A space
tourism group developing a suborbital rocket ship is now taking aim at orbital
trips with a new spacecraft that doubles as a hypersonic glider.
Canada's London,
Ontario-based firm PlanetSpace unveiled designs for
its Silver
Dart spacecraft, an eight-person
vehicle derived from experimental aircraft studies in the 1970s, Thursday
with hopes of carrying fare-paying passengers into orbit and resupplying the International Space Station (ISS).
"The Silver
Dart is the DC-3 of the space industry," said Geoff Sheerin,
PlanetSpace president and CEO, in a telephone
interview. "It has so many things going for it in terms of performance."
Sheerin's
Silver Dart program is separate from his Canadian Arrow effort to use a proven
V2 rocket design to build a three-person rocket ship for suborbital flights.
Plans for the Silver Dart date back about four years as Sheerin
was researching the Canadian Arrow rocket to compete in the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition for suborbital spaceflight.
"About five
percent of my time has been looking and poring over the program," Sheerin said of the Silver Dart plans.
But NASA's
intention to purchase commercial
services for both cargo and crew flights to the ISS encouraged Sheerin and his team to push forward with their work. NASA
plans to retire its three remaining space shuttles - Atlantis, Endeavour and
Discovery - in 2010.
Based on
the U.S. Air Force's Flight Dynamics Laboratory-7 (FDL-7) program, the Silver
Dart is a lifting body designed to glide from hypersonic speeds of Mach 22 down
to landing, PlanetSpace officials said. The spacecraft
is expected to launch vertical atop a stack of about 10 Canadian Arrow rocket
engines and land
horizontally on an aircraft runway, they added.
The first
Silver Dart spaceflight is expected follow the inaugural manned Canadian Arrow
launches, the first of which is slated for 2008 with four more to follow, Sheerin said.
"You want
to have a multitude of vehicles," said PlanetSpace
chairman Chrinjeev Kathuria. "With the Canadian
Arrow, you'd want to enter the [spaceflight] market very quickly. The second
stage is the Silver Dart."
NASA based
its X-24B test aircraft on the FDL-7 lifting body and valued the added range
and stability the sleek, sharp-nosed design, according to documentation from
the space agency's Dryden Flight Research Facility in California.
Paul Cyzsz, an engineer who worked on the original FDL-7 effort
and is guiding PlanetSpace's Silver Dart work, said
the new spacecraft would use a 1960-1970s era shell wrapped around a lighter
inner body with updated, modern electronics.
"The
advantage of an all metal aircraft is that you can land in any kind of
weather," said Paul Cyzsz, adding that unlike NASA's
space shuttle - which does not land in rain to prevent damage to its exterior.
"You can't trap it in space, it can always get back to
the continental United States."
Cyzsz
said the FDL-7's lifting body design would also give the Silver Dart about
twice the lift coefficient as NASA's space shuttles at subsonic speeds.
"We're
committed to building the Silver Dart," Sheerin said,
adding that he decided early on that his program needed the additional
performance of a different space vehicle. "I really kind of
feel in love with this concept."
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