Europe just flew titchy reusable SPACEPLANE IXV around the planet Europe's first reusable spaceplane has had a successful flight, traveling 413km (256 miles) above the Earth before splashing down on the other side of the planet. The delayed Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) spaceplane lifted off from ESA's spaceport in French Guiana at 1340 GMT on Tuesday heading east atop a three- …
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I seem to have been a little ambiguous. I meant that only three fatalities in such a program was remarkable, not that there were none. This is an example of the way different people use commas. If I had meant there were no fatalities I would write "was, remarkably, fatality free".
From all the pictures on other sites and those in the article it looks more like the craft is equipped with a pair of elevons directly on the body, without any fins/stabilising surfaces. I would guess that steering is accomplished by rolling and letting the "lift" pull the craft round in the desired direction. I would guess that "lift" is also a relative term, but obviously better than a brick. Mind you I have heard that an F111 has a glide ratio of 7:1 ie 7m sink for each metre of forward flight, if you have a flameout.
"With enough speed, even a bathtub would have good lift, and that thing was very fast indeed."
Well, there are some caveats to that. Lift/drag ratios generally drop with each new velocity regime beyond subsonic (supersonic, hypersonic, ludicrous speed). The US space shuttle had a poor subsonic lift/drag ratio of 4.69 [Ref. 1], similar to many lifting bodies actually, but its hypersonic lift/drag ratio wasn't much over 1 [Ref. 2].
References:
1. https://archive.org/stream/nasa_techdoc_19990052613/19990052613#page/n19/mode/2up
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift-to-drag_ratio#Supersonic.2Fhypersonic_lift_to_drag_ratios
@Arnaut the less:
"WW1 saw plenty of fighter aircraft [...] but not one of them would have been considered remotely safe for ordinary paying passengers"
Umm.
As it happens, after the Great War a lot of ex military aircraft were used by fledgling airlines to carry ordinary paying passengers. Most of them were converted bombers (e.g., D.H. 4A, Handley-Page O/400), but I'm looking at a photo here in a book of two paying passengers in 1919, about to climb into a Rumpler C.I operated by Rumpler-Luftverkehr, described in the International Encyclopedia of Aviation (Octopus Books, 1977) as a fighter - although elsewhere it's called a reconnaissance aeroplane.
The reason not many fighters were used for paying passengers is that fighters didn't have much carrying capacity - that Rumpler C.I could carry two passengers. Bombers were used as airliners, crudely converted, then freshly built adaptations of bombers, then (quite quickly) completely new designs aimed at purely civil operations.
None of them were remotely safe by modern passenger aircraft standards, but plenty of Great War bombers were no more dangerous than early airliners - in fact, if you look at the records, there are some early airliners which were a lot more risky to travel in than Great War bombers.
A case in point would be the de Havilland D.H.86 from 1934 - a dreadfully dangerous civil aeroplane in original form, yet designed long after the Great War.
As it happens, I'd argue that Great War aircraft developments were less "accelerated" than the Apollo programme: aircraft technology at the end of the war was certainly better than at the start, but it was pretty much the same sort of thing. What they'd achieved by 1918 was to improve the performance, reliability, and manufacturability of engineering concepts which had already been shown to work by 1914 - and to discard some stuff which didn't work so well.
The Apollo programme rushed into service a huge stack of new ideas which had never been flown before, never mind to the moon. Can't really be compared to early aviation, unless you want to compare the risk to those flying - huge numbers of earlier aviators died in flying accidents. RIP the Apollo 1 crew, but no Apollo (or Mercury or Gemini) flights killed their astronauts.
Something to think about, I reckon.
It wasn't that the early astronauts weren't very brave men running huge risks, but they were flying with better engineering and with better risk management (and maybe some better luck).
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