Samizdata

At long last the secretive space venture of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has gone public. The video of the test hop is very informative to the rocket afficionado. Note what you do not see: rocket ‘bells’ and flames. The lack of expander nozzles and the large number of small engine ports in the bottom are strongly indicative of an aerospike engine; the lack of flame means they are probably running a high efficiency cryogenic engine using LOX/LH.

These features, plus the shape of the vessel have a long commercial space history. The prototype of this design was Gary Hudsen’s ‘Phoenix’ of the 1980’s. In the early 1990’s, Bill Gaubatz of McDonell Douglas actually built something much like it, but without the aerospike. Bill used the easily available RL-10 LOX/LH engine for his ‘boilerplate’ test ship. (Some months ago I posted a picture of the remains of this test vehicle).

I have been waiting a long time for someone to actually try this configuration. Some say it cannot be made to fly single stage to orbit; others swear vehemently that it can. Noone, however, disagrees that it can do a fine suborbital job or that it is a much more effective general purpose space vehicle than anything with wings.

Audio downloads of the Libertarian Alliance Conference from November 25th are available and if anyone is interested, you can download and listen to my talk on the current state of the ‘New Space’ industry.

Dale Amon expounds on a 21st century industry at a Victorian venue in Whitehall, London.
Photo: DMA (with a little help from Tom), all rights reserved.

After an hour or so scanning the ‘Region A’ which Jeff Bezo’s BlueOrigin’s environmental impact statement says is the launch area, I have found one reasonable possibility.

If anyone else feels like doing some detective work and having a bit of craic, feel free to carry on and report back to Samizdata HQ on your findings.

As I write I am sitting in a motel room in Colorado after two days of meetings in Wyoming associated with the launch of a new company. I am sad to say I will miss the coming festivities of the Samizdata Fifth Anniversary party so I hope those present have a wonderful time.

Meanwhile back in Colorado… exactly why is it I am blogging about the start up of another commercial space company?

Perhaps it is the officers of the new company, Wyoming Space Information Systems (WYSIS) : James C Bennett, CEO; Dale M Amon, CTO; and Rand Simberg, Space Operations.

I expect Rand will also make some announcement on Transterrestrial Musings if he has not done so already, and I will post more information as we finalize and develop plans.

I am sure at least most of you have heard of free and open source software. If not, I am not quite sure which part of the headwaters of the Rio Negro you are living on and how you managed to get your satellite internet link past the croc’s and piranha’s.

You can be excused however, if you are unaware of the open source hardware movement. There are people out there designing everything from CPU’s to rocket engines in a global network but only the very plugged in are aware of these efforts. One stands above them all in my mind, and not just because I know a ‘kiwi’ who is one of the key participants: the Darwin open source replicator project.

A replicator is a machine which cannot only make things, but can make copies of itself. In the ‘classical’ literature the macro versions of this are known as Von Neuman machines; in more recent decades most who keep up with such things have come to associate them with Drexlerian nanoscale replicators. The nanoreplicator may be decades away, but the first generation of macroscale open source replicators is already available and spreading.

Darwin is not quite a full Von Neuman machine but it is a good start:

RepRap 1.0 “Darwin” is a Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) rapid prototyping machine that is capable of making the majority of its own component parts. It is available free under the GNU General Public Licence from this website to everyone.

As Darwin can copy itself, once you have one you can make others for your friends; or if they have one you can ask them to make one for you. Of course, you can also make as many as you want for yourself; the more you have, the faster you will be able to make other items.

If you have some room to spare and want to play too, I suggest you join. Once there are enough of these gadgets around the world, I am sure there will be plenty of folks passing around the designs of all sorts of nifty things for you to build with it.

Within a handful or two of decades we will build spaceships this way.

I read this item with interest as it shows a major difficulty with the flying laser battlewagon has been solved.

The big laser gunships use powerful chemical lasers in which fairly toxic chemicals are used in massive quantities to fire missile-killing rays thousands of miles through the atmosphere and space. Even a very large aircraft can carry only enough ‘ammunition’ for a handful of shots. For this and other lesser reasons I have not been enthusiastic on the viabiliity of the current developmental generation of laser weapon systems for defense against anything beyond a single missile. I do admit I have always appreciated the major cool of a 747 with a battle laser on board!

Not surprisingly the USAF has seen the same problems I have. The referenced article shows they have worked on and perhaps solved it. If the chemicals are recycled onboard the aircraft, the number of shots becomes very large, limited only by the recycling efficiency and the onboard power available to carry it out.

The chemicals become a sort of ‘capacitor’ or rapid discharge ‘battery’ rather than a consumable ‘bullet’. In operation an airborne laser would fire one or more shots and then over a period of time use lower density power systems to recharge for the next salvo.