Saturday, 2 October 2004

Space Ship One and the Xprize
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Space Politics
I'm sitting here right now after digesting the stories and the rebroadcast feeds for Burt Rutan's first flight for the Xprize. By now you know that it was successful. I was able to watch the live feed from Space.Com when it happened. Then came back and listened to the rebroadcast of "The Space Show" which had done a live feed for their show. I thought David Livingston was very entertaining, a lot of fun and a little sarcastic, pooking fun at the main stream media and organizers. But I believed that he had the best info for the buck.

I looked at the machine and wonder how much modification would be required to make Space Ship One an orbital vehicle. The design was never made to make it back from orbit but I just might have a way.

I believe it can be done with out serious modification of the air frame. It goes back to some of my electrostatic research which keeps me busy in my spare time. By putting a shaped electrostatic field around the craft we can achieve two objective significantly reduce the drag on the air frame with a generated ion layer and this also acts some what like a force field which would keep the air frame from heating up and radiation out. There is also a third benefit this configuration will achieve it will produce a small amount of thrust on the trailing edge of the spacecraft which will improve the crafts performance and maneuverability at both high speed and low speed configurations. The weight penalty for this would be no more than 100 lbs.

Below is a quick illustration of my proposal.


Image1a. The Ship is in gray. The Blue line is the positive plate and the red lines are the negative plate. Pulsed Electrostatic energy will be run through the system in the range of 750,000 volts. Which Cause an ionized Electrostatic to envelope the surface of the ship. Represented by the field lines around the ship. This will reduce the stress on the ship both thermodynamically and aerodynamically. Allowing for a much larger range of operation.