I stumbled across a few photos of the crowd of invited space enthusiasts gathered at the first public flight of the Delta Clipper (I forget who sent me these photos… if it was you, speak up!) in, I believe, September 1993. I’m in these photos, with a group of other space-geek college students form Iowa State U.
Ah, the days when I still had hope. Also in this photo is the guy who would become my first real boss after graduation, although I didn’t know it at the time. He’s one of the reasons why I lost that youthful hope and optimism.
Watching the DC-X lift off, slow down, hover, translate sideways and land was a hell of a thing. I would have bet my last nickle that were were on the verge of a new age in opening spaceflight to lower cost and higher flight rate. It was impossible to watch that demo and not get a little excited.
5 Responses to “Delta Clipper: those were the days”
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The take off/landing stuff was the easy bit. The hard part was getting something into orbit with the required mass fraction and surviving the return with enough fuel to land. Since Mac Dac wasn’t addressing that issue, I assumed this was just a dog and pony show to use up the last bits of the Star Wars money. It turned out that I was correct.
DC-X was hardly a dog and pony show, at least in its Air Force days. It successfully developed and demonstrated any number of technologies and operations vital for reasonably affordable space transport. The fact that the DC-X was itself not capable of the sort of mass ratio required for orbital flight is beside the point. A two-stage vehicle based on DC-X technologies and techniques would have been relatively easy to develop, and would have been dirt cheap compared to a conventional system.
No space vehicle will ever be “dirt cheap” unless they can fly it every single day. The key is flight rate. 🙂
Indeed, flight rate *is* the key. That was one of the great – and ultimately ignored – advancements of the DC-X: demonstration of relatively high flight rate using rocket technologies that were roughly appropriate for an actual spacecraft. The secret to affordable space transport won’t be found in the latest bleeding edge materials to build a fragile eggshell, but in mundane tech that allows rockets to fly like jetliners.
This is why I have high hopes for XCOR. They are pioneering *practical* rockets.
Third picture, behind the stroller, guy in orange and white Hawaiian shirt? That’s me!