Spaceport RT
RSEVERY [Randall]  Mon Mar 15, 1993

  I just received this from the Internet this afternoon.  I thought
some of you might be interested....

 Cheers....   Randall Severy

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: Cohen@ssdgwy.mdc.com (Andy Cohen)
 Newsgroups: sci.space
 Subject: DC-X
 Followup-To: sci.space
 Date: 12 Mar 1993 22:51:22 GMT
 Organization: MDA-W

 I had the incredible honor to get a detailed tour of the Delta Clipper-X...
  and I'd like to try sharing some of it with you all....

 I went over there on my daily lunch time walk-by and saw a group of MDA
 folk getting a tour ..... so I ...walked over and joined them....  I
 got to hear the end of the description of how the hydraulic system on
 the engine gimbles work....We were then invited to climb the stairs to
 get a closer look at the upper sections...some of the buildings here
 are tall and made for working on titans and deltas.....  The interior
 of the DC-X was exposed with the exterior-Dick Rutan-produced shell
 standing on it's German produced landing gear off to the side...  I got
 a closeup view of the Oxygen tank which looked like it came from a
 titan booster or possibly a delta-large cylindrical and takes up at
 least 2/3 of the interior...  The sperical hydrogen tanks are in a
 framework which sits on top of the O2 tank. The same framework has a
 platform over the H2 tanks which house the avionics...which are off the
 shelf from the F-15 program.  I also got to see the hydraulics for the
 side flaps.... Everything is literally OFF-THE-SHELF....rivets,
 connectors...cables are longer than they needed to be just in case of a
 design change.....DC-X is a perfect example of concurrent engineering
 in the extreme!

 The outside shell is square on the bottom and narrows at the top to a
 circle.  Each side has a large flap which is used like the stabilizer
 on a jet to control the DC.....along with the flaps, and the engine
 gimbeling, the tour guide told me that the engines are throttled at
 different rates to also control DC direction...the use of all three are
 supposed to be enough to.....turn it around for a landing.......

 The landing gear are not strong enough to hold a fully loaded
 DC-X...instead a launch frame holds the infrastructure and during
 flight at some point the foor "legs" extract then help absorb shock at
 landing...along with the engines......

 We were standing at the opening of the building looking at the landing
 gear when.....Pete Conrad strolled by and went into a trailer....  I
 immediately realized that the trailer housed the launch control
 system..... After telling the tour guide of the support for DC-X coming
 from the people here at sci.space I asked if I could go into the
 control trailer....  It was great!  a set of Silicon Graphics
 workstations all with highly interactive, graphical representations of
 the DC-X flight systems..all running a liftoff simulation and tied
 directly to the avionics on the real bird.....Pete's console had a
 display of an ADI-like presentation to give some idea of the
 reliationship of DC-X orientation with the Earth surface.  There were
 graphical representations of the engines and the flaps too......it was
 a lot like what I and my team have been developing for SSF.

 The team in the trailer were happy to exchange technical details.... I
 told them that I'd trade my slot on SSF for a seat, but they
 all.....laughed!

 They were MOST interested in hearing about YOUR support.

 I agreed to carry hard copies of posts from here to their facility as a
 morale booster.....they say they work 40 hour days there....... and are
 looking forward to months in the desert.......They do not know about
 how this communitee feels about their efforts...so SPEAK UP!!

 I will be uploading for FTP more stuff....stay tuned!!  Just 3 more
 weeks to the rollout!!!