Anyone else see this announcement from Boeing?

[Kitworks]

Think it will really fly? Looks pretty cool and cheap if they can make it work as promised...

http://spaceref.biz/agencies/darpa-1/boeing-to-design-xs-1-experimental-spaceplane-for-darpa.html

[Kryten]

The image is only something DARPA knocked up. Despite the name, the requirement isn't actually for a winged vehicle, and there's a good chance they'll produce a more conventional-looking VTVL rocket.

[rdfox]

Actually, given the requirement, I suspect that Boeing would prefer to build a winged vehicle, since this is merely a first stage. In fact, I suspect that said winged vehicle will look suspiciously like it shares its wings and engines with the 747-8, but with a body designed specifically for the mission to allow the booster to be dropped from it without the violent negative-gee maneuver that would be needed to separate from it if you were to use Shuttle-style carriage on top of the existing 747 fuselage. (When the 747 was used for Enterprise's drop flights in the Approach and Landing Test series, even with the lift of the Shuttle's wings, the 747 had to make a zero-gee pushover to separate from Enterprise, due to the Shuttle's poor glide ratio; with an essentially wingless upper-stage booster, you'd need to make it even more aggressive, and negative gees are hard on both pilots and airframes.)

Really, if you want a fully reusable first stage, that's the simplest way to do it--use a large airplane for the "initial loft" up to about 15-17km and 250-300 m/s horizontal velocity, then drop the rest of the booster from it and have it fire once clear; the airplane then flies back to base. This has a long and proud tradition, from the early X-planes (X-1 and variants, X-2, X-15, from B-29s, B-50s, and B-52s) to today's Pegasus/Pegasus XL (from B-52s and L1011s) and Rutan's SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo (from the White Knight series motherships). Indeed, the USAF even tested the capability of launching ICBMs that way once in the mid-1970s, in a capability demonstration where a Minuteman ICBM was rolled out of the rear cargo ramp of a C-141 in flight and then fired to fly a normal mission. (The idea there was that it would allow the Air Force to compete with the Navy for having a "survivable" rapid-response deterrent force, in that transports flying around the US with ICBMs on board, ready for in-flight launch, couldn't be pre-targeted by Soviet missiles, much like the Navy's ballistic missile submarines at sea...)

[Sky_walker]

AFAIK XS-1 is a project from 2010, or something like that.

Basically - military guys try to do what NASA failed to. Deliver fully reusable space plane (no boosters that you loose with each launch).

[Kryten]

Actually, given the requirement, I suspect that Boeing would prefer to build a winged vehicle, since this is merely a first stage. In fact, I suspect that said winged vehicle will look suspiciously like it shares its wings and engines with the 747-8[...]

Part of the program requirement is hitting Mach 10, so a 747 isn't exactly going to cut it.