War Is Boring

Offiziere.ch: Ambitious U.S. Space Transport Moves Forward

30.12.09

Categorie: David Axe, Space |
Tags: Marines, Rutan, Scaled, space, SUSTAIN

SpaceShipTwo

by DAVID AXE

Against all odds, a controversial Pentagon concept for delivering people, robots and cargo through space to remote combat zones is moving forward. For nearly eight years the so-called Small-Unit Space Transport and Insertion concept, known by its acronym “SUSTAIN,” has weathered skeptical government officials, questions about its strategic wisdom and the ongoing global recession. In recent weeks, the Pentagon office overseeing SUSTAIN completed a “technology roadmap” that spells out how the government and industry might ultimately build a space transport.

SUSTAIN has its roots in the November 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. To insert troops from ships on the Indian Ocean to southern Afghanistan, a distance of 500 miles over mountains and desert, the Pentagon relied on a complex network of forward airstrips and aerial refuelers supporting unreliable CH-53E helicopters. One chopper, piloted by Marine Major Alison Thompson, nearly crashed when it suffered a compressor stall.

Several months later, Roosevelt Lafontant, then working in a Washington, D.C. space intelligence office, had lunch with his friend Franz Gayl, a Marine Corps science adviser. The men observed that there had to be a better way to deliver people and material quickly over long distances. The answer, they realized, was space. They drew up a basic outline of the concept, called it SUSTAIN, and began enlisting supporters in their effort.

A space transport had long been on the Pentagon’s wish list. Concepts from the 1950s anticipated soldiers boarding vertical-launching rocketships for hypersonic ballistic journeys into enemy territory. The advent of NASA’s Space Shuttle in the 1970s proved that a reusable space transport was theoretically possible, but it also underscored the cost, complexity and risk of orbital transportation. Each Shuttle mission takes months to prepare and, if research is included, costs $1 billion. Two Shuttles have crashed, killing their entire crews.

In the 1990s, NASA tried to simplify space transportation by reducing the traditional two-stage rocket launch to just one. But all the single-stage transport ideas foundered, at the cost of billions of dollars. Coming in the wake of those failed concepts, Lafontant and Gayl’s SUSTAIN idea at first seemed potentially disastrous. But developments in private industry proved they were on to something. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, several small tech firms literally raced to produce the world’s first private space transportation service.

In October 2004, California-based Mojave Aerospace Ventures snagged the $10-million X Prize for sending a privately-developed spacecraft into near-orbit twice in a two-week period and landing it safely like an aircraft. The egg-shaped SpaceShipOne got its first-stage boost from a jet-powered mothership aircraft. SpaceShipOne fired its own solid-fueled rocket for its second stage. It spiraled to Earth with wings extended for drag.

Read the rest at Offiziere.ch.

(Photo: Mojave)