OT - SpaceShipOne flight on June 21

Right, it was the F105 that was affectionally (and sometimes not so affectionally) referred to as the Thud.

Yep - the 1A just went 70+K feet - the B,C, & D were better versions.

Martin

Whoops - forgot to paste.

Martin

A,B,&,D versions.

was a little young - two weeks before I was born. Been in the supersonic age ever since.

Have a 16 x 20 official photograph of the X1A and a few others from the old days.

Martin

I've seen it there.

Yeap, I just knew there was something funny with that number , but I got it right when talking to the guy. Saw 104 before , it had a what looked like a blue crystal ball mounted behind the cockpit. Had a picture of it , but all my cool plane pictures got ripped.

I presume you are referring to the Bell X1 and not the Scout X1A. The former is manned the latter isn't. I'm not sure whether it ever went much higher than about 72,000ft as it wasn't designed or powered for pure altitude work. And the limited life support capabilites of the day would have placed a limit on the attainable altitude much, much. below what the X15 could achieve. The North American X15 set an altitude record of

345,200ft in 1963, as I recall, that wasn't exceeded by a winged spacecraft until the orbital flight of Columbia (nearly 20 years later).

I find it immensively impressive that SpaceShipOne only had relatively (in my opinion, minor problems on it's first flight. Keep in mind that Herr Rutan had neither the resources nor money to do the decades of research and testing that went into the Shuttle before its first flight. Being directly involved with a lot of that wind tunnel testing and other aspects of the Shuttle design, mainly in the +100Kft regime, I have a good appreciation for what he wasn't able to do. That, to me makes his achievement all the more impressive.

Also occasionally cursed at, and prayed for.

Gunner

That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there. - George Orwell

Rutan did *zero* wind tunnel testing. It was all done via CFD or Computational Fluid Dynamics, or a big fast computer chunking out airflow studies.

So, old way, billons of dollars of high tech supersonic wind tunnel tests. New way, a rack of servers running Linux. Times have changed.

Stop for a miniute and consider why that's the case here.

OLD way - computer simulation was in it's infancy and not up to the job. There was no option but to put it in the tunnel and watch what happens.

NEW way - computer technology and simulation programming have matured to the point of being serious tools. But it is still bound by the principle of GIGO. (Garbage In, Garbage Out)

More now than before, you HAVE to know what to expect from the model. If it turns up different anwsers than expected (especially if the results are better than expected!) - you better find out why!

Richard Lamb

I'm in total agreement with the body of your post, but the sig line cracked me up!

Thanks.

Richard