Rocketeers.co.uk - a British view of commercial spaceflight

It speaks volumes about our space programme, and indeed the current state of our country, that the single largest UK space project (worth £3.6 billion) is a nice toy for the military.

Jonathan Amos writes about the Skynet 5D spacecraft, and speculates about the wider applicability of Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) to space projects, including Skysight, a possible Earth Observation system which the government would use on a data purchase basis.

• UK Skynet: Not to be confused with The Terminator -- Spaceman blog: BBC Online

USA Today has a summary of the state of play of the space tourism industry by Bill McGee:

• Space Travel is Ready for Booking -- USA Today

The MIT Technology Review blog Delta-V covers an interview with Burt Rutan:

• Burt Rutan Explains Why Space Tourism Matters

This is just plain dumb:-

"...propellants are responsible for about a third of the total cost of mature forms of travel, such as commercial airflight or automobile transportation, [Rutan] estimates that a sub-orbital ticket could one day cost as little as $475 per passenger, while a ticket to orbit could cost $12,000...While such orbital travel would be dramatically cheaper than the tens of millions charged today for private trips to the International Space Station, this would still dash romantic dreams of mass colonization of space by rocket."

Bullshit. At those prices, at least a billion people would have the income levels to be able to afford to go, and even at conservative estimates, tens of millions would actively want to go. I'd call that mass colonisation...

Insurance groups met at the World Space Risk Forum in Dubai last week, to discuss the prospects of space tourism, according to this ABC News report. The consensus was generally positive, reporting that the field is expected to be viable in the next two to three years.

I was struck by this comment by Laurent Lemaire of Elseco Limited:

'You're going to be sick, you're going to be shaken, it's not going to be pleasant. But when you stop in the silence and see the earth from above, it's probably something that's deeply fulfilling,' said Lemaire.

Um. It's going to be "unpleasant" in the same way that a rollercoaster ride is "unpleasant". It's all part of the experience! Besides, I'd hope Virgin would do something to address the resonance in the hybrid motor that was seen in part of the SS1 ascent. That's one of the advantages of a liquid-fuelled system -- a much smoother ride.

Former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao also discussed the plans of Manx-based Excalibur Almaz at the forum.

(Source: Reaction Engines)

Company News

The D1 redesign of SKYLON is progressing well. The preliminary trajectory analysis has been fed into a preliminary configuration analysis to establish how the vehicle will be trimmed in aerodynamic flight. This is the start of an iterative cycle of performance analysis and configuration definition with increasing refinement and detail which will lead to the final D1 definition.

Work has started on the payload provision based on the interfaces proposed in Revision 1 of the SKYLON Users’ Manual. The public consultation produced no suggestions for any changes whatsoever (which was a bit of a surprise) so as a consequence those interfaces are now being worked into the D1 vehicle design.

Work also started on defining D1’s Auxiliary Propulsion System. This system performs many functions on SKYLON; orbit manoeuvring, reaction control, the supply reactants to both the fuel cells and hydraulic power unit, and heat absorption during re-entry. As part of this work, Lolan Naicker of Cranfield University will conduct a postgraduate research project as part of his MSc Astronautics and Space Engineering looking at the SOMA engine which provides SKYLON’s orbit manoeuvring propulsion.

The first firm results from the Reaction Engines trade mission to the USA (as reported last month) came in February with the placing of a small study contract with the Physical Science Laboratory at the New Mexico State University. NMSU will be undertaking a preliminary evaluation of the requirements that SKYLON D1 will need to meet for safe autonomous flight based on their extensive heritage with unmanned flight vehicles, their expert knowledge of the US National Airspace System, and their expertise and experience in the Global Airspace System.

General News

On 10th February at the QEII Conference Centre in London, the Space Innovation and Growth Team (Space IGT) released a report by the Space industry to advise Government on future Space policy. REL contributed to the report entitled ‘A UK Space Innovation and Growth Strategy 2010 – 2030’ and had a small exhibition stand in the foyer at the opening. SKYLON featured in the promotional movie as seen on the BNSC website.

(Source: Amazon)

The latest in the highly-acclaimed edumanga series from No Starch Press, The Manga Guide to the Universe explores the Universe, with the aid of manga cartoons. The story revolves around three students who develop an interest in the Universe after listening to a Japanese folktale about a girl from the Moon. The girls enlist Kanta, an astronomy major, to teach them more about the Universe.

The Manga Guide to the Universe begins with an overview of how ancient cultures thought about and studied the Sun, Moon, and stars, coupled with an overview of important astronomical work by Copernicus, Gallileo, and other seminal astronomers. Kanta explains how our solar system works; how we calculate distance in space; the Big Bang Theory; and theories about the Universe's evolution and cosmic expansion. Readers explore the Milky Way, faraway galaxies, supernovas, quasars, and black holes, as well as the history of space exploration, including the Moon landing, the launch of the International Space Station, and the Hubble Space Telescope--all with the aid of original Manga cartoons. This edumanga title is co-published with Ohmsha, Ltd. of Tokyo, Japan, and is one in a series of translations from Ohmsha's bestselling Japanese originals.

(Source: SSTL press release, 1st March 2010)

Twenty-six years ago today the University of Surrey team led by future SSTL-founder Sir Martin Sweeting launched the UoSAT-2 satellite (a.k.a UO-11) onboard a Delta rocket with LandSat-D from Vandenberg Air Force Base, USA on the 1st March 1984.

The 60kg small satellite was built in just 6 months and carried a Digitalker speech synthesiser and experiments including magnetometers, a CCD camera, a Geiger-Müller tube and a microphone to detect micrometeoroid impacts.

UoSAT-2 was instrumental in providing a communications link from the Canadian-Soviet Ski-Trek support teams to the expedition party in 1986. The position of the skiers' emergency beacon was calculated daily by Cospas-Sarsat ground stations and relayed to them and thousands of amateur radio listeners as a spoken message from the Digitalker on board UO-11. This is really worth a listen - visit the expedition web page. The message could also serve as an emergency channel to the skiers in the event that all other radio links failed.

UoSAT-2 also carried the Digital Communications Experiment (DCE) that was the first digital packet store-&-forward payload on a microsatellite. Find out more about this payload and see some photos of UoSAT-2 being built at Lloyd Wood’s personal UoSAT-2 pages.

The plucky small satellite was still transmitting last week on 145.825 MHz AFSK-FM at 1200 bps after 26 years in orbit! The small demonstration satellite’s on-board batteries are exhausted after 26 years in orbit, so the satellite now only operates in sunlight and has inactive beacons at 435.025 MHz and 2401 MHz.

The latest issue of the Space IGT newsletter is available for download.

Of particular interest is the following:-

The Space SIG website is set to receive a fresh new look with additional tools for enabling online networking. The Connect Portal, brought to you by the Technology Strategy Board will replace the existing infrastructure creating clear and easy mechanisms for you to work across the Space SIG and KTN landscape. This includes:

• A network of networks – enabling the exchange of ideas from one discipline to another and in the process finding new and surprising ways of innovating.
• Building social networks online – a powerful way to gain the benefits of membership and to help you develop productive relationships for innovation.

We will inform you of the registration details for the new network so you can benefit from this exciting new platform.

Rocketeer comments: I'm solidly in favour of improved networking in the UK space science and technology sector. This falls in the category of "why the hell didn't you do this before?!".

(Source: University of Strathclyde)

Alan Bond, Managing Director of Reaction Engines Limited will deliver the first James Weir Lecture, titled "Travelling at the edge of space: Reaction Engines and Skylon in the next 20 years".

This seminar will be in Court Senate suite from 1730 hrs on 10 March 2010. To register for attendence please email Fiona Lynn.

Abstract

The use of liquid hydrogen to cool the air entering a high speed aircraft engine has been in the literature for fifty years, but was not developed because of the high fuel flow required. In the early 1980s it was found that if the fuel was not used simply as coolant, but as the heat sink for the engine driving the intake compressor while using the hot stagnated air as its heat source, the fuel consumption was greatly reduced. Reaction Engines has been evolving these engines for over 20 years resulting in designs for the SKYLON spaceplane, and engines suitable for Mach 5 civil airliners. The next twenty years should see the pre-cooled engine transform access to space and flight to the antipodes. This talk describes Reaction Engines R&D programme and its ambitions for the future.