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Virgin Galactic. Have your tickets ready?


Draco-REX

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interesting....quoted from comment section virgingalactic.com

 

"Several articles have suggested that the ability to do without the kinds of thermal protection used by NASA vehicles is purely a function of lightweight materials and clever design. This ignores the rather significant difference between reentry at a velocity of essentially zero and reentry at orbital velocity -- roughly mach 22. No amount of clever feathering is going to solve the problem of getting rid of that kind of kinetic energy without serious thermal protection."

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"Several articles have suggested that the ability to do without the kinds of thermal protection used by NASA vehicles is purely a function of lightweight materials and clever design. This ignores the rather significant difference between reentry at a velocity of essentially zero and reentry at orbital velocity -- roughly mach 22. No amount of clever feathering is going to solve the problem of getting rid of that kind of kinetic energy without serious thermal protection."

 

This. Suborbital - aka ballistic - and orbital are TWO COMPLETELY different things.

Fold that thing like that at Mach 25 and it'll rip to shreds, so I doubt that ship design is ever for anything other than pleasure excursions: pop up the millionaires, give em 2-10mins of zero G and some photo-ops, then let em come back down, collect cash.

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