Samizdata

The X-Prize entry from Armadillo Aerospace is coming along nicely. They’ve carried out a helicopter drop test. They’ve acquired a Russian space suit – sans gloves so far – from eBay. They’ve got the landing legs sorted. Most importantly, they have finally sourced more high purity 50% Hydrogen Peroxide. They are still having difficulties convincing the manufacturer (FMC) to sell them the hi-test rocket fuel grade. Nonetheless, this lets them continue the engine test series so they can solve problems identified in an earlier firing.

Armadillo Aerospace was created by John Carmack, one of the founders of Id Software. If you want to support private enterprise in space, buy their games! Of course, since they are the creators of such titles as “Wolfenstein”, “Doom” and “Quake”, you probably have already done so.

X-Prize entry under construction
Photo: Courtesy Armadillo Aerospace

The DOD announced a site for a new US missile defense system today: Adak Island.

This is exactly where I expected the first 21st century land-based ABM system would go. It is the most likely of two well placed islands in the Aleutians Chain extending south and west from Alaska. Adak Island is an old NSA Cold War listening post and has a military airfield.

It also just happens to sit almost exactly on the great circle route on which a North Korean based ICBM must travel to reach American soil. The DOD release doesn’t mention that little tidbit. You’ve heard it first on Samizdata.

For the astronomically inclined there have been interesting goings on in the constellation of Scorpio these last three years. The star Delta Scorpii, a constant magnitude 2.3 for as long as anyone can remember, changed habits in July 2000. It has been a variable star ever since and not only that, seems to get a bit brighter on each cycle. It is now just a hair under becoming a first magnitude star. That means it is nearly bright enough to be seen in Manhattan and London.

As to exactly what is going on, no one seems quite sure, but it shows the sky is a changeable thing even on a human timescale.

On July 21st, 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned from the Moon after joining up with Michael Collins who had orbited overhead.

The last man set foot on the moon a few years later. All the hard work and miraculous efforts of thousands of dedicated scientists and engineers was thrown into the dustbin of history. World experts on esoteric science and engineering fields were fired and drove taxis to feed their families.

This is what happens when you place your faith in the State.

Down load and play this song (vocals Julia Ecklar, words and music Bill Roper)

If you still don’t understand then you have no soul and I can’t help you.

I’ve been reading the discussion about Brian’s post on a possible USAF suborbital spaceplane project. It seems to me much of the discussion is overblown and ungrounded in reality. This is the expected next generation of military aircraft. An acquaintance of mine, Mitchell Burnside Clapp, championed a military space plane project named “Black Horse” a decade ago when he was a USAF officer. I have some of his papers on my islandone web site. Mitchell has been involved with commercial space ventures since he left the military.

This is not an ICBM or an ICBM derivative we are talking about. That is a non-starter for practical vehicles, whether for the warfighter or the commuter. It will be an aeroplane with a rocket engine. If it is a descendant of Mitchell’s design studies it will use in-flight refueling to top off the tanks. This reduces the weight of landing gear. They will only need to support a partially fueled craft. Once such a craft drops away from the tanker, it lights up and goes suborbital. It is not that much different operationally from the SR-71, it just goes a bit faster and higher.

Perhaps the USAF will buy from some of my other friends. There are some in the Mojave desert who would be more than happy to scale up to their suborbital design (XCOR). Brian has indicated this is a DARPA initiative, so contracts to companies like XCOR are a very real possibility. DARPA likes small groups with new ideas and has very little red tape or strings attached to their funding. I know. I’ve worked on DARPA projects myself.

This could be the real start of the commercial space launch industry. Greg Maryniak of the X-Prize organization has at various time spoken on this point. The early days of aviation were done privately and their products were then purchased by government. So airplanes are, in the minds of the person on the street, a commercial product. Rockets were built by and for government projects. Apollo made space travel a “government product” in the common mind. It was a false start and it has delayed space travel by decades. It sent us down a dead end road of manned artillery rockets and giant white winged elephants.

We are about to see a total conceptual change. People like those at X-Prize are changing the mind set. There are a dozen or more small companies building suborbital aerospace planes and ships. At least one (Rutan) will fly by the end of the year (target is mid-December on Wright Brothers first flight anniversary); several more will probably fly in the following 2 years. We are about to go back in time and start the space program over. This time we’ll do it the way the Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss and others did it. Privately but with the odd military or mail contract to keep body and soul together.

Suborbital aircraft are no revolution in aerial warfare. They bring no completely new capability to the USAF. It is advantageous to the aircrews. I am sure they will very much appreciate flight times of 1.5 hours instead of fourteen and up. As to those on the recieving end… I don’t much think they care what time the bomber took off and how long it flew before sending them off to Valhalla.

Where it may well be revolutionary is in US basing policy. It won’t change things over night. In a couple decades closure of US overseas air bases may be a viable policy option. That’s a salutory effect from where I sit.

We already are seeing the start of a retrenchment of US global forces. I suggested this outcome some months ago. We are moving large numbers of our forces out of Europe; we have moved out of Saudi Arabia; US troops are being pulled back from the truce line in North Korea. I can’t see us maintaining a high profile in Turkey any more. Even worse than being unreliable, they have had been working to assasinate leaders and destabilize the Kurdish areas of Iraq. Turkish black ops guys on such missions have been captured by US forces at least twice. We will be stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq for a long time, but it will not be comparable to the fifty year deployments in Germany and South Korea.

You may argue whether the US government intends this trajectory. Nonetheless, we are on it. The time will come when we can force a return to a “Fortress America” defense posture. There is no other possible path that will make it politically feasible for us to militarily disengage from the world. If we can defend ourselves against any attacker from anywhere on the globe and do so quickly from our own shores, we can satisfy worries of the most paranoid Hawk.

At the same time we will decrease our target profile amongst the nutcases of the world.

Sometimes things cross my desk which are so interesting I have to just pass them on verbatim. I’ve been expecting this one for years. In 1999 I walked under the wings of the Proteus high altitude aircraft in the Rutan hanger at Mojave. I knew immediately that Rutan had to be thinking of this as a first stage prototype. I also knew that I would not hear about such a thing until roll out.

Rollout day has finally arrived.

Here is a press release from Huntsville L5.

Huntsville Rocket Man Key Player in First Private Manned Space Program
Legacy Ties to Local HAL5 HALO Program

In the early morning hours of April 18, before the in burning heat blasted the Mojave Desert, the hangar doors swing open to reveal yet another strange craft with the obvious signature of the designer. Burt Rutan, President of Scaled Composites LLC, thus unveiled “The First Private Manned Space Program” with the roll-out of the suborbital SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipOne will be air-launched from the “White Knight” high-altitude research aircraft at 50,000 feet. Once released, SpaceShipOne will fire its rocket engine and climb to over 100 km (62 miles), carrying a crew of three into space on a suborbital flight. The rocket engine that will enable this historic feat was co-developed by Huntsville-native Timothy L. Pickens, who served as the Propulsion Systems Developer for Scaled Composites.

Tim first met Burt Rutan (designer of the famous Voyager aircraft) at an AIAA event in Huntsville in 1998. Because of their common interests, a professional rapport developed that would lead to Burt asking Tim to move to Mojave and lead a very important part of this “history in the making.” From what started out as napkin sketches with Burt in a Huntsville restaurant became what was rolled out in the Mojave. The propulsion concept was very much rooted in the Rocket City. Tim’s contributions to the SpaceShipOne project drew extensively from his involvement in HAL5’s High Altitude Lift-Off (HALO) Program. HALO pioneered the high-altitude launch of hybrid rockets.

Tim’s SpaceShipOne responsibilities included main and RCS propulsion development, nitrous-oxide portable fill station, rocket motor test stand, ECS support, propulsion fluids, and pressurization. Two hybrid motor vendors were selected to handle the fuel pouring, injector/valve design, and engine controller. This allowed Tim to reduce Scaled’s workload, decrease costs, and focus on the complex issues of designing the hybrid rocket motor, fuel case, and nozzle.

SpaceShipOne’s hybrid rocket engine employs a solid fuel grain (HTPB rubber) and a liquid oxidizer (nitrous-oxide), providing greater safety and lower cost than fully solid or liquid rocket engines. Scaled’s hybrid motor also employs a common bulkhead between the oxidizer tank and the motor. Tim’s co-designed the case/throat/nozzle (CTN) which reduced weight and complexity. This approach saves weight and reduces complexity. SpaceShipOne will be the first venture to launch people into space without government money or government technology. Rutan claims this will be accomplished before the 100th anniversary of the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk (17 December 2003).

SpaceShipOne’s Huntsville roots can be seen in HAL5’s Project HALO. HALO’s hybrid rockets utilize either an asphalt or HTPB solid fuel grain with liquid nitrous-oxide that is kept in an oxidizer tank separated by a common bulkhead with the motor case. In 1997, HALO air-launched a hybrid rocket from a high-altitude balloon over the Atlantic Ocean into the edge of space. That HALO mission, designated Sky-Launch 1 (SL-1), is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records 2000 (Millennium Edition) as the highest flight of an amateur rocket (36 nautical miles).

Like SpaceShipOne, HALO SL-1 used no government money, nor hardware. HAL5 had tested a rocket utilizing the same motor design a year before when it launched HALO Ground Launch-1 (GL-1) from a field in Tennessee to about 30,000 feet. In 1998, the group conducted the HALO SL-2 mission from a barge in the Gulf of Mexico. Other projects that spun off from HALO included the Balloon Launched Return Vehicle (1998) and the Cheap Access to Space (CATS) prize launch (2000). The HALO Program began in 1994 with a high-altitude balloon flight, launched from Huntsville’s Space & Rocket Center Alabama. Rocket motor testing at a site just east of Maysville in rural Madison County began early in 1995, followed by dozens of high-altitude balloon flights and hundreds of rocket motor firings. Tim Pickens was the Rocket Lead/System Designer for all of those local HALO and HALO spin-off projects. He was responsible for all mechanical and system designs.

Tim has returned to Huntsville where he continues to support Rutan’s propulsion efforts on a consultant basis. He is currently a propulsion engineer working for Plasma Processes and runs his own propulsion test company called Orion Propulsion located in Gurley, Alabama. Tim has designed and built a rocket-powered bike featured in Custom Bike magazine, and he is currently working on a “James Bond” type rocket belt. Mr. Pickens, who began his serious hybrid rocket work with the HALO Program, has since worked on such noted rocket engines as the RL-10, Fast-Track, the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME), and Space America’s 4000-50,000 pound thrust LOX/Kerosene engines. HALO member Glen May currently works for Scaled Composites in Mojave, California as a propulsion technician responsible for many aspects of the program.

Tim and other members of Project HALO will be testing future rocket engines and are available for press interviews on Thursday, 24 April from 7-10 PM, at his rocket workshop located at 104 Lindell Drive in Madison. For more information on Project HALO, please see web site.

HAL5 will host a public presentation by Mr. Pickens on the Huntsville connection to SpaceShipOne at the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library main auditorium on Thursday, 1 May 2003 from 7:00 to 8:30 PM. The public is invited and attendance is free. For more information, please call (256) 971-2020.

HAL5 is the Huntsville Alabama chapter of the National Space Society. It formed in 1983 as a non-profit, 501(c)(3), space educational/advocacy organization. Members share the enthusiasm that space development can stimulate our world with immeasurable benefits in the areas of education, energy, environment, industry, resources, and (ultimately) room to grow for our society. Members believe that by educating and working with the public, the government, and private industry, we can speed up the date when routine, safe, and affordable space travel is available to anyone who wants to go. Tim is helping this to become a reality.

The National Space Society, formed in 1974 by Wernher von Braun, is an independent, non-profit space advocacy organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. Its 23,000 members and over 50 chapters around the world actively promote a spacefaring civilization.

Please note that the NSS was created from the merger of two organizations formed around the same time; Werner Von Braun’s NSI mentioned above, and The L5 Society from which myself and chapters such as Huntsville L5 came from. The two merged in 1987.

Greg Allison, the leader of the HAL5 group is usually seen wandering about the yearly ISDC