Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works in love all Things tech and tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: Listener Ivan had asked me in the last episode to
Speaker 1: do a show about space planes. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: there was a bit more to talk about to fill
Speaker 1: up just a single episode. So here is the part
Speaker 1: two to this. UH. In that last episode, I covered
Speaker 1: what a space plane is in general and gave a
Speaker 1: history of some of the important developments and aviation that
Speaker 1: led to the deployment of the Space Shuttle, which was
Speaker 1: the first practical implementation of space plane technology. UH. There
Speaker 1: were space planes before the Space Shuttle, to be clear,
Speaker 1: but all of those were meant as test vehicles, experimental
Speaker 1: prototype vehicles that were meant to expand our understanding of
Speaker 1: engineering and strategies in order to create a working space
Speaker 1: plane that would have applications beyond just research and development
Speaker 1: and aviation, as in, uh, deploying satellites, for example, or
Speaker 1: taking crew to and from outer space. And so now
Speaker 1: we're going to pick up in the early nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: after the space Shuttle program had UH launched, and talk
Speaker 1: about some of the other space planes that have either
Speaker 1: been developed or proposed. And there's gonna be a lot
Speaker 1: of jumping around in time on this, because, as I've
Speaker 1: mentioned in previous episodes, the way space exploration and space
Speaker 1: programs have evolved over time is messy. It's not a
Speaker 1: simple in you know, in year X it started, and
Speaker 1: then that went on for ten years, and then this
Speaker 1: other project started. You have a lot of overlapping timelines.
Speaker 1: And so sometimes that means that if you were to
Speaker 1: just look at launches, like when a test vehicle launched
Speaker 1: for the first time, it would look like a more
Speaker 1: linear approach, But in fact a lot of these things
Speaker 1: were in development at around the same time. So with
Speaker 1: that said, in nineteen eighty two, the then Soviet Union
Speaker 1: began test flights of a new space plane design, an
Speaker 1: unmanned space plane called the Bore four, the b O
Speaker 1: R four. That b O R stands for something in
Speaker 1: Russian that is so complicated. I'm not going to try
Speaker 1: and say it because I will dislocate my jaw. I
Speaker 1: am that bad at all languages, including English. Anyway. This
Speaker 1: was the culmination of nearly a decade of work. When
Speaker 1: the Soviet space program really began serious research and development
Speaker 1: on space plane design in the nineteen seventies. The ultimate
Speaker 1: goal was to create a space plane called the Spiral
Speaker 1: fifty fifty, and that was a project that actually dated
Speaker 1: back even further in the Soviet space program. It first
Speaker 1: got started in the nineteen sixties. These two concepts are
Speaker 1: closely tied together, uh the Boar four and the Spiral
Speaker 1: fifty fifty. So let's start with Spiral fifty because that's
Speaker 1: what would ultimately give way to the Boar four. And
Speaker 1: while the spiral was a concept, the Boar four was
Speaker 1: actually constructed, So the spiral fifty concept was incredibly ambitious.
Speaker 1: The goal was to create an aircraft that could take
Speaker 1: off like a conventional jet, So in other words, it
Speaker 1: would launch from a horizontal position off some sort of
Speaker 1: takeoff surface like a runway. Then it would travel up
Speaker 1: into air and continue to ascend until it reached outer space.
Speaker 1: Not just above the carm online at a hundred kilometers
Speaker 1: that's the dividing line between the Earth's atmosphere and what
Speaker 1: we considered to be space, but even beyond that, all
Speaker 1: the way out into orbit. This vehicle was intended to
Speaker 1: bring supplies and crew two from space station's orbiting Earth,
Speaker 1: and then it would return to Earth at the end
Speaker 1: of its mission and land again like a conventional aircraft.
Speaker 1: And as you can imagine, this would mean creating a
Speaker 1: truly innovative system because the stuff that lets you fly
Speaker 1: around in Earth's atmosphere doesn't work so great in outer space.
Speaker 1: The concept included a pair of expendable rocket stages which
Speaker 1: would be necessary to push the vehicle out into space
Speaker 1: beyond the atmosphere. But within the atmosphere there would be
Speaker 1: an air breathing hypersonic booster that would provide the propulsion
Speaker 1: to get the aircraft to those very high altitudes before
Speaker 1: having to depend upon other rocket engines. This is a
Speaker 1: good moment to talk about why you would want or
Speaker 1: need an air breathing rocket in the first place, because
Speaker 1: we have a long history of using rockets that have
Speaker 1: oxidizers attached to them. Why would you go with a
Speaker 1: different design. Well, first of all, let's talk about oxidizers
Speaker 1: in the first pace. For combustion to happen, you have
Speaker 1: to have three things. These are the the three things
Speaker 1: that make up the triangle for fire. You have to
Speaker 1: have heat, you have to have fuel something to burn,
Speaker 1: and you have to have an oxidizer. Not surprisingly due
Speaker 1: to the names oxygen is an oxidizer a very common
Speaker 1: one here on Earth. Stuff can burn on Earth because
Speaker 1: we have oxygen that facilitates that process. But in space
Speaker 1: there's a distinct shortage of oxygen, so without an oxidizer,
Speaker 1: flames would die out and combustion would stop. Is the
Speaker 1: same thing as if you were to light a candle
Speaker 1: and then cover that candle with a clear glass bowl.
Speaker 1: You would see that the candle's flame would start to
Speaker 1: flicker as it was using up all the oxygen, and
Speaker 1: then it would ultimately sputter out. The same thing would
Speaker 1: happen with rocket engines unless we carried an oxidizer in
Speaker 1: addition to the fuel we plan on burning. But we
Speaker 1: also know that getting into space requires a very careful
Speaker 1: management of weight versus thrust. You want to minimize the
Speaker 1: weight as much as you can to make efficient use
Speaker 1: of fuel. The heavier the weight of the payload, whatever
Speaker 1: it is you're sending out into space, the more fuel
Speaker 1: you're going to need, and the more oxidizer you're going
Speaker 1: to need in order to generate the thrust necessary to
Speaker 1: put that mass into orbit, and it turns out that
Speaker 1: the oxidizer component in rocket engines weighs a lot. This
Speaker 1: is easily shown through an example. So we're gonna look
Speaker 1: at the Space Shuttle to explain what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1: If you have an empty Space Shuttle, it's the spacecraft,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have any payload in it. It would weigh
Speaker 1: in at a hundred sixty five thousand pounds or about
Speaker 1: seventy five thousand kilograms. The two solid fuel booster rockets
Speaker 1: that are would be on either side of the Space
Speaker 1: Shuttle when it was on the launch pad would each
Speaker 1: way one eighty five thousand pounds or eighty four thousand kilograms.
Speaker 1: The giant external fuel tank if it were completely empty
Speaker 1: of fuel, just the fuel tank by itself, that's the
Speaker 1: part that's in the center between those two big booster
Speaker 1: rockets that weighed seventy eight thousand, one hundred pounds or
Speaker 1: about thirty five thousand kilograms. So collectively, all of those
Speaker 1: components empty space shuttle, empty fuel tank, two solid fuel
Speaker 1: rocket boosters weighed six hundred thousand pounds. That's two d
Speaker 1: seventy eight thousand kilograms that's without fuel and without oxidizer.
Speaker 1: The oxidizer, which for the Space Shuttle was a hundred
Speaker 1: forty three thousand gallons or five hundred forty one thousand
Speaker 1: liters of liquid oxygen, weighed in at a staggering one
Speaker 1: point three five nine million pounds or six hundred sixteen
Speaker 1: thousand kilograms, So, in other words, the oxidizer weighed more
Speaker 1: than twice as much as the Space Shuttle, the rocket boosters,
Speaker 1: and the external tank combined. So the most most of
Speaker 1: your weight is coming not from the materials, but from
Speaker 1: the fuel and the oxidizer that makes up the vast
Speaker 1: majority of the weight that you're trying to send up there.
Speaker 1: A hypersonic air breathing rocket would use the oxygen in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere as the oxidizer, which means again it would
Speaker 1: only work as long as there were enough oxygen in
Speaker 1: the environment to feed the rocket. However, it would remove
Speaker 1: the necessity to carry so much fuel and oxidizer on board,
Speaker 1: drastically reducing the weight and by extension, the cost of
Speaker 1: the launch vehicle. Because if you don't have to put
Speaker 1: in as much fuel an oxidizer, you don't have to
Speaker 1: spend as much money per launch. So it was a
Speaker 1: way of making the flight more efficient, less costly, less difficult,
Speaker 1: less challenging in the long run, if you're talking about
Speaker 1: just figuring out how much thrust you need to uh
Speaker 1: to propel that much weight into the into space. An
Speaker 1: air breathing rocket also known as a rocket based combined
Speaker 1: cycle engine, works on a principle not that different from
Speaker 1: a conventional jet engine, which means now I get to
Speaker 1: talk about how jet engines work. This is how I
Speaker 1: sneak eighty different tech topics into a single episode. An
Speaker 1: I a stinker. Okay, So a jet engine is a
Speaker 1: type of gas turbine engine. Gas turbine engines have a
Speaker 1: rotating component called the turbine, which you should be familiar with.
Speaker 1: This is the same sort of component used in various
Speaker 1: power facilities, like a steam turbine or a wind turbine,
Speaker 1: and like those turbines, the gas turbine engine turbines are
Speaker 1: spun by a fluid. Right, for steam turbines, you have
Speaker 1: steam passing through this this fan blade turbine system which
Speaker 1: causes the rotation, but in this case the fluid is
Speaker 1: pressurized gas that's created by burning fuel, which then causes
Speaker 1: air to expand rapidly and then forcing that expanding air
Speaker 1: through the turbine. The turbines will spend at incredible speeds,
Speaker 1: which generates a lot of heat in the process. That
Speaker 1: actually is a limiting factor. You cannot have a regular
Speaker 1: jet engine operate beyond a certain point before you get
Speaker 1: into a dangerous situation because it's generating so much heat
Speaker 1: that components will either start to melt or they'll start
Speaker 1: to break down just from the incredible stress, the mechanical
Speaker 1: stress that it's under. Now, there are three main parts
Speaker 1: of your conventional jet engine. You have a compressor, which,
Speaker 1: as the name suggests, compresses air to increase the pressure.
Speaker 1: This usually comes in the form of sort of this UH,
Speaker 1: this bladed design and UH. It is typically powered by
Speaker 1: the spinning of the turbine itself. There's a chamber called
Speaker 1: the combustion area, which, as the name would suggest, is
Speaker 1: where fuel gets added to the incoming compressed air and
Speaker 1: then is burned. It's ignited, which causes that compressed air
Speaker 1: to expand and become a high velocity gas. And then
Speaker 1: you have the turbine which extracts that energy coming out
Speaker 1: of that gas, allowing the gas to flow through the
Speaker 1: turbine spinning it and UH that's where you generate your
Speaker 1: your energy or your generate your power, I should say.
Speaker 1: Jet engine turbines use that energy to help drive the
Speaker 1: compressor and intake fans. And in a jet engine, the
Speaker 1: hot air from the combustion area will combine with cold
Speaker 1: air that actually flows around the core of the engine.
Speaker 1: So you have an engine design where air can flow
Speaker 1: around the core as well as going into the core.
Speaker 1: The air that goes into the core is the air
Speaker 1: that gets compressed and then is UH in that combustion chamber.
Speaker 1: The air going around it stays at a lower temperature.
Speaker 1: The two will combine at the nozzle and escape through
Speaker 1: the back of the engine. Now, as we know, a
Speaker 1: reaction has an equal but opposite reaction, so that gas
Speaker 1: shooting out the back of the engine creates a forward
Speaker 1: thrust on that engine pushes the engine in the opposite direction.
Speaker 1: The amazing amount of velocity means that it's enough to
Speaker 1: push an entire massive vehicle like a jet plane, through
Speaker 1: the air. An air breathing rocket engine would work very
Speaker 1: much in the same way as your standard jet engine,
Speaker 1: but would need some simplification in order to avoid overheating.
Speaker 1: Simplification is being kind. I'm talking about removing some parts.
Speaker 1: So scram jets a k A supersonic combustion. Ram jets
Speaker 1: draw in air through an inlet, essentially an especially designed opening,
Speaker 1: rather than using an intake fan, and they don't need
Speaker 1: a rotating compressor to compress the air because the speed
Speaker 1: at which these jets are traveling is so great that
Speaker 1: the air gets compressed just by coming in through the inlet.
Speaker 1: And so you have this incoming air that's being compressed
Speaker 1: as it comes into this ramjet engine, and then fuel
Speaker 1: will get added to the combustion area and this supersonic
Speaker 1: airflow and fuel mixture gets ignited. That fuel tends to
Speaker 1: be stuffed, like liquid hydrogen for example, And the reduction
Speaker 1: of moving parts would allow this engine to operate and
Speaker 1: much higher speeds than conventional jet engines, which again would
Speaker 1: encounter those structural problems if they were to go way
Speaker 1: too fast. So theoretically a scram jet you would be
Speaker 1: able to hit like speeds of like mock fifteen I
Speaker 1: think the fastest. As I recall, I don't have it
Speaker 1: in my notes, but somewhere in the mock nine point
Speaker 1: six or nine point seven range. That's the fastest we've
Speaker 1: ever seen one go, but in theory they could go
Speaker 1: much faster. Because of the nature of these engines, they
Speaker 1: require a vehicle to already be going pretty fast before
Speaker 1: they kick in, So you need to combine those air
Speaker 1: breathing rockets with some other method that for the initial takeoff.
Speaker 1: They would not be sufficient to drive a vehicle so
Speaker 1: that they could take off from a horizontal surface, So
Speaker 1: you might need an expendable rocket, for example, like the
Speaker 1: kind that was proposed for the Spiral fifty. I'll talk
Speaker 1: more about the Spiral in a moment, and I'll explain
Speaker 1: what happened to that project, But first before I do that,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All right,
Speaker 1: back to the Spiral. The project struggled throughout its relatively
Speaker 1: short life due to lack of funding, but elements of
Speaker 1: the project would continue even after the full Spiral fifty
Speaker 1: fifty got the acts, which it officially did sometime around
Speaker 1: although it had been canceled once before in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: One of those projects was the MiG one oh five,
Speaker 1: also known as the Experimental Passenger Orbital Aircraft. This big
Speaker 1: one oh five was ah jet that was designed to
Speaker 1: be a space plane. It never actually traveled all the
Speaker 1: way up into space. It was built and it was
Speaker 1: flown several times, but never all the way up to
Speaker 1: an altitude that would qualify space. It did have in
Speaker 1: its design a pilot capsule that was completely insulated from
Speaker 1: the rest of the aircraft and it was fully ejectable,
Speaker 1: So that was in order to us to to keep
Speaker 1: the pilot safe. The fear was that without this capsule
Speaker 1: and without that creatability, if something were to happen when
Speaker 1: the vehicle was traveling at fantastic speeds, the pilots, the
Speaker 1: pilot wouldn't have any options. The pilot would be a goner.
Speaker 1: The MAG one oh five could take off from a runway,
Speaker 1: or it could be dropped from a tuple of tow bomber.
Speaker 1: The project was initially canceled on June sixty nine, but
Speaker 1: the Soviets reinitiated the program in nineteen seventy four when
Speaker 1: they heard about the US space Shuttle program. The MiG
Speaker 1: one oh five was actually built and flew on eight
Speaker 1: test flights at least eight anyway from nineteen seventy to
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight. But again it never made it all
Speaker 1: the way up into space. The tests were to make
Speaker 1: certain the design principles were sound, but the project was
Speaker 1: ended in nineteen seventy eight after the pilot of the
Speaker 1: eighth test flight was forced to make a pretty hard landing,
Speaker 1: and ultimately the Soviet Union decided that the cost of
Speaker 1: that program didn't make much sense and they wanted to
Speaker 1: divert the funds to other projects. The Boer series b
Speaker 1: O R was another part of the design of this
Speaker 1: space plane, and it started off as part of the
Speaker 1: Spiral fifty fifty project. These were subscale test vehicles for
Speaker 1: this proposed spiral, so Bore one was a much smaller
Speaker 1: model Bore two boor three. They grew in size Bore four,
Speaker 1: the one that typically we we say qualifies as a
Speaker 1: space plane, was one half the scale of the proposed
Speaker 1: Spiral fifty fifty, but it was also an unmanned vehicle
Speaker 1: and it was primarily meant to test the design the
Speaker 1: physical design of the spiral, making sure that the quality
Speaker 1: the the calculations they had made for lift and gliding
Speaker 1: and maneuverability would all make sense. And one Spiral fifty
Speaker 1: fifty got the axe Bore four was able to continue,
Speaker 1: but had kind of transitioned from being a test vehicle
Speaker 1: for the spiral to being a test vehicle to try
Speaker 1: different heat shield materials that would be used for a
Speaker 1: different Soviet project that I'll talk about in just a second.
Speaker 1: UH So, in a way, you could think of the
Speaker 1: Boar four as being similar to a previous uh project
Speaker 1: over the United States, one called Asset, which I talked
Speaker 1: about in the last episode, that was intended to test
Speaker 1: out heat shield materials for the Dinah Sore Experimental Vehicle,
Speaker 1: which ended up getting the AXE. In the US, the
Speaker 1: so Union built at least a few Bore four vehicles,
Speaker 1: and as far as we know, there were at least
Speaker 1: four test flights that took place between two and nine four,
Speaker 1: and the Boar four was sent up to space on
Speaker 1: a launch vehicle. They used different launch vehicles for each
Speaker 1: of the tests, and then essentially it was allowed to
Speaker 1: drop back to Earth and it would parachute down to
Speaker 1: land in the ocean and the Soviet Navy would recover
Speaker 1: the vehicles. Uh. A reason why I use a lot
Speaker 1: of supposedly's and as far as we knows, it's because
Speaker 1: the SOI Union was notoriously secretive. They did not want
Speaker 1: the rest of the world to necessarily know what they
Speaker 1: were and were not capable of doing so. A lot
Speaker 1: of this information is stuff that came to light after
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union collapsed, but there's still tons of stuff
Speaker 1: we just don't know all the answers to Anyway. While
Speaker 1: the Boar four was originally part of Spiral, the lessons
Speaker 1: learned from that project but instead had informed the design
Speaker 1: of a different Soviet space plane called the Buron Uh.
Speaker 1: It was also the catalyst for a design of a
Speaker 1: US space plane, the Boar four that is, but more
Speaker 1: on that in a bit. So. Buron is a Russian
Speaker 1: word for blizzard or snowstorm, and one that I am
Speaker 1: sure I am mispronouncing, so my apologies. The Buron was
Speaker 1: essentially the Soviet Union's version of the Space Shuttle. It
Speaker 1: was originally intended to keep the Soviet Union in a
Speaker 1: competitive place with regard to the United States and space
Speaker 1: exploration and space exploitation. To be frank ironically, the cost
Speaker 1: of the program would actually help contribute to the collapse
Speaker 1: of the Soviet Union itself. So while it was meant
Speaker 1: to make sure the Soviet Union remained in a strong
Speaker 1: position worldwide. You could argue that it was one of
Speaker 1: the many factors that would lead to the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: dissolving in the nineteen seventies, While the United States was
Speaker 1: developing the space Shuttle program, the Soviet Union began to
Speaker 1: look into creating a similar program to maintain tactical parody
Speaker 1: with the US. There was a legitimate fear among Soviet
Speaker 1: leadership that the space Shuttle was going to be put
Speaker 1: to military use, which would put the Soviets at disadvantage,
Speaker 1: and the engineers in the Soviet space program studied the
Speaker 1: designs for the space Shuttle program, and they sort of
Speaker 1: began to pick and choose which components of the space
Speaker 1: Shuttle they thought were good in relation to the Soviet
Speaker 1: space program and which ones they should reject. So, for example,
Speaker 1: the Soviets had not developed a an enormous solid rocket
Speaker 1: booster that the Space Shuttle would be using. The in fact,
Speaker 1: Space Shell used two of them for liftoff, so the
Speaker 1: Buron space program would instead rely on liquid propellant boosters,
Speaker 1: not solid rocket fuel boosters. A Buran orbiter was launched
Speaker 1: on November. This was actually several years behind schedule, as
Speaker 1: the program was plagued with lots of problems, technological issues,
Speaker 1: funding problems, a lot of managements. That's a lot of
Speaker 1: Soviet politicians further up the chain who were arguing with
Speaker 1: one another as the years went by. This orbiter that
Speaker 1: launched had no crew aboard it. It was a completely
Speaker 1: autonomous flight. It flew to space, it returned, used automated systems,
Speaker 1: and actually landed under automatic control, making it the first
Speaker 1: space plane too go into space and return and land automatically.
Speaker 1: It was a successful test of this technology, but the
Speaker 1: cost of the program was incredible and the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: was crumbling, so after the collapse of the Soviet regime,
Speaker 1: the program languished. As far as I can tell, it
Speaker 1: was never officially canceled, largely because frankly, the government had
Speaker 1: bigger things to worry about having this this massive transition,
Speaker 1: but because there were no funds, the program essentially ceased
Speaker 1: to be without an official cancelation. Uh the orbiter was
Speaker 1: stored in a hangar, but that hangar would later collapse
Speaker 1: during a snowstorm and that would cause damage to the
Speaker 1: spacecraft inside. Meanwhile, as Buron was preparing to make history
Speaker 1: and its launch, there were engineers in the United Kingdom
Speaker 1: who were working on a different concept. This was a
Speaker 1: horizontal takeoff and landing vehicle called the Hotel h O
Speaker 1: t o L horizontal or take off landing. The rocket
Speaker 1: engine proposed for this vehicle was a special one called
Speaker 1: the Rolls Royce RB five four five air slash liquid
Speaker 1: hydrogen slash liquid oxygen rocket engine YEP. A Rolls Royce
Speaker 1: engine falls into the category of a single stage to
Speaker 1: orbit or s s O concept, so you would have
Speaker 1: this one instead of a multi stage rocket, you have
Speaker 1: this single stage method of getting this vehicle up into space.
Speaker 1: The concept placed the engine at the rear end of
Speaker 1: the vehicle, so think of like a a kind of
Speaker 1: a space shuttle looking design, and then blunt the back
Speaker 1: end and you know, you chopped the tail end of
Speaker 1: it off and you place an engine right there on
Speaker 1: the very back, and then the wings had to go
Speaker 1: in the back too, because that's where the engine was.
Speaker 1: And numerous calculations showed that they were going to have
Speaker 1: to make a lot of different adjustments because the way
Speaker 1: they had laid out the vehicle meant that its center
Speaker 1: of gravity was not where it needed to be in
Speaker 1: order for it to maintain efficient flight, so they had
Speaker 1: to keep making tweaks, which led to compromises when it
Speaker 1: came to the payload that the vehicle would be able
Speaker 1: to carry, and eventually that reached a point where it
Speaker 1: was clear that the concessions they were having to make
Speaker 1: would make this aircraft unfeasible for practical use because you
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to carry enough stuff in it to
Speaker 1: make it worth the expense of launching it. So the
Speaker 1: project was ultimately defunded, but a company called Reaction Engines
Speaker 1: Limited resurrected that design to become the foundation for a
Speaker 1: new project called Skylawn. Skylawn is still in development, and
Speaker 1: assuming it ever becomes a reality, it will rely upon
Speaker 1: an air breathing rocket propulsion system called SABER, which stands
Speaker 1: for Synergetic air Breathing Rocket Engine. So I'll have to
Speaker 1: wait and see if that ever becomes a reality. There
Speaker 1: are people really working on it. The question is will
Speaker 1: there ever be a working aircraft before something else happens,
Speaker 1: like a project gets runs out of funding. In two
Speaker 1: thousand four, a company co founded by Paul Allen, who
Speaker 1: was one of the co founders of a little company
Speaker 1: called Microsoft back in the nineteen seventies debuted an experimental
Speaker 1: rocket powered vehicle called Spaceship one. Spaceship one is designed
Speaker 1: to launch from a larger aircraft, so you can think
Speaker 1: of it as a giant plane that has uh like
Speaker 1: two fuselages, one on either side of an extreme uh
Speaker 1: Maine design. In the center is a h a connector
Speaker 1: where it can carry a payload underneath it. They call
Speaker 1: it like a parasite system, kind of like a lamb
Speaker 1: prey on a shark. I guess, And although that's a
Speaker 1: not a parasite, it's a symbiotic anyway, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: So the Spaceship one would be carried by this larger vehicle,
Speaker 1: which would then take it to a proper altitude, and
Speaker 1: then the Spaceship one would detach and engage its engines
Speaker 1: to continue its trip. The Spaceship one would become the
Speaker 1: first private manned spacecraft to actually fly into space. Back
Speaker 1: in two thousand four, they won an X Prize for it.
Speaker 1: This was a test bed vehicle in many ways. It
Speaker 1: was not capable of orbital flight typically the way a
Speaker 1: flight would work. I kind of mentioned this a second ago.
Speaker 1: But you have the carrier aircraft, which was called the
Speaker 1: White Knight that would climb to an altitude of about
Speaker 1: nine miles or fourteen kilometers or so. Why Night would
Speaker 1: then release Spaceship one, which would drop into a glide.
Speaker 1: It would reach a safe distance from the carrier aircraft,
Speaker 1: which wouldn't take long at all, and then ignite its
Speaker 1: rocket engine. And when the rocket would fire, the spacecraft
Speaker 1: craft would adjustice attitude to a climbing UH angle and
Speaker 1: it would start climbing higher in altitude. The engines would
Speaker 1: only fire for a relatively short time. The rest of
Speaker 1: the flight upward would be empowered and driven by momentum.
Speaker 1: But if you had a long enough rocket burn you
Speaker 1: could propel the craft beyond the carm online which is
Speaker 1: at sixty two miles kilometers. And then the spacecraft would
Speaker 1: change its wing configuration in order to create more drag,
Speaker 1: So it would have a system where it's wings would
Speaker 1: move in such a way to UH to do arrow braking.
Speaker 1: By creating drag, it would slow. As it was slow down,
Speaker 1: it would then start to lose altitude and re enter
Speaker 1: the atmosphere and it would begin to descent and deceleration
Speaker 1: process back to Earth. And I hear that the landing
Speaker 1: would be more than a little bit bumpy, but it
Speaker 1: was serviceable for an experimental aircraft. That design would lead
Speaker 1: to the Spaceship Too. That one was built by the
Speaker 1: Spaceship Company. That company grew out of the one that
Speaker 1: made Spaceship one, as well as a partnership with another company,
Speaker 1: Virgin Group. These days, Virgin Galactic owns the Spaceship Company,
Speaker 1: So this is where we get Virgin Galactic and that
Speaker 1: proposal for a space tourism type of private spacecraft. The
Speaker 1: spaceship to design is in many ways similar to Spaceship one.
Speaker 1: It is carried by a larger aircraft, this time the
Speaker 1: White Knight too. It's meant to be a passenger aircraft,
Speaker 1: so you could actually have space tourism. Passengers wouldn't go
Speaker 1: into orbit like the Spaceship one. This aircraft would cross
Speaker 1: the Carman line. Passengers would experience free fall conditions, so
Speaker 1: witlessness essentially. They would be able to experience that for
Speaker 1: a short while before the aircraft re entered the Earth's
Speaker 1: atmosphere and would return home. It would be able to
Speaker 1: hold up to six passengers and two pilots. In October,
Speaker 1: the test vehicle Spaceship to VSS Enterprise had a tragic
Speaker 1: accident uh it crashed after the aircraft had suffered some
Speaker 1: damage during its flight. One of the co pilots died
Speaker 1: in this crash, the other one was injured. An investigation
Speaker 1: after the fact found that there were numerous problems that
Speaker 1: could have contributed to this disaster, ranging from safeguard designs
Speaker 1: to perhaps an underprepared and anxious co pilot. So there
Speaker 1: wasn't one issue necessarily that was at fault, but there
Speaker 1: was a combination of problems that may have contributed to this.
Speaker 1: The program, however, has continued. There is now the VSS
Speaker 1: Unity space plane, which has conducted several test flights. Since
Speaker 1: there's no word on when commercial flights will begin, but
Speaker 1: Virgin Galactic has taken bookings for them. Flight will last
Speaker 1: about two and a half hours and will include some
Speaker 1: weightlessness on that flight, and a ticket on one of
Speaker 1: these early Virgin Galactic flights will set you back the
Speaker 1: princely sum of two hundred fifty thousand dollars, yes a
Speaker 1: quarter of a million bucks for a two and a
Speaker 1: half hour space flight, our space plane flight. You know,
Speaker 1: I mean how that two and a half hours You're
Speaker 1: only going to be spending a few minutes in the
Speaker 1: weightlessness environment. So still, you know it could be a
Speaker 1: once in a lifetime opportunity if you've got the cash.
Speaker 1: Really starts to divide the haves and have nots in
Speaker 1: a totally new way, doesn't it. Like those who have
Speaker 1: been to space and those who haven't. I'm going to
Speaker 1: be in that second category at that price range anyway,
Speaker 1: in order for me to make enough money to finally
Speaker 1: get to space. I'm going to take a quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. Between the unveiling of Spaceship one
Speaker 1: and the first test flighted Spaceship two, there were a
Speaker 1: couple of other notable space plane developments. As I said,
Speaker 1: we have to jump around chronology quite a bit. One
Speaker 1: of those developments was the famously secret X thirty seven
Speaker 1: B a k a. The Orbital Test Vehicle or o
Speaker 1: t V. X thirty seven actually covers a range of
Speaker 1: different orbital test vehicles. The X thirty seven B is
Speaker 1: the one we're particularly interested in because it's in use
Speaker 1: right now as I record this podcast. So Boeing manufactured
Speaker 1: the X thirty seven B. The project began at NASA,
Speaker 1: it changed hands to the Department of Defense in the
Speaker 1: early two thousands and the Air Force oversees it. It's
Speaker 1: an unmanned spacecraft, so there's no pilot, there's no crew.
Speaker 1: It's launched as a payload on a rocket launch vehicle
Speaker 1: like SpaceX's Falcon nine, for example, and then it goes
Speaker 1: into orbit, and it will orbit the Earth for given
Speaker 1: amount of time dependent upon the mission, and it can
Speaker 1: return to Earth and land as a space plane on
Speaker 1: a landing strip. And it has done this four times already,
Speaker 1: with the fifth mission still in uh in service as
Speaker 1: of the recording of this podcast. So officially, the purpose
Speaker 1: of the X thirty seven B is to perform, as quote,
Speaker 1: an experimental test program to demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable,
Speaker 1: unmanned space test platform for the U S Air Force
Speaker 1: end quote. It's supposed to test various systems and designs
Speaker 1: for a sustainable approach to space operations. So in other words,
Speaker 1: again more R and D, so that you can build
Speaker 1: those capabilities into future practical vehicles. However, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of people who have theories about other purposes the
Speaker 1: X thirty seven B could fulfill practical applications it may
Speaker 1: already be doing in addition to being a testing ground
Speaker 1: such as acting as a surveillance tool like a spy satellite,
Speaker 1: or even as a papens platform. In April two thousand eighteen,
Speaker 1: the Orbital Test Vehicle five mission hit a landmark when
Speaker 1: it was announced the unmanned vehicle had spent two hundred
Speaker 1: days in orbit. Uh. That isn't a landmark in the
Speaker 1: sense of breaking any records. The previous orbital test vehicles
Speaker 1: had all done that as well. The purpose of the mission,
Speaker 1: at least the stated purpose of the mission is to
Speaker 1: test experimental systems and how they hold up to the
Speaker 1: rigors of space travel over time, including stuff like radiation exposure.
Speaker 1: As of August, the orbiter was still circling the Earth.
Speaker 1: Satellite tracker in the Netherlands captured images of it. Uh.
Speaker 1: But we don't know how long this mission will last.
Speaker 1: The Air Force is notoriously quiet about the X three
Speaker 1: seven B, giving only the bare minimum of information about it. However,
Speaker 1: the past OTV missions have shown that they tend to
Speaker 1: go up there for a very long time. Each O
Speaker 1: t V mission would last longer than the one before
Speaker 1: for it, so if we go by that, the o
Speaker 1: t V five mission isn't even out of the first
Speaker 1: half of its journey. The O t V four, the
Speaker 1: one before this one, spent a total of seven eighteen
Speaker 1: days in orbit from May to May. So if we're
Speaker 1: just over two hundred, we're coming up on one year
Speaker 1: for O t V five, we got a ways to go. If,
Speaker 1: in fact, it continues the trend of staying up there
Speaker 1: longer than its predecessor. In the United States, the move
Speaker 1: to create a space force suggests that projects like the
Speaker 1: X three seven B will be leveraged to test out
Speaker 1: systems with direct military applications beyond a research platform for
Speaker 1: future designs. I am not necessarily in favor of that,
Speaker 1: but it appears to be a reality. Remember earlier when
Speaker 1: I was talking about how the Bore four, that unmanned
Speaker 1: Soviet test vehicle, inspired some U S engineers, Well, it's
Speaker 1: time for us to go back to that story. So again.
Speaker 1: Back in the after the first test flight of the
Speaker 1: Boar four, there was an Australian surveillance aircraft that caught
Speaker 1: images of the Boar four when the Soviets were retrieving
Speaker 1: it from the ocean. American engineers would pour over those
Speaker 1: images to figure out what the Soviets were up to
Speaker 1: and work began on designing their own model of the
Speaker 1: Boar four. They use those images to build a reconstruction
Speaker 1: of it. The American engineers discovered that the Boar four
Speaker 1: shape was particularly good for stable flight and would allow
Speaker 1: for extreme maneuverability in glide mode. Well in the wake
Speaker 1: of the Challenger accident in the mid eighties, NASA began
Speaker 1: to look into other potential solutions that might be used
Speaker 1: to transport astronauts safely back to Earth if they were
Speaker 1: on say, a space station, it would be an emergency
Speaker 1: return vehicle, essentially something that could hold up to ten
Speaker 1: passengers at a time, possibly Now this was when the
Speaker 1: United States was also considering the construction of a new
Speaker 1: space station that would have been called space Station Freedom.
Speaker 1: The vehicle's designation for this escape vehicle was h L
Speaker 1: DASH twenty. Engineers would build a full scale mock up
Speaker 1: of the h L twenty, but by the time that happened,
Speaker 1: things had already changed politically. The United States was now
Speaker 1: partnered with Russia on a new project, the International Space Station,
Speaker 1: and part of that design included relying upon a Russian
Speaker 1: Soyu's capsule, which would use the ballistics method of re
Speaker 1: entry into the Art's atmosphere in order to land back
Speaker 1: on Earth, and that would become the lifeboat for this
Speaker 1: international space station. It seemed to negate the need for
Speaker 1: the HL twenty. Flash forward several years in, a company
Speaker 1: called space Dev announced that it was going to use
Speaker 1: the HL twenty design as a starting point for a
Speaker 1: new reusable spacecraft that could be operated as a means
Speaker 1: of taking crew to and from the space station. The
Speaker 1: announcement came in right around the same time that NASA
Speaker 1: was explaining that the space Shuttle program was wrapping up.
Speaker 1: This new spacecraft was called the Dream Chaser. Space Dev
Speaker 1: was one of the companies that bid for money from
Speaker 1: NASA in order to continue developing its space plane design
Speaker 1: because NASA was in need of some sort of spacecraft
Speaker 1: that could be sent up to the International Space Station
Speaker 1: since the Space Shuttle program was ending. But in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: NASA decided to focus on SpaceX and Boeing for that,
Speaker 1: and both of those companies were designing capsules that resemble
Speaker 1: sort of the Apollo spacecraft in general design, so again
Speaker 1: they would use sort of the ballistic re entry method
Speaker 1: rather than a space plane guided landing method. In twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: space Dev's parent company, Sierra Nevada Corporation, would secure a
Speaker 1: contract with NASA to perform six delivery missions for that
Speaker 1: space agency, with a contract term going from late twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen up to twenty four The dream Chaser design had
Speaker 1: to be changed significantly for this agreement, so they stripped
Speaker 1: out a lot of the crew capacity, so that I
Speaker 1: think six crew seats were taken out, and that whole
Speaker 1: section was converted so it could hold pressurized or unpressurized cargo.
Speaker 1: The company still plans to pursue the the crew version
Speaker 1: of the dream Chaser in the future. They're hoping that
Speaker 1: they can revisit that in tw so they haven't abandoned
Speaker 1: that idea entirely, but in the meantime they're also working
Speaker 1: on this other version of their vehicle which has practical application.
Speaker 1: Boeing meanwhile is working on another space plane design that
Speaker 1: has the DARPA designation of Excess one Excess standing for
Speaker 1: experimental space plane. Boeing calls this aircraft the Phantom Express.
Speaker 1: This autonomous space plane is a vertical takeoff, horizontal landing spacecraft,
Speaker 1: so the the engine on this is designed to take
Speaker 1: off vertically like it was a space Shuttle, except it's
Speaker 1: all part of the same vehicle, it's not on a
Speaker 1: booster rocket. The goal of the spacecraft is ambitious. It
Speaker 1: is to be able to launch into space, deliver small
Speaker 1: satellites to orbit and return in the same day, and
Speaker 1: then get refurbished and turned around in order to be
Speaker 1: usable within twenty four hours, with a goal of doing
Speaker 1: this for ten days in a row. Such a plane
Speaker 1: would significantly bring down the costs of launching smaller satellites.
Speaker 1: It would reduce the need to have those smaller satellites
Speaker 1: piggyback on top of larger payloads. Typically, if you have
Speaker 1: a small satellite and you want to launch it into orbit,
Speaker 1: you have to wait. You have to wait until there's
Speaker 1: a payload that still has some room for your small satellite,
Speaker 1: because the cost would be prohibitive to just send your
Speaker 1: satellite up. This would bring those costs way down. The
Speaker 1: Phantom Express would include a space plane that would also
Speaker 1: act like the booster rocket. It would send the craft
Speaker 1: into space, but there would be on top on the
Speaker 1: back of this space plane what would essentially look like
Speaker 1: a secondary rocket. The payload would actually be attached to
Speaker 1: this secondary rocket, and once it reached a certain altitude,
Speaker 1: it would launch this secondary rocket off the back of
Speaker 1: the space plane, and the secondary rocket would push the
Speaker 1: payload into the proper orbit. Meanwhile, the space plane would decelerate,
Speaker 1: reenter the air's atmosphere, and come back and land under
Speaker 1: its own power, so it would be ready to use
Speaker 1: right away. I don't know about the secondary rocket. I
Speaker 1: honestly don't know if that's designed to be recoverable or not.
Speaker 1: I would think it would be, but perhaps not it
Speaker 1: maybe that that's just a one use only component. There
Speaker 1: are several other space planes that are in various stages
Speaker 1: of development. China. The air space program has several promising designs. UH.
Speaker 1: There's another design called Black Ice for a private space plane.
Speaker 1: This is a concept from Strato Launch Systems, which was
Speaker 1: also founded by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame. The Black
Speaker 1: Ice concept would launch from the largest airplane ever built,
Speaker 1: the Strato Launch. I have to do a full episode
Speaker 1: on Strate Launch at some point. The Strate Launch has
Speaker 1: a wingspan of three five feet, which is a hundred
Speaker 1: seventeen meters, and it has six bowing seven forty seven
Speaker 1: engines that it uses to generate lift for flight. UH.
Speaker 1: The Strato Launch or really to propel itself so that
Speaker 1: creates enough lift for flight. I should say I was oversimplifying,
Speaker 1: but the Strateo launch hasn't flown yet as of the
Speaker 1: recording of this podcast. It has conducted some tests on
Speaker 1: the ground, including a recent taxi test where it traveled
Speaker 1: at eighty miles per hour down a runway. It would
Speaker 1: need to travel at least a hundred forty miles per
Speaker 1: hour in order for it to take off, but these
Speaker 1: are early tests to make sure that the design of
Speaker 1: the aircraft is sufficient so it will hold together. You
Speaker 1: know it will, it will actually be stable. More tests
Speaker 1: will follow, but the company does hope to reach the
Speaker 1: point where the aircraft will fly and carry payloads by
Speaker 1: twenty and there are lots of stories of failed projects. There's,
Speaker 1: for example, the x Core links, which was supposed to
Speaker 1: go for a test flight back in The company behind it, however,
Speaker 1: went bankrupt and all of its assets were sold off.
Speaker 1: But perhaps I'll go into more detail in those projects
Speaker 1: in a future episode. I hope you guys enjoyed this
Speaker 1: pair of episodes about space planes and our return to space.
Speaker 1: It's not exactly the same thing as a full week
Speaker 1: and a half of space related topics like the last time,
Speaker 1: but I thought it was pretty interesting and obviously, creating
Speaker 1: a reusable vehicle that can return under its own power
Speaker 1: and be turned back around to fly again in a
Speaker 1: short time frame would really transform the way we access
Speaker 1: and utilize space, possibly for good, possibly for ill. But
Speaker 1: it would definitely bring that price down, and maybe eventually
Speaker 1: it would bring the brice down enough so that a
Speaker 1: regular shmow such as myself might be able to afford
Speaker 1: a ticket and and get up there and experience what
Speaker 1: spaces like for even a short amount of time. Um
Speaker 1: I would even take a parabolic flight where it's just
Speaker 1: simulating micro gravity. I would do that if I could
Speaker 1: hit me up. Guys anyway, if you would like to
Speaker 1: contact me and let me know about a topic you
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