More Space Planes

two to this. UH. In that last episode, I covered what a space plane is in general and gave a history of some of the important developments and aviation that led to the deployment of the Space Shuttle, which was

the first practical implementation of space plane technology. UH. There were space planes before the Space Shuttle, to be clear, but all of those were meant as test vehicles, experimental prototype vehicles that were meant to expand our understanding of engineering and strategies in order to create a working space plane that would have applications beyond just research and development and aviation, as in, uh, deploying satellites, for example, or

taking crew to and from outer space. And so now we're going to pick up in the early nineteen eighties after the space Shuttle program had UH launched, and talk about some of the other space planes that have either been developed or proposed. And there's gonna be a lot of jumping around in time on this, because, as I've mentioned in previous episodes, the way space exploration and space

programs have evolved over time is messy. It's not a simple in you know, in year X it started, and then that went on for ten years, and then this other project started. You have a lot of overlapping timelines. And so sometimes that means that if you were to just look at launches, like when a test vehicle launched for the first time, it would look like a more linear approach, But in fact a lot of these things

were in development at around the same time. So with that said, in nineteen eighty two, the then Soviet Union began test flights of a new space plane design, an unmanned space plane called the Bore four, the b O R four. That b O R stands for something in Russian that is so complicated. I'm not going to try and say it because I will dislocate my jaw. I am that bad at all languages, including English. Anyway. This

was the culmination of nearly a decade of work. When the Soviet space program really began serious research and development on space plane design in the nineteen seventies. The ultimate goal was to create a space plane called the Spiral fifty fifty, and that was a project that actually dated back even further in the Soviet space program. It first got started in the nineteen sixties. These two concepts are closely tied together, uh the Boar four and the Spiral

fifty fifty. So let's start with Spiral fifty because that's what would ultimately give way to the Boar four. And while the spiral was a concept, the Boar four was actually constructed, So the spiral fifty concept was incredibly ambitious. The goal was to create an aircraft that could take off like a conventional jet, So in other words, it would launch from a horizontal position off some sort of

takeoff surface like a runway. Then it would travel up into air and continue to ascend until it reached outer space. Not just above the carm online at a hundred kilometers that's the dividing line between the Earth's atmosphere and what we considered to be space, but even beyond that, all

the way out into orbit. This vehicle was intended to bring supplies and crew two from space station's orbiting Earth, and then it would return to Earth at the end of its mission and land again like a conventional aircraft. And as you can imagine, this would mean creating a truly innovative system because the stuff that lets you fly around in Earth's atmosphere doesn't work so great in outer space.

The concept included a pair of expendable rocket stages which would be necessary to push the vehicle out into space beyond the atmosphere. But within the atmosphere there would be an air breathing hypersonic booster that would provide the propulsion to get the aircraft to those very high altitudes before

having to depend upon other rocket engines. This is a good moment to talk about why you would want or need an air breathing rocket in the first place, because we have a long history of using rockets that have oxidizers attached to them. Why would you go with a different design. Well, first of all, let's talk about oxidizers in the first pace. For combustion to happen, you have to have three things. These are the the three things

that make up the triangle for fire. You have to have heat, you have to have fuel something to burn, and you have to have an oxidizer. Not surprisingly due to the names oxygen is an oxidizer a very common one here on Earth. Stuff can burn on Earth because we have oxygen that facilitates that process. But in space there's a distinct shortage of oxygen, so without an oxidizer,

flames would die out and combustion would stop. Is the same thing as if you were to light a candle and then cover that candle with a clear glass bowl. You would see that the candle's flame would start to flicker as it was using up all the oxygen, and then it would ultimately sputter out. The same thing would happen with rocket engines unless we carried an oxidizer in addition to the fuel we plan on burning. But we also know that getting into space requires a very careful

management of weight versus thrust. You want to minimize the weight as much as you can to make efficient use of fuel. The heavier the weight of the payload, whatever it is you're sending out into space, the more fuel you're going to need, and the more oxidizer you're going to need in order to generate the thrust necessary to put that mass into orbit, and it turns out that the oxidizer component in rocket engines weighs a lot. This

is easily shown through an example. So we're gonna look at the Space Shuttle to explain what we're talking about here. If you have an empty Space Shuttle, it's the spacecraft, it doesn't have any payload in it. It would weigh in at a hundred sixty five thousand pounds or about

seventy five thousand kilograms. The two solid fuel booster rockets that are would be on either side of the Space Shuttle when it was on the launch pad would each way one eighty five thousand pounds or eighty four thousand kilograms. The giant external fuel tank if it were completely empty of fuel, just the fuel tank by itself, that's the part that's in the center between those two big booster rockets that weighed seventy eight thousand, one hundred pounds or

about thirty five thousand kilograms. So collectively, all of those components empty space shuttle, empty fuel tank, two solid fuel rocket boosters weighed six hundred thousand pounds. That's two d seventy eight thousand kilograms that's without fuel and without oxidizer.

The oxidizer, which for the Space Shuttle was a hundred forty three thousand gallons or five hundred forty one thousand liters of liquid oxygen, weighed in at a staggering one point three five nine million pounds or six hundred sixteen thousand kilograms, So, in other words, the oxidizer weighed more than twice as much as the Space Shuttle, the rocket boosters,

and the external tank combined. So the most most of your weight is coming not from the materials, but from the fuel and the oxidizer that makes up the vast majority of the weight that you're trying to send up there. A hypersonic air breathing rocket would use the oxygen in the atmosphere as the oxidizer, which means again it would only work as long as there were enough oxygen in

the environment to feed the rocket. However, it would remove the necessity to carry so much fuel and oxidizer on board, drastically reducing the weight and by extension, the cost of the launch vehicle. Because if you don't have to put in as much fuel an oxidizer, you don't have to

spend as much money per launch. So it was a way of making the flight more efficient, less costly, less difficult, less challenging in the long run, if you're talking about just figuring out how much thrust you need to uh to propel that much weight into the into space. An air breathing rocket also known as a rocket based combined cycle engine, works on a principle not that different from a conventional jet engine, which means now I get to talk about how jet engines work. This is how I

sneak eighty different tech topics into a single episode. An I a stinker. Okay, So a jet engine is a type of gas turbine engine. Gas turbine engines have a rotating component called the turbine, which you should be familiar with. This is the same sort of component used in various power facilities, like a steam turbine or a wind turbine, and like those turbines, the gas turbine engine turbines are

spun by a fluid. Right, for steam turbines, you have steam passing through this this fan blade turbine system which causes the rotation, but in this case the fluid is pressurized gas that's created by burning fuel, which then causes air to expand rapidly and then forcing that expanding air through the turbine. The turbines will spend at incredible speeds, which generates a lot of heat in the process. That

actually is a limiting factor. You cannot have a regular jet engine operate beyond a certain point before you get into a dangerous situation because it's generating so much heat that components will either start to melt or they'll start to break down just from the incredible stress, the mechanical stress that it's under. Now, there are three main parts of your conventional jet engine. You have a compressor, which, as the name suggests, compresses air to increase the pressure.

This usually comes in the form of sort of this UH, this bladed design and UH. It is typically powered by the spinning of the turbine itself. There's a chamber called the combustion area, which, as the name would suggest, is where fuel gets added to the incoming compressed air and then is burned. It's ignited, which causes that compressed air

to expand and become a high velocity gas. And then you have the turbine which extracts that energy coming out of that gas, allowing the gas to flow through the turbine spinning it and UH that's where you generate your your energy or your generate your power, I should say. Jet engine turbines use that energy to help drive the compressor and intake fans. And in a jet engine, the hot air from the combustion area will combine with cold air that actually flows around the core of the engine.

So you have an engine design where air can flow around the core as well as going into the core. The air that goes into the core is the air that gets compressed and then is UH in that combustion chamber. The air going around it stays at a lower temperature. The two will combine at the nozzle and escape through

the back of the engine. Now, as we know, a reaction has an equal but opposite reaction, so that gas shooting out the back of the engine creates a forward thrust on that engine pushes the engine in the opposite direction. The amazing amount of velocity means that it's enough to push an entire massive vehicle like a jet plane, through

the air. An air breathing rocket engine would work very much in the same way as your standard jet engine, but would need some simplification in order to avoid overheating. Simplification is being kind. I'm talking about removing some parts.

So scram jets a k A supersonic combustion. Ram jets draw in air through an inlet, essentially an especially designed opening, rather than using an intake fan, and they don't need a rotating compressor to compress the air because the speed at which these jets are traveling is so great that the air gets compressed just by coming in through the inlet.

And so you have this incoming air that's being compressed as it comes into this ramjet engine, and then fuel will get added to the combustion area and this supersonic airflow and fuel mixture gets ignited. That fuel tends to be stuffed, like liquid hydrogen for example, And the reduction of moving parts would allow this engine to operate and much higher speeds than conventional jet engines, which again would encounter those structural problems if they were to go way

too fast. So theoretically a scram jet you would be able to hit like speeds of like mock fifteen I think the fastest. As I recall, I don't have it in my notes, but somewhere in the mock nine point six or nine point seven range. That's the fastest we've ever seen one go, but in theory they could go

much faster. Because of the nature of these engines, they require a vehicle to already be going pretty fast before they kick in, So you need to combine those air breathing rockets with some other method that for the initial takeoff. They would not be sufficient to drive a vehicle so that they could take off from a horizontal surface, So you might need an expendable rocket, for example, like the

kind that was proposed for the Spiral fifty. I'll talk more about the Spiral in a moment, and I'll explain what happened to that project, But first before I do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All right,

back to the Spiral. The project struggled throughout its relatively short life due to lack of funding, but elements of the project would continue even after the full Spiral fifty fifty got the acts, which it officially did sometime around although it had been canceled once before in nineteen sixty nine. One of those projects was the MiG one oh five, also known as the Experimental Passenger Orbital Aircraft. This big one oh five was ah jet that was designed to

be a space plane. It never actually traveled all the way up into space. It was built and it was flown several times, but never all the way up to an altitude that would qualify space. It did have in its design a pilot capsule that was completely insulated from the rest of the aircraft and it was fully ejectable, So that was in order to us to to keep

the pilot safe. The fear was that without this capsule and without that creatability, if something were to happen when the vehicle was traveling at fantastic speeds, the pilots, the pilot wouldn't have any options. The pilot would be a goner. The MAG one oh five could take off from a runway, or it could be dropped from a tuple of tow bomber. The project was initially canceled on June sixty nine, but the Soviets reinitiated the program in nineteen seventy four when

they heard about the US space Shuttle program. The MiG one oh five was actually built and flew on eight test flights at least eight anyway from nineteen seventy to nineteen seventy eight. But again it never made it all

the way up into space. The tests were to make certain the design principles were sound, but the project was ended in nineteen seventy eight after the pilot of the eighth test flight was forced to make a pretty hard landing, and ultimately the Soviet Union decided that the cost of that program didn't make much sense and they wanted to divert the funds to other projects. The Boer series b O R was another part of the design of this space plane, and it started off as part of the

Spiral fifty fifty project. These were subscale test vehicles for this proposed spiral, so Bore one was a much smaller model Bore two boor three. They grew in size Bore four, the one that typically we we say qualifies as a space plane, was one half the scale of the proposed Spiral fifty fifty, but it was also an unmanned vehicle and it was primarily meant to test the design the physical design of the spiral, making sure that the quality the the calculations they had made for lift and gliding

and maneuverability would all make sense. And one Spiral fifty fifty got the axe Bore four was able to continue, but had kind of transitioned from being a test vehicle for the spiral to being a test vehicle to try different heat shield materials that would be used for a different Soviet project that I'll talk about in just a second.

UH So, in a way, you could think of the Boar four as being similar to a previous uh project over the United States, one called Asset, which I talked about in the last episode, that was intended to test out heat shield materials for the Dinah Sore Experimental Vehicle,

which ended up getting the AXE. In the US, the so Union built at least a few Bore four vehicles, and as far as we know, there were at least four test flights that took place between two and nine four, and the Boar four was sent up to space on a launch vehicle. They used different launch vehicles for each of the tests, and then essentially it was allowed to drop back to Earth and it would parachute down to land in the ocean and the Soviet Navy would recover

the vehicles. Uh. A reason why I use a lot of supposedly's and as far as we knows, it's because the SOI Union was notoriously secretive. They did not want the rest of the world to necessarily know what they were and were not capable of doing so. A lot of this information is stuff that came to light after the Soviet Union collapsed, but there's still tons of stuff

we just don't know all the answers to Anyway. While the Boar four was originally part of Spiral, the lessons learned from that project but instead had informed the design of a different Soviet space plane called the Buron Uh. It was also the catalyst for a design of a US space plane, the Boar four that is, but more on that in a bit. So. Buron is a Russian word for blizzard or snowstorm, and one that I am sure I am mispronouncing, so my apologies. The Buron was

essentially the Soviet Union's version of the Space Shuttle. It was originally intended to keep the Soviet Union in a competitive place with regard to the United States and space exploration and space exploitation. To be frank ironically, the cost of the program would actually help contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. So while it was meant to make sure the Soviet Union remained in a strong

position worldwide. You could argue that it was one of the many factors that would lead to the Soviet Union dissolving in the nineteen seventies, While the United States was developing the space Shuttle program, the Soviet Union began to look into creating a similar program to maintain tactical parody

with the US. There was a legitimate fear among Soviet leadership that the space Shuttle was going to be put to military use, which would put the Soviets at disadvantage, and the engineers in the Soviet space program studied the designs for the space Shuttle program, and they sort of began to pick and choose which components of the space Shuttle they thought were good in relation to the Soviet

space program and which ones they should reject. So, for example, the Soviets had not developed a an enormous solid rocket booster that the Space Shuttle would be using. The in fact, Space Shell used two of them for liftoff, so the Buron space program would instead rely on liquid propellant boosters, not solid rocket fuel boosters. A Buran orbiter was launched on November. This was actually several years behind schedule, as the program was plagued with lots of problems, technological issues,

funding problems, a lot of managements. That's a lot of Soviet politicians further up the chain who were arguing with one another as the years went by. This orbiter that launched had no crew aboard it. It was a completely autonomous flight. It flew to space, it returned, used automated systems, and actually landed under automatic control, making it the first space plane too go into space and return and land automatically.

It was a successful test of this technology, but the cost of the program was incredible and the Soviet Union was crumbling, so after the collapse of the Soviet regime, the program languished. As far as I can tell, it was never officially canceled, largely because frankly, the government had bigger things to worry about having this this massive transition, but because there were no funds, the program essentially ceased

to be without an official cancelation. Uh the orbiter was stored in a hangar, but that hangar would later collapse during a snowstorm and that would cause damage to the spacecraft inside. Meanwhile, as Buron was preparing to make history and its launch, there were engineers in the United Kingdom who were working on a different concept. This was a horizontal takeoff and landing vehicle called the Hotel h O

t o L horizontal or take off landing. The rocket engine proposed for this vehicle was a special one called the Rolls Royce RB five four five air slash liquid hydrogen slash liquid oxygen rocket engine YEP. A Rolls Royce engine falls into the category of a single stage to orbit or s s O concept, so you would have this one instead of a multi stage rocket, you have this single stage method of getting this vehicle up into space.

The concept placed the engine at the rear end of the vehicle, so think of like a a kind of a space shuttle looking design, and then blunt the back end and you know, you chopped the tail end of it off and you place an engine right there on the very back, and then the wings had to go in the back too, because that's where the engine was.

And numerous calculations showed that they were going to have to make a lot of different adjustments because the way they had laid out the vehicle meant that its center of gravity was not where it needed to be in order for it to maintain efficient flight, so they had to keep making tweaks, which led to compromises when it came to the payload that the vehicle would be able to carry, and eventually that reached a point where it was clear that the concessions they were having to make

would make this aircraft unfeasible for practical use because you wouldn't be able to carry enough stuff in it to make it worth the expense of launching it. So the project was ultimately defunded, but a company called Reaction Engines Limited resurrected that design to become the foundation for a new project called Skylawn. Skylawn is still in development, and assuming it ever becomes a reality, it will rely upon an air breathing rocket propulsion system called SABER, which stands

for Synergetic air Breathing Rocket Engine. So I'll have to wait and see if that ever becomes a reality. There are people really working on it. The question is will there ever be a working aircraft before something else happens, like a project gets runs out of funding. In two thousand four, a company co founded by Paul Allen, who was one of the co founders of a little company called Microsoft back in the nineteen seventies debuted an experimental

rocket powered vehicle called Spaceship one. Spaceship one is designed to launch from a larger aircraft, so you can think of it as a giant plane that has uh like two fuselages, one on either side of an extreme uh Maine design. In the center is a h a connector where it can carry a payload underneath it. They call it like a parasite system, kind of like a lamb prey on a shark. I guess, And although that's a not a parasite, it's a symbiotic anyway, it doesn't matter.

So the Spaceship one would be carried by this larger vehicle, which would then take it to a proper altitude, and then the Spaceship one would detach and engage its engines to continue its trip. The Spaceship one would become the first private manned spacecraft to actually fly into space. Back in two thousand four, they won an X Prize for it. This was a test bed vehicle in many ways. It was not capable of orbital flight typically the way a flight would work. I kind of mentioned this a second ago.

But you have the carrier aircraft, which was called the White Knight that would climb to an altitude of about nine miles or fourteen kilometers or so. Why Night would then release Spaceship one, which would drop into a glide. It would reach a safe distance from the carrier aircraft, which wouldn't take long at all, and then ignite its rocket engine. And when the rocket would fire, the spacecraft craft would adjustice attitude to a climbing UH angle and

it would start climbing higher in altitude. The engines would only fire for a relatively short time. The rest of the flight upward would be empowered and driven by momentum. But if you had a long enough rocket burn you could propel the craft beyond the carm online which is at sixty two miles kilometers. And then the spacecraft would change its wing configuration in order to create more drag, So it would have a system where it's wings would move in such a way to UH to do arrow braking.

By creating drag, it would slow. As it was slow down, it would then start to lose altitude and re enter the atmosphere and it would begin to descent and deceleration process back to Earth. And I hear that the landing would be more than a little bit bumpy, but it was serviceable for an experimental aircraft. That design would lead to the Spaceship Too. That one was built by the

Spaceship Company. That company grew out of the one that made Spaceship one, as well as a partnership with another company, Virgin Group. These days, Virgin Galactic owns the Spaceship Company, So this is where we get Virgin Galactic and that proposal for a space tourism type of private spacecraft. The spaceship to design is in many ways similar to Spaceship one. It is carried by a larger aircraft, this time the White Knight too. It's meant to be a passenger aircraft,

so you could actually have space tourism. Passengers wouldn't go into orbit like the Spaceship one. This aircraft would cross the Carman line. Passengers would experience free fall conditions, so witlessness essentially. They would be able to experience that for a short while before the aircraft re entered the Earth's atmosphere and would return home. It would be able to

hold up to six passengers and two pilots. In October, the test vehicle Spaceship to VSS Enterprise had a tragic accident uh it crashed after the aircraft had suffered some damage during its flight. One of the co pilots died in this crash, the other one was injured. An investigation after the fact found that there were numerous problems that could have contributed to this disaster, ranging from safeguard designs

to perhaps an underprepared and anxious co pilot. So there wasn't one issue necessarily that was at fault, but there was a combination of problems that may have contributed to this. The program, however, has continued. There is now the VSS Unity space plane, which has conducted several test flights. Since there's no word on when commercial flights will begin, but

Virgin Galactic has taken bookings for them. Flight will last about two and a half hours and will include some weightlessness on that flight, and a ticket on one of these early Virgin Galactic flights will set you back the princely sum of two hundred fifty thousand dollars, yes a quarter of a million bucks for a two and a half hour space flight, our space plane flight. You know, I mean how that two and a half hours You're only going to be spending a few minutes in the

weightlessness environment. So still, you know it could be a once in a lifetime opportunity if you've got the cash. Really starts to divide the haves and have nots in a totally new way, doesn't it. Like those who have been to space and those who haven't. I'm going to be in that second category at that price range anyway, in order for me to make enough money to finally get to space. I'm going to take a quick break

to thank our sponsor. Between the unveiling of Spaceship one and the first test flighted Spaceship two, there were a couple of other notable space plane developments. As I said, we have to jump around chronology quite a bit. One of those developments was the famously secret X thirty seven B a k a. The Orbital Test Vehicle or o t V. X thirty seven actually covers a range of different orbital test vehicles. The X thirty seven B is the one we're particularly interested in because it's in use

right now as I record this podcast. So Boeing manufactured the X thirty seven B. The project began at NASA, it changed hands to the Department of Defense in the early two thousands and the Air Force oversees it. It's an unmanned spacecraft, so there's no pilot, there's no crew.

It's launched as a payload on a rocket launch vehicle like SpaceX's Falcon nine, for example, and then it goes into orbit, and it will orbit the Earth for given amount of time dependent upon the mission, and it can return to Earth and land as a space plane on a landing strip. And it has done this four times already, with the fifth mission still in uh in service as

of the recording of this podcast. So officially, the purpose of the X thirty seven B is to perform, as quote, an experimental test program to demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the U S Air Force end quote. It's supposed to test various systems and designs for a sustainable approach to space operations. So in other words, again more R and D, so that you can build

those capabilities into future practical vehicles. However, there are a lot of people who have theories about other purposes the X thirty seven B could fulfill practical applications it may already be doing in addition to being a testing ground such as acting as a surveillance tool like a spy satellite, or even as a papens platform. In April two thousand eighteen, the Orbital Test Vehicle five mission hit a landmark when it was announced the unmanned vehicle had spent two hundred

days in orbit. Uh. That isn't a landmark in the sense of breaking any records. The previous orbital test vehicles had all done that as well. The purpose of the mission, at least the stated purpose of the mission is to test experimental systems and how they hold up to the rigors of space travel over time, including stuff like radiation exposure. As of August, the orbiter was still circling the Earth.

Satellite tracker in the Netherlands captured images of it. Uh. But we don't know how long this mission will last. The Air Force is notoriously quiet about the X three seven B, giving only the bare minimum of information about it. However, the past OTV missions have shown that they tend to go up there for a very long time. Each O t V mission would last longer than the one before for it, so if we go by that, the o t V five mission isn't even out of the first

half of its journey. The O t V four, the one before this one, spent a total of seven eighteen days in orbit from May to May. So if we're just over two hundred, we're coming up on one year for O t V five, we got a ways to go. If, in fact, it continues the trend of staying up there

longer than its predecessor. In the United States, the move to create a space force suggests that projects like the X three seven B will be leveraged to test out systems with direct military applications beyond a research platform for future designs. I am not necessarily in favor of that, but it appears to be a reality. Remember earlier when I was talking about how the Bore four, that unmanned Soviet test vehicle, inspired some U S engineers, Well, it's

time for us to go back to that story. So again. Back in the after the first test flight of the Boar four, there was an Australian surveillance aircraft that caught images of the Boar four when the Soviets were retrieving it from the ocean. American engineers would pour over those images to figure out what the Soviets were up to and work began on designing their own model of the Boar four. They use those images to build a reconstruction

of it. The American engineers discovered that the Boar four shape was particularly good for stable flight and would allow

for extreme maneuverability in glide mode. Well in the wake of the Challenger accident in the mid eighties, NASA began to look into other potential solutions that might be used to transport astronauts safely back to Earth if they were on say, a space station, it would be an emergency return vehicle, essentially something that could hold up to ten passengers at a time, possibly Now this was when the United States was also considering the construction of a new

space station that would have been called space Station Freedom. The vehicle's designation for this escape vehicle was h L DASH twenty. Engineers would build a full scale mock up of the h L twenty, but by the time that happened,

things had already changed politically. The United States was now partnered with Russia on a new project, the International Space Station, and part of that design included relying upon a Russian Soyu's capsule, which would use the ballistics method of re entry into the Art's atmosphere in order to land back on Earth, and that would become the lifeboat for this international space station. It seemed to negate the need for

the HL twenty. Flash forward several years in, a company called space Dev announced that it was going to use the HL twenty design as a starting point for a new reusable spacecraft that could be operated as a means of taking crew to and from the space station. The announcement came in right around the same time that NASA was explaining that the space Shuttle program was wrapping up.

This new spacecraft was called the Dream Chaser. Space Dev was one of the companies that bid for money from NASA in order to continue developing its space plane design because NASA was in need of some sort of spacecraft that could be sent up to the International Space Station

since the Space Shuttle program was ending. But in twenty fifteen, NASA decided to focus on SpaceX and Boeing for that, and both of those companies were designing capsules that resemble sort of the Apollo spacecraft in general design, so again they would use sort of the ballistic re entry method

rather than a space plane guided landing method. In twenty sixteen, space Dev's parent company, Sierra Nevada Corporation, would secure a contract with NASA to perform six delivery missions for that space agency, with a contract term going from late twenty nineteen up to twenty four The dream Chaser design had to be changed significantly for this agreement, so they stripped out a lot of the crew capacity, so that I think six crew seats were taken out, and that whole

section was converted so it could hold pressurized or unpressurized cargo. The company still plans to pursue the the crew version of the dream Chaser in the future. They're hoping that they can revisit that in tw so they haven't abandoned that idea entirely, but in the meantime they're also working on this other version of their vehicle which has practical application. Boeing meanwhile is working on another space plane design that has the DARPA designation of Excess one Excess standing for

experimental space plane. Boeing calls this aircraft the Phantom Express. This autonomous space plane is a vertical takeoff, horizontal landing spacecraft, so the the engine on this is designed to take off vertically like it was a space Shuttle, except it's all part of the same vehicle, it's not on a

booster rocket. The goal of the spacecraft is ambitious. It is to be able to launch into space, deliver small satellites to orbit and return in the same day, and then get refurbished and turned around in order to be usable within twenty four hours, with a goal of doing this for ten days in a row. Such a plane would significantly bring down the costs of launching smaller satellites. It would reduce the need to have those smaller satellites

piggyback on top of larger payloads. Typically, if you have a small satellite and you want to launch it into orbit, you have to wait. You have to wait until there's a payload that still has some room for your small satellite, because the cost would be prohibitive to just send your satellite up. This would bring those costs way down. The Phantom Express would include a space plane that would also

act like the booster rocket. It would send the craft into space, but there would be on top on the back of this space plane what would essentially look like a secondary rocket. The payload would actually be attached to this secondary rocket, and once it reached a certain altitude, it would launch this secondary rocket off the back of the space plane, and the secondary rocket would push the

payload into the proper orbit. Meanwhile, the space plane would decelerate, reenter the air's atmosphere, and come back and land under its own power, so it would be ready to use right away. I don't know about the secondary rocket. I honestly don't know if that's designed to be recoverable or not. I would think it would be, but perhaps not it maybe that that's just a one use only component. There are several other space planes that are in various stages

of development. China. The air space program has several promising designs. UH. There's another design called Black Ice for a private space plane. This is a concept from Strato Launch Systems, which was also founded by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame. The Black Ice concept would launch from the largest airplane ever built, the Strato Launch. I have to do a full episode

on Strate Launch at some point. The Strate Launch has a wingspan of three five feet, which is a hundred seventeen meters, and it has six bowing seven forty seven engines that it uses to generate lift for flight. UH. The Strato Launch or really to propel itself so that creates enough lift for flight. I should say I was oversimplifying, but the Strateo launch hasn't flown yet as of the

recording of this podcast. It has conducted some tests on the ground, including a recent taxi test where it traveled at eighty miles per hour down a runway. It would need to travel at least a hundred forty miles per hour in order for it to take off, but these are early tests to make sure that the design of the aircraft is sufficient so it will hold together. You

know it will, it will actually be stable. More tests will follow, but the company does hope to reach the point where the aircraft will fly and carry payloads by twenty and there are lots of stories of failed projects. There's, for example, the x Core links, which was supposed to go for a test flight back in The company behind it, however, went bankrupt and all of its assets were sold off. But perhaps I'll go into more detail in those projects

in a future episode. I hope you guys enjoyed this pair of episodes about space planes and our return to space. It's not exactly the same thing as a full week and a half of space related topics like the last time, but I thought it was pretty interesting and obviously, creating a reusable vehicle that can return under its own power and be turned back around to fly again in a short time frame would really transform the way we access

and utilize space, possibly for good, possibly for ill. But it would definitely bring that price down, and maybe eventually it would bring the brice down enough so that a regular shmow such as myself might be able to afford a ticket and and get up there and experience what spaces like for even a short amount of time. Um I would even take a parabolic flight where it's just simulating micro gravity. I would do that if I could

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