Private space - Per aspera ad astra
A few years ago, the prospects for private space were very vague. This is not surprising - the development associated with the launch of spacecraft is expensive, and the slightest mistake leads to disastrous consequences. That is why for many years - from the very dawn of space flights, and until recently - space remained available only to the governments of the leading world powers. But everything changes. New players are entering the market, the industry is becoming a little more open and commercial, a little less bureaucratic and old-fashioned.
Oddly enough, the first commercial attempts to develop a spacecraft were made quite a long time ago. Back in the distant 80s of the last century, the German company OTRAG announced its intention to create what was called Common Rocket Propulsion Units (CRPU).
This rocket was noticeably different from the multistage systems used at that time: its principle of operation was based on the use of parallel, rather than sequential, stages. The company has developed unified rocket modules - tubes with a diameter of 27 centimeters and a length of about 6 meters. Four of these tubes, installed one above the other, would turn into a 24-meter fuel tank, at one end of which a rocket engine was installed. These modules, in turn, united into concentric layers, forming rocket stages: the outer layer served as the first stage, the innermost one being the last. After working out the blocks of each stage, they had to be dropped reducing the mass and exposing the inner layers - an approximate start process is shown in the figure to the right.
The company conducted several trial launches of single steps, but things didn’t go further - in the mid-80s the project was closed, largely due to political pressure.
')
Now let's move a dozen years ahead and several thousand kilometers west to the Mojave Desert in the west of the United States.
KMVH - Mojave Air and Space Port airfield
Here in the late 90s, a man named Gary Hudson founded Gary Hudson Rotary Rocket, setting an ambitious goal to build a single-stage reusable manned spacecraft. Hudson believed that his creation will be able to reduce the launch price of cargo to low near-earth orbit by 10 times.
The original idea was very interesting. Hudson and his partner Bevin McKinley (Bevin McKinney) were going to combine the traditional spacecraft with a kind of helicopter. The spacecraft had to have a rotor, at the ends of the blades of which there were special nozzles - a kind of miniature rocket engines; The end streams of these nozzles should have set the blades in motion. This rotor was planned to be used at the initial stage of launch in order to lift the spacecraft into the air. Then, after reaching the height at which the aerodynamic flight of such a scheme became impractical, rocket engines would have to do, and the rotor would play the role of a giant turbo pump. Initially, the company planned to use a unique rotating wedge-air engine, somewhat similar to the engine of the N-1 rocket developed in the 1960s in the USSR.
One of the test flights
Calculations showed that such an approach did slightly increase the specific impulse, but only enough to “free” raise the mass of the rotor itself. In other words, the rotor did not give any advantage at launch, but it didn’t interfere in any way. So why is he then needed, you ask. And he was needed for landing. The traditional schemes used then (and even now are not far away) for a soft landing of the spacecraft, were either a parachute system or wings. Helicopter landing has several advantages over them. Parachutes, unlike the screw, do not give any way to manage the process of descent, and the device with wings and “aircraft” landing depends on the infrastructure - it needs a strip for landing. In addition, the weight of the rotor is about 5 times smaller than the weight of the wings.
Alas, Hudson’s dreams also did not come true. In 2001, the company went bankrupt, and the Roton device created by them for conducting atmospheric tests today adorns the space center in Mojave as a perpetual monument.
Roton today. It is rather tall - 19 meters.
As I said, space launches of the road. Moreover, they are very expensive. If you believe Wikipedia, the launch of the Shuttle cost $ 500 million. The launch of the Union is about 50-70 million. Proton - 25-100 million. Atlas-5 - 180 million. This is an important reason why launches have remained the prerogative of governments for so long.
During the Cold War, when NASA struggled to overtake the USSR in the lunar race, its budget grew to an incredible size - in the early 70s it was almost 5 percent of the total US national budget. Today, NASA receives about 10 times less - about 17 billion dollars a year. This forces them to take various cost-cutting measures. One of such measures is the conclusion of contracts with private commercial companies. And if earlier such contracts provided for full government control over the development, today NASA acts exclusively as a buyer of technology, and not as a mentor-warden.
Of course, such contracts are a tasty morsel, so young and ambitious companies want to get them, tearing off a significant chunk of the market from such giants as Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
Perhaps the most famous of such private companies is SpaceX. On Habré there are a lot of articles devoted to this company; for example, you can find a bunch of very impressive videos with Grasshopper launches.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is also the founder of Tesla Motors, said that he always wanted to change the world, and space is exactly what will change the world to the greatest extent. SpaceX has gone a long way from its foundation in 2002 to the time when it became the first commercial company that managed to put into orbit and successfully return the spacecraft to Earth, as well as the first company that made the spacecraft docked with the ISS.
Falcon 9 Mask
The first step of the company was the Falcon 1 rocket, out of five launches of which two success was completed. In September 2008, the rocket for the first time reached an orbit with a mass-sized mock-up on board, and six months later it launched the RazakSAT satellite into orbit.
Falcon 1 was followed by Falcon 9. More than twice the size of Falcon 1, the two-stage Falcon 9 marked the company's success. This rocket is capable of taking cargo both to low earth (up to 12 tons of payload) and to geosynchronous orbit (up to 4 tons). At the same time, the cost of outputting a kilogram of cargo to a low orbit is about $ 4,000, and according to Mask, this figure is quite realistic to reduce to $ 1,000. By 2015, SpaceX is going to make possible the full re-use of the first stage due to landing technologies on engines that are being perfected on Grasshopper missiles. Then the company plans to make the entire rocket reusable, which will further reduce the cost of launches.
Running Falcon 9
In addition to the means of delivery, SpaceX assets also include spacecraft. First of all, of course, Dragon - it was he who docked with the ISS on May 25, 2012. This is a reusable ship, the return of which to Earth occurs by landing in the ocean. SpaceX plans to equip it with a vertical landing system that uses the thrust of 18 accelerators with which the Dragon is equipped. It should be noted that in the current form of the Dragon is a cargo ship. As part of the NASA Commercial Crew integrated Capability program, SpaceX is also developing its manned version of DragonRider, which will have to allow a crew of up to 7 people to be delivered into orbit.
Finally, the company has a project Red Dragon - the landing module, which theoretically can be delivered to Mars by 2018. At the company's suggestion, he must deliver equipment to the Red Planet to collect samples and return them to Earth. Unfortunately, as of fall 2013, NASA has no plans to finance this project due to budget constraints. However, SpaceX already has a number of lucrative contracts with NASA, the last of which, involving 12 launches to the ISS over the next few years, will bring almost 1.8 billion of budget money from SpaceX
Naturally, SpaceX is not the only bidder for NASA contracts. For example, the company Sierra Nevada, which developed the reusable ship Dream Chaser - a kind of replacement for Shuttle - received from the Agency a number of large grants, the total amount of which is close to $ 500 million.
Dream chaser
The Dream Chaser is a vertical takeoff and horizontal aerodynamic landing vehicle; it can deliver up to 7 people to low Earth orbit. Launches are planned to be made using Atlas-5 launch vehicle. It is also worth noting that the ship can also be used for suborbital flight - for the purposes of space tourism.
The Dream Chaser configuration allows you to reduce the overload on entry into the atmosphere to 1.5g, which is very, very little. Moreover, for landing he does not need any special infrastructure - it can land on any runway capable of receiving commercial airliners. By the way, it was Sierra Nevada who developed the engines for SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 received the Ansari X-Prise as the first private aircraft that crossed the Karman line.
October 26, 2013, that is, quite recently, the first test free flight of the Dream Chaser. The device with a helicopter raised to a height of about 4 kilometers and dropped down. His task was to independently get to the runway and make an automatic landing; flight duration was about a minute. After separation from the helicopter, the Dream Chaser successfully reached the airfield, perfectly aligned itself over the axial lane, and began landing, however, for some reason, the vehicle did not get out of the left landing gear, and after touching the lane it fell on its side and slid into the desert .
The same flight Dream Chaser
Watching him after leaving the strip was almost impossible due to the large amount of dust raised. However, when specialists began to inspect the ship, they found that the cabin was not damaged, and all the equipment was working properly.
You should not think, however, that NASA has completely switched to the support of private development. “Old Guard” - those companies that have received defense contracts in the aerospace field for years - are also not averse to grabbing their piece of cake. Perhaps the strongest player among them is the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. These guys have a lot of experience - Lockheed was engaged in, among other things, the development of Atlas-5 missiles, which I mentioned above, and Boeing - in the development of the Delta family of missiles. However, it does not prevent the private space from successfully expanding its sphere of influence.
Another player, this time focused on space tourism, is Blue Origin, founded by Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos. Initially, the company set an ambitious goal to carry out one suborbital launch a week already in 2010. Unfortunately, such plans were too optimistic. The dates were shifted to 2011 for the unmanned, and 2012 for manned flights. But in this framework, the company did not meet. As of the end of 2013, alas, no new information on indicative dates for the first launch.
But what about Blue Origin? Firstly, they cannot be denied enthusiasm. Even at school, Bezos dreamed of space, and at 18 he talked about how he wanted to launch space hotels and amusement parks so that up to 2-3 million people could be in orbit at the same time. Secondly, they have several successful projects.
The first development of Blue Origin was the Charon system, which on March 5, 2005 successfully climbed to a height of about 100 meters, and then made a controlled landing at the starting point. The second step was the apparatus Goddart, first took off in November 2006, and made, according to the FAA, two more test launches.
One of the main developments of the company is the New Shepard ship, intended for suborbital flights. As planned, the ship should be fully controlled by the on-board computer. The first test flight took place on August 24, 2011, and ended in failure - according to the company, at an altitude of 14 kilometers and a speed of 1.2 Mach, the device went beyond the allowed values ​​of the angles of attack, and the security system turned off the engines. This is another reminder that space does not forgive mistakes.
New shepard
At the end of 2012, the company successfully conducted tests for the emergency ejection of a capsule from a launch vehicle model. The capsule rose to a height of about 700 meters, and then successfully made a soft landing with the help of parachutes.
Blue Origin has a reusable orbital spacecraft project. Any suitable reusable launch vehicle should lead the ship to a suborbital trajectory, and then return to Earth. The very same spacecraft, using its own engines, must continue to accelerate to achieve the specified parameters of the orbit. Entry into the atmosphere and landing should be provided by means similar to those of New Shepard. To date, the company has successfully conducted propulsion tests.
Naturally, Blue Origin successfully cooperates with NASA, having received about $ 30 million from the Agency at various stages of development, mainly in the work on propulsion systems.
Well, what about our beloved Red Planet? After all, probably interplanetary flight is much more complicated and inaccessible for private companies?
Not really.
First of all, you must all have heard of Mars One. This ambitious project, conceived by Bass Landdorp, has already started, and even gathered more than 200 thousand volunteers who are ready to participate in the selection of applicants for a manned flight to be held in 2022. By the way, for the flight to Mars, the company plans to use a modified version of the Mars One Dragon from SpaceX. Well, the Falcon 9 Heavy rocket of the same company will have to lift it from Earth.
The first unmanned launches of the Mars One program are already scheduled for 2018, so it’s not long to wait.
The creators of the project assure us that the cost of sending people one way, and supplying them with everything they need until their death, will not exceed $ 6 billion. From all this, they also want to arrange a grand reality show, with funds from the display of which it is planned to finance the expedition.
This is how the project creators imagine the Martian colony
Although the list of advisors of the project is a sufficient number of specialists, many still very skeptical of this venture, believing that the founders of Mars One do not have a sufficiently deep understanding of all the problems that will have to be faced. Time will tell who is right.
But Mars One is not the only private attempt to send people to Mars. For example, the first space tourist Dennis Tito founded the organization Inspiration Mars a few months ago, whose goal is to launch an expedition in 2018 to fly around Mars and return to Earth.
The flight, the height of the pericenter of which is 160 km from the surface of Mars, will have to last 501 days. The crew of two people will try to take advantage of the approach of Mars and Earth, which will occur in 2018, and will minimize the cost of fuel per flight.
Tito and his co-authors compiled a document describing the technical side of the expedition, and sent it to IEEE for consideration. However, in connection with the calculations made by them, a number of questions arise. So, for example, none of the existing media is suitable for putting into orbit modules of such weight and size that are indicated in the report. For the start, the SLS NASA system could be used, but it is unlikely that it will be completed by 2017.
Living Capsule and Return Module, in Artist's View
This project, like Mars One, has been subject to some criticism. For example, in one of the articles of the Economist magazine, the issue of the effects of cosmic radiation during flight, as well as the safety of returning to Earth, is raised due to the high rate of entry into the Earth’s atmosphere on the way back.
On the other hand, Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, believes that the project is technically quite feasible, and the main problem is the extraction of the necessary funds.
Representatives of NASA noted a small amount of time remaining before the proposed launch, cosmic radiation, as well as problems of the psychology and physiology of the crew’s stay in a confined space for 500 days. In any case, as in the situation with Mars One, we will find out the answers pretty soon - after all, until 2018, very little is left.
Private space is not limited to the United States. For example, the English company Excalibur Almaz announced its readiness to begin commercial flights around the moon in 2015. Their ship has already conducted 9 successful test flights, and the main problem, according to company representatives, is now obtaining all the necessary licenses.
The spacecraft developed by Excalibur Almaz, is made on the basis of the return vehicle of the Transport Supply Ship, developed in the USSR in the 70s of the last century, and “made” in a literal sense. In 2011, the company received two spacecraft corps, used in the Almaz program, and plans to “Use these modules to provide additional space for tourists and researchers.” They roughly correspond to the Star module from the Russian segment of the ISS, that is, they will provide about 95 cubic meters of space with their own weight of about 29 tons. All electronics modules will be completely replaced by modern.
Flight of the Moon by the ship of the company, in the artist’s view
At the same time, representatives of the company also note that, due to modernization, solutions have been repeatedly checked instead of being developed from scratch, they will be able to save a total of about $ 2 billion. It is planned to launch launches from the Baikonur cosmodrome on Proton missiles.
Copenhagen Suborbitals, a non-profit organization from Denmark founded in 2008, also deserves special mention.
The first developed by this major missile they became HEAT-1X. It is a single-stage rocket with a length of 9 meters and a diameter of 64 centimeters, which was launched on June 3, 2011. The rocket successfully launched and managed to reach a height of 2.8 kilometers, when the engine had to be remotely disconnected from the ground due to the rocket exceeding the vertical tolerance.
Heat 1X on the launch platform
Then followed the SMARAGD and Sapphire rockets, launched in 2012 and 2013, respectively. The launch of the first of them was only partially successful - some time after the start, the electronics refused. But the launch of the second one, which was designed to work out the flight control system, was carried out without any problems. The company's ultimate goal is to develop a Heat-1600 rocket suitable for suborbital flight.
At the same time, the company is developing and manned capsules. The first pancake came out lumpy - the project of the experimental capsule Tycho Brahe, the astronaut in which it was supposed to be standing, was rejected after the first test on a dummy due to too large vertical overloads during launch.
The second capsule was launched as part of the emergency rescue system inspection. She successfully separated and released parachutes, however, due to aerodynamic instability she did not have time to reach a safe height, as a result of which the parachutes did not have time to fill with air, and the capsule fell into the water, having received some defeats.
It is important to understand that the staff of this organization are volunteers, and none of them is a professional rocketry. Given this, as well as the fact that they work, in fact, with donations and their own funds, the fact that they managed to build a full-sized rocket is a very, very significant achievement.
In Russia, the most prominent representative of private space is the Dauria Aerospace company, which has its own blog on Habré , and Zelenyikot will probably tell you more than once about its successes .
So, today private space is no longer a fantasy, but a reality. Of course, this is a titanic work. For example, Musk, who has to control both SpaceX and Tesla at the same time, says that “Everything is difficult when things are going well, and it is incredibly difficult if something goes wrong”, and he is undoubtedly right. Cosmos does not forgive mistakes. It is worth only a little mistake - and all efforts can be wasted. In this business, from success to failure is not even one step - and much less. But we, of course, will hope that all this will translate into something big and serious. That launches will be cheaper, and their reliability will grow, and in a few years or decades each of us will be able to afford to fly once into Space.
Cases of bygone days
Oddly enough, the first commercial attempts to develop a spacecraft were made quite a long time ago. Back in the distant 80s of the last century, the German company OTRAG announced its intention to create what was called Common Rocket Propulsion Units (CRPU).
This rocket was noticeably different from the multistage systems used at that time: its principle of operation was based on the use of parallel, rather than sequential, stages. The company has developed unified rocket modules - tubes with a diameter of 27 centimeters and a length of about 6 meters. Four of these tubes, installed one above the other, would turn into a 24-meter fuel tank, at one end of which a rocket engine was installed. These modules, in turn, united into concentric layers, forming rocket stages: the outer layer served as the first stage, the innermost one being the last. After working out the blocks of each stage, they had to be dropped reducing the mass and exposing the inner layers - an approximate start process is shown in the figure to the right.
The company conducted several trial launches of single steps, but things didn’t go further - in the mid-80s the project was closed, largely due to political pressure.
')
Roton
Now let's move a dozen years ahead and several thousand kilometers west to the Mojave Desert in the west of the United States.
KMVH - Mojave Air and Space Port airfield
Here in the late 90s, a man named Gary Hudson founded Gary Hudson Rotary Rocket, setting an ambitious goal to build a single-stage reusable manned spacecraft. Hudson believed that his creation will be able to reduce the launch price of cargo to low near-earth orbit by 10 times.
The original idea was very interesting. Hudson and his partner Bevin McKinley (Bevin McKinney) were going to combine the traditional spacecraft with a kind of helicopter. The spacecraft had to have a rotor, at the ends of the blades of which there were special nozzles - a kind of miniature rocket engines; The end streams of these nozzles should have set the blades in motion. This rotor was planned to be used at the initial stage of launch in order to lift the spacecraft into the air. Then, after reaching the height at which the aerodynamic flight of such a scheme became impractical, rocket engines would have to do, and the rotor would play the role of a giant turbo pump. Initially, the company planned to use a unique rotating wedge-air engine, somewhat similar to the engine of the N-1 rocket developed in the 1960s in the USSR.
One of the test flights
Calculations showed that such an approach did slightly increase the specific impulse, but only enough to “free” raise the mass of the rotor itself. In other words, the rotor did not give any advantage at launch, but it didn’t interfere in any way. So why is he then needed, you ask. And he was needed for landing. The traditional schemes used then (and even now are not far away) for a soft landing of the spacecraft, were either a parachute system or wings. Helicopter landing has several advantages over them. Parachutes, unlike the screw, do not give any way to manage the process of descent, and the device with wings and “aircraft” landing depends on the infrastructure - it needs a strip for landing. In addition, the weight of the rotor is about 5 times smaller than the weight of the wings.
Alas, Hudson’s dreams also did not come true. In 2001, the company went bankrupt, and the Roton device created by them for conducting atmospheric tests today adorns the space center in Mojave as a perpetual monument.
Roton today. It is rather tall - 19 meters.
NASA, government and money
As I said, space launches of the road. Moreover, they are very expensive. If you believe Wikipedia, the launch of the Shuttle cost $ 500 million. The launch of the Union is about 50-70 million. Proton - 25-100 million. Atlas-5 - 180 million. This is an important reason why launches have remained the prerogative of governments for so long.
During the Cold War, when NASA struggled to overtake the USSR in the lunar race, its budget grew to an incredible size - in the early 70s it was almost 5 percent of the total US national budget. Today, NASA receives about 10 times less - about 17 billion dollars a year. This forces them to take various cost-cutting measures. One of such measures is the conclusion of contracts with private commercial companies. And if earlier such contracts provided for full government control over the development, today NASA acts exclusively as a buyer of technology, and not as a mentor-warden.
Of course, such contracts are a tasty morsel, so young and ambitious companies want to get them, tearing off a significant chunk of the market from such giants as Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
Perhaps the most famous of such private companies is SpaceX. On Habré there are a lot of articles devoted to this company; for example, you can find a bunch of very impressive videos with Grasshopper launches.
Spacex
SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is also the founder of Tesla Motors, said that he always wanted to change the world, and space is exactly what will change the world to the greatest extent. SpaceX has gone a long way from its foundation in 2002 to the time when it became the first commercial company that managed to put into orbit and successfully return the spacecraft to Earth, as well as the first company that made the spacecraft docked with the ISS.
Falcon 9 Mask
The first step of the company was the Falcon 1 rocket, out of five launches of which two success was completed. In September 2008, the rocket for the first time reached an orbit with a mass-sized mock-up on board, and six months later it launched the RazakSAT satellite into orbit.
Falcon 1 was followed by Falcon 9. More than twice the size of Falcon 1, the two-stage Falcon 9 marked the company's success. This rocket is capable of taking cargo both to low earth (up to 12 tons of payload) and to geosynchronous orbit (up to 4 tons). At the same time, the cost of outputting a kilogram of cargo to a low orbit is about $ 4,000, and according to Mask, this figure is quite realistic to reduce to $ 1,000. By 2015, SpaceX is going to make possible the full re-use of the first stage due to landing technologies on engines that are being perfected on Grasshopper missiles. Then the company plans to make the entire rocket reusable, which will further reduce the cost of launches.
Running Falcon 9
In addition to the means of delivery, SpaceX assets also include spacecraft. First of all, of course, Dragon - it was he who docked with the ISS on May 25, 2012. This is a reusable ship, the return of which to Earth occurs by landing in the ocean. SpaceX plans to equip it with a vertical landing system that uses the thrust of 18 accelerators with which the Dragon is equipped. It should be noted that in the current form of the Dragon is a cargo ship. As part of the NASA Commercial Crew integrated Capability program, SpaceX is also developing its manned version of DragonRider, which will have to allow a crew of up to 7 people to be delivered into orbit.
Finally, the company has a project Red Dragon - the landing module, which theoretically can be delivered to Mars by 2018. At the company's suggestion, he must deliver equipment to the Red Planet to collect samples and return them to Earth. Unfortunately, as of fall 2013, NASA has no plans to finance this project due to budget constraints. However, SpaceX already has a number of lucrative contracts with NASA, the last of which, involving 12 launches to the ISS over the next few years, will bring almost 1.8 billion of budget money from SpaceX
Sierra nevada
Naturally, SpaceX is not the only bidder for NASA contracts. For example, the company Sierra Nevada, which developed the reusable ship Dream Chaser - a kind of replacement for Shuttle - received from the Agency a number of large grants, the total amount of which is close to $ 500 million.
Dream chaser
The Dream Chaser is a vertical takeoff and horizontal aerodynamic landing vehicle; it can deliver up to 7 people to low Earth orbit. Launches are planned to be made using Atlas-5 launch vehicle. It is also worth noting that the ship can also be used for suborbital flight - for the purposes of space tourism.
The Dream Chaser configuration allows you to reduce the overload on entry into the atmosphere to 1.5g, which is very, very little. Moreover, for landing he does not need any special infrastructure - it can land on any runway capable of receiving commercial airliners. By the way, it was Sierra Nevada who developed the engines for SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 received the Ansari X-Prise as the first private aircraft that crossed the Karman line.
October 26, 2013, that is, quite recently, the first test free flight of the Dream Chaser. The device with a helicopter raised to a height of about 4 kilometers and dropped down. His task was to independently get to the runway and make an automatic landing; flight duration was about a minute. After separation from the helicopter, the Dream Chaser successfully reached the airfield, perfectly aligned itself over the axial lane, and began landing, however, for some reason, the vehicle did not get out of the left landing gear, and after touching the lane it fell on its side and slid into the desert .
The same flight Dream Chaser
Watching him after leaving the strip was almost impossible due to the large amount of dust raised. However, when specialists began to inspect the ship, they found that the cabin was not damaged, and all the equipment was working properly.
You should not think, however, that NASA has completely switched to the support of private development. “Old Guard” - those companies that have received defense contracts in the aerospace field for years - are also not averse to grabbing their piece of cake. Perhaps the strongest player among them is the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. These guys have a lot of experience - Lockheed was engaged in, among other things, the development of Atlas-5 missiles, which I mentioned above, and Boeing - in the development of the Delta family of missiles. However, it does not prevent the private space from successfully expanding its sphere of influence.
Blue origin
Another player, this time focused on space tourism, is Blue Origin, founded by Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos. Initially, the company set an ambitious goal to carry out one suborbital launch a week already in 2010. Unfortunately, such plans were too optimistic. The dates were shifted to 2011 for the unmanned, and 2012 for manned flights. But in this framework, the company did not meet. As of the end of 2013, alas, no new information on indicative dates for the first launch.
But what about Blue Origin? Firstly, they cannot be denied enthusiasm. Even at school, Bezos dreamed of space, and at 18 he talked about how he wanted to launch space hotels and amusement parks so that up to 2-3 million people could be in orbit at the same time. Secondly, they have several successful projects.
The first development of Blue Origin was the Charon system, which on March 5, 2005 successfully climbed to a height of about 100 meters, and then made a controlled landing at the starting point. The second step was the apparatus Goddart, first took off in November 2006, and made, according to the FAA, two more test launches.
One of the main developments of the company is the New Shepard ship, intended for suborbital flights. As planned, the ship should be fully controlled by the on-board computer. The first test flight took place on August 24, 2011, and ended in failure - according to the company, at an altitude of 14 kilometers and a speed of 1.2 Mach, the device went beyond the allowed values ​​of the angles of attack, and the security system turned off the engines. This is another reminder that space does not forgive mistakes.
New shepard
At the end of 2012, the company successfully conducted tests for the emergency ejection of a capsule from a launch vehicle model. The capsule rose to a height of about 700 meters, and then successfully made a soft landing with the help of parachutes.
Blue Origin has a reusable orbital spacecraft project. Any suitable reusable launch vehicle should lead the ship to a suborbital trajectory, and then return to Earth. The very same spacecraft, using its own engines, must continue to accelerate to achieve the specified parameters of the orbit. Entry into the atmosphere and landing should be provided by means similar to those of New Shepard. To date, the company has successfully conducted propulsion tests.
Naturally, Blue Origin successfully cooperates with NASA, having received about $ 30 million from the Agency at various stages of development, mainly in the work on propulsion systems.
Heading to Mars!
Well, what about our beloved Red Planet? After all, probably interplanetary flight is much more complicated and inaccessible for private companies?
Not really.
First of all, you must all have heard of Mars One. This ambitious project, conceived by Bass Landdorp, has already started, and even gathered more than 200 thousand volunteers who are ready to participate in the selection of applicants for a manned flight to be held in 2022. By the way, for the flight to Mars, the company plans to use a modified version of the Mars One Dragon from SpaceX. Well, the Falcon 9 Heavy rocket of the same company will have to lift it from Earth.
The first unmanned launches of the Mars One program are already scheduled for 2018, so it’s not long to wait.
The creators of the project assure us that the cost of sending people one way, and supplying them with everything they need until their death, will not exceed $ 6 billion. From all this, they also want to arrange a grand reality show, with funds from the display of which it is planned to finance the expedition.
This is how the project creators imagine the Martian colony
Although the list of advisors of the project is a sufficient number of specialists, many still very skeptical of this venture, believing that the founders of Mars One do not have a sufficiently deep understanding of all the problems that will have to be faced. Time will tell who is right.
But Mars One is not the only private attempt to send people to Mars. For example, the first space tourist Dennis Tito founded the organization Inspiration Mars a few months ago, whose goal is to launch an expedition in 2018 to fly around Mars and return to Earth.
The flight, the height of the pericenter of which is 160 km from the surface of Mars, will have to last 501 days. The crew of two people will try to take advantage of the approach of Mars and Earth, which will occur in 2018, and will minimize the cost of fuel per flight.
Tito and his co-authors compiled a document describing the technical side of the expedition, and sent it to IEEE for consideration. However, in connection with the calculations made by them, a number of questions arise. So, for example, none of the existing media is suitable for putting into orbit modules of such weight and size that are indicated in the report. For the start, the SLS NASA system could be used, but it is unlikely that it will be completed by 2017.
Living Capsule and Return Module, in Artist's View
This project, like Mars One, has been subject to some criticism. For example, in one of the articles of the Economist magazine, the issue of the effects of cosmic radiation during flight, as well as the safety of returning to Earth, is raised due to the high rate of entry into the Earth’s atmosphere on the way back.
On the other hand, Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, believes that the project is technically quite feasible, and the main problem is the extraction of the necessary funds.
Representatives of NASA noted a small amount of time remaining before the proposed launch, cosmic radiation, as well as problems of the psychology and physiology of the crew’s stay in a confined space for 500 days. In any case, as in the situation with Mars One, we will find out the answers pretty soon - after all, until 2018, very little is left.
Outside the USA
Private space is not limited to the United States. For example, the English company Excalibur Almaz announced its readiness to begin commercial flights around the moon in 2015. Their ship has already conducted 9 successful test flights, and the main problem, according to company representatives, is now obtaining all the necessary licenses.
The spacecraft developed by Excalibur Almaz, is made on the basis of the return vehicle of the Transport Supply Ship, developed in the USSR in the 70s of the last century, and “made” in a literal sense. In 2011, the company received two spacecraft corps, used in the Almaz program, and plans to “Use these modules to provide additional space for tourists and researchers.” They roughly correspond to the Star module from the Russian segment of the ISS, that is, they will provide about 95 cubic meters of space with their own weight of about 29 tons. All electronics modules will be completely replaced by modern.
Flight of the Moon by the ship of the company, in the artist’s view
At the same time, representatives of the company also note that, due to modernization, solutions have been repeatedly checked instead of being developed from scratch, they will be able to save a total of about $ 2 billion. It is planned to launch launches from the Baikonur cosmodrome on Proton missiles.
Copenhagen Suborbitals, a non-profit organization from Denmark founded in 2008, also deserves special mention.
The first developed by this major missile they became HEAT-1X. It is a single-stage rocket with a length of 9 meters and a diameter of 64 centimeters, which was launched on June 3, 2011. The rocket successfully launched and managed to reach a height of 2.8 kilometers, when the engine had to be remotely disconnected from the ground due to the rocket exceeding the vertical tolerance.
Heat 1X on the launch platform
Then followed the SMARAGD and Sapphire rockets, launched in 2012 and 2013, respectively. The launch of the first of them was only partially successful - some time after the start, the electronics refused. But the launch of the second one, which was designed to work out the flight control system, was carried out without any problems. The company's ultimate goal is to develop a Heat-1600 rocket suitable for suborbital flight.
At the same time, the company is developing and manned capsules. The first pancake came out lumpy - the project of the experimental capsule Tycho Brahe, the astronaut in which it was supposed to be standing, was rejected after the first test on a dummy due to too large vertical overloads during launch.
The second capsule was launched as part of the emergency rescue system inspection. She successfully separated and released parachutes, however, due to aerodynamic instability she did not have time to reach a safe height, as a result of which the parachutes did not have time to fill with air, and the capsule fell into the water, having received some defeats.
It is important to understand that the staff of this organization are volunteers, and none of them is a professional rocketry. Given this, as well as the fact that they work, in fact, with donations and their own funds, the fact that they managed to build a full-sized rocket is a very, very significant achievement.
In Russia, the most prominent representative of private space is the Dauria Aerospace company, which has its own blog on Habré , and Zelenyikot will probably tell you more than once about its successes .
Conclusion
So, today private space is no longer a fantasy, but a reality. Of course, this is a titanic work. For example, Musk, who has to control both SpaceX and Tesla at the same time, says that “Everything is difficult when things are going well, and it is incredibly difficult if something goes wrong”, and he is undoubtedly right. Cosmos does not forgive mistakes. It is worth only a little mistake - and all efforts can be wasted. In this business, from success to failure is not even one step - and much less. But we, of course, will hope that all this will translate into something big and serious. That launches will be cheaper, and their reliability will grow, and in a few years or decades each of us will be able to afford to fly once into Space.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/206166/
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