DARPA Building New Spaceplane

[NASAFanboy]

Apparently, the US Department of Defense has an unhealthly obsession to build spaceplanes. Most recently, the head of DARPA and the US Secretary of Defense announced a project to build a spaceplane, the XS-1, that would go into operation in 2017. Congress has approved funding (They approve everything military.)

What does the XS-1 do?

Think of a X-37. Merge it with Skylon, give it to the Army. That's the XS-1...it's the US Military equivalent of Skylon (Minus the hitting orbit part) And it's going off in a mere 5 years, maybe less.

Pretty ambitious, if you ask me. If NASA isn't seeing the potiental of unmanned spaceplanes, atleast the military is.

I don't know. It's well-supported in Congress and the DoD, and it's not competing against the Orion (Orion is going to a rock. This is going to earth orbit.), and will be finished three years prior (Sparing it the fate of the Dyna-Soar, which competed with the Gemini and lost)

I think it'll actually make it

But still, reading the articles make it sound like another space shuttle.

Edited November 17, 2013 by NASAFanboy

[Kryten]

DARPA aren't building anything, and right now neither is anybody else. DARPA has made a request for proposals, which includes the amount of money they'd be able to award to somebody able to fulfill all of the requirements-~$140 million. Given the requirements include flying 10 times in ten days at speeds of Mach 10, and the only plane to cross Mach 10 at all cost well over $200 million to develop, aerospace companies aren't exactly chomping at the bit.

[NASAFanboy]

DARPA aren't building anything, and right now neither is anybody else. DARPA has made a request for proposals, which includes the amount of money they'd be able to award to somebody able to fulfill all of the requirements-~$140 million. Given the requirements include flying 10 times in ten days at speeds of Mach 10, and the only plane to cross Mach 10 at all cost well over $200 million to develop, aerospace companies aren't exactly chomping at the bit.

It'll more likely increase.

Boeing, Lockheed, they both likely have a interest (Since they cater to the Government, the Government does them favors when it comes to tax time)

As of now, I'm just going to be optimistic and hope it flies in 2019.

[Nibb31]

DARPA's RFP actually says nothing about spaceplanes. The requirement for the XS-1 is for a first stage that can reach Mach 10 and be reused 10 times in 10 days. For all we know, a reusable Falcon 9 first stage might already be meet the requirements.

The 10 times in 10 days requirement sounds a bit silly. Does it mean that after 10 flights it can be thrown away or does it mean that it can fly 100 times with a flight per day? Or does it mean that you can have 1000 engineers refurbishing the vehicle for 10 days ? Wouldn't you meet the same requirement with a fleet of 2 vehicles that fly every two days, or simply have 10 cheap vehicles that fly once a year?

Edited November 17, 2013 by Nibb31

[Faark]

The 10 times in 10 days requirement sounds a bit silly. Does it mean that after 10 flights it can be thrown away or does it mean that it can fly 100 times with a flight per day? Or does it mean that you can have 1000 engineers refurbishing the vehicle for 10 days ? Wouldn't you meet the same requirement with a fleet of 2 vehicles that fly every two days, or simply have 10 cheap vehicles that fly once a year?

Pretty sure it means they want sth like today's military jets for space... land it, refuel it and send it up again in no time, to fight the evil guys and secure resources in foreign countries for murica. Them pushing a lot of money into it would actually be a good move towards commercial companies do sth similar for us common folk.

[Lexif]

Them pushing a lot of money into it would actually be a good move towards commercial companies do sth similar for us common folk.

Ah, just like all the research and production of supersonic jet fighters made us all travel in supersonic civil planes like the Concorde. I think we've all greatly benefited from that. Not.

[magnemoe]

Ah, just like all the research and production of supersonic jet fighters made us all travel in supersonic civil planes like the Concorde. I think we've all greatly benefited from that. Not.

Main issue with supersonic passenger flights is the cost.

Too few are willing to pay 5000$ to save four hours from Paris to New York. Yes some are but not many enough. Add that it has to be an point to point flight. If you has to go from Madrid or to Miami you don't save anything as you could taken an direct flight with an standard plane.

[Faark]

Ah, just like all the research and production of supersonic jet fighters made us all travel in supersonic civil planes like the Concorde. I think we've all greatly benefited from that. Not.

But you did fly with a plane once in a while or have at least seen them on TV? Did you notice those big tubes that produce the planes thrust? Those are jet engines and while they are now widely used to transport civilians all around the world, they where first invented by the german military to rule the world. I'm sure we could write an incredible long list of stuff first invented for or pushed by the military. You might know that those world wide data exchange network pretty much every computer is now connected to that was initially funded by the US DoD.

So yes, if the some military think they need jet fighters for space and are willing to spend their $ for that, it will most likely accelerate other space programs as well.

[Lexif]

Faark, I fully appreciate the technology transfer between the military and the civilian aerospace world. If I look out of the window of an airliner, there's a high bypass turbofan hanging out there, first developed for the C-5 competition, I think.

magnemoe expressed my point more eloquently. Maybe I shouldn't have been so sarcastic. The problem is not technology, but economy. The premium passengers that now fill the front of a conventional widebody are not even enough to make scheduled first-class-only longhaul or ultra longhaul flights profitable. Those that could pay the premium will rather take a private jet and depart when they want from where they want. That's often faster than catching a low frequency Concorde flight if you count the time spent at the airport etc.

I guess private supersonic jets won't sell in high enough numbers to change the political environment and justify the huge development costs.

But back to topic, please.

[K^2]

magnemoe expressed my point more eloquently. Maybe I shouldn't have been so sarcastic. The problem is not technology, but economy. The premium passengers that now fill the front of a conventional widebody are not even enough to make scheduled first-class-only longhaul or ultra longhaul flights profitable. Those that could pay the premium will rather take a private jet and depart when they want from where they want. That's often faster than catching a low frequency Concorde flight if you count the time spent at the airport etc.

I guess private supersonic jets won't sell in high enough numbers to change the political environment and justify the huge development costs.

The fact that VLJ market is booming right now suggests that we might see supersonic and hypersonic private jets in the near future. I think some of the suborbital research could transfer to private flight. Whether we'll actually have private suborbital spaceplanes is another question. I'm guessing not without some really major breakthroughs in propulsion.

[Lexif]

The fact that VLJ market is booming right now suggests that we might see supersonic and hypersonic private jets in the near future. I think some of the suborbital research could transfer to private flight. Whether we'll actually have private suborbital spaceplanes is another question. I'm guessing not without some really major breakthroughs in propulsion.

VLJs? I thought they were more in the market to replace old, old Citations, Lear Jets and turbocharged piston and turbo prop designs. I thought, like what they replace, they are flying lower and slower than commercial jets, are single pilot certified and therefore cheaper to operate if you don't fly yourself. (Most went to air taxi companies, I thought?)

What made me hopefull is the market for large business jets. Lots of completly new aircraft designs (a rare event), and a bit of a speed competition going on. I have high hopes in Gulfstream. Though we are only talking about a certified M0.93, the testing regime has to involve going up to Mach 1, so they have to do increase their know how. They already talked about plans for a quiet supersonic jet last year, though I'm not sure what came of it. They have the money and are the only big manufacturer specialised on large business jets, so they have an incentive to stand out.

But to be honest, most of the business jet market seems to be about the interiors, and the companies are notoriously shy of developing completely new airframes. Bombardier essentially milked all their jet aircraft out the original Challenger fuselage. Same with Gulfstream. I would hope for an outsider to shake up the market, but the clients are mostly very conservative, too. A lot of the volume is not personal jets but charter and company flight departments (and fractional ownership for smaller types), I think.

[jwenting]

Main issue with supersonic passenger flights is the cost.

Too few are willing to pay 5000$ to save four hours from Paris to New York. Yes some are but not many enough. Add that it has to be an point to point flight. If you has to go from Madrid or to Miami you don't save anything as you could taken an direct flight with an standard plane.

What killed Concorde was not the ticket price (that was artificially inflated to boost sales by British Airways, they found they sold MORE tickets for it at $5k a pop than at $1k, go figure), but the noise, and especially noise abatement regulations coming into effect just as Concorde was starting to enter service.

That destroyed the market for it for any airline having longish overland flights to do with it, effectively restricted it to trans Atlantic flights between coastal cities.

And THAT caused orders and tenders for hundreds of them to be canceled, leaving it in service only in limited numbers with the state run airlines of the two countries that built it, who more or less were forced to keep them because scrapping the few that had been delivered would mean losing face.

Entering service at the height of the 1970s OPEC crisis didn't help either.

[K^2]

The point is that VLJs are in the right price and capability range to do precisely what you have talked about. Cater to the needs of the wealthy. A typical business jet is still designed to carry a group of people, or it ends up being too expensive.

The neat thing about VLJs is that we couldn't even build these just a short time ago. Not with the sort of efficiency they have now. All thanks to miniaturization of turbofan engines. Similar thing can happen to a supersonic flight.

[Lexif]

Jwenting, it's true that that's the reason why Concorde got so few orders. But I think the lack of success of other premium-only services shows that there's also a flaw in the business plan. If a major airline draws the premium passengers out of their normal jets, those suddenly become less profitable. And while the passengers will pay more than for the slow ride, they are now on an aircraft with much larger operating costs.

The point is that VLJs are in the right price and capability range to do precisely what you have talked about. Cater to the needs of the wealthy. A typical business jet is still designed to carry a group of people, or it ends up being too expensive.

The neat thing about VLJs is that we couldn't even build these just a short time ago. Not with the sort of efficiency they have now. All thanks to miniaturization of turbofan engines. Similar thing can happen to a supersonic flight.

Their tiny engines are really amazing. But I would much rather buy a used Piaggio Avanti for that price, while turboprop, it has about the same performance and at least it has a toilet. And it looks amazing. I think there's a question of structural efficiency in there somewhere where there would be some kind of sweet spot in size, and I think VLJs are way below it.

[Seret]

The 10 times in 10 days requirement sounds a bit silly. Does it mean that after 10 flights it can be thrown away or does it mean that it can fly 100 times with a flight per day? Or does it mean that you can have 1000 engineers refurbishing the vehicle for 10 days ? Wouldn't you meet the same requirement with a fleet of 2 vehicles that fly every two days, or simply have 10 cheap vehicles that fly once a year?

It's probably simply what it sounds like. Complete 10 flights on 10 consecutive days to win. DARPA are a research agency, they're looking at a programme of testing, not a service-ready vehicle.

In practical terms that will set a lot of the design goals. For example, it needs a power plant that can stand up to 10 starts without overhaul, or maybe one that can be completely replaced in a few hours. As it stands the vehicle could go off for an overhaul after 10 flights, but they want people to design something that could be available for duty for a continuous block of days. The USAF are clearly sensing that they're within reach of a practical transatmospheric global strike capability, and want DARPA to work up technologies that are practical for military service.

[K^2]

I don't see why you need a toilet on a private jet, at least in U.S. There are places where it's harder to find a rest stop on a freeway than an airport. And if I own an airplane, there is no way in hell I'm letting someone else have the fun of flying it.

Besides, something like Cirrus SF50 Vision is cheaper than Avanti, even a used one, will eat way less fuel, and would be easier and cheaper to store due to smaller size. Honestly, the only advantage Avanti has is the range. Almost 3x as much, but like I said, airports are like mushrooms after a summer's rain around here, and you'd want to stretch your legs and use the rest room about as often as you'd need to get more Jet A. If I had $1.5M to blow on an airplane right now, I'd get Vision or something similar.

In the foreseeable future, however, I'd be lucky to scrape up enough for a 152. Or maybe an Icon, if I find good work closer to the ocean.

[jwenting]

Lexif: true, but remember Concorde was envisioned at a time when ALL air travel was premium. The 747 and its low cost transatlantic travel came as a very rude surprise at a time when Concorde was thought to have to compete with the 707 DC8, with a similar size cabin, similarly efficient engines, and similar crew size, ergo not that much higher cost per seat/mile.

Larger SSTs were planned (in fact the US tried to build one that would have 3-400 passenger capacity, putting it in competition with the early 747 models) but never built when the marked evaporated after all the noise abatement laws came into effect that effectively made it illegal to operate SSTs over land.

[NASAFanboy]

I think that the future of space travel will be like the future of jets.

Small suborbital spacecraft for the well-to-do (Upper missile class), mid-sized orbital spaceplanes for billionaires and airline companies, and large spacecraft a managed by large corporations or government entities.

I'm afraid that's all my optimism can hope for with today's technology and the current projected rate of growth. We'll hit this status at around 2060-2080.

[magnemoe]

What killed Concorde was not the ticket price (that was artificially inflated to boost sales by British Airways, they found they sold MORE tickets for it at $5k a pop than at $1k, go figure), but the noise, and especially noise abatement regulations coming into effect just as Concorde was starting to enter service.

That destroyed the market for it for any airline having longish overland flights to do with it, effectively restricted it to trans Atlantic flights between coastal cities.

And THAT caused orders and tenders for hundreds of them to be canceled, leaving it in service only in limited numbers with the state run airlines of the two countries that built it, who more or less were forced to keep them because scrapping the few that had been delivered would mean losing face.

Entering service at the height of the 1970s OPEC crisis didn't help either.

The pricing make lite sense, yes I know increasing price can boost sale for luxury products like designer clothes however business class tickets are not one of this products. BA might found they would earn more money by pricing it as first class and not business class, at least for business travelers it would be an huge benefit of an shorter trip leaving you functional the same day you arrive.

But yes overland routes would be out but most trips inside Europe would be to short for concorde speed to be an huge benefit anyway. In the US this would be different. And yes the oil crisis was an major issue, not just the high prices but the pessimism followed it.

Add that the military dropped the idea of fast bombers because anti air rockets would have no issues with hitting them so you could not build on their experiences, the US and USSR dropped their supersonic plane ides.

[Idobox]

jwenting,

USSR, USa and France-UK were all working on SST. There are lots of stories of industrial espionage, especially about USSR spying on France too. Anyway, the russian Tu144 was unreliable, crashed twice, and was considered a failure. The boeing 2707 was cancelled 2 years after the first flight of the Concorde and the Tu144, and about at the same time noise laws were passed in the US.

It might be primary anti-americanism, but many people believe the US passed anti noise laws to kill the concorde because they knew they couldn't compete early enough. Especially, the Concorde was not especially noisy at low altitudes.

[Lexif]

And if I own an airplane, there is no way in hell I'm letting someone else have the fun of flying it.

OK, I can really relate to that. :-) The original Lear Jet was designed as a jet trainer for the military and apparently quite snappy and fun to fly. So there was already a VLJ for people like you way back then. But people like you are a small minority. For most, the target is to waste less productive time. They want to either work on the plane, get some good sleep (saving a night in a hotel) or just get there faster. Without the money from those people (or rather, their companies), technical advances will be hard to get to mass production.

I guess a nice market for a supersonic business jet might be centered on the middle east. If you'd fly to India often enough, you could make a lot of use of the speed out over the ocean and the distance is long enough to make it worthwile. There's also a lot of money in the area and the regulatory environment seems to be quite relaxed.

[rdfox]

For the record, DARPA contracts almost never cover the full R&D costs associated with the project; it's more like "seed money" to get it started, in that companies can point to that and tell banks and investors, "Look, even we don't get the contract, you'll at least be able to get that much money back on this, and think of the possible profit if we DO get the production contract."

The plum, the real financial reward for the R&D project, is the contract for the *production* model, where you make back your R&D costs and then start making profits. This is true in the private sector, too--Rutan and his investors didn't think they'd even break even on the Ansari X Prize jackpot; they figured that the only way to make a profit on it was to use the fame from winning the prize to get a contract to build a production version for a tourism company. As it turned out, to win the $10 million prize, they spent $20 million, but ended up turning a net profit once Richard Branson contracted with them to provide vehicles for Virgin Galactic.

Likewise, do you really think ANYone will be able to win the Google Lunar X Prize with a total budget less than the $1 billion prize that Google's put up? It's all about applications after the fact, baby...

[VirtualCLD]

I don't see why you need a toilet on a private jet, at least in U.S. There are places where it's harder to find a rest stop on a freeway than an airport. And if I own an airplane, there is no way in hell I'm letting someone else have the fun of flying it.

Besides, something like Cirrus SF50 Vision is cheaper than Avanti, even a used one, will eat way less fuel, and would be easier and cheaper to store due to smaller size. Honestly, the only advantage Avanti has is the range. Almost 3x as much, but like I said, airports are like mushrooms after a summer's rain around here, and you'd want to stretch your legs and use the rest room about as often as you'd need to get more Jet A. If I had $1.5M to blow on an airplane right now, I'd get Vision or something similar.

In the foreseeable future, however, I'd be lucky to scrape up enough for a 152. Or maybe an Icon, if I find good work closer to the ocean.

I'm curious as to where you fly. Around here in New England, JetA is not available at all airports, but I do admit there are enough to the point you don't have to worry about range anxiety. AVGas in a little 152, 172 or PA-28 is a different story. Not all airports are open or even have gas in stocks, so unless you're familiar with the airport, you're taking a gamble. I think the larger problem is that pilots (and people in general) tend to have a case of get-there-itis and do not want to stop enroute if they don't have to. Of course that's no excuse.

Seeing as how the DARPA RFP doesn't explicitly ask for a spaceplane concept (unless I'm missing something), it's hard to say what contribution it could have to the private sector. I can imagine that a first stage that is reliable enough to be reused 10 times in 10 days could lead to technical innovations that enable lower cost rocket launches. In either event, just the technological development from a competition (assuming this gets to the hardware phase) could be useful.

[Kryten]

Seeing as how the DARPA RFP doesn't explicitly ask for a spaceplane concept (unless I'm missing something)...

You aren't. They've explicitly stated anything that fits the performance requirements goes, spaceplane or not.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Sounds pretty typical. You propose a plane that can get to space, you won't get more than nickels and dimes for it. Now tell them it'll have guns on it, and suddenly the cash comes flowing in!