Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, two planes, actually. Yes, animal of the system. Let’s talk first about SpaceShipOne, and then we can talk about the mothership in a moment. The whole idea that Burt initially figured out is if we’re going to send this really lightweight thing all the way up 100 kilometers above the earth to win this prize, it’s going to have to come back down. Normally, when winged things come back down—think the X-15 or the Space Shuttle—it needs an incredible amount of heat shielding because these things go crazy fast in the atmosphere. Famously, they were putting new tiles back on the Space Shuttle every single time it landed because these things would heat up and fall off. They’re amazing at doing their job, but it’s hard to maintain it; it’s heavy. Of course, in Scaled they’re building a lightweight aircraft. What do they do? They come with this design called the feather, which does two really, really interesting things. The first is that it applies an incredible amount of drag while keeping the aircraft very stable. What’s going to happen is it’s going to come back down to earth slow enough that heat is actually not a huge issue. When I say slow enough, it still’s supersonic (or at least starts supersonic) and then goes through the… Slow is relative here.…

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