CRS-2 contract awards

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>>7783911
Dream Chaser had originally lost the crew contract to SpaceX and Boeing CST-100 (now called SpaceLiner). Now it will be repurposed for cargo delivery and low-stress return, due to its high lift gliding return profile.

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>>7783922
The Dream Chaser is the culmination of almost forty years of design and refinement, starting from the HL-20 lifting body design. It will be great to see it get off the drawing board!

It already had a successful glide test, with another coming up shortly. The first orbital test launch will be sometime in 2017-18, now that funding is coming in again.

well that's cool OP

Thank you. Now I know why Musk faked the reusable landing.

>>7785185
wat?

>>7785283
The upcoming awarding of the contracts. Musk wanted a demonstration that his rocket would be reuseable, therebye justifying his inclusion in the contract, and maybe a bigger pie slice.
Tin foil conspiracy?
If the next landing succeds i will write the most grovelling apology on here ever

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I'm kind of disappointed that it has a service module now. It sort of defeats the purpose of a space plane. Plus, the newest proposal goes inside a fairing.

>>7785379
So you are saying that the Falcon 9 taking of, deploying its payload and landing again was somehow faked? The one witnessed by thousands of people on live stream, tracket by everyone from NASA to the US air force and watched by hundreds of people on the ground? That one?

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>>7785379
no you'll just continue sucking whatever cocks are presented to you as always

>>7783930
>alright, the Space Shuttle was a piece of shit, how do we regain face?
>let's just cut off the cockpit and strap two engines to it
>brilliant
NASA everybody

>>7785482
>>alright, the Space Shuttle was a piece of shit, how [does NASA] regain face?
wrong project. That's SLS. oh, and it isn't "regain face", it's "keep Shuttle contractors employed in my districts"

Dream Chaser isn't NASA, but private company Sierra Nevada, who acquired the design when they bought SpaceDev.

Also: video of how the system works for cargo transport. I forgot the new system had folding wings and no windows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mIlGw--e60

>>7785702
>make silly joke
>autist thinks it's serious
classic /sci/

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>>7783911
>They can build a space plane but they can't build a website

Seriously, what is this fucking schoolboy html4 garbage?

http://www.sncspace.com/ProductLines/AboutDreamchaser

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>>7783922
Parts below the line do not return.

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>>7785737
>Space Shuttle is below the line
welp

Also, I love how the Dream Chaser looks like a natural progression of the original Space Shuttle. Like the Shuttle 2.0

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>>7785454
White going up.

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>>7785454
Black coming down.
Not the black/white demarcation line is well defined.

>>7785428
Fairing launch is actually better. You don't have to worry about the various aerodynamic problems that arise from having wings at the nose of the rocket.

>>7786112
Of course it's white going up. The rocket is covered in frost at launch.

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>>7786112
>>7786118
Just like South Africa

>>7786182
So you're saying is that Space-X is actually an art project by Elon Musk criticizing the end of apartheid in his native South Africa? I can live with this.

This is good because it provides a strong diversity of options that will increase long-term success. The spaceplane can use multiple rockets and lands on runways, spacex and orbital can use multiple launch sites providing options for future space stations.

Now all we need is launch costs to continue to drop while at the same time work on getting commercial/private space stations in orbit.

Some potential station uses include:
>space tourism
>research facilities
>fuel depots
>foreign government stations
>space shipyards

>>7783911
We already have a spaceplane that goes to orbit. It's called the X-37b.

>>7786141
>Covered in frost
Can you see the writing on the side?

>>7786141
Heres how it works....
(Congressman x on the phone) "Hey Elon, we gonna place tranche II contracts for ISS supply"
(Elon) "Great, hope we are on the list, we are doing great work here, development is going well, but slowly"
(Congressman x) "Sure Elon, 'bout that, we really need an international propaganda coup, ya know, something to get the people interested in space and away from economics"
(Elon) "What you have in mind senator?"
(Congressman x) "Well son, we know you got that test rocket flying around at low level - we needca successful landing"
(Elon) "But its 5 days to launch, and its fraud!"
(Congresman x) Dontchya worry son, just make sure only you are videoing it - 30 days till the contracts are placed boy"

Elon, pissed by this, complies... but doesnt bother to repaint the second rocket... fuck the government.

>>7787268
Even if it was a different rocket coming down
Though it begs the question how they managed this
That's still the other rocket landing successfully

>>7786479
If they could get a ticket for space tourism down to like
100,000 dollars
And have some actual facilities up there to do shit in

It could easily be a trillion dollar industry

>>7786112
>>7786118
I'm pretty sure you will toss any attempt at reason out the window, but here it goes:
The Falcon 9( and almost any rocket) har 2 internal tanks. One for containing the fuel, RP-1, and one for the oxidizer, LOX.
Now, the tank on the bottom contains the fuel at about -5 Celsius, and the top tank contains the oxidizer at about -240 Celsius. Due to weight constrains the tank walls are not that much insulated, but the bulkhead between the tanks are, to keep the their wildly different temperatures ranges separated.
Now, the fuel is loaded right before launch, so it wont heat up to much, but that still leaves time for ice to form on the side of the rocket, and much faster/more on the tank with -240 Celsius than the one with -5 Celsius. If you watch any of the old Saturn V launch tapes, you will see huge chunks of ice falling of at launch. Same is happening on your picture of the Falcon 9 launching. Ice will continue to form there until the LOX tank is empty, but it also depends on humidity and such.

Now, when it comes back down, there is still a large amount of fuel and oxidizer left. But as i mentioned, those -5 Celsius wont make much ice, making the surface of the lower tank pretty much ice-free at this point. That means that any rocket exhaust will stick directly on the fuselage. Now, on the upper tank, you have a lot more Oxidizer at a lot lover temp. This will continue to build ice while its returning as well, continually making a surface for the soot/shit to stick too. And then vibrations will make the ice fall off in chunks, and then new ice is formed and so on. You can see that the tank gets dirtier above a certain point again, this is due to the tank not being full any more, so no/not so much fuel at the top to produce an ice cover.
Of course, the rockets flight path and aerodynamic properties could also contribute to different amounts of residue.

>>7787658
>>7786118
This raises an interesting question: just how much of its first-stage propellant did this Falcon 9 actually use up? Did it still have enough mass that it could have hovered on a single engine? That might make the landing far easier.

It looks as if it still had about 2/5 of its propellant.

This bunch of satellites was a very light load to LEO (the actual maximum LEO payload of the latest version of Falcon 9, used as an expendable rocket, is probably about 20 tons now -- the launch with successful recovery only had about a 2-ton payload), and the upper stage impulse had been increased with fuel densification. The upper stage could have done practically the entire job of getting to orbit, just by being lifted to an altitude where its extended-nozzle engine wouldn't destroy itself due to being grossly overexpanded for sea-level air pressure.

Some people in the rocket business experience with VTVL "moon landers" are saying, "Sure, they can hover and land as long as the weight is within the range of engine throttling, but they're going to have a hell of a time making thrust > weight landings work."

If the weight is less than your minimum thrust, then you have to time your engine ignition within narrow margins. It's much harder than if you have the ability to hover, and take the landing as slow as you want.

They might still have a way to go before this is a practical way to recover stages, without drastically underloading the launch vehicle.

>>7785702
>Dream Chaser isn't NASA, but private company Sierra Nevada, who acquired the NASA design when they bought SpaceDev, and has no real prospects of selling it to anyone but NASA.
Sierra Nevada is like Bigelow: they just bought some NASA tech, developed by government scientists with public money, and lobby to sell it back to NASA.

Just money men making deals, incapable of any real creation.

>>7786479
>Now all we need is launch costs to continue to drop while at the same time work on getting commercial/private space stations in orbit.

Supposedly, Bigelow is ready to move forward with his inflatable space hotels. He did launch two real working prototypes, with the BEAM module also going up to the ISS on the next Dragon mission. For the station itself, he says he has been waiting for there to be multiple crew options using a standard docking port for redundancy. So minimum of 2018 for the Commercial Crew vehicles to be ready: SpaceX Dragon2 and Boeing CST-100 Starliner.

That's the party line, but for all we know that is just an excuse to hide other problems. There are plenty of rumors of Bigelow mismanagement.

Anyone ever heard of Sierra Nevada?

>>7788800
Their Dream Chaser concept has been in space news for years.

>>7785723
There's nothing wrong with that site, you web 2.0 hipster prick.