or at http://www.solar-thruster-sailor.info/PosterSSS.pdf

Frank

Has anyone figured out how to not only have them survive the rocket ride up but also open up without tearing?

I’d like to believe it’s easier than NASA’s “everything-and-the-toilet-sink” approach, but no one has demonstrated that it is yet either. When will an “amateur” effort launch a satellite? And don’t tell me SpaceX almost did – they’ve brain-picked NASA’s best and there’s nothing simple about their rockets either.

Once a few rocket-planes have spanned continents then we’ll see. But 100 km joy-rides aren’t space-flight. Not yet.

As for SCRAMjets, those are really a dead end for launch services. They have precisely the wrong characteristics for launch vehicles (they operate over too narrow a band of the atmosphere and too narrow a band of speed).

NASA would have you believe, as a salve for their many, many failures, that spaceflight is a fundamentally enormously difficult problem that requires wizbang futuristic technology to truly take in hand. The truth is that we have all the technology we need to get into space much more cheaply than we can today, it’s just that the blundering government agencies and the entrenched, bloated aerospace oligopoly has made it difficult for legitimate innovation and entrepreneurism to gain a foothold. That may be changing, ever so slowly, at the moment and I think we’ll see a flowering of development in launch services in the not too distant future. Look to SpaceShip-1 as an example. For a fraction of the cost and with a much, much simpler design that team was able to reproduce a lot of the relevant capability of the X-15, and it didn’t take space age carbon-carbon composites or state-of-the-art glass cockpits and fly-by-wire systems or SCRAMjets or aerospike engines, it took little more than a fiberglass hull, rubber and NO2, and a stick and rudder. These are the things the new space age will be made of. Solid no-nonsense design and guts, not buck rogers bells and whistles and fancy powerpoint slides.

Just to answer J.R.’s question about SSTO – basically it was at the bleeding edge of aerospace technology, and after blowing billions on trying to do it basically it got canned because we just don’t have the tech. Quite simply the only practical SSTO designs have TWO stages.

Which NASA should’ve realised after all the studies of the Shuttle concept in the early 1970s.

SCRAMjets might make SSTO viable, but they’re currently still in development – they proved a lot harder too. But at least we know they can work. And SSTO is relatively easy to do IF you don’t come back down. Thus One-Shot SSTO for bulk cargo is pretty straight forward. But there’s no bulk-cargo missions on offer at the moment.

Solar sails face a much more difficult battle for legitimacy and development. The technology itself is much less mature and thus the risk is much higher. Worse yet, because spaceflight outside of Earth orbit is, to date, entirely non-commercial there isn’t much motive other than sheer intellectual curiosity and engineering chutzpah to develop the technology. The real driver which could lead to a blooming of solar sailing development would be dramatically lower launch costs (which would enable entrepreneurs and adventurers to get their foot in the door).

I agree that propulsion systems like the Mini Mag Orion has the most potential for today’s technologies. It boggles the mind to think that if they took this seriously, there could be manned missions all over the solar system within 20 years.

By the way, whatever happened to all the hype about single stage to orbit technologies that they were talking about 10 – 15 years ago. Seems to me that they are still not using best available and lowest cost technology to even get out there. I guess that’s what you get when things are politically motivated.

Enzo

So while all these technologies are definitely interesting, they don’t particularly grab me. It’s the getting into orbit part that’s the bottleneck and the real challenge. As I understand it, a space elevator on Earth is right at the limit of the theoretical maximum tensile strengths achievable, and as someone who’s a bit of a pessimist when it comes to futurism, my suspicion is that it is an impossible dream.

Which may well mean the overwhelming majority of us are stuck here.