Any more billionaires feeling left out of the space race?
Paul Allen's new rocket-launching plane
91–100 of 170 posts
Re: Paul Allen's new rocket-launching plane
#92I can just imagine him up there in the plane, listening to Huey Lewis and the News.
Re: Paul Allen's new rocket-launching plane
#93Does anyone have any insight into how the dual flight decks are utilized?
There's only one flight deck and it in the right-hand fuselage. I was at a recent friends and family day at Scaled Composites and was able to see and touch this amazing plane.
I see, so it's just uniformity of production. How fortunate that you are to be able to tour this! Cheers.
Re: Paul Allen's new rocket-launching plane
#94This might be a dumb question, but it looks like there are two cockpits on this plane. I imagine the plane is drive by wire, so it doesn't matter where you are on the plane. Why do they have two?
Extending my question further, why does this plane have a cockpit at all? Isn't this something you could remotely pilot, especially to mitigate the potential risk of being at 30k feet with thousands of kilos of RP-1 or similar?
Re: Paul Allen's new rocket-launching plane
#95Dumb question: why don't they launch rockets from the tops of mountains?
Related question: Couldn't we create some sort of rocket elevator with huge and very high balloons?
Re: Paul Allen's new rocket-launching plane
#96This might be a dumb question, but it looks like there are two cockpits on this plane. I imagine the plane is drive by wire, so it doesn't matter where you are on the plane. Why do they have two? Extending my question further, why does this plane have a cockpit at all? Isn't this something you could remotely pilot, especially to mitigate the potential risk of being at 30k feet with thousands of kilos of RP-1 or simil…
I'm guessing they made it out of two of an existing plane design and that is just what you got. Or for balance, you wouldn't want them to differ much.
Re: Paul Allen's new rocket-launching plane
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Dunning-Kruger effect: The idea that people of low skill or knowledge about something don't know how much they don't know and thus think they're much better at it then they actually are. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
was dianne his wife?
Thank you for getting it.
Re: Paul Allen's new rocket-launching plane
#98Dumb question: why don't they launch rockets from the tops of mountains?
Altitude is much less important than velocity.* The extra altitude you'd get from launching from a top of a mountain would not be worth the expense of having to lug the rocket up there in the first place.
Re: Paul Allen's new rocket-launching plane
#99I feel overcome by the Dianne Kruger effect, to an extent I don't remember feeling any time recently. I'm becoming more and more interested in news about rocketry (due to SpaceX of course) but I'm still a full on space-pleb. I see something like this and my intuition screams "Woah! Of course! Why don't other rocket companies do this? What's wrong with them?!" But the rational part of my brain kicks in and slaps me do…
The traditional rocket companies have no interest in reducing launch costs. Now they're looking like fools for letting SpaceX patent critical tech they could have developed 20 years ago.
SpaceX doesn't patent anything[0]. Tesla does file for patents, but has basically made all their patents free to use for all[1]. Seems like Musk is just not a fan of the patent regime.
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-patents-2012-11
[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
Re: Paul Allen's new rocket-launching plane
#100This is awesome but a little bit scary. Interesting that they didn't physically connect the tail wings at all, I wonder what stresses and torques the main wing will endure under maneuvering or turbulence. I assume all the control surfaces are computer controlled to synchronize and minimize that, but from the perspective of an ignorant observer, looks a little fragile.
it's a proven design. scaled composites, which built this also built the GlobalFlyer with similar configuration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_GlobalFlyer
> it's a proven design
No. This is breakthrough science. Scaled proofed a specific implementation of one of its materials.