Do you want to give a ride!!...so on you go...
Virgin galactic the first airline for a space travel, virgin galactic engineers spent a lot of work for designing such a best aircraft took them a few decades. They initially failed in few tests
But ‘From the mid 1990's, Virgin looked at many plans for potential space launch vehicles. All were rejected, primarily on the basis that they were fundamentally unsafe by design.’(Virgin galactic –The North star).
Later in 2002 new design plans have been developed Burt Rutan's, plans for Spaceship One made them to utilize many more 1000 times more safer than any other spaceship in the world, which then the civilization transformed to a new era of space travel.
'SPACESHIP 2 (Ref:Virgin galactic)
Spaceship two is a rocket powered space plane launches horizontally from an aircraft at altitude app 50,000ft rather than ground launch (i.e.) vertically, because of dangers involved in it like the controllability and burning the fuel for a rocket engine involves in a lot of fuel quantities like solid oxygen (Propellants) which affects the mass of the vehicle. And because a rocket has to operate in the very thin upper atmosphere, where oxygen for fuel combustion is scarce, in space there is none oxygen so it has to carry its own oxidizer. There are two main types of rocket propulsion: liquid engines and solid motors.
Liquid engines:
Liquid engines mixes two liquids(liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen) and ignite them to produce thrust. The main advantage of the liquid engines is they provide very high efficiencies and can be shutdown early if necessary; they are expensive and complex to build.
Solid motors:
These are like fireworks. A solid mixture of fuel and oxidiser and once you burn it then off you go.
The advantage is that it’s simple and the disadvantage is once you lit the fire, they can’t be stopped, they burn until all the propellant is used up.
Hybrid motor:
Hybrid motors offer both simplicity and safety. This is the type of motor that SpaceShipTwo will employ and that was used by SpaceShip1. Main advantage of this motor is that the pilots will be able to shut down the SpaceShip2 rocket motor at any time during its operation and glide safely back to the runway. And the oxidiser used is Nitrous and fuel is a rubber mixture.
The spacecraft must fly through the lower and denser regions of the atmosphere, since the rocket’s thrust when released would be so high, so the spacecraft velocity also must alsobe so high to work efficiently. (To match both velocities)
One of Milestone is Wing feathering for re-entry.
The technically challenging and dangerous thing is Burt Rutan’s was made to find the failsafe solution, which he found was wing feathering for re-entry was the humble shuttle cock which relies on aerodynamic design and laws of physics.
How does it work!!
When the spaceship is out of the atmosphere, the entire tail plane of the spaceship can be rotated up to 65degrees.
This feathered configuration is an automatic control of the altitude and with the fuselage parallel to the horizontal; this creates high drag and the spaceship descends to the upper regions of the atmosphere, the feather configuration is also highly stable, effectively giving the pilot a hands-free re-entry.
Composite materials are used for more strength and safety, especially Carbon fibre composite is a marvellous material; four times the strength of steel and a quarter of its weight, meaning less energy is required to propel both vehicles.
This is a revolutionary event in the world history, achieving the supreme heights in the Aeronautical and Aerospace industry
Continued...
References:
Virgingalactic.com
Note:This blog post is just for information, and upcomming evolutions and developments in Aerospace and other sciences
