Re: Spaceship One - Successful Flight

From: Craig Fink (craig_at_WeBeGood.net)
Date: 09/29/04 

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 18:11:19 GMT

On Wed, 29 Sep 2004 17:43:50 +0000, Rand Simberg wrote:

> On 29 Sep 2004 17:33:00 GMT, in a place far, far away, Ian Stirling
> <root@mauve.demon.co.uk> made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
> way as to indicate that:
>
>>Brett Buck <buckbw@pacbell.net> wrote: <snip>
>>> Just from my observation, the problem appeared to be a coupling
>>> from yaw
>>> to roll - definitely had a significant yaw angle, and the effective
>>> dihedral is extraordinarily high with this design - a lot like the
>>> lifting bodies that had similar control issues. Maybe that resulted
>>> from a yaw thrust vector misalignment, maybe just plain old roll/yaw
>>> coupling issues at high speeds. But it seems very unlikely to be
>>> something that can easily be fixed.
>>
>>Is it fly-by-wire, in which case it might?
>
> No, stick and rudder.

I read somewhere that during ascent it's fly by wire with electrical trim
tabs, no computer. During a post flight interview, someone (?Rutan?) said
that the problem with the previous flight was caused by an actuator
overheating (overused) and the actuator shut down. It later reset itself
and worked correctly. They address this problem before this flight.
Although prior to the uncontrolled roll, it looked like the vehicle was
pitch, yaw and rolling quite a bit. Maybe the had larger upper level
winds, causing the same problem to occur.

Craig Fink

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