:: dimming lights :: blog ::

So this week was the one year anniversary of the first flight into space by a private organization. Mike Melville of Scaled Composites piloted the SpaceShipOne passed the X-15’s record. The Science Channel reran their documentary of this historic undertaking by Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, and the rest of Scaled Composites. I can’t think of anything more inspiring right now than the thought of what could come next. What I really want to talk about is the brilliance of the design approach by Rutan, and how this approach should affect NASA’s future plans.

Rutan approached this project exactly the way you’d expect a famous inovator to, with a clear, simple, and elegant design in mind. I believe his first great idea was to create a pair of vehicles to get the job done. Rather than head down the pay of a single stage take off, he invisioned using the same technique that let Chuck Yager break the sound barrier. He decided to build a mother ship, White Knight, that would life the space vehicle, SpaceShipOne, to 50,000 feet where it would drop SpaceShipOne. The reason I think this approach is so good is that its completely modular. One can think of White Knight as a your general purpose launching platform for space vehicles. With a little more modification, it could nearly be a one size fits most platform to launch from, which offers the ability to greatly simplify the space vehicle. The space shuttle in a way follows this idea, but its mothership, huge boosters, are massively expensive and only semi-reuseable. To illustrate how true this description of White Knight is, NASA is currently using it to launch its own experimental plane, the X-37.

The second, and without a doubt, most ingeneous idea of Rutan’s was the feathering bi-fold nature of SpaceShipOne. I cannot account for how original this idea is, but to my knowledge he’s the first to imploy it on a working space vehicle. Rather than try and beat the heat of re-entry through hugely expensive arrays of heat resistant tiles or limit the peformance of the vehicle by having it land like an Apollo capsule, Rutan came up with a way to let Earth bring the ship down while letting the atmosphere slow it down enough to not generate immense heat. By folding the wings of SpaceShipOne up and letting her fall down on her belly, the craft is slowed on re-entry by the drag of the verticle wings. In fact, it’s slowed enough that it is only slightly over mach 1 on rentry. You may recall how Coloumbia burnt up on rentry. This is because the space shuttle comes speeding through the atmosphere on a narrow angle and is let to glide as fast as it likes, which generates all of that heat. SpaceShipOne has only minimal heat protection. In fact, its hull is mostly fabric and glue!

Rutan’s design is simply elegant to me. He managed to build a successfull space program for what a government could barely hold the the neccessary meetings for to implement one. How can NASA compete with this? The answer is it shouldn’t compete. NASA should focus its goals into a different niche than the purpose of Rutan and the new Virgin Galactic. NASA should, however, take home some lessons from this. In fact, we should all take home these lessons because NASA is all of our’s space program.

• No amount of money can make up for true innovation. We must ensure that NASA as well as our nation continues to foster creativity and innovation without applying massive amounts of red tape.
• We must not get stuck in our old ways of design and thought. To go to Mars and beyond we need to think in ways we have never thought before.
• We need to understand why Rutan was successfull. It was because he was so determined and commited. America needs to be just as commited to space if we as a country will reach Mars.
• Finally, we need to understand that space flight is dangerous. Exploration is dangerous. We will have failures, but they must be viewed as triumphs because we tried in the first place.

I really hope Rutan and Virgin Galactic succeed. We need people like this to go out there and get these things done. That is what our country is all about. NASA needs to clearly define its mission as something separate from commerical space flight. NASA’s mission is to gather the best of what innovators have to offer, and make our dreams of exploration and scientific discovery come true.

my cousin and i have decided to give a shot at 1100 mile separation song composing. we’re giving Near Eros another shot. i’m not totally sure what will come out of this yet, but we’re both super excited. the folks at Jamspot are kind enough to let me use their facility for recording drums. i’ll finally get to start using all of my recording gear! it will undoubtedly be a while before i post any songs, but i will do so when they are ready. the new site for the project is www.neareros.net.

killa.