Articles with tag: "newspace"
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo Video
January 25th, 2008
On January 23, 2008, Burt Rutan and Richard Branson unveiled the new designs of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and its carrier aircraft, White Knight 2. This engaging animation gives you a sense of what a suborbital trip on SpaceShipTwo might be like.
NewSpace Reference Links
September 14th, 2007
Note: This is an old list of NewSpace links that I compiled way back in the Principia 1.0 days, and it’s just now making the transition over to the Labs. My apologies if some of the links are broken!
News Articles
- Space Tourism Taking Shape, CNN.com.
- $100 Million Moon Trip: Space Tourism’s Hot Ticket, National Geographic News.
- NASA Launches Startups for Ships, Wired News.
- Race for Next Space Prize Ignites, Wired News.
- How We’ll Get Back to the Moon, NASA.
- X Prize Losers: Still in the Race? The Space Review.
- SpaceX and The First-Launch Crisis, The Space Review.
The Future of Earth-to-Orbit Propulsion
December 15th, 2006
by Robert C. Truax, January 1999
Copyright © 2000 Aerospace America. Reprinted with permission.
Image credit: SpaceX
But turbopump engines, whether high pressure or low, were a mistake from the very beginning. They simply are not worth what they cost in time and money. In all the early development efforts, pump-fed systems were preceded by a pressure-fed version. In every case, the mission was accomplished and the program goals met before the development of the pump system was completed. After the X-I broke the sound barrier with its pressure-fed rocket engine, who ever heard of the D-558-2 — powered by a pump-fed engine?
Technically simple two-stage launchers with pressure-fed engines and ocean recovery offer the economical operations that have escaped our high-technology turbopump rockets for more than four decades.