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Abstract
ROCKET PLANE
What does it feel like to fulfill a dream?
How will you describe what the Earth looks like from space and looking out to see the stars and the Moon in a black sky in the middle of the day? Will it feel somehow more magical, yet more fragile? Will the world around you look the same?
Youâ„¢ve waited your whole life for this flight, and now the time has come to take the ride of a lifetime. Your day begins with a special breakfast and a brief photo shoot. Then you board this space plane as its called to begin a ride that will forever transform your life and your perception of Earth.
A rocket-powered aircraft or rocket plane is an aircraft that uses a rocket for propulsion, sometimes in addition to jet engines. Rocket planes can achieve much higher speeds than similarly-sized jet aircraft, but for much shorter periods of operation, typically only a few minutes.
Rocketplane Limited, Inc. (RLI) was founded in 2001 as an Oklahoma Corporation with a vision to be a driving force in the future of commercial space flight. The Rocketplane XP is a suborbital space plane due to enter service in late 2007 that will carry paying participants and microgravity scientific payloads to an altitude greater than 330,000 ft. XPâ„¢s tight development and production schedule demanded a very short and concise conceptual design phase with a high degree of confidence. Processes were developed to perform rapid turn around trades in performance, weight allocation, systems engineering, structural concepts, jet and rocket propulsion, volumetric efficiency, and thermal protection. The results from these disciplines were integrated in order to arrive at candidate configurations; and finally after iteration, at a baseline which meets all the requirements. XPâ„¢s unique conceptual design process allowed quick progression into preliminary and detailed design phases and formed a foundation of knowledge and methodology that can be applied to future concepts.
The future will see similar technology used to drastically reduce Transatlantic flight times. An 8hr trip from London to New York will take a mere 15-20 minutes!...It will be like being inside the movie BACK TO THE FUTURE!!