From there we drop the spaceship off of the White Knight and it glides for 10 seconds while the pilot sets up, gets the aircraft all trimmed up, ready for the rocket boost and he throws the switch, and the hybrid rocket motor in the SpaceShipOne accelerates the pilot at about two to three times normal gravity. The air is very rarified up at that altitude so it's a great place to start from. We're through about 85 percent of the Earth's atmosphere already when we go down 45,000 feet. The White Knight is a turbofan-powered airplane that carries the SpaceShipOne up to 45 to 50,000 feet so that we can start our space flight from a relatively high position in the atmosphere where the air's already pretty thin. Matthew Gionta: SpaceShipOne is slung underneath the belly of the White Knight aircraft, two aircraft that we've developed from scratch here. We'll also look at the details of the design, the propulsion system, and the privately funded space program that spawned it all. In this article, Matthew tells us how SpaceShipOne works and what it's like to fly in this spaceship. HowStuffWorks learned about SpaceShipOne from Matthew Gionta, chief engineer of the company that built it - Scaled Composites. So, years from now, when space tourism is as common as a trip to Disney World, we may look back on SpaceShipOne as the undertaking that turned a page in history. And it was Lindbergh's successful flight that ushered in the modern airline industry. While that may sound far-fetched, consider that Charles Lindbergh's historic 1927 solo flight from New York to Paris won the $25,000 Orteig Prize.
The spaceship's creators envision a world where space travel is a thriving commercial business catering to anyone who has the desire to venture to the stars. This prize wasn't the ultimate motivation for the development of SpaceShipOne, however. The competition challenged independent designers to safely put three people into space twice in two weeks with a reusable spacecraft. The ship is already a success on one level - on October 4th, 2004, it won the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
0 kommentar(er)
