Or, rather, the down-low coalition.

There’s plenty of things to do up there – it’s a whole new physical frontier. For instance, you can make some very interesting metal alloys – just the thing for the hot sections of gas turbines – in micogravity. And the main obstacle to things like asteroid mining (although the best way to mine asteroids is to mine the Moon – what do you think made all those craters, and where do you think the stuff they were made of went?) is the cost of getting things to orbit from the Earth’s surface. The technical challenges are considerable, but far from insurmountable. I think opening it up would be a worthwhile thing to do.

Propellant goes into propellant tanks. Those are simple and quite light for the mass of their contents. You build a vehicle that’s a flying propellant tank – rather like historical rocket stages, but with more performance and incorporating recovery provisions. If your propellant tanks are integral to the vehicle structure and have the correct geometry (cylindrical barrel sections with ellipsoidal bulkheads, say) they can be made very lightweight and strong. And yes – it is possible to use composites, although you’ve got to pick a sensible geometry. (Boeing has recently fabricated and successfully tested a series of progressively larger-diameter prototype CFRP LH2 tanks.) The easiest approach, VTVL, has actually been rather neglected.

You keep bringing up the example of the X-33 as if was somehow proof of your assertions that SSTO is impossible. All it proves is that it’s the wrong way to do it. There’s nothing compelling the designers of an SSTO to follow the same approach. McDonnell-Douglas and Rockwell had considerably better proposals which entailed a far lower degree of technical risk, but they were passed over by NASA management. Look at the DC-X program in particular – it received only very meager funding, but they managed to build an actual flight vehicle and test it successfully. They’d have gotten a lot more done, but unfortunately they were not favored by NASA management. Anyway – then as now, aerospace contractors generally prefer to avoid firm fixed-price contracts. Why didn’t they offer to do the RASV on a cost-plus contract?

The performance of the Atlas isn’t up for dispute. You can look up the empty and gross mass numbers for the core stage – that stage had a very high mass ratio. And it demonstrated SSTO-like performance on hundreds of flights. Once again, pretty much the entire vehicle, less a pair of small booster engines, made it to orbit. Look up SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment – the first communications satellite), which was a 1959 launch. You can find pictures of what the thing looked like on orbit. They put the whole core stage up there – the stage was the satellite. You can look up the numbers for the Titan II lower stage as well. SCORE isn’t the only example – look at the flights with Mercury capsules. The Atlas core stage remained attached to the capsule all the way to orbit, although they subsequently separated. The posigrade rockets on the Mercury capsule, which are what did the separating, only imparted an additional 15 ft/s.

The benefit of building an SSTO is that it is the most convenient way to make the launch vehicle fully reusable. This allows you to amortize the cost of the vehicle, engines, etc. (and these costs are, if one is going to be conducting lots and lots of launches, the largest component of the total cost) over many missions, thereby reducing launch costs. It’s possible to go the other way and mass-produce inexpensive expendable launch vehicles. However, past a certain flight rate – and it arrives pretty quickly – they’re undercut by reusables. The same goes for partially-reusable vehicles – they’re outdone by fully-reusable vehicles. It gets very expensive to build rockets just to throw them away after a single flight.

It’s true that the recovery provisions you mention don’t provide any benefit on the way up – however, they do allow you to come back down and fly again, which is necessary for reuse. Depending on the configuration, not all of these provisions will be necessary. For example, it’s possible to build a purely ballistic SSTO – one that ascends like a conventional rocket (because that’s what it is) and comes back down something like a space capsule. Such a vehicle does not require wings or a lifting-body geometry.

The reason they didn’t build the Boeing RASV or any of the other HAVE REGION proposals was because it was decided to proceed with the Rockwell X-30/NASP instead, for political reasons. This was a much riskier approach. And as I have already mentioned, Boeing offered to build their proposed vehicle on a fixed-price, as opposed to a cost-plus, contract.

The example of the 1950s-era expendable stages with near-SSTO performance shows that the necessary performance is attainable. Furthermore, there might actually be some use for an expendable SSTO – although staging has its benefits, it’s also pretty challenging. (The reason the Atlas had the configuration it did was because it allowed all the main engines to be started on the ground – back then, no one was really sure if it was possible to start a large rocket engine at altitude. The Soviet R-7, the Soviet equivalent of the Atlas, had booster stages parallel to the lower core stage for the same reason.) If you’ve got an expendable rocket, like the early Atlases, that comes very close to one-way SSTO performance, you might well come out ahead by avoiding the additional complexity of staging. All that would be needed for one of these ancestral Atlases to achieve one-way SSTO performance would be a new engine – one with improved specific impulse and thrust-to-weight ratio compared to the original, in addition to the throttling capability necessary to fly an optimized trajectory – on the core stage, and a bit of structural reinforcement. You could omit the boosters. There are also operational savings – the ground handling and so on is much simpler with a single-stage vehicle. Actually, an expendable single-stage rocket, if mass-produced, might be pretty competitive, and there have been such proposals – although what I said previously about expendables, even cheap ones, ultimately being undercut by reusables still holds.

I’m also well aware of what you mentioned regarding the X-33 and its composite tanks. Again – if they hadn’t chosen a lifting-body geometry and therefore avoided multi-lobed tanks, they would have had far less of a weight problem. (Incidentally, I’m pretty sure Lockheed-Martin, after the X-33’s cancellation, managed to get the multi-lobed tanks to work – they have got applications – but they’ll always be heavier than cylindrical tanks.) They might have been able to use metallic tanks instead, for one, or to pursue the development of composite tanks with less risk. (I think the composite LH2 tank ended up heavy enough, mainly due to the reinforcement that was required around the joints between the lobes, that it would have been lighter to use aluminum-lithium alloy, like the LO2 tank, instead.) It’s also possible to completely prevent the failure mode that the X-33 tanks experienced by filling the voids within the honeycomb core of the sandwich-structure composite comprising the tank skins with a low-density material, such as foam or aerogel. So, once again – the failure of the X-33 can be attributed the shoddiness of the management practices employed and the shortcomings of the specific concept/configuration. Incidentally, it was pretty obvious to the engineers working on the program that it was badly managed and that management was making lots of poor decisions – given better leadership, they might have been able to get it to work, although they’d have been better off following a different approach.

DarfurMiller:

I’m familiar with the Dyna-Soar. I don’t know how closely you can compare it with the STS, though – they had very different designs and quite different missions. And remember – the Dyna-Soar was just a payload on top of an expendable booster that was separate from it, whereas the Shuttle Orbiter was an integral part of the STS, not to mention that it was to have a much smaller payload. (Ultimately the cancellation of the Dyna-Soar was justified – ballistic missiles and satellites could do most everything that it could do, and there’s better ways to do the things it could do that satellites can’t. That’s not to say that a real military spaceplane would be impossible to build or useless – just that, as it transpired, the Dyna-Soar occupied whatever the opposite of a sweet spot is.)

Their respective stories are related – the Dyna-Soar is just one of a long succession of concepts, proposals, etc. stretching from the 1950s to the present day, expressing the USAF’s interest in acquiring novel space capabilities. The exact kind of capabilities, means of achieving them, figures of merit, etc. have varied over the years – for instance, in the first decade of this century, the USAF was interested in reusable launch vehicles not so much for the sake of reducing launch costs, but for the sake of increased responsiveness and operational flexibility, in which respect RLVs have an advantage over expendables for obvious reasons.

Part of the reason why the Shuttle ended up being such a dog was because it had to address a disparate and mutually-contradictory set of requirements in an attempt to meet both NASA and USAF needs – but that’s a story for another time.

I’m perfectly well aware that the challenge is to achieve orbital velocity, and that the performance of a launch vehicle stage, or the performance required to fly a given trajectory, is best quantified in terms of a velocity increment, or delta-V. It is very possible to build a single-stage vehicle with enough performance to get there and back and do it again after getting turned around with a useful payload.

It is also possible to build a multi-stage (generally two) fully-reusable launch vehicle, but the greatest reduction in costs is achieved with a single-stage vehicle. This is because, all else being equal, the ratio between the payload and empty mass (the empty mass of the vehicle – that is, less propellants, payload, etc. – is the main driver of cost, since it is the mass of everything that must be developed and built) will be higher for a single-stage than a multi-stage vehicle, since, among other things, there’s no need to duplicate equipment (engines, landing gear, etc.) over multiple stages.

There’s other historical examples besides the HAVE REGION structural test articles. (The HAVE REGION vehicles were all intended to have orbital performance – the point of building the structural test articles was to see if they could make the airframe light enough for the vehicle to get there and back with a useful payload . They found out that they could.) You may have heard of Tsiolkovsky’s equation – well, there have been a number of historical launch vehicle stages (the core stage of the original balloon-tank Atlas, the first stage of the Titan II) that achieved a mass ratio similar to what would be needed for SSTO (albeit one-way) performance. The original Atlas was a stage-and-a-half rocket – it had a pair of booster engines that fed from the tanks of the core stage and were jettisoned relatively early during the ascent. The main stage itself was unitary, and could achieve orbit with a payload.

With modern engines, this vehicle would be able to achieve SSTO performance – with a payload equal or greater to than the original Atlas, which put the Mercury capsules and lots of other things into orbit – although it would be a one-way trip, and in any event the airframe, being very lightly built, has a very short fatigue life – in other words, it’d be too full of little cracks, and therefore weakened, to be reused. Still, that’s most of the way there – only an incremental performance improvement is required to allow the vehicle to include the necessary recovery provisions (heatshield, landing gear, parachutes, etc.) and a sufficiently beefed-up airframe. Alternatively, it’s also possible to build a fully-reusable stage-and-a-half vehicle – something with a core stage that is almost an SSTO, but which receives a little help at the start of the trip from jettionsable (and possibly recoverable/reusable) parallel-staged boosters.

I’m also well aware that the X-33 program failed – and, in the process, soured a lot of people on the concept of SSTOs. However, this is because Lockheed-Martin chose a poor approach – one that entailed a high degree of technical risk. (McDonnell-Douglas, which built the DC-X, had a much more sensible approach, but they were disfavored for what were essentially political reasons.) For example, the X-33 had a lifting-body fuselage. The propellant tanks therefore had to have a strange-looking “multi-lobed” geometry in order to fit inside. Propellant tanks with such a geometry are inherently weaker, and therefore have to be heavier, than conventional cylindrical propellant tanks. (Cylindrical propellant tanks are easily incorporated into a winged vehicle with a cylindrical fuselage, like the Boeing RASV or the rival Rockwell X-33 proposal, which wasn’t pursued.) The failure of a prototype tank during structural tests ultimately doomed the program. Lockheed-Martin (unlike rival contenders McDonnell-Douglas or Rockwell) also proposed to avoid proceeding through the intermediate step of building roughly half-scale sub-orbital prototypes. The concept was flawed in many other respects – how long do you have?

Needless to say, there are lots of other ways to build an SSTO – some better than others. The failure of the X-33/VentureStar program, and the X-30/NASP before that, can be attributed to problems with the specific concept/configuration chosen, and not with the notion of SSTOs in general. It’s perfectly possible to avoid experiencing the same problems the X-33/VentureStar program experienced by the simple expedient of not incorporating the design features that led to those problems.

As I have mentioned, the VTVL configuration is a particularly good approach.

http://www.astronautix.com/fam/vtovl.htm

The old Douglas SASSTO proposal is a good example of such a vehicle.

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/sassto.htm

Note that this approach is completely different from the X-33.

Anyway – the F9R, although it’s a useful development and a major advance, is only a first step. It’s possible to go much further.

I had a reply in the pipeline to a previous comment, but perhaps the system ate it. It may yet end up posted. The gist of it is that it’s perfectly possible to build a worthwhile SSTO – in fact, it can probably be done with traditional aerospace materials (i.e. various sorts of metal alloys.) In the 1970s, under the HAVE REGION program, Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas and Lockheed-Martin constructed structural test articles that were representative of military spaceplane airframes – the test results were quite favorable and they got within half a percent of the target weight.

The Dragon capsule is just a payload. Especially from the standpoint of achieving large reductions in launch costs, reusable launch vehicles are much more interesting. Incidentally, the basic concept behind the Dragon – a reusable capsule that can perform a powered soft landing on land – isn’t new. The Dragon is similar to an unbuilt Soviet vehicle called the Zarya, which was planned as a replacement for the Soyuz.

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/zarya.htm

Anyway, the F9R is most of the way there. The first stage has sufficient performance to fly the trajectory and can survive reentry heating and aerodynamic loads. That’s most of the challenge. Compared to that, what remains is just an incremental improvement.

It should be noted that the idea of recovering the lower stage of a multi-stage launch vehicle, downrange or elsewhere, is nothing new. There have been, over the years, many quite feasible proposals – and although challenging, it isn’t that hard. Boeing, for example, had plans for water recovery of S-ICs (the first stage of the Saturn V) back in the 1960s. It’s just that no one was willing to grit their teeth and take the plunge until recently.

Although it would not be easy, it is possible – and desirable, due to the reduction in space transportation costs – to build a fully-reusable SSTO. Furthermore, it’s probably possible to do it with relatively traditional aerospace materials – that is, metal alloys – as the example of HAVE REGION shows.

As part of this 1970s-era USAF program – the USAF was interested in obtaining a military spaceplane – Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and McDonnell Douglas prepared proposals and conducted research into some of the necessary technologies. They went as far as constructing structural test articles – these were instrumented partial mock-ups of prospective full-up vehicles, and representative (i.e. they were built to the kind of strength/weight requirements one would need for the airframe of the actual vehicle, were similar in design, included examples of those parts of the airframe that would be challenging to build to show that it could be done, etc.) of what would be required. The designers got within half a percent of the target weight and the test results were favorable.

Boeing, in particular, was very confident in its HAVE REGION proposal, the RASV (Reusable Aerospace Vehicle). They went as far as to offer to build it on a $4B USD – in late 1970s-era money – fixed-price contract. Unfortunately, the relevant decision-makers opted to follow a different approach, which led to the infamous X-30/NASP. (It turns out that rocket engines are a much better choice for this sort of mission than air-breathing engines, such as scramjets, which is what the NASP was going to use.) Mind you, the RASV wasn’t quite single-stage-to-orbit – this large delta-winged vehicle had a little help from a rocket-powered ground acceleration sled, which got it up to a couple hundred meters per second before it left the ground. A small reduction in the velocity increment required to achieve orbit is a great help.

There are, of course, other – much easier – ways to build an SSTO, and the state of the art has improved considerably since the late 1970s. The bottom line is that it can be done, although one must be clever about it.

It’s already been done, as a matter of fact:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

This particular configuration – Vertical Take-Off, Vertical Landing, or VTVL for short – is the easiest way to build a single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch vehicle.

Interster – a South African take on Gerry Anderson-style “Supermarionation” – is also relevant. It was produced in the late 1970s/early 1980s, since – as I recall – the South Africans had a hard time importing TV programming to air on SABC, for obvious reasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interster

I like to watch UFO documentaries to amuse myself, of which the Roswell incident is a staple. Major UFO events in various non-US countries are sometimes described as, for example, the “Russian Roswell,” which label is generally attributed to the Tunguska event.

Well, I think this particular case might be the Roswell of the rape-culture/rape-hysteria phenomenon. There are some very amusing parallels:

01: The big flap over the event came a fair bit later than the actual event. The Roswell incident occurred in 1947, while the book that propelled it into the limelight was published in – if I recall – 1978.
02: Many details of the account appear to have been – “confabulated” might be putting it charitably – gleaned from fiction. In this case (Rapewell? Yes – let’s go with that), as our incisive host and some others have observed, many of the details in the Rolling Stone story appear to be, besides having only a tenuous factual basis, have a rather literary character – most notably, the broken-glass motif. In the case of Roswell, the 1978 account (a flying saucer crashes in the desert, the US military recovers the wreckage and hushes up the case) is very similar to a 1950 book/novel that was published by a then-respectable journalist, although his two sources subsequently turned out to be con-men.
03: In both cases, it appears that something out of the ordinary did happen, and that what actually occurred was, in many ways, more interesting than what didn’t. For example, it wasn’t a weather balloon that crashed in the New Mexico desert, as the Air Force (well, Army Air Forces) initially claimed, but a high-altitude constant-altitude balloon designed to carry a microphone payload (Project MOGUL) in order to listen for Soviet nuclear detonations. The alleged hieroglyphic markings turned out to be the result of a Brooklyn toy manufacturer, who had been contracted to make the radar reflectors that allowed the balloons to be tracked on radar, using whatever Scotch tape they had on hand to assemble it – which included kiddy stuff with various flower markings on it. The stuff dried up in the head and blew away, but not before the ink transferred itself onto the balsa-wood beams the tape had been attached to, leaving markings. And the radar reflectors were the source of the foil that Mac Brazel found scattered on his ranch. With Rapewell, the precise details are less clear – and I haven’t been following too closely – but it appears that what’s-her-name was involved in some sordid sexual escapades and ended up cooking up a story for whatever reason.

I could go on, but the result would just be a discursive, incoherent mess. Even so, perhaps this is an interesting direction in which to venture. Probably many of the same aspects of human psychology are at work in both the UFO and rape-culture hysterias.

As a follow-up:

http://www.ussliberty.org/submarine.txt

Apparently, there was a USN submarine – perhaps the USS Amberjack (SS-522), a Tench-class boat, on the scene. It apparently filmed the attack. Who knows – maybe the film (and perhaps other records) survive somewhere, in unexpurgated form.

Two of the Apollo astronauts – Lowell, who commanded Apollo 13, and Cernan, who commanded Apollo 17 and walked on the Moon – were of Slavic extraction. Lowell’s mother was Czech, while Cernan had a Slovak father and a Czech mother.

Moving from the pilots to the designers of aircraft and spacecraft, other notable examples include Igor Sikorsky, who began his career in the Russian Empire before emigrating to the US and creating the US helicopter industry, Frank Piasecki, another helicopter guy, and Alexander de Seversky. Alexander Kartveli (although he was an ethnic Georgian) deserves a mention as well – he was born and spent his formative years in the Russian Empire, after all.

There are many other examples. It isn’t sufficient for one to simply consider the big names in currently-trendy fields to establish general trends.

Is there some sort of conspiracy – one intended to drive satirists out of business – going on? It would explain a great deal.

Japan wasn’t entirely isolated during the period of sakoku – although contact with the Western world was limited to the Dutch outpost on Dejima in Nagasaki (I think the island no longer exists), but the Japanese did keep abreast to some extent of scientific and technological developments in Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangaku

For example, I think there were a few indigenous Japanese mechanical clocks prior to the 1850s.

By the way, I recall reading once that the flintlock musket is ultimately Japanese in origin – the flintlock mechanism was adapted from a type of lighter (for tobacco) the Japanese once used, although it was mostly Europeans that adapted and made use of it.

Item is not germane to subject of this specific entry, but is relevant to general theme:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-28490546