Spaceship One hits Mach 1.2

[Dont Hurt Me]

For those following the X-prizehttp://spacedaily.com/news/xprize-03d.html

[Stelliform]

Here is the BBC Article. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3330595.stm) Pretty cool stuff! The first privately funded aircraft to break the sound barrier. And on the 100th anniversary of the Wright Bros. flight!

They say that they are probably 2 flights away from claiming the X-prize.

[Dont Hurt Me]

thanks for the addition stelliform, very awesome to do this 100 yrs on the day the Wright brothers made man flight. They had a little problem with the left landing gear strut on touchdown, seems it either collapsed or somehow wasnt locked and skidded off the side of the runway. no one was hurt and they said it was minor damage. I thought those struts looked a little on the lite seide. it will be interesting to see what caused that problem. anyways this is another first.:) WAY TO GO GUYS!

[Mr. Anderson]

talk about cool - this is friggin great!

And this pic is awesome! I hope they win the X-Prize but also don't keep the competition from continuing with the goal of getting commercial space flight off the groudn! :D

D

[jayscheuerle]

Originally posted by Stelliform
They say that they are probably 2 flights away from claiming the X-prize.

Well, it takes 2 flights to claim the X-Prize, so I'm guessing they're going to need a few more than that.

They're going to need to go quite a bit faster than Mach 1.2 to get to the edge of space. They were about 1/5 of the way there for the test, but the plane itself was around 1/7 of the way there. Stuff gets funky when the air gets thin though. To see that progress is being made is exciting. It's a funky looking ship, too!

[Dont Hurt Me]

They are doing this at a fraction of what we would have to pay Nasa to acomplish the same thing.:mad: The program has been very methodicle in its step by step approach. I still think with Nasa's billions they could have done a suped up version of this to get man and light cargo to orbit. Very dissappointed with the crap and overblown expenses they have socked us American Tax payers with. Scaled composits has vision something that takes billions if you are lucky to get out of Govt ran projects for space.

[wdlove]

That is an awesome picture Mr. Anderson. Thank you for posting, how did you manage to get such a great picture>

Thank you for the update Dont Hurt Me.

[Mr. Anderson]

jayscheuerle: if you read the article you'll see that this was just a test. The final working speed will be 2500 mph (significantly faster ;) ) and they'll be going to over 360,000 ft, 62 miles high, not 12 miles or 68,000 ft. They managed to get 12 miles on just 15 seconds of thrust! That's quite impressive!

wdlove: I didn't take the pic, its from their website.

D

[toaster_oven]

just out of curiosity- how fast does one have to travel to escape earth's gravity?

-toaster

[mactastic]

Originally posted by toaster_oven
just out of curiosity- how fast does one have to travel to escape earth's gravity?

-toaster

25,000 mph IIRC.

edit:
Escape velocity is defined to be the minimum velocity an object must have in order to escape the gravitational field of the earth, that is, escape the earth without ever falling back.

The object must have greater energy than its gravitational binding energy to escape the earth's gravitational field. So:

1/2 mv2 = GMm/R

Where m is the mass of the object, M mass of the earth, G is the gravitational constant, R is the radius of the earth, and v is the escape velocity. It simplifies to:

v = sqrt(2GM/R)

or

v = sqrt(2gR)

Where g is acceleration of gravity on the earth's surface.

The value evaluates to be approximately:

11100 m/s
40200 km/h
25000 mi/h
I think that's right anyway.

[pooky]

Originally posted by toaster_oven
just out of curiosity- how fast does one have to travel to escape earth's gravity?


Escape velocity at the surface of the Earth is about 25,000 mph. Of course, this is assuming one burst of acceleration followed by "coasting" upward. In reality, a ship would accelerate continuously and would eventually reach an escape velocity somewhat less than 25,000 mph somewhere above the planet's surface.

[mactastic]

I guess the smartass answer would be really really really really fast. :p

[Dont Hurt Me]

The first answer was much better, thanks for the very cool first post mactastic. Spaceship one isnt designed to go orbital but i bet Nasa could do it with these same ideas that came from the X-15 /B-52 project with newer technologies like Scaled Composits are using.