QUOTE]
This is exactly what I meant.
The energy required to reach orbit far exceeds the energy required to simply travel along at a typical cruising altitude for a commercial jet-liner. There would be no net-benefit (in terms of efficiency) for travelling in space for intercontinental flights. One small benefit, but at a significant cost, is that really fast travel is a possibility for "space planes".
Virgin engineer meeting when designing this.
"Ok so we need a plane that can go in space, but one plane alone doesn't have enough power, what do we do?"
"STICK THREE PLANES TOGETHER :D"
Umm, the purpose of this experiment isn't a plane that goes into space (yet). They were testing an aerodynamic concept for re-entering the atmosphere safely and hassle-free.
[QUOTE=lexus04;29933190]Umm, the purpose of this experiment isn't a plane that goes into space (yet). They were testing an aerodynamic concept for re-entering the atmosphere safely and hassle-free.[/QUOTE]
Yep.
When you pitch an aircraft far back to slow it down, you can lose the ability for the control surfaces on the tail to operate as efficiently, because there is nowhere near as much air moving over them at that point. They are in the wake of the plane itself.
What this does is allow the main body of the plane to pitch back to slow down faster, but the control surfaces like elevators and rudder stay in the direction of travel, allowing the plane to be maneuverable at more extreme attitudes.
I can't wait to fly in this beast in November, it's going to be awesome.
The first few seconds after dropping from the middle plane must be scary.
"OH FUCK C'MON ENGINES TURN ON"
Cold war-era russain airship.
Quite typical.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVbwaHTuLvE&feature=related[/media]
Thread music for playing behind the vid.
Wait only the middle part goes into space, then why the other two pods?
[QUOTE=Number-41;29942722]Wait only the middle part goes into space, then why the other two pods?[/QUOTE]
The larger craft, WhiteKnightTwo, takes the space craft, SpaceShipTwo, up to 50,000ft where the space ship can use its rocket motors to reach its target height. By not requiring the energy to reach 50,000ft the space ship can be much smaller, lighter, and ultimately safer.
The WhiteKnightTwo serves a second purpose; its two cabins are nearly identical to the cabin of the spacecraft so passengers can train in it before flying in "the real deal". It can perform the zero-G parabolic arcs like NASA's "vomit-comet" thus simulating weightlessness without the need to be in space.
Read it in your avatar's voice...
I'm studying aerospace engineering at university and everything I've learnt so far made made me expect that think to fall out of the sky when it folded up. Awesome achievement
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