May 25, 2005

SPACECRAFT Blog has moved to http://krishl.us/spacecraft

 

February 18, 2005

Damper Design (Design)

Design review this morning for the precession damper Andre is designing for Whorl-I in the SSSL. I'll post some details later.

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February 17, 2005

Virginia Tech Sounding Rocket Project (Design)

The VTSRP launch date is getting closer; the launch window opens on March 14, and will remain open for about one week. The Improved Orionwill launch from the Wallops Island Flight Facility near Chincoteague, Virginia, carrying the MAGIC instrument to an altitude of about 85 km. The payload will be recovered at sea for future study of the dust particles it collects.

What's next for VT Rocketry? We're working to evolve the project into a club, with rocketry projects including model rockets, amateur rockets, and sounding rockets. Watch this spot.

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February 16, 2005

Commander Binnie & SpaceShipOne (Exploration)

Yesterday, Virginia Tech had a distinguished visitor, Commander Brian Binnie, one of the three SpaceShipOne pilots, who had the distinction of being the pilot of the X-Prize-winning flight, as well as the flight where he "got dirt all over the plastic spaceship." The university gave the event a lot of publicity. He was supposed to arrive on Monday evening and be here all day, including a tour of our Space Systems Simulation Lab. The students worked hard getting the lab all shiny and some demos ready to show. Alas, Roanoke airport was fogged in, and the airline pilot refused to allow him to parachute into the VT Drill Field. So, he got to spend the night in Cincy instead of Blacksburg, and since he didn't get to Blacksburg until later in the morning, the tour of our lab was cancelled.

He did, however, spend a couple of hours with a small group of students and faculty in the early afternoon, had dinner with another group, and gave the Big Public Lecture at 8 PM last night, in the 3000-seat auditorium in Burruss Hall. I attended all three of these events.

The "small group" seminar began with an informal "gather around the astronaut" session where the students got to interact with Binnie. A few of them had posters or newspapers that they got him to autograph. Very cool. Then there were some introductions, and he spoke informally for about 35 minutes on "How I Got Here." Unfortunately, his comments included a bit of NASA-bashing, which I thought cheapened it a bit, and sent the wrong message to the students. Again, mostly very cool. Then the floor was opened for questions, and several students asked good questions.

One student asked an excellent question: Of the other X-Prize competitors, which do you think had good design ideas? Aha, I thought, here's his chance to be a good sport; criticizing NASA is one thing, but surely he'll have some good things to say about the competition.

His response was first that they weren't paying any attention to the competition, but he then went on to describe some of their concepts in a manner clearly intended to illustrate that they were amusing but not serious approaches. I found his reply to this excellent question to be disappointing, to say the least.

Later in the evening he gave an entertaining 90-minute lecture with powerpoint slides and embedded video to an audience of at least 1000 folks. Needless to say, he charmed the crowd with his anecdotes about the development, test, and successful flights of SpaceShipOne. He got quite a bit of laughter when he presented his one-chart description of "The Other Space Agency": Nay-Say. Continued laughter greeted his comparison of the $30M crew compartment door of the Space Shuttle to the $20 crew compartment door of the SpaceShipOne. He described at length the differences between the two doors' designs in both concept and implementation. He did not mention, however, that the Shuttle version is required to take 6-10 people and 20,000 pounds of spacecraft parts into Earth orbit for 7-14 days, as compared with SpaceShipOne's taking 1 test pilot to the edge of the atmosphere for 5 minutes. Well, those distinctions probably aren't that important anyhow.

In summary, much of his talk was fascinating, illuminating, and inspiring. But a substantial bit in the middle seemed to be based on the premise that anything that makes my competition sound bad makes me look good. In general, I disagree with that premise, and I hope that many of the VT students in the audience recognized the less-than-graceful tone that it set. I would rather that he had focused on the many challenges that the Scaled Composites team faced and how they overcame them, rather than spending time denigrating NASA and other X-Prize competitors.

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