The Only Spacecraft Which Flies Under 100% Human Control

foreign Scott Manley here this week Virgin Galactic made their first customer flight after what seems like an eternity spaceship 1 made its debut flight in May of 2003 20 years ago and it was a year later in October 2004 when spaceship won won the Ansari X prize and Richard Branson pretty much assured the entire world that they were ready to scale this up and started selling tickets and two decades later yeah it is pretty easy to criticize this for being late it is easy to say that look this is just a carnival ride that goes a bit higher and faster than normal but the truth is I love spaceship 1 and spaceship 2. because they are the only spacecraft that are 100 manually flown by a human pilot in fact in many ways they have more in common with the small general aviation aircraft that I fly than say a the space shuttle spaceship 1 was built to win the X prize and it went from concept to construction to winning the prize in a few years and a big part of that was because the designer insisted on working on things he understood and that Designer was Bert Rutan who's probably one of the most important small aircraft designers of the 20th century he started out with small kit aircraft was really a big fan of having canards he pioneered the use of Composites in aircraft structures and of course this company was called Scaled Composites it would build things like the Voyager and the global flyer which would both fly around the world without needing refueling so the rules for the Ansari X prize were pretty simple you had to be able to carry three people above 100 kilometers and land and then the same vehicle had to repeat the trip inside one month it was important that this was reusable because the idea was that this would provide access to space for people that didn't have have government-sized budgets backing them so being an aircraft designer Bert Rutan knew all about the X-15 he knew that this aircraft would be carried to your deployment altitude and then it would light a rocket motor it should fly up above the target altitude and then it would come back down but he also knew that coming back down in the X-15 was a rough experience to avoid the vehicle lawn darting into the desert floor the the aircraft needed to come down with a pretty high angle of attack of about 40 degrees and if they had the side slip too far off center that could turn into a spin that could kill people and indeed did Kill One Pilot so he began by designing a re-entry system which would be 100 passively stable that would require no pilot input and they what he came up with was something like a shuttlecock from badminton you had a pod in the Middle with a bunch of feathers you know surfaces that would catch the air slow blow the vehicle down high in the upper atmosphere it would then deploy a parachute and descend under that and then ideally it would get captured by a helicopter and return to the launch site but if it didn't then it would just land on the desert floor and they would have to recover it in another way but Bert was an aircraft designer and he really wanted to find something that could fly like an aircraft now it was possible with the X15 as you saw that it could maintain these high uh angles of attack but they required great skill from the pilot or alternatively these days you just use a fly-by-wire system but he didn't want to do that either that would have added complacency so instead they came up with the signature feature of spaceship one and two the Feathering system where the tail booms extend up and change the entire aerodynamic configuration of the aircraft into a stable High drag configuration that allows them to decelerate in the upper atmosphere then subsequently they fold those back down and transition back to a regular aircraft for landing so while the space shuttle flies like an aircraft it is an awful aircraft it has this complex fly-by-wire system to enable it to transition from the Hypersonic speeds all the way down to the runway on the other hand spaceship 1 literally has cables and rods directly linking the control York to the control surfaces this is essentially the same type of system that I fly with there's no flyby wire there's no Power Systems when you're pushing that stick it is directly moving those control surfaces there's no intermediate hydraulic system because the aircraft's small enough these are reversible controls if you stand outside the aircraft and move one of the control surfaces the stick inside will move in response the horizontal stabilizers also Incorporated electrically driven trim because during some portions of the supersonic flight the aerodynamic forces were simply too much for a regular human interestingly this isn't actually needed at the highest speeds the vehicle reaches because by that point it's already gone high enough that the atmosphere is Getting Thinner so although it says that you're moving at mach 3.3 the actual indicated air speed is something like 100 knots and since we're talking about thin air the tail number in novem number 328 kilo foxtrot is as a reference to 328 kilo feet or 100 kilometers altitude that they were aiming for another interesting technical tidbit about the control system was the left and right Rudders were independent so you could push both Rudder pedals in and it would flare both of the Rudders outwards and they would act as an air brake a lot of the vehicle was designed by hand there wasn't much in the way of wind tunnel testing or you know cfd applied to this and there was intentionally a lot of commonality between the mothership White Knight and spaceship one they designed the cockpit to be very similar so they would build the structures for a white knight first and then assuming that worked out well they could build the spaceship 1 version knowing what new using what they had learned the engine was a hybrid motor using solid fuel and nitrous oxide as an oxidizer that would be flowed through the middle of the burning cavity and accelerate the reaction it was designed and built by space Dev and and it was so simple there was one valve in the entire system this little project was funded by Paul Allen to the tune of 25 million dollars it went from your concept to completion to winning the prize in something like three years and sure 25 million dollars probably sounds like a lot he did get 10 million back almost instantly when they complete won the prize and they get a bit more from sponsorships and now 20 years later virgin galactic's own accounts claim that they have invested two billion dollars in developing spaceship 2 and White Knight 2. and there have been plenty of changes they had to scale the design up to have room for six passengers in the back right now they're only flying with four passengers in the back they've also got two pilots up front for the most recent flight there was actually only three paying passengers it is a bigger and more complex vehicle and yet it still adheres to the principle of the pilots flying it using stick and Rudder skills one of the Big Technical challenges they had was scaling up that rocket engine and in 2007 during testing there was an engine failure and explosion which killed three employees and then there was a tragic in-flight accident where for unknown reasons the co-pilot unlocked the Feathering mechanism early in the flight which resulted in the Feathering mechanism rotating early due to aerodynamic forces when they were still firing the engine and in low supersonic regime the vehicle broke up killing the co-pilot and the pilot was badly injured while the NTSB would find that the accident was caused by the co-pilot's actions they also faulted the designers for not including lockouts and Fail-Safe systems or spending more time considering human factors in the design but rewinding a bit spaceship 2 does differ quite significantly from spaceship one and there's a number of reasons for this first of all Bert Rutan kind of stepped back as the chief designer a new guy Jim Thai who had been involved with spaceship one he came along and he became became the new chief designer the most obvious change is that spaceship 2 uses a low Wing design while spaceship 1 had a high wing and Bert Rutan had chosen a high Wing design because it would enhance the dihedral effect and therefore increase vehicle stability but it turned out that during one of the first flights to space that due to a side slip occurring it turned into a roll and apparently the spaceship once set a record of 29 roles in vertical orientation and a big part of this was the high Wing I might guess the even more obvious change was the fact that it was so much bigger because it had to be able to carry so many people aesthetically there's a lot more Chrome on this but it is just Skin Deep it's a foil that is applied to the surface the reason for this is that unlike most other Rockets the tail booms extend past the point of the rocket exhaust and that rocket exhaust being it's a solid motor has a lot of thermal energy coming out that you want to reflect back to avoid damaging the composite the teal booms also got control surfaces on the inside as well as the outside and during Landing you can see that they've also included an air brake in the belly which is obviously a nice thing to help you slow down on the runway remember this only has two wheels the third uh your landing gear is just a skid I believe it's a piece of mahogany with the green aligned with the direction of motion you want to put that down very carefully and of course if you're a pilot you want to put that down on the center line so you get some nice white paint on it so you can show off apparently there's a company tradition where they take this uh wood and they frame it and give it to the pilots after they make their first landing now one little aerodynamic feature that had me stumped for a long time was this perforated wedge along the back of the wing on unity's First Flight into space the wedge was there but it didn't have all these perforations in it and if you go back further to VSS Enterprise it didn't have this at all but I was lucky enough to visit them a few years ago even although I wasn't allowed to release the footage for itar reasons and so from what I can tell the wedge was originally added because when they went through transonic region they had a tendency to pitch nose up too quickly but then they found that when they were coming back down it was starting to make a lot of noise due to the air flowing over the wings and then somebody figured out that if you drilled a bunch of holes in it then you would get most of the aerodynamic effects with none of the noise there's another interesting thing about the feathered orientation when those booms are up and it is pitching around it is rotating around in intermediate axis that means that axis of rotation is unstable so if you rotate around that axis too fast then the thing will pick up yaw and roll just like it did on this particular flight if you look very carefully you can see that it's starting to rotate in a bunch of axes that aren't pitch and the video Cuts all of this out and this behavior is actually modeled correctly in Kerbal Space Program although in Kerbal Space Program it takes a bit longer to develop into the tumble and I think that's just because the real thing the booms are much more flexible than the structures that you have in Kerbal Space Program also in the most recent flight we got some great footage of the pilots performing the drop and burn maneuver Drop burn the engine right but even better we got cockpit sound and you can hear not only the engines but the passengers in the back let's play this again so notice that he's got the York pushed all the way forward to ensure separation and then immediately after they drop they bring the yolk back and fire the engine strictly speaking the pitch down isn't required to ensure separation you can see as soon as that drops the mother ship just lifts up because it's trimmed to carry all this extra weight during separation you can also see White Knight flexing visibly as that strain is removed from it one of the things I really love about this shot is about 10 seconds after the drop if you look in the bottom right of the frame you can see a spaceship 2 just shooting up on a you know on the rocket flame headed off into the sky and of course at this point there are people commenting but it doesn't go high enough yeah it doesn't go high enough it would be great if it weren't higher it's just the structure is too heavy they perhaps need a bigger engine they are able to get this thing up to about 85 kilometers which is technically space if you use 50 miles whereas other people in the world really want to see 100 kilometers as the standard there is definitely an argument that new Shepard is going to provide its passengers with a better view as they have the bigger windows and they go higher but as someone that's just learned to fly and is fantasizing about flying all sorts of cool things this happens to be up there as one of the coolest things possible this is from unity's first space flight back when they were still at Mojave and it actually works better for me because I can look back North in California and see all these places that I have been I'm easily picking out features that are two 300 miles away the most easily identifiable being Monterey Bay and Mono Lake so here's an idea of where they are relative to Mojave so it's absolutely a cool system I have no idea how they managed to spend 2 billion dollars on it but I expect a lot of that has to do with Creative Accounting to make some investors look like they paid more than others I'm hoping that it'll continue to fly and take its customers and use their trips to space and back and I'm sure that blue origin's new Shepherd will start flying again and provide some sort of competition but let's be clear from a pilot's point of view there is absolutely nothing like this I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 10,110

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Id: Z74_sTPym-0

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2023