Skylon may fly this year, first SSTO spaceplane?

[Seret]

I'm constantly amused by the wildly pessimistic views certain people have regarding the efficiency of a properly managed team. Goes both ways.

Sure, but a properly managed engineering team will often take a conservative approach to new technology. Unknowns are inherently risky, so it's not prudent to rush development. Some of the timescales I see people throwing around here do raise an eyebrow, I've got to say.

[Seret]

For instance, liquefaction plants that produce liquid oxygen etc have lots of inefficient large-scale stuff to dry the incoming air and pre-cool it before they can start liquefying it

Natural gas is liquefied for transport by ship, that's an even bigger market they could tap into if the technology proved suitable. The volumes they handle I'm sure they'd be interested in improving their efficiency by even a few percent.

[sgt_flyer]

I think conservative approaches can't be used for SSTO designs. Heck, nasa's Venture Star SSTO was anything but a conventional approach : extra wide lifting body, extremely new lightweight materials, linear aerospikes, etc. And in all of this, their main problem was in creating a bizarrely shaped fuel tank to maximise the used space inside (in the end, they never managed to develop this special fuel tank before the project was shut down)

At least, Skylon's fuel tanks are much more conservative in design than the venture star's tanks

[SargeRho]

I think they solved the composite tank problem less than a month after it got axed.

[jwenting]

I think they solved the composite tank problem less than a month after it got axed.

They actually solved it before it got axed, but didn't finish production until after it got axed.

Of course that problem was only an excuse, the real reason was that NASA didn't want any competition to the Holy Shuttle (which provided tens of thousands of union jobs and little private fiefdoms for hundreds of "administrators".

Venturestar wasn't the only Shuttle replacement to get axed like that.

[SargeRho]

I wonder if it would be evonomically viable for Lockheed Martin to resume the Venture Star project on their own dime. An SSTO that could be rapidly reused, and has for the most part already been designed and built, that HAS to be worth something.

[sgt_flyer]

Well, the only components designed and built were the small scale ones for the x-33 project - upscaling those for the venture star might be still too much for just lockheed martin to do on their own dimes