SpaceShipTwo

[Salo]

Flashback: Virgin Galactic Announces Switch From Rubber to Nylon Engine             
Posted by Doug Messier
on May 24, 2015, at 11:17 am


RocketMotorTwo firing. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)
 
Parabolic Arc Flashback: One year ago, Virgin Galactic announced it changing SpaceShipTwo's propulsion system from a rubber hybrid to a nylon hybrid engine due to demonstrated better performance. The news was announced on a Friday at the start of long holiday weekends in the U.S. and Britain, a perfect time to dump news when neither reporters nor the public are paying much attention. Sierra Nevada, by the way, was blindsided that their rubber engine was being dropped and their lucrative agreement was going away.
 
Today, the nylon engine decision is being re-evaluated due to performance. The company recently revealed it is testing both hybid engines again, and it might go back to using the rubber one. That means the company still doesn't know how its going to power its spacecraft despite being nearly 11 years into the SpaceShipTwo program. That explains why it is taking as long as it is.
 
MOJAVE, Calif., May 23, 2014 (Virgin Galactic PR) – Virgin Galactic, the world's first commercial spaceline which is owned by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Abu Dhabi's aabar Investments PJS, has selected a polyamide-based fuel grain to power its hybrid rocket motor for the remainder of the test flight program and start of commercial operations. This decision follows numerous ground test firings and is supported by data collected over an extensive development program.
In 2008, Scaled Composites, Virgin Galactic's primary contractor, appointed rocket propulsion specialist, Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) to develop the basic hybrid rocket motor design for SpaceShipTwo. As a part of the program, Virgin Galactic has been developing two variants of this motor using two types of solid fuel grain: HTPB, a type of rubber (the fuel used in the SpaceShipOne rocket motor) and polyamide, a category of benign thermoplastic using Scaled engineering. Both fuel grains were designed to be interchangeable with the hybrid motor, and both have been tested extensively.
Virgin Galactic has now determined it will use the polyamide version for its space flights. Both industrial partners will continue to support the motor program as the company progresses toward commercial service.
"Of the numerous challenges Virgin Galactic has faced and overcome in our unprecedented mission to create the world's first spaceline, the greatest engineering challenge has been to develop the world's largest operational hybrid rocket motor to power SpaceShipTwo and its occupants safely, regularly and efficiently to space," said Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides. "It is a great credit to the work of our partners Scaled and SNC that we have completed this important milestone."
To view a ground-firing of the polyamide-fueled hybrid rocket motor, CLICK HERE

[triage]

 http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-010516a-virgin-galactic-spaceshiptwo-rollout.html

Jan. 5, 2016

— Virgin Galactic will roll out and christen its second SpaceShipTwo on Feb. 19, fifteen months after its first suborbital spacecraft was lost during a test flight.

....

The second SpaceShipTwo, which informally was referred to as the VSS Voyager prior to the accident, was about 65 percent complete when the Enterprise was lost. It was first lowered onto its landing gear six months after the tragedy.

As part of completing the ship, safeguards were added to prevent the premature deploy of the tail booms.

The Feb. 19 rollout precedes the restart of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo test flight program, including captive carry, free flight and powered (engine) flights with the company's WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, VMS ("Virgin MotherShip" ) Eve.

Virgin Galactic's flight team of seven pilots includes former NASA astronaut Rick "CJ" Sturckow and Kelly Latimer, the first female research test pilot hired by the space agency's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California. The team is led by chief David Mackay, a former Royal Air Force test pilot and Virgin Atlantic captain.

тут в статье на русском https://geektimes.ru/post/269634/ нафантазировали

19 февраля этого года состоится второй тестовый полёт SpaceShipTwo
непонятно что хотел сказать автор - когда был первый? 
и будет ли полет и какой он будет, или будет просто выкатывание для публики.

там ссылка на http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/22/hey-musk-bezos-my-spaceship-is-better-branson.html

[Paleopulo]

pnetmon пишет:
и будет ли полет и какой он будет, или будет просто выкатывание для публики.

Будет просто выкатывание. Даже рулежек не планируется.
В теории, Хокинг должен будет впервые обнародовать название второго корабля. Хотя уже пишут, что это будет Юнити.

[Виктор Левашов]

Юнити это Союз или Соединение Объединение

[ХВ.]

Хороший пример, имя нашего корабля "Союз", заразителен. Но не для Комарова с компанией.

[Старый]

Виктор Левашов пишет:
Юнити это Союз или Соединение Объединение

Союз это Юнион. А Юнити - Единство.

[triage]

с наименованием никак не пойму - что за имя в 2014 году

The second SpaceShipTwo, which informally was referred to as the VSS Voyager prior to the accident, was about 65 percent complete when the Enterprise was lost

хотя вики прояснила ситуацию  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipTwo,_Serial_Number_Two
A US Trademark application in October, 2015 suggests the name to be VSS Unity. [13]

[triage]

 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-virgin-galactic-idUSKCN0VS00F
Thu Feb 18, 2016 8:44pm EST
Richard Branson said on Thursday his Virgin Galactic venture is eager to rejoin the race among rival billionaire entrepreneurs to send passengers and satellites into space, following a deadly accident 16 months ago.
"To have three or four people who are fairly entrepreneurial competing with each other means we'll be able to open up space at a fraction of the price that governments have been able to do so in the past," Branson told Reuters as he toured Virgin Galactic's 150,000-square-foot LauncherOne rocket design and manufacturing plant in Long Beach, California.
On Friday, Virgin Galactic plans to unveil its new SpaceShipTwo, a six-passenger, two-pilot winged space plane designed to take thrill-seekers, researchers and commercial customers on five-minute hops into suborbital space, reaching altitudes of about 62 miles (100 km).
Virgin Galactic is moving ahead with plans to build its own space launchers, including the new passenger vehicle and LauncherOne rockets designed to lift small satellites starting as early as next year, company officials said.
Branson's rivals in the privately funded space race include SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, Amazon's (AMZN.O) Jeff Bezos and Microsoft (MSFT.O) co-founder Paul Allen.
Branson's venture has been grounded since its first spaceship, designed and built by Northrop Grumman Corp's (NOC.N) Scaled Composites, was destroyed on Oct. 31, 2014, during a test flight in Mojave. The accident killed one pilot and dashed Virgin Galactic's plans to start commercial operations as early as this year.
The National Transportation Safety Board, which investigated the accident, determined that the co-pilot prematurely released locks that pin the ship's rotating tail section into place. The new spaceship includes a pin that prevents the pilots from unlocking the tail section too early, before aerodynamic forces have built up to keep the tail from rotating on its own.
The Spaceship Company, or TSC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Virgin Galactic, already had taken over manufacturing of the second spaceship in a planned fleet of five when the accident occurred.
.....

Сегодня покажут новый SpaceShipTwo

[triage]

интересно о чем это журналисты пишут про автоматический режим

" https://lenta.ru/news/2016/02/19/spaceship/
SS2 предназначен для проведения туристических суборбитальных полетов до высот около ста километров. Корабль способен поднять в воздух шесть человек. Стоимость полета на SS2 составляет 200 тысяч долларов за одного человека. Первые испытания (с пилотами на борту) корабля SS2 прошли 15 июля 2010 года в атмосфере Земли. После этого был проведен ряд тестовых полетов, в том числе и в автоматическом режиме."

[triage]

Представили

 http://www.virgingalactic.com/richard-branson-unveils-virgin-galactics-new-spaceship-named-vss-unity-by-professor-stephen-hawking/
February 19, 2016
Richard Branson Unveils Virgin Galactic's New Spaceship Named VSS UNITY By Professor Stephen Hawking

 
....
The new SpaceShipTwo is the first vehicle to be manufactured by The Spaceship Company, Virgin Galactic's wholly owned manufacturing arm, and is the second vehicle of its design ever constructed. VSS Unity featured a new silver and white livery and was guided into position by one of the company's support Range Rovers, provided by its exclusive automotive partner, Land Rover.

Richard Branson said, "Together, we can make space accessible in a way that has only been dreamt of before now, and by doing so can bring positive change to life on Earth. Our beautiful new spaceship, VSS Unity, is the embodiment of that goal also great testament to what can be achieved when true teamwork, great skill and deep pride are combined with a common purpose."

 http://www.digitalnewsagency.com/stories/9613-sir-richard-branson-unveils-virgin-galactics-new-spaceship-named-vss-unity-by-professor-stephen-hawking

 http://www.image.net/virgingalactic

 http://www.virgingalactic.com/what-spaceshiptwos-rollout-milestone-means-and-whats-next/
February 18, 2016
What SpaceShipTwo's Rollout Milestone Means — And What's Next.

Спойлер

Very soon, Virgin Galactic will introduce our new spaceship to our customers, our partners, and the world. We'll celebrate the hard work our engineers and technicians have poured into making each of SpaceShipTwo's parts, testing each one of them, and assembling them together into our beautiful new vehicle. As we celebrate the end of one critical phase of work, we also mark the start of a new phase, one focused on further testing and, ultimately, the first commercial human spaceflight program in history.

In recent years, Virgin Galactic has built up a truly world class operations organization to match our manufacturing and testing teams. We've pulled in experienced leaders fr om NASA's mission control and astronaut corps, fr om the militaries of three nations and from leading aviation and transportation companies, and we've charged them with developing a plan to safely test and operate a reusable spacecraft. They have done their homework and subjected their processes to expert external reviews, and they are eager to take the proverbial keys to SpaceShipTwo.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Testing
When we talk to our customers, partners, and supporters about our mission of opening space to all, they often express both a desire for the future to arrive quickly and also a profound sense of amazement that commercial space travel is finally something real, not just science fiction. Managing that transition from fiction to reality requires clever ideas, lots of hard work, and above all else, lots and lots of testing.

Even before we unveil this brand new vehicle—indeed, even before we'd assembled the parts together into something that looked like a spaceship—we had begun a rigorous test campaign patterned off the relevant industry standards. Starting at the level of individual pieces and components, we poked, prodded, stretched, squeezed, bent, and twisted everything used to build these vehicles. We've run a spaceship cabin through thousands of pressure cycles simulating the flight from ground level to space and back; we've conducted nearly one hundred full-scale tests of our rocket motor system; we've bent and torqued our megastructures in ways significantly exceeding what they'd see in flight.

This type of testing isn't complete yet—because it will never be complete. As a manufacturing organization, we will always do this sort of testing on parts. But we are now entering a phase wh ere instead of just testing pieces and subsystems, we test the vehicle as a whole.

We are not starting from scratch even in that respect. Because our new vehicle is so similar to its predecessor, we benefit from incredibly useful data from 55 successful test flights as well as the brutal but important lessons from one tragic flight test accident. And so, we will begin our full vehicle tests by validating and calibrating that existing data set by running tests similar to what you've seen before. But there is still much more to test.

Some aspects of testing are likely obvious to the layperson; for example, while we've built an in-house rocket team that quite possibly has the most experience of any group in the world with hybrid rocket motors of this class, that experience in ground testing has be validated, repeatedly, with performance in the air. There are other equally important tests that aren't obvious to the casual observer, or perhaps even to experienced rocketeers and aviators who haven't worked with our unique vehicle design. Our team's job is to plan out not just the obvious tests but also the strange and inventive ones, to conduct those tests, and to use the data from those tests to re-examine everything about our vehicle to ensure we can take the next step forward.

What To Expect When You're Space Testing
If you are expecting SpaceShipTwo to blast off and head straight to space on the day we unveil her, let us disillusion you now: this will be a ground-based celebration. Indeed, our new vehicle will remain on the ground for a while after her unveiling, as we run her through full-vehicle tests of her electrical systems and all of her moving parts. We already know these things work individually, but one can't simply assume they will all work together—that must be tested and verified. We'll do so quickly, but we won't cut corners.

Once that is done, we'll be eager to get air under the wings of our new spaceship. We'll begin first with captive carry flight, during which SpaceShipTwo stays firmly mated to her mothership, WhiteKnightTwo. Once that is completed, we'll move to glide testing, wh ere our new spaceship flies freely for the first time as a glider coming home from an altitude of 45,000+ feet (14 km) while our incredible pilots test out her handling.

After several glide flights have been completed and we are satisfied with the results, rocket-powered test flights are next. We will execute a thoughtful and steady progression of flights. Each mission will be designed to test something important: how the heat from the rocket motor dissipates in the rear of the vehicle, how the vehicle behaves when breaking the sound barrier on both ascent and descent, how closely our models of forces on the vehicle match reality.

Each flight will generally fly a little higher, a little faster, and sometimes we may need to repeat a test point to get additional data or confirm a result. When she first crosses 100,000 feet (31 km), SpaceShipTwo will already be above 99% of the atmosphere, and the pilots will experience true weightlessness while surrounded by a sky that has noticeably begun turning black. When she eventually reaches 50 miles (80 km), her pilots will have met NASA and the US Air Force's requirements for official astronaut status, and they will be recognized by our team and by the US government as bonafide space travelers; when she crosses 62 miles (100 km) sometime later, they will also be recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.

When we are confident we can safely carry our customers to space, we will start doing so. We feel incredibly honored that our earliest paying customers already number more than the total number of humans who have ever been to space. Our first spaceflight with paying customers; our first flight full of research experiments; our first flight with a full complement of eight (a feat that has only been accomplished once before in all of history, by the Space Shuttle on mission STS-61A); the dozens of times we will fly the first ever astronaut from a given nation — each of these will be exciting milestones in the history of space exploration.

No one is more eager than us to complete those milestones—nor to share this journey, with all its challenges and triumphs, with a global public that craves inspiring and ambitious stories to balance out the daily barrage of the 24 hour news cycle. But this isn't a race. We have shown we are committed to being thorough in our testing: it is the right thing to do and it is essential to our ultimate success. As a thousand year old saying goes, there is no easy way from the Earth to the stars. But finally, there is a way, and through steady testing, we will find it.

[свернуть]

[Astro Cat]

А что ж они первый то забросили? Вроде все работало. Ну возили бы туристов на нем пока.

[Алексей Георгиевич Белозерский]

А что ж они первый то забросили? Вроде все работало. Ну возили бы туристов на нем пока.

Первый SS2 Энтерпрайс потерпел катастрофу 31.10.2014г. Один пилот(М.Олсбери) погиб, второй(П.Сиболд) выжил, но получил при приземлении на парашюте повреждения различной тяжести..

[triage]

Алексей Белозерский пишет:

А что ж они первый то забросили? Вроде все работало. Ну возили бы туристов на нем пока.

Первый SS2 Энтерпрайс потерпел катастрофу 31.10.2014г. Один пилот(М.Олсбери) погиб, второй(П.Сиболд) выжил, но получил при приземлении на парашюте повреждения различной тяжести..

Думаю имелся в виду самый первый SpaceShipOne

Интересно - SST представленный как прицеп к автомашине - это намек на доступность и повседневность в будущем этого средства?

Сара Брайтман отметилась на представлении 

 http://www.space.com/31993-stephen-hawking-virgin-galactic-spaceshiptwo-unity.html
...
Unlike actor Harrison Ford and English soprano Sarah Brightman, Hawking did not attend the event. But Virgin Galactic played a four-minute-long recorded message from the physicist when it was time to announce Unity's name.
...

наверное на это денег найдет    

Хотелось бы услышать как дела со строительством следующего корпуса...

а на http://www.parabolicarc.com/ однако хорошее освещение по SST

 http://www.parabolicarc.com/2016/02/19/virgin-galactic-rolls-spaceshiptwo-2/
....
The new SpaceShipTwo is the first vehicle to be manufactured by The Spaceship Company, Virgin Galactic's wholly owned manufacturing arm, and is the second vehicle of its design ever constructed.
....
The new vehicle's build process kicked off in 2012 with each component part undergoing rigorous testing before assembly. With VSS Unity now fully manufactured and unveiled, The Spaceship Company will undertake integrated systems verification, followed by ground and flight tests in Mojave and ground and air exercises at its future home in Spaceport America, New Mexico. The Spaceship Company has already started work on the next SpaceShipTwo.
....

http://www.geekwire.com/2016/after-16-months-second-spaceshiptwo-unity-rollout-positive/
....
Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic's vice president of operations:
Moses, a veteran of the space shuttle program, said lots of incremental improvements have been made between Enterprise and Unity. One big improvement has to do with the hybrid rocket motor – which is back to using rubber-based rather than polyamide-based fuel, thanks to "major breakthroughs" in how the motor is put together. Years ago, there were concerns about vibration when the rocket was fired up. Now Moses says "it's a magic-carpet, baby-smooth ride" – once you get past the initial blast of acceleration, that is.
...

[Astro Cat]

pnetmon пишет:
Думаю имелся в виду самый первый SpaceShipOne

Именно он. Успешно летал 3 раза в космос.

Посмотрел видео полетов - не было стабилизации после выхода из атмосферы. Вращался бешено вокруг оси. Туристам бы не понравилось. )))

[Paleopulo]

pnetmon пишет:
Интересно - SST представленный как прицеп к автомашине - это намек на доступность и повседневность в будущем этого средства?

Наверное таскать машиной просто дешевле. Вон и ДримЧассер SNC на такой же обычной машине наскало по ВПП. 

[triage]

Paleopulo пишет:

pnetmon пишет:
Интересно - SST представленный как прицеп к автомашине - это намек на доступность и повседневность в будущем этого средства?

Наверное таскать машиной просто дешевле. Вон и ДримЧассер SNC на такой же обычной машине наскало по ВПП.

мне просто помнится эта картинка.... а так да.



p.s. интересный вид сверху http://www.image.net/virgingalactic  

[Astro Cat]

Че они все вместо переднего шасси лыжу используют?

[Дмитрий Инфан]

Чтобы быстрее тормозилось 

[Туфи]

Switching to nylon engine might have some benefit. That kind of polymer can be produced with better characteristics, more predictable and reliable compared to rubber. Why they did not made it that way from the start? IMHO they rushed whole thing from the start. What firm had an explosion of a nitrous oxide generator intended for use as oxidant for the fuel few years ago does anyone remember?

[triage]

Немного напомнили о себе 
 http://www.virgingalactic.com/update-from-mojave-testing-testing-1-2-3/
March 10, 2016
Update From Mojave: Testing Testing 1-2-3