The Lotus 7 of Spacecraft

摘要

Some years ago Burt Rutan stood before a crowd in a tent at the Experimental Aircraft Association fly-in at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and asserted that "the jump from Pietenpols and Stitses to a pressurized Lancair is bigger than the jump from the Lancair to an airplane that can go into space." The technology available to homebuilders, he went on, was already so advanced that you could create an extra-atmospheric homebuilt out of parts and materials from the catalogs of airplane parts supplier Aircraft Spruce and industrial equipment giant McMaster-Carr. Ten years and more than $20 million of Microsoft tycoon Paul Allen's money later, he admits that he was wrong. It was a much bigger jump than he thought. His initial version—what Rutan now calls the 1999 design—was smaller and less powerful than SpaceShipOne and could have been carried aloft by Proteus, Rutan's tandem-wing twin-jet that first flew in 1998 and has had a busy career as a for-hire high-altitude research platform ever since. He discarded that design, along with a number of alternative reentry configurations, when digital simulations, using computational fluid dynamics software, showed that they lacked the desired stability characteristics for both subsonic and supersonic flight.