I recommend switching to YouTube and viewing it in 1080P full screen...



BeachAV8R

I saw that earlier today - very cool!

I can understand it being a milestone and all, but I don't understand why unlock the tail plane to fold the craft up? All I see is high alpha. How does this added drag help?

Cool video.


Wheels

My eyes must be getting bad, I was expecting Father Ted footage.

Cooool!!!

Is there a WK 2 and SS 2 for X-plane yet?

I'm not sure I have this right, but my understanding is that they fly to the edge of the atmosphere, and this approach allows them to re-enter the denser atmosphere in a slow, controlled way avoiding the need for expensive thrusters and ablative heat shielding that something like a capsule might need.

While I wish them luck (anything to advance spaceflight is a good thing), I'm going to remain slightly skeptical until they do a full scale reentry test or release a lot more info about their design and expected flight profiles. It's one thing to feather like that at 50k ft and only going a few hundred km/h. It's totally different to do it when you're at orbital velocities of 27000 km/h.



The thing is, you have to be going insanely fast to stay in orbit (see above). All of that energy and the velocity that comes with it has to be lost somehow. I don't really think the vehicle is going to be able to carry enough fuel to burn its engines to slow down. Capsule type spacecraft lose it via drag, letting the ablative shield absorb the energy. The shuttle does it via aerobraking, letting the thermal tiles deflect the energy. What's going to absorb all of that energy when SS1 reenters? I'm not sure.

It doesn't go anything like that fast, it only gets up to 4,600 km/h maximum when the rockets burns-out and I suspect slower than that when it re-enters the atmosphere, so heating isn't a big problem at all.

The shuttlecock design was never intended, and would never work, for an orbital vehicle.