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Those of us who sail catamarans tend to hold a prejudicial belief that “two hulls (like two heads) are better than one”. Apparently, Burt Rutan and the Scaled Composites team think so as well.
But when Space Ship Two / White Knight Two made its debut appearance this week, there was something even more enticing about it. Like the wind driving Humanity’s future in space was about to shift. We began to see how the rest of us might tack our way into the black sky for more than just 6 or 7 minutes of floating fun.
And, for some of my aeronautically knowledgeable friends, it was deja vu all over again. Like: “where have we seen this before?” It was downright ghostly:
Take a look at this design – circa 1979 or so – from the Russian Myasishchev Design Bureau as modeled by aerospace scholar Alex Panchenko:
It’s an extreme makeover of the Russian Air Force’s 3M bomber (aka the “Bison”) which had been in service since 1955. [Anyone who knows more about this, please reply with comments: below.] The plan was to drop a rocket-boosted vehicle, “X-15 style”, in the upper atmosphere - at subsonic but significant velocity - which would then light its candle and transit out of the atmosphere. In other words, a Virgin Galactic lift ticket.
Here’s another amazing Panchenko model-photo of the Bison space-launcher beast. It was called the 3M-2 concept. Bison bombers were made-over pretty often in that period. One of them even got puffed up (Super-Guppy style) to carry large parts for the Soviet Buran space shuttle and its Energia booster.
Apparently, the 3M-2 was to have had multiple permutations for various roles: It would have made a dandy crew delivery vehicle. Yes, also a handy satellite killer. And ambitious commanders, no doubt, dreamed of delivering squads of elite Soviet troops anywhere on Earth in a couple of hours (even as our USMC’s SUSTAIN program concept seeks to do in the coming years).
Alex Panchenko’s photos are postcards from the future as well as the past. Please remember, the first word in Scaled Composites is “scaled”. The rampant speculation, of course, is that Rutan has sold Sir Richard’s team on the idea that Scaled’s Level Two design will easily and inexpensively scale to an orbital Level Three configuration.
No surprise: that’s precisely the mission for which the Myasishchev group was designing the 3M-2 back in the late 1970s / early 1980’s.
Composer Igor Stravinsky (stealing from artist Pablo Picasso) supposedly once said: “the merely good composer borrows; the great composer steals!” Aerodynamic artist Burt Rutan would likely agree. His Space Ship Three / White Knight Three design, in Virgin livery colors, may just steal the entire orbital people-mover market by dropping the price to levels mere mortals can maybe afford.
So perhaps we’ll be sailing - sooner rather than later - into the space industrial revolution on twin keels.
“Ready about!?”
January 27th, 2008 at 10:07 am
You might want to look at the “He 111Z” aircraft from Germany in World War II. They took 2 He 111’s and joined them together in a similar fashion to create a single plane that was large enough to pull their giant assault gliders. the center wing was fitted with 1 or 3 engines, depending on the situation, and they looked at also using it to carry “monster bombs” and rockets between the fuselages. Very similar. Maybe this is where the Russians got their inspriation?
January 28th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Well, there have been a number of Russian concepts based on a TSTO strategy, whereas the first stage is airbreathing (look at the older MAKS and Tu-160 + Burlak concepts, for instance).
To assume the idea was ’stolen’ precisely from the Myasischev bureau is restrictive…
There have been also US-born concepts of the same sort, but they were/are classified.
Concepts based on TSTO and where the first stage is driven by airbreathing engines have been discussed at many IAC Congresses; it is intuitive that to save on launcher costs you may want to use airbreathing propulsion in some form, be that SCRJ, RJ or GT.
So Rutan may have invented the wheel again, for all we know, but quite independently and certainly not yet to insert crewed payload into orbit.
January 28th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
In the near term, TSTO is the way to go, if we are planning to make it to orbit using airlaunch. Now add a LEO transit lounge/hotel to the Myasishchev/Rutan architecture and voila !, we have the next dimension in rapid, commercial aviation !…and very timely too given the humming antipodal economies.
January 29th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
There’s even more history in the configuration of SS1 and SS22 itself. Dean R Chapman wrote a NACA Technical Paper 4276 that described a reentry via shuttlecock configuration that either ejected or reconfigured for a glide back. (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19930085059_1993085059.pdf). Everything Rutan needed to size the vehicle for his mission can be found in that technical report. I suspect that he didn’t “invent the wheel again”, but rather he took the approach of using old technology to solve a new problem. It’s ws what any good engineer would and should do.