Sentence examples for spaceplane from inspiring English sources
noun
A rocket plane designed to pass the edge of space, combining certain features of aircraft and spacecraft.
We talked with the bosses of vehicle operators, spaceplane launch systems and engine developers such as Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Generation Orbit and Reaction Engines.
The Space Shuttle did indeed look like a visitor from the future a winged spaceplane, rather than a cone stuck on top of a cylinder, like its predecessor, Apollo.
But the country has recently altered its approach, investing £300m ($484m) through the European Space Agency (ESA), resulting in the first British astronaut Tim Peake, as well as developing a spaceplane and a centre to develop new uses for satellites.
Spaceplanes are a long-held dream of aeronautical engineers, and the SABRE engine is a development of an abortive British spaceplane project called HOTOL, undertaken in the 1980s by Rolls-Royce and British Aerospace (now BAE Systems).
For an experimental spaceplane, two disasters in 135 missions is not a terrible record (the Apollo project was far more dangerous: of the 16 manned missions to use Apollo hardware, one suffered a fatal accident on the ground during tests and one was almost lost in space).
The Pentagon recently announced plans for another reusable spaceplane known as the XS-1.
Compared with spaceplanes, conventional rockets are reasonably well understood.As George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic's chief executive, pointed out in an interview that took place before the crash, there have been around 100 space-launch vehicles in history, but only a handful of rocketplanes, of which only two (the Space Shuttle and the X-15) have flown in space with anyone on board.
But insurance will be cold comfort following the failure on October 31st of VSS Enterprise, half of the firm's SpaceShipTwo fleet of spaceplanes, resulting in the death of one pilot and the severe injury of another.On top of the tragic loss of life, the accident in California will cast a long shadow over the future of space tourism, even before it has properly begun.
A spaceport, we learned, has the facilities and infrastructure to support the launch of spaceplanes which can either carry satellites or humans embarking on that most modern of interests, space tourism.
Space-tourism firms may even need export licences to carry foreign passengers on sub-orbital spaceplanes.
Why this fascination with complicated, unproven spaceplanes rather than simple, well-tried rockets?One answer is the unshakable belief by many in high office that, provided enough taxpayer dollars are thrown at a problem, clever engineers will find ingenious solutions.
