CNN Headline News annoyed me earlier today by repeatedly saying that SpaceShipOne had been to "Orbit". This is misleading at best, especially when they said the carrier ship took it "to orbit". Sheesh. Later, the quick version did say "to space".

A great accomplishment, though, despite the reporters who don't know that space != orbit.

I'd go on that trip. =D>

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Wayne
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"Epistemology models ontology" - John Polkinghorne

It's not misleading, it's flat out wrong.

I was trying to be kind. They may have meant "orbital altitude", but even that's a stretch, and gives them more credit than they probably deserve.

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Wayne
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"Epistemology models ontology" - John Polkinghorne

CNN also reported that Columbia was travelling 18 times the speed of light on reentry.

A few words on media coverage of SpaceShipOne:

In short, it was abominable. Some of the worst coverage of an historic event that I've ever seen. And they kept referring to is as "historic" - after which they'd promptly bring us a wonderful story about SATs or the governor of Connecticut. They constantly interrupted poor Miles O' Brien on CNN and the other correspondents despite saying that they would check back "often". I couldn't get the webcast, so I was stuck with our wonderful cable news networks. By far the worst is that they barely covered the actual launch of SpaceShipOne - the ignition of the rocket! I finally found it on MSNBC, but I don't think CNN or FOX had it. The takeoff and landing, at least, was alright in terms of coverage. Sometimes I got a little annoyed at the news people who wouldn't just shut up so I could hear Burt Rutan (I think it was Rutan) on the PA system. The impromptu news conference with Melvill after the flight was great. Never seen a guy so happy before.

And of course we have the inevitable.... bad astronomy! It wasn't too bad today, except for the ticker on CNN (I think) which said that the spacecraft had reached "suborbital space". Suborbital refers to a trajectory, not a region of space. You fly into space suborbitally, not into suborbital space. Saying that it reached subortbital space is akin to saying that I drove on a car road or boated in a ship ocean. I didn't drive on a car road, I drove on the road in my car. I boated in the ocean on my ship. Other than that, it wasn't too bad. The only other annoying thing was referring to the takeoff of White Knight as the launch of SpaceShipOne, which are really two different events.

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"Too low they build, who build beneath the stars". - Edward Young, 1745

On CNN : At one point, they were comparing this flight to achieving orbit. This flight attained a speed of mach 3 and it takes about mach 25 to achieve orbit.

This part was all right until someone said it takes about 8 times the energy to get to orbit. AHHHHHG! It must go about 8 times as fast (to one sig fig ) This doesn't mean 8 times the energy...remember .5mv^2 is the kinetic energy. That means 64 times the kinetic energy is required (not counting the extra potential energy for the added height).

NPRs coverage sateted that it would take about 80 times the energy to get to orbit...a lot closer (8.33^2 ~70, add for energy loss to air resistance and extra altitude, you're a probably in the ballpark).

Rob

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BA aside, I'm a bit disappointed that SpaceShipOne is the current top contender for the X-prize. While it's undoubtedly cool, and could probably start a small-scale tourist industry, it lacks what I thought was the whole point of the competition: To develop a cost-efficient way to launch things into orbit. As I see it, SpaceShipOne is doomed in that respect; it's not going to attain anything above suborbital speeds, so while it might technically achieve the victory conditions, it's useless as a basis for more ambitious projects.

Feel free to disagree with me; I'd like nothing better than having any sort of low-cost solution. I just don't see how this could be it.

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What do you suppose was the reason for defining the conditions for the prize that way? I'm thinking that they saw it as a first step, one that they wanted to encourage.

I don't think so. SpaceShipOne is for suborbital flights and it can do this for reasonable prices.
Now, if there is a market for such flights (tourism, zero-g experiments, astronaut training?), maybe the next vehicle is built to reacher greater heights and longer zero-g. These vehicles then have to cope with re-entry heating in a more serious way.
At some point, me have a vehicle that not only allows us to go high, but also far. Maybe there is a market for half-around-the-world express flights. People payed a lot for Concorde flights, but the benefit wasn't as significant as a suborbital hop would provide.
And at some point, we will have a vehicle that can reach orbit.
SSO is just a first step. But not a dead end.

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

I agree with kucharek. The X-prize was clearly defined as SpaceShip One can achieve the goals well.

Did anyone hear anything about SpaceShipOne's flight on the morning news this morning?

I didn't on the local station.

Gee, what's more important - Coby Bryant's trial or an event that marks the beginnings of a new era?

Coby Bryant of course! #-o

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"As I lay beneath the Southern Cross, the stars tell more than I could" . . . David Meece

I figure that the hours you'd save flying transcontinental on a suborbital ballistic trajectory would be offset by the infrequency of such flights and the longer pre-flight checks.

Eh, the Cockpit will most likely only contain a Man and a Dog.

The Man is there to Operate the Controls, in the Event of an Emergency.

The Dog is there to Bite him, if he does so, at any other time.

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Out of curiousity, does anyone know how much has been spent on Spaceship One so far? Will the X-Prize even come close to covering their costs or are they hoping solely for some sort of corperate payoff once they've won?

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The figure being bandied about is $20 million. I suspect that it's quite a bit more than that, with no real evidence.

Paul Allen has said that the cost was between $20 to $30 million. Most of that, of course, has been R&D. The next one to roll off the line would be cheaper. I read somewhere, that one of the X-Prize teams has lined up folks for research projects onboard one of the crafts, it's possible that they could sign up with whomever manages to claim the prize.

With Concorde the passengers saved the time, the crew/groundcrew didn't. If you don't have paying passengers then the benefits are lost.

In addition Concorde was always more profitable westbound since that gained time relative to office hours than eastbound which just screwed you up with jetlag as opposed to sleeping overnight. It depends who the target market would be.

Some of the discussion on this in the media (listening to Sci Fri right now -- good show, generally). People keep pulling out the personal computer model; that it was not predictable from the viewpoint of the 60's that the computer would become affordable and arrive on desktops and in pockets everywhere.

This is a scaling problem. Gaining orbit requires a fixed amount of energy and certain environmental conditions that essentially require robust hardware. You can shrink the mass, and the cost of building it, but only to a point. You still got to pay for the metal, and for the fuel. The personal computer, on the other hand, benefits from a technology in which improvements in technology almost inevitably resulted in a smaller stock of materials, smaller sizes, and cheaper production.

It's a matter of semantics, but I've seen both events (liftoff of the carrier aircraft and vehicle drop) referred to as "launch" even in technical literature for such vehicles. This isn't entirely without precedent -- other vehicles which used conventional aircraft as their first stage include the X-15 and the Pegasus commercial satellite booster. It's a bit fuzzy, because obviously White Night is not a rocket, and yet most people think of "launch" as meaning the time the spacecraft leaves the surface.