Talk:Scaled Composites Tier One

message: I came across a newsgroup post to sci.space.tech which contains a great amount of technical info, gleaned from a recent presentation Rutan did. I'm not sure how reliable the information is, though, or if the info is considered public (though I guess it's out of the bag now, since it's been posted to usenet). Particularly noteworthy are details regarding the ISP and total impulse of the engine. --NeuronExMachina 22:03, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: technical info

message: Why isn't this page merged into the Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne article?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.160.56.223 (talk) 04:26, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know how reliable this source is, but they're talking about a dry weight of 1200 kg e.g. in Encyclopedia Astronautica. It may well be that the total mass of 3600 kg is wrong because the total oxidizer+propellant is 3600 pounds and someone may have confused the numbers. 193.171.121.30 15:03, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: That site's pretty reliable, I'd say. -Joseph (Talk) 16:23, 2004 Oct 2 (UTC)
The article states that the engine was updated between the flights 15 and 16, but I seem to recall that Burt Rutan stated that this is not the case and they just planned a longer burn.  Maybe they took delivery of the upgraded engine but didn't use it ?
--195.137.80.174 10:31, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge??

message: :I'd like to respond to what User:81.168.80.170 wrote about my recent edits to Tier One:
I ended up reversing all three of your substantive edits to Tier One:
*You changed a link from pilot (spaceflight) to pilot.  The original was correct, despite the linked article not existing yet; pilot is a disambiguation page, and pilot (spaceflight) is one of the articles it points at.  I've created a substub there to avoid future confusion, but this kind of thing is common.  You should avoid making links more ambiguous than they were to start with, and remember that a link to a non-existent article is not broken per se.
*You changed "Mg" to "tonne".  The article consistently uses SI units, so "Mg" is appropriate.
*Without mention in the edit summary, you added some HTML comments that appear to cast doubt on the NPOVness of the comparison between the reentry modes of SpaceShipOne and the Space Shuttle.  If you have such doubts, please raise them on Talk:Tier One, or improve the text yourself.
195.167.169.36 15:30, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: This feathered reentry mode is inherently far safer than the behaviour at similar speeds of the only comparable craft previously built, the Space Shuttle.  The Shuttle undergoes enormous aerodynamic stresses and must be precisely steered in order to remain in a stable glide.  (Although this is an interesting comparison of behaviour, it is not an entirely fair comparison of design concepts: the Shuttle starts reentry at much higher speed than SpaceShipOne, and so has some very different requirements.)
Any advance on this?  81.168.80.170 22:18, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: It's better as the comparison is now at similar speeds. Meanwhile, while looking for better mass figures I found this database but it doesn't (yet) include SpaceshipOne. -Wikibob | Talk 23:51, 2004 Sep 27 (UTC)
===Belly-Flop reentry===
the Shuttle didn't have to be designed for hypersonic gliding in the first place; it could have done a belly-first ballistic entry if the Air Force hadn't demanded cross-track capacity for a polar mission (hence fair comparison?)
Actually, that's not quite true.  The belly-first reentry was a feature of the SSTO designs.  By the time NASA redesigned the Shuttle in an attempt to bring the USAF onboard, the design has already shifted to TAS.  (Thrust Augmented Shuttle - essentially the design that was built.)  The development costs of the SSTO versions were believed to be very high (with good reason - it would have been larger than a C-5A!), and thus the shift to the (seemingly) simpler and cheaper TAS design.
Even so, the belly-first position had some significant problems with heat flow around the wing roots and the horizontal stabilizer.  It also faced the non-trival aerodynamic problem of shifting from belly-first airflow to conventional (nose-first) airflow.  Additionally the SSTO versions would have required an untried method of building "hot-structure" skin in order to survive re-entry at all.  Lastly, the SSTO designs still would have faced high-sonic conditions during both launch and reentry.
Despite the mythology that has arisen around them, the SSTO versions were nothing more than paper - they never were mature designs.  There is no evidence to believe that solving their problems would have resulted in a vehicle significantly cheaper that the Shuttle we have now. Elde 08:19, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: comparison with Shuttle reentry

message: the Shuttle didn't have to be designed for hypersonic gliding in the first place; it could have done a belly-first ballistic entry if the Air Force hadn't demanded cross-track capacity for a polar mission (hence fair comparison?)
Actually, that's not quite true.  The belly-first reentry was a feature of the SSTO designs.  By the time NASA redesigned the Shuttle in an attempt to bring the USAF onboard, the design has already shifted to TAS.  (Thrust Augmented Shuttle - essentially the design that was built.)  The development costs of the SSTO versions were believed to be very high (with good reason - it would have been larger than a C-5A!), and thus the shift to the (seemingly) simpler and cheaper TAS design.
Even so, the belly-first position had some significant problems with heat flow around the wing roots and the horizontal stabilizer.  It also faced the non-trival aerodynamic problem of shifting from belly-first airflow to conventional (nose-first) airflow.  Additionally the SSTO versions would have required an untried method of building "hot-structure" skin in order to survive re-entry at all.  Lastly, the SSTO designs still would have faced high-sonic conditions during both launch and reentry.
Despite the mythology that has arisen around them, the SSTO versions were nothing more than paper - they never were mature designs.  There is no evidence to believe that solving their problems would have resulted in a vehicle significantly cheaper that the Shuttle we have now. Elde 08:19, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Belly-Flop reentry

message: : The parts of the craft that experience the greatest heating, such as the leading edges of the wings, have about 6.5 kg of ablative thermal protection material applied. The main ingredient of this material was accidentally leaked to Air and Space.
What is the main ingredient?  --η[ υωρ] 01:22, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Ingredients

message: FYI, this newsgroup posting has many more details about the flight controls, from a talk which Mike Melville gave.
--NeuronExMachina 01:50, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: More details on flight controls

message: t/Space is working with Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites 
for cheap flight into Orbit 
http://www.transformspace.com/
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/cxv.htm 
81.244.170.155 13:43, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Tier Two

message: The article currently states the ROC to be 25 km/min, or 416 m/s, which contradicts the ≈1 km/s peak vertical speed in the flight profile section. Eridane (talk) 14:04, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Rate of Climb

message: "Scaled Composites Tier One" is just a less commonly-used name for the SpaceShipOne project; is there any reason at all that these two articles shouldn't be merged? Geoffrey.landis (talk) 16:34, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge with Space Ship One

message: As has been noted by several others, this article is very redundant with the SpaceShipOne article, and most likely people looking for information would go to that article, not this one.
I moved all of the material that was specifically about the SpaceShipOne vehicle itself to that article, leaving this one primarily about the program and the support equipment.    It still might be valuable to merge the articles: if we do, this is a start, and if we don't, the two articles are at least somewhat more cleanly divided between the vehicle and the program. Skepticalgiraffe (talk) 21:30, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moved material to SpaceShipOne