>The 747 engines are probably used. There are lots of retired 747s around, many at the Mojave boneyard. Great aircraft, but a fuel hog by current standards.
>The crew’s flight deck is literally that of a 747.
>Allen bought two used jumbo jets formerly flown by United Airlines and cannibalized them for parts that account for about half the empty weight of the Roc.
>So although the shell of the cockpit and all the rest of the plane’s body is new — hand-built by Scaled Composites from carbon fiber composites — various key pieces and systems, including avionics, hydraulics and fuel subsystems, are salvaged 747 parts. BAE Systems was subcontracted to disassemble the 747 and install its systems on the Roc.
>The cockpit seats look old and used because they are. The seats as well as the controls the crew will manipulate and the windows they’ll look out of all came from the 747s.
>So did the plane’s six Pratt & Whitney engines, which are already refurbished, cleaned, wrapped and set aside in a corner, ready to hang on the airframe when it’s finished.
That's absolutely how I would've done it. Way cheaper to make a monster hybrid of two used 747s than to try to make a one-off custom airplane from scratch. Sure, it won't be as efficient at its job as if it were purpose-built, but you'd never get all of that R&D money back.
The market would have to be really large (like way larger than the current global launch market) to justify it though. The conjoined twin 747s are gonna be good enough for any payload that they can carry.
The Seattle Times article says that the Vulcan rocket will have a mass of 375 tons. (Probably US tons?) Assume it's got the same payload fraction as a Soyuz, about 2.5%, which means it can put 9.4 tons into orbit. (A Falcon 9 can put 22 metric tons into orbit)
According to some comment on stack exchange, the world collectively orbited 255 tons of stuff in 2007. Assuming every payload can be launched on a Vulcan rocket, (Which they can't) and assuming a generous turnaround time of one week, (Allen says it should be faster than that) then it would take only a single plane 27 weeks to satisfy the launch needs of the entire world. You could double the amount of stuff launched, and still only need one plane.
There's probably not going to be a lot of airframes to spread development costs across.
Either that, or we will launch a lot more stuff, 9 tons at a time.
The biggest thing going against it is it's not clear this scheme can drive the costs down enough to double or triple the launched mass per year. There is a limited number of things we can do in space. A significant part of the cost of any single probe is the launch.
If we can reduce launch costs enough (maybe making the booster reusable) and through building a standard probe with pluggable sensors, drive down the building costs, we could have dozens of probes going places we currently can't afford to go. We spend enormous effort in shaving off every single gram from anything that goes to space. If going to space gets cheaper, we can spend a lot less time shaving probes and more time probing.
Correct. They just flew in two used 747s and cannibalized them for parts. http://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/paul-a...
>The crew’s flight deck is literally that of a 747.
>Allen bought two used jumbo jets formerly flown by United Airlines and cannibalized them for parts that account for about half the empty weight of the Roc.
>So although the shell of the cockpit and all the rest of the plane’s body is new — hand-built by Scaled Composites from carbon fiber composites — various key pieces and systems, including avionics, hydraulics and fuel subsystems, are salvaged 747 parts. BAE Systems was subcontracted to disassemble the 747 and install its systems on the Roc.
>The cockpit seats look old and used because they are. The seats as well as the controls the crew will manipulate and the windows they’ll look out of all came from the 747s.
>So did the plane’s six Pratt & Whitney engines, which are already refurbished, cleaned, wrapped and set aside in a corner, ready to hang on the airframe when it’s finished.