The Rocket Man has a nice article up on the incremental testing of some of the new X-plane rockets, as well as the Japanese RVT, and a few others. The insights are well worth reading, and it serves as a good explanation as to the high costs of going to orbit.
Incremental flight testing is either the process of gradually testing a complete vehicle in every region of the flight envelope prior to performing its eventual mission, which is the method Scaled Composites is using, and/or the process of building and testing successfully more complex vehicles to determine optimum vehicle design, which is the process the Japanese are using in their RVT project.The first method is the one currently used in the development of airplanes. A basic design is decided upon and a number of essentially identical test aircraft are built. These aircraft are then subjected to a series of tests, starting out with simple taxi tests and gradually working towards full flight testing at maximum speed/altitude/g’s. The goal of every test is to collect data about how the vehicle is performing and then to analyze that data to see if any part of the vehicle needs to be modified. Any alterations to the vehicle are followed by additional flight tests to verify the modification work as planned.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by elkaim at December 22, 2003 4:18 PM