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September 30, 2004
SPADS Parallels Pioneering Effort of SpaceShipOne as SS1 Clears the First Hurdle
Mojave Spaceport and Edwards Air Force Base. On 29 September 2004 as dawn broke across the high desert region of central California, two pioneering efforts were drawing to an historical moment, inexorably linked by humankind's inate desire to reach for the stars - and ten million dollars!
SpaceShipOne
At 8:13am PDT (29 Sept 2004), Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne (SS1) coasted above the 100 km altitude point and successfully completed the first of two Ansari X-Prize flights. The peak altitude reached was 337,500 ft. The motor was shut down when the pilot, Mike Melvill, noted that his altitude predictor exceeded the required 100 km mark. The motor burn lasted 77 seconds – 1 second longer than on the June 21st flight. Melvill was prepared to burn the motor up to 89 seconds, which indicates significant additional performance remains in SS1.
Note: SS1's second flight has been officially scheduled for Oct 4th, about 7:00am. See the X Prize announcement.
Spaceport Arrival and Departure Safety System (SPADS)
As the White Knight (SS1's carrier plane) and SS1 were climbing to the release point of about 50,000 feet, a demonstration of another pioneering effort was underway about 20 miles across the desert on Edwards Air Force Base. There, a doppler radar was "watching" the SS1 flight out of the Mojave Spaceport, and gathering remarkably new and large amounts of data on the flight of the crafts. This was the culmination of a California Space Infrastructure Program (CSIP) project demonstration known as SPADS, Spaceport Arrival and Departure Safety System.
Pictured at right above is the Weibel radar, heart of the SPADS project. One of the square panels is the transmitter and the other receives the returned signals from the tracked objects.
At left is pictured the control room (actually a small trailer just over a 100 feet from the radar) for the SPADS equipment. Pictured on the screen are velocity graphs of the shotgun blasts fired today as another part of the demonstration. The system was able to track individual BBs (steel shot pictured at right below), and the wadding from the blast as well.
The ability to simultaneously and efficiently track multiple aerospace and space vehicles in an environment where reusable launch vehicles are potentially operating in the same area requires new multi-frequency/multi-object tracking. The development and deployment of such a system is required significantly ahead of impending congestion conditions to obtain system maturity and reliability. The SPADS system is such a system, undergoing initial prototyping in a SPIRAL development program at the Air Force Flight Test Center (412th Test Wing), Edwards AFB, CA.
This first SPADS spiral was jointly funded by CSA's CSIP program and the Air Force.
In addition to CSA and the Air Force, other participants in the SPADS project demonstration included (alphabetically):
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