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Sounds like you read about the General Electric MOOSE and the Douglas Paracone.

http://www.astronautix.com/m/m...

http://www.astronautix.com/p/p...

Sounds like you read about the General Electric MOOSE and the Douglas Paracone.

http://www.astronautix.com/m/m...

http://www.astronautix.com/p/p...

ITS has an unusually large gamble involved, even by the standards of Musk's companies. Just to pick issue one of many: it's cryogenic composite tanks. Composites and cryogenics don't play well together; there have been attempts in the past, and they were failures. Musk is wanting to take us from "zero launch vehicles of any size using composite cryogenic tanks" to "by far the largest launch vehicle ever built, fully reusable up to a thousand times (for the booster), out of composites". That's a huge jump. ...

They're also working on insanely high pressure, full flow staged combustion engines with a rarely used propellant mix, used up to a thousand times each with low maintenance...

Ordinarily I'd agree with you. If we were talking about the usual suspects (NASA/Boeing/LockMart), they'd have a pile of paper at this stage and not much else.

But SpaceX has (had) a giant carbon fiber tank which they successfully burst tested to 2/3rds the design pressure back in November, then blew up testing with liquid nitrogen on February 17th 2017. (Judging by the pictures, it failed at the equatorial seam.)

They've built and tested a 1/3rd scale Raptor engine (which I presume you already knew, but other readers might not). It's the first full flow methane fueled rocket engine ever to be test fired, and only the second full flow design in history. (The first was Russia's RD-270, tested back in 1967.)

Having done those things is impressive enough, but the absurdly fantastic part is how rapidly they've done it. They were in Mississippi at the Stennis Space Center in late 2013 to refurbish and modify the E2 test stand to handle methane. Slashdot covered that. They were done with that process April 21st, 2014. Slashdot didn't notice that part. They used that test stand to validate their design and conducted the scale model test firing on September 26th, 2016, just 2 years, 5 months, and 5 days later. And it worked. They were so sure it would work, they didn't even bother with the customary 'burp' test to be sure it would ignite properly. That's a ridiculously rapid development process for any rocket motor, let alone for a design that's been done only once before in history and never for the fuel they selected. For comparison, development of the F-1 used on the Saturn V started in 1955 for the Air Force and it wasn't until 1965 that it underwent a successful test firing without destroying itself, after three years of self-destructive test firings.

SpaceX have definitely set themselves some very hard tasks, but their demonstrated ability to actually get to the test article stage, and from there to the production stage, and to do so quickly, is unmatched in modern times.

I'm also thinking what is remarkable is how someone like Korolev managed to get a good education, learn management skills, live through Stalin abuses, able to get Politburo to provide him resources... What if he died in the gulags? Did USSR have others with the engineer/manager talent but perished in purges, what if they lived?

US managed to get talent that excelled like Goddard, Ames, Glenn, Dryden (these four guys with others laid the groundwork for the space age), Von Braun, Kraft, Low, Gilruth, etc. also lots of engineers from Germany (Operation Paperclip) and Canada (cancellation of Avro Arrow and Avrocar) though lately it seems talent has become bogged down unless they have a few billion of their own to kick around (Musk, Bezos). However, as you mentioned astronauts/cosmonauts are talented, however, first need someone to build the rocket (hard as they have to battle bureaucracies, egos, do engineering tradeoffs, etc.) then find someone to ride it (easy as seen when lots of highly qualified people apply for astronaut positions).

Someone from Ukraine pointed out this guy, Mikhail Yangel, which he said was more brilliant and instrumental in Soviet rocket development programs. On subject of avoiding death before his time, a rocket prototype blew up on the pad in 1960 killing Nedelin, the Chief of the rocket forces, and nearly 100 others. Yangel was only saved because he had gone into a bunker for a smoke just before the explosion. Also from the link, "Korolev works for Tass, Chelomei works on crap, Yangel works for us." http://www.astronautix.com/y/y...

I have a hard time agreeing with that. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I think there are a number of things which detract from that argument. The principles of solid fuel rockets are pretty solidly nailed down, especially in terms of chemistry, and while solid fuel does have certain conveniences, ballistic missiles can run just fine on alcohol, jet fuel, kerosene, or whatever is lying around. Almost anyone could produce ballistic missiles, it's a lot easier than putting something in orbit. JAXA building one solid fuel rocket every two or three years is not actually equivalent to having the ability to manufacture ballistic missiles en masse. Turns out, you build missiles differently from rockets, which might explain why they have different names. Playing around with KSP will probably give you the most insight into the kind of structural differences you would need to adapt this technology, but rockets tend to be fairly precisely designed around mission requirements, so if you change those drastically you would still need to re-engineer your rocket significantly. Also, it's extremely unlikely that they were manufacturing this with mass production in mind (i.e. hundreds at once) so that capability would also need to be developed. Also, one of the fun features of solid fuel rockets is that shutting them off once you turn them on can be a challenge, so anything that's going to supply you with the velocity to reach orbit is going to be complete overkill if you happen to not want to do that, so you can't just slap a warhead on top of this rocket and call it a day.

This could be considered a starting point for a ballistic missile program, but so could a copy of John Clark's Ignition!. The problems of ballistic missiles and of orbiting satellites are not as similar as they might appear, and in no sense could these rockets be considered "dual use". And remember that thing where the US did the reverse, trying to turn Redstone ballistic missiles into orbit-capable launch vehicles? Here's a list of Redstone launches. Note that the word "failure" occurs 80 times in that list, and Redstone was considered a reliable rocket. So essentially rocketry is difficult, and this should not be considered a strategic move. It might be useful for some political purpose to pretend that it is a strategic move, but I tend to doubt that as well -- as you say, if it's just NK that gets upset no one will care.

1. Republican president Eisenhower started NASA as a bi-partisan response to Sputnik with then-senator Lyndon Johnson (Democrat of Texas who became JFK's v.p. and then President). It was under Eisenhower that the Von Braun team began the Saturn launch vehicle program and let the first contracts for the F-1 engine development program. The activity was done under the auspices of the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency then located at the Redstone Arsenal and under several project names including Juno V. The Juno V became the Saturn as the project and the Von Braun team were transferred from the Army to the newly-formed civilian NASA. This is how Kennedy was able to come along only months after becoming president and announce the moon mission and was able to watch the first Saturn launch from Cape Canaveral during his first term (and, sadly, only) year in office. Saturn started under a REPUBLICAN and had bi-partisan support

2. LBJ started chopping money for Saturns in his 1966 budget and eventually cancelled the Saturn rocket production line, thereby ending Apollo. He could not afford his war in Vietnam, his "Great Society" social programs, AND the moon program. On the day that Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon 6 months into the Nixon administration, all Saturn production had already been halted (under LBJ's budgets the least of which was made law in October 1968 before Nixon was elected. At that point, the Apollo Applications program was already well-underway and looking for the best and most affordable uses for the limited number of Saturn launch vehicles which had been built and were in storage. They ended up not even using them all since Nixon got really gun-shy after Apollo 13 and did not want to be the president to be blamed for losing people in space.

3. Like it or not, Nixon green-lighted the shuttle program while John Young was hopping around on the moon - setting up decades of both Republicans and Democrats wrapping themselves in positive PR of the shuttles.

4. Republican Reagan preserved and extended the shuttle program post-Columbia by having NASA build a replacement orbiter rather than leading the nation in a long navel-gazing exercise and hiding under a rock. Democrats and Republicans post-Reagan then rode on the coat-tails of shuttle.

5. Obama has spent his entire 8 years trying to kill-off NASA manned spacecraft and NASA manned launch vehicles. Every NASA budget he has proposed has either eliminated or severely down-sized the funding for these and every time congress has overridden him. The bi-partisan congress (practically the only cross-the-aisle cooperation) has repeatedly fought him to force construction of SLS and Orion; if SLS and Orion ever help send man to Mars(and I'm not holding my breath on that) it will be IN SPITE OF Obama rather than because of it as he will someday pretend.

You could know all these FACTS if you bothered to look at them - NASA has the entire history of the Saturn rockets online etc.

Next time, try using facts before pushing a partisan political agenda. NASA and its projects have had supporters and opponents in BOTH parties. Obama simply has not been one of those supporters. He's great with a teleprompter and he has a snarky swagger that seems to engender fanboy worship of him, but that facts put him in Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter territory with regard to Space rather than in Eisenhower, Reagan, JFK, and LBJ territory.

The Soyuz launch vehicle is still at best half as capable as the F-9 and its launch prices were quoted for around $50M ten years ago.

I feel for the guy. My Dad was an engineer on the Aerojet 260 project. They felt, all along, the segmented approach was unsafe. It was just that NASA and USAF never agreed. Still have a bunch of photos and some news clippings. So Thiokol got the bid and my Dad's work on the largest rocket motor ever fired is just one for the history books.

Not an SR-71, a Tu-160. Specifically the TU-160SK / Burlak combo, which was actually studied by the Germans.
First stage ignition at mach 1.7 and 13500 metres altitude to get a 1100kg payload into a 100km orbit.

The plane was considered to be the zeroth stage.

According to this site:

http://www.astronautix.com/cra...

It weighs 450 kg, a little less than half a ton. Maybe he disassembled it and shipped it home one piece at a time?

local scientific survey module

http://www.astronautix.com/cra...

The rover is light...they had to get it there on that most rickety looking lunar lander.

It's kind of funny that they once envisioned this:

http://public.media.smithsonia...

But instead we got this:

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def...

To be frank, it looks like a 2nd grade science project using cardboard, aluminum foil, and brass-colored duct-tape.

If somebody brought a model of that to school in the 50's as a lunar lander project, it would be laughed at, smashed, and given an "F", not necessarily in that order.

I remember seeing some aerospace contractor sketches of the early 60's. It started out a bit cleaner, but over time became more and more skeletal. No politically-conscious manager would approve a contract with something that ugly, so they dressed it up a bit.

I would note that Von Braun sketched up spindly looking designs in the early 50's: http://www.astronautix.com/cra...

Ahead of his time.

A space plane isn't inherently unreliable. Placing said space plane below the level of cryogenic fuel tank insulation, with ice subject to crashing into it at hundreds of miles an hour is, in retrospect, pretty silly. Dream Chaser (DC) sits at the top of the rocket stack - it's smaller than the space shuttle, so this is feasible.

Putting the space plane on top of the stack isn't without it's own problems though... mainly in the form of huge aerodynamic issues because the wings are now where they can exert the greatest leverage. (Read among other things: in the exact right spot to cause the most control problems and to tear the stack to shreds if there's only a small problem with the angle of attack.) That's why the Dyansoar's Titan booster had suchhuge fins, simply gimbaling the engines did not provide sufficient control authority to offset the resistance of the wings.

For the record, as a huge fan of Spacex, I don't think the DC needs to be trashed on - it was a good (not great) proposal stuck between the big PR darling and the politically best-connected contractor in the business.

You forgot: "and was the most technically difficult proposal and submitted by the contractor with the least experience of any kind". Sierra Nevada has no substantial grounds for complaint, their solution may have been competitive on price, but contrary to popular belief these types of contracts are NOT awarded solely on the basis of costs. Technical factors also play a huge role. Which also explains the award to Boeing, it wasn't political connections, it was because SpaceX has a damm poor track record when it comes to delivering on time.

Looking at Bezos's New Shepherd Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing vehicle you might think that somewhere along the line Jeff caught a glimpse of Boeing's old design.

I assume you're talking about the right image in the Encyclopedia Astronautica link - that is an educated (and ultimately incorrect) guess by Encyclopedia Astronautica of what the vehicle would look like, from years before actual images were released (see http://www.blueorigin.com/upda...).

The designs were revived in the 1980s by Gary Hudson and Pacific-American Launch Systems (Phoenix) and later by General Dynamics (Millennium Express --disclaimer, I helped name it) as their proposal for the DC-X competition.

Yes, New Shepherd was clearly influenced by all that (as have several others, including a Japanese suborbital test vehicle). The design makes sense for a number of reasons:

• structure weight is critical for SSTO, and the closer you get to a sphere, the better your structure-weight to propellant-volume gets, hence the relatively squat shape
• the rounded-cone shape makes a great reentry vehicle, with some maneuverability (assuming asymmetric mass distribution)
• the heat-shield on the base serves to protect against engine exhaust on launch as well as reentry heating
• aerospike nozzles are inherently altitude-compensating, so potentially more efficient

Of course there are downsides to the design too, particularly in terms of integrating the design so that it's light enough for SSTO, and starting and controlling the large number of thrust chambers (usually at least 16, some designs with 24 or 32).

Back in 1981-1983 when I was local support team leader for Space Studies Institute in Miami, FL promoting the idea of space colonies among the locals, one of the slides we showed was of this artist's conception of a Single Stage to Orbit Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing system proposed by Boeing to loft solar power satellites into LEO. This vehicle also appeared in Gerard O'Neill's original edition of "The High Frontier" that Jeff Bezos probably read while he was becoming the valedictorian of his high school class.

Looking at Bezos's New Shepherd Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing vehicle you might think that somewhere along the line Jeff caught a glimpse of Boeing's old design.

There has been a satellite servicing project at NASA/Goddard for about, uh, 3 decades. While for most of its existence it was focused on servicing performed by astronauts, there has always been some work going on in robotic servicing. One of the recent accomplishments was a robotic refueling demonstration

http://ssco.gsfc.nasa.gov/robo...

The only time the robotic effort was funded it a relatively high level was during the space station freedom era, and that only lasted for a couple of years before congress pulled the plug. To make matters worse, most of the money that was appropriated went to Martin-Marietta for concept studies

http://www.astronautix.com/cra...

So what. Once you have flyback capability it is bleeping obvious. Ever seen the Ithacus concept from 1966?

I would have loved to have seen what it would do with a couple of merlins but it was designed at a time when it looked like the closest the Navy would get to a carrier was slapping some planks on a merchantman and by the time it was done they were ass deep in carriers.

Umm...according to the wiki page, the U.S. had at least one operational carrier since 1922. I'm not sure if you mean it was assigned to the Air Force or Marines or something so it wasn't a "Navy carrier?" By the time the war broke out in Europe, the U.S. had six...and the V-173 proposal looks like it was given to the Navy in 1939.

If you're referring to the BI-1 as the "Russian rocket fighter," A) it doesn't sound like they got it to fly as well as they liked, B) there is no mention on the Wikipedia article of it being sent to production, and C) no mention whatsoever of it being a fighter.

http://www.astronautix.com/cra...

Plans for production were abandoned. Rocketplane testing in the USSR only resumed with the testing of German designs after the war..

If you're talking about the Ohka for the Japanese "much better version of the ME163," you at least hit the mark in that they were actually manufactured (which you can say about a lot of the German designs) and used in combat. Saying they were "much better" seems rather unreliable as they only sound like they were ever used for flying a straight line really fast and then ramming. The Me-163 had to, y'know, actually maneuver and fire and land again. Did they even bother putting landing gears on Ohkas? I think not.

I've heard of the ice carrier, yes, but the Flapjack was a U.S. design (unless there's another one that went by the same nickname). Which, pursuant to my first point, the U.K. had at least one carrier operational at the start of the war as well (the Ark Royal just off the top of my head...and that was an old one; I'm sure they had several more available).

P.S: Thanks for the interesting, if misleading, post for a change.

Try reading about Ithacus. Basically you use rocket power to be able to insert troops and cargo anywhere on Earth in a matter of minutes. The idea is hardly new. It dates from the 1960s.

In the early 1960's, General Electric was working on an emergency "bail-out" system for astronauts in low-earth orbit. http://www.astronautix.com/craft/moose.htm
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE

Yup, hadn't forgotten MOL, which I thought at the time could have been pursued usefully, but thanks for the tip. So far as I know none of the MOL missions involved anti-sat weaponry. According to what I've read, at least one of Almaz stations was armed with a cannon ~23mm and test fired. Somewhere I still might have some links, but can't find them. (my lack of organization is really pissing me off these days) This link gives some good info on Almaz:

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/almazops.htm

Came across something interesting regarding the hassle of selecting orbits - if we go high enough to avoid more atmosphere and thus drag we start to run into the inner Van Allen belt, but there've been serious proposals to remove it, which would give us a lot more flexibility for putting things where we'd like them. Higher orbits would cost more, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt#Implications_for_space_travel

This to me is astounding, a brand new (to me) nifty idea. It would give us a lot more room to play with and maybe give time for folks to begin seriously cleaning LEO of debris.

SpaceX quotes their launch price for the Falcon 9 at $54 Million. All the sources I can find for the Atlas V put the launch cost at $138 Million. Though I couldn't find a price listed on their website, which is really understandable if you think about it.

It's not a matter of funding, but a matter of economics. There are big economies of scale in launch frequency. There are huge fixed costs such as R&D, launch pads, launch teams, etc. And there's the learning curve effect where highly complex activities become cheaper, more mundane, understandable, and less error prone, the more often they are done.

One can't take advantage of these, if one builds a low frequency launch vehicle. That's what NASA has been doing ever since the Saturn V, building a series of large, low launch frequency launch vehicles one after the other. But from the supply chain point of view, the current cycle of develop and abort (going back several launch vehicle attempts) is optimal for funding. One gets paid a lot of money and doesn't have to deliver much of anything.

The military missile programs in the US and USSR on the other hand, while they don't launch a lot of missiles, they do make a lot of them and as such, take most of the advantages of the above.

The missile programs while not at all cheap were easily affordable on a NASA-sized budget. According to Wikipedia, development of the Peacekeeper missile was around $20 billion in 80s money. That's about three years of budget for NASA at the time (it'd be more like two today). The Minuteman program was apparently similar in cost (Encyclopedia Astronautica claims development costs of $2 billion ranging from the 50s through the last decade).

Larger launch vehicles can put up somewhat larger structures (because the payloads can be wider and heavier), but IMHO the main constraint for actual NASA activities is the cost of the activity, not the physical dimensions of the payload. For example, if the US-launched components of the ISS had been physically shrunk in dimension about 10% in width (5.5 meters width down to 5 meters), so that they could be launched on a Delta IV Heavy instead of a Space Shuttle (none of these components were particularly heavy, the heaviest parts were the Russian parts and those were mostly launched by Proton rockets). Then NASA could have dropped the Shuttle in 2000, instead of 2011, and saved somewhere around $20 billion in cost, just from no longer having to maintain the infrastructure for the Shuttle. NASA probably have had to spend some of that savings to accelerate Delta IV development (teh Delta IV Heavy didn't actually launch till 2004) and perhaps develop a capsule for use with the Delta IV Heavy, but I gather those costs wouldn't be much larger than a few billion dollars. That's still savings of more than 5% of the NASA budget for the last ten years.

In other words, with a modest reduction in capability and the phasing out of the Shuttle a decade early, one gets a substantially cheaper space station (and a fair chunk of the NASA budget for the last ten years). This is typical of the sorts of choices that NASA has made over the past half century. So in my view, NASA has plenty of budget for its current activities (and any proposed goals such as lunar bases and Mars manned exploration), it just doesn't spend that money even remotely well.

Silly answer: It's a Terrier Malemute with an improve Malemute upper stage.

Serious answer: it's a sounding rocket based on the US Navy RIM-2 Terrier surface-to-air missile from the 1950s as the first stage, with a Thiokol Malemute upper stage. The Terrier is used as a first stage for a variety of small rockets.

A recent launch of note that used Terrier-Malemute variants was ATREX.

You're forgetting the F-1A.

The F1 was designed in 1959. The F1A is an improved version, which is what we're really talking about.

And the F1A has these stats:

Rocketdyne Lox/Kerosene rocket engine. 9189.6 kN. Study 1968. Designed for booster applications. Gas generator, pump-fed. Isp=310s.

Thrust (sl): 8,003.800 kN (1,799,326 lbf). Thrust (sl): 816,178 kgf. Engine: 8,098 kg (17,853 lb). Chamber Pressure: 70.00 bar. Area Ratio: 16. Propellant Formulation: Lox/RP-1. Thrust to Weight Ratio: 115.71.

Status: Study 1968.
Unfuelled mass: 8,098 kg (17,853 lb).
Height: 5.48 m (17.97 ft).
Diameter: 3.61 m (11.84 ft).
Thrust: 9,189.60 kN (2,065,904 lbf).
Specific impulse: 310 s.
Specific impulse sea level: 270 s.
Burn time: 158 s.
First Launch: 1967.

Source: http://www.astronautix.com/engines/f1a.htm

The RD-170 has these stats:

Chambers: 4. Thrust (sl): 7,550.000 kN (1,697,300 lbf). Thrust (sl): 769,876 kgf. Engine: 9,750 kg (21,490 lb). Chamber Pressure: 245.00 bar. Area Ratio: 36.87. Thrust to Weight Ratio: 82.66. Oxidizer to Fuel Ratio: 2.6.

AKA: 11D520.
Status: Development ended 1976.
Unfuelled mass: 9,750 kg (21,490 lb).
Height: 3.78 m (12.40 ft).
Diameter: 4.02 m (13.17 ft).
Thrust: 7,903.00 kN (1,776,665 lbf).
Specific impulse: 337 s.
Specific impulse sea level: 309 s.
Burn time: 150 s.
First Launch: 1981-93.
Number: 12 .

Source: http://www.astronautix.com/engines/rd170.htm

Chest thumping? I think not.

--
BMO

You're forgetting the F-1A.

The F1 was designed in 1959. The F1A is an improved version, which is what we're really talking about.

And the F1A has these stats:

Rocketdyne Lox/Kerosene rocket engine. 9189.6 kN. Study 1968. Designed for booster applications. Gas generator, pump-fed. Isp=310s.

Thrust (sl): 8,003.800 kN (1,799,326 lbf). Thrust (sl): 816,178 kgf. Engine: 8,098 kg (17,853 lb). Chamber Pressure: 70.00 bar. Area Ratio: 16. Propellant Formulation: Lox/RP-1. Thrust to Weight Ratio: 115.71.

Status: Study 1968.
Unfuelled mass: 8,098 kg (17,853 lb).
Height: 5.48 m (17.97 ft).
Diameter: 3.61 m (11.84 ft).
Thrust: 9,189.60 kN (2,065,904 lbf).
Specific impulse: 310 s.
Specific impulse sea level: 270 s.
Burn time: 158 s.
First Launch: 1967.

Source: http://www.astronautix.com/engines/f1a.htm

The RD-170 has these stats:

Chambers: 4. Thrust (sl): 7,550.000 kN (1,697,300 lbf). Thrust (sl): 769,876 kgf. Engine: 9,750 kg (21,490 lb). Chamber Pressure: 245.00 bar. Area Ratio: 36.87. Thrust to Weight Ratio: 82.66. Oxidizer to Fuel Ratio: 2.6.

AKA: 11D520.
Status: Development ended 1976.
Unfuelled mass: 9,750 kg (21,490 lb).
Height: 3.78 m (12.40 ft).
Diameter: 4.02 m (13.17 ft).
Thrust: 7,903.00 kN (1,776,665 lbf).
Specific impulse: 337 s.
Specific impulse sea level: 309 s.
Burn time: 150 s.
First Launch: 1981-93.
Number: 12 .

Source: http://www.astronautix.com/engines/rd170.htm

Chest thumping? I think not.

--
BMO

First, Low Earth Orbit speeds are about 17000 MPH. Launching a sub-orbital spacecraft toward a destination is actually just as fat and also orders of magnitude less expensive to build. The technology to do that is much more within reach than a vacuum tube train and it requires far less infrastructure.

Second, who says the tube that has the train car has to be a vacuum? If the train car were shaped like a dart, one could accelerate it with a rocket motor to get it to speed, and then as it breaks through a membrane to get in to the tunnel, it would compress a mixture of natural gas and air where the tunnel meets the edge of the dart. The burn of this fuel would then accelerate the car/dart further in to the tunnel. This is roughly the method that the SHARP gun used to accelerate projectiles to 3 km/sec. I'm not exactly sure how one could keep the acceleration to something that wouldn't turn everyone in to goo, but I am certain that a bit of propellant selection might make this practical.

Q. How much does it cost to launch a Space Shuttle?
A. The average cost to launch a Space Shuttle is about $450 million per mission.

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/delheavy.htm

Delta IV Heavy ... Launch Price $: 254.000 million in 2004 dollars in 2002 dollars.

http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/elvs/atlas5_specs.shtml

Atlas V Heavy ... US $130 M

And SRBs that size have to be made in segments

Nope - the original spec was single spun body, not segmented. The air force also developed a single spun body version, same as military boosters. NASA - It's all pork all the way down.

If you want a cannon, use an actual cannon, and not an electromagnetic accelerator. Pipe is way cheaper than than a series of coils and a frickin huge power supply to feed them. These big electromagnetic launchers leave out the part about how they brown out an entire state when launching. One Space Shuttle engine had the equivalent of 4 Hoover Dams power output (8 GW), or 8 nuclear power plants. The StarTram Generation 1 system will need 53 GW for 30 seconds.

This gun was built in the 1960's and reached orbital altitude but not orbital speed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP

This one reached 3/8 of orbital speed in the early 1990's

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/sharp.htm

Slightly faster one (1/2 orbital speed) would be a very effective launcher, replacing the whole first stage of a two stage rocket.

I was told once that the original design for the Shuttle's SRBs did not call for segmentation. It was supposed to be on once piece shipped by boat. But because the manufacturing for contracted elsewhere for political reasons, it required a redesign of the SRBs to be segmented for cargo rail placement.

That's true (not even a boat needed, probably - just built more or less on site).
There was however no way to ship single-body SRBs from Utah.

If this works, maybe the people who were designing things like the MOOSE orbital bail-out system weren't as crazy as everyone thought....

(see: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/moose.htm )

What, exactly, are you sorry about?

Nobody claimed they couldn't get into LEO (although of the three only the Terrier-Malemute is really capable of it).

Neither of these rockets are new - both the Orion and the Malemute first flew in the 70's, so the military (and anyone else interested) has had plenty of time to consider them as launch vehicles.

Also, the "Terrier" in Terrier-Malemute and Terrier-Improved Orion is the old RIM-2 Terrier Surface-to-Air missile from the 50's used as a first stage for the Malemute and Orion rockets, making them two-stage for improved altitude and payload.

Finally, while there certainly is a fuzzy border between top-performing sounding rockets and small lift launch vehicles (generally defined as being able to lift 2,000 lbs to LEO), these three vehicles belong squarely in the sounding rocket category.

This is not a test of a new inexpensive launch vehicle, nor is it a way to demonstrate our military capabilities. It's just science.

What, exactly, are you sorry about?

Nobody claimed they couldn't get into LEO (although of the three only the Terrier-Malemute is really capable of it).

Neither of these rockets are new - both the Orion and the Malemute first flew in the 70's, so the military (and anyone else interested) has had plenty of time to consider them as launch vehicles.

Also, the "Terrier" in Terrier-Malemute and Terrier-Improved Orion is the old RIM-2 Terrier Surface-to-Air missile from the 50's used as a first stage for the Malemute and Orion rockets, making them two-stage for improved altitude and payload.

Finally, while there certainly is a fuzzy border between top-performing sounding rockets and small lift launch vehicles (generally defined as being able to lift 2,000 lbs to LEO), these three vehicles belong squarely in the sounding rocket category.

This is not a test of a new inexpensive launch vehicle, nor is it a way to demonstrate our military capabilities. It's just science.

The summary reads like an angry teenager implying that they could do better.

Because they can do better. Starting from the Soviet Union days, the Soyez launch systems had an amazing success record. All the problems they've recently point to a falling of standards. From the bottom of the page:

But as a space launcher, the R-7, with upper stages, became the most successful in history. By the year 2000 over 1,628 had been launched with a success rate of 97.5% for production models.

In a great many ways, Gemini was more advanced than Apollo. This shouldn't be surprising so far as it was established after the Apollo program was already running along very well and that the engineers behind Gemini were able to start with a "clean-sheet" design to build their vehicles. It was a small, very agile design team with a limited budget (unlike Apollo where the statement "waste anything but time" was plastered on the walls of many contractors) and a well defined scope to their vehicles. The total amount of money spent on the whole program was just a little over a billion dollars, which included the spacecraft costs, the launchers, and even the estimated cost of the recovery fleets involved (multiple U.S. Navy fleets assigned for a couple weeks on each mission).

All in all, this is really a tribute to SpaceX that they can even build something comparable, and you sir have given SpaceX a huge compliment by even making the comparison. There was even an attempt by McDonnell Douglas to continue the program with the Big Gemini project (more details can be found here), sadly only the first of a great many NASA manned spaceflight programs to be cancelled over the years even after hardware was created.

More importantly, the physics is still the same today as it was forty years ago, so it shouldn't be so surprising that similar solutions have been found to get the job done, at least from a superficial point of view.

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/julongun.htm

When just few percent of the launchpad mass gets into LEO, such (50+%) waste matters a lot. "The most reliable ... most frequently used launch vehicle in the world" (and among the least expensive ones, also in cost per kg) is a fully expendable rocket, semi-mass produced (on average over 30 per year; though there's a more mass-produced example in the very first widely used, large rocket; and who knows where we would be if OTRAG weren't cancelled for political reasons), and probably comfortably on its way towards a century of service (with how a new launchpad in Guiana is inaugurated right about now). Mass production, simplification, modularisation (of standard units) is what generally seems to do the trick in lowering costs of operations; few large, unique and overcomplicated units generally accomplishes quite the contrary.

Besides, capsules can be largely reusable as well. And don't forget how much they can do, and did, that STS-class vehicle cannot. Plus, why would you want humans to do experiments in a capsule? Space stations are for that ...for quite a bit longer than a puny one week (and if you insist, compare the length of "Soyuz strips" with those of the Shuttle in this timeline ...the first type looking there more like actual spaceships).

And most of the space station modules historically lifted, did so on an expendable launcher. In fact, there is some talk of retrofitting few in-storage "western part style" ISS modules with small orbital tugs, launching them on average medium launchers, and docking them autonomously like all Russian and some Japanese and European modules do - what will most likely end up being less expensive (including the R&D and manufacture of tugs!), less wasteful, than launching such modules on STS was! (which was "required" for many ISS modules only because they were specifically constructed that way, to give the Shuttle some purpose).
Think about it for a second - STS was among the three most powerful, by far, launchers in history (if not the most powerful at take off, too lazy to check). And yet, its payload capability was merely in the range of many medium expendable launchers. Proton, Ariane 5, Delta IV, Atlas V, Falcon, Long March, Angara, Rus. Pick one.

One shot of such launcher already gives comparable amounts of stuff to work with (of course you also need to launch crew on a separate launch or two, but it still ends up more economical and with much greater possibilities, much longer stay). And, if doing one launch of STS-scale rocket but without the waste of a glorified glider, you'd have few times more in just that one launch (Energia was a bit more sensible like that from the start - the Buran was just its payload; another one was an 80 ton space station modules, one being also at the core of their Mars mission spacecraft which Energia was to asemble; SLS will be also capable of such, it will represent this more sensible approach)

And if you want to bring some stuff back... well, capsules also lead in the amounts of recovered, valuable, purpose-specific, actually reused equipment (also scientific missions, including half of NASA experiments of such type, most during the Cold War; another type, and few more variants of just this one capsule here ...though the "Reentry" text of Foton, seemingly pasted over few arts, doesn't really make much sense and needs to be corr

I tend to agree. The article says there are only 8.7 million robots in the world. (I'm not sure about their definition. Do they count Roombas. Hard automation driven by cams?) That's an incredibly small number. It's one year of production for Toyota or GM, for example.

The big problem is that the cost of the mechanics hasn't declined much. That's mostly a lack of volume issue. However, the control electronics keeps getting cheaper, since it's computer technology.

Robot vision systems have improved a lot. Many pick and place robots now have at least a basic vision system for fine alignment. This is cheaper than trying to make the robot and the fixture so rigid that the job can be done blind. The biggest headache in industrial robotics is simply getting everything lined up so precisely that a dumb machine can do the job. Adding enough smarts to allow for some misalignment makes things work much better.

There's been progress on unstructured vision. Towel folding now works. The software is really slow. That can probably be fixed.

Having been in the field, I will say that we're now at the point where throwing money at the problem works. That wasn't true in the 1980s and 1990s. (See NASA's Flight Telerobotic Servicer, a $200 million flop.). The DARPA Grand Challenge was instructive in showing what money can do. The 2004 Grand Challenge was pathetic - nothing worked very well. At the 2005 Grand Challenge, the worst vehicles were better than anything from 2004, and the best ones were really good. It took NASCAR-sized budgets and the combined efforts of entire computer science departments and auto manufacturers, but it worked.

Uhm, something leaving orbit is plummeting through earth's atmosphere at a velocity which almost nothing else can achieve.

Ithacus was intended to launch from aircraft carriers for suborbital troop delivery; I don't know whether it was ever intended to land there:

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/ithacus.htm

In the late 60's, the USSR was planing on using using a Proton to send a Soyuz capsule on a circumlunar flight. (Note that they weren't planing on orbiting the moon, just swinging round the dark side and heading back to Earth, similar to the course Apollo 13 used.) They flew four unmanned test flights, but they were unable to fly a reentry pattern that wouldn't have killed the crew. The plans were shelved after Apollo 8 beat them to it with their lunar-orbital mission.

Zond 5, 6, 7, or 8 did fairly well (6 depressurised while still in deep space, but that's unrelated to reentry). Skip reentry worked fine. Turtles were alive and well (except for those on 6 of course :p ). Their main problems seemed to stem from the late go-ahead, crazy schedule, lack of focus, and related technical problems, apparently.

That's a well-known early development in walking machines. Technically it's closer to being an exoskeleton than a robot. It's slaved to the limbs of the guy inside, and is dependent on his balance reflexes. That didn't work out too well.

It took a long time to get legged machines to work well. Most early work was about gait and foot coordination. It turns out that balance is more important than gait, and slip control is more important than balance. It finally all came together with BigDog. (BigDog demonstrates that the technology was finally far enough along that throwing $20 million at the problem was a win. Money alone is not enough; see the Flight Telerobotic Servicer, on which NASA blew over $200 million in the late 1980s. DARPA also funded a 6-legged walking truck in the 1980s, but it never got beyond a slow walk on easy terrain.)

The GE walker dates from an era when American industry tried to push the state of the art with ambitious internal research projects. That's rare in the US today. But in Germany, there's Festo. Every year, Festo does an impressive robotics project. They've done a flexible manta ray which swims through water; it's highly maneuverable and moves and looks like a real manta ray. Most recently, they built a robot bird, which flies around gracefully and under good control.

Lets just hope they upgrade the heat shield before trying that - 15mm of cork won't cut it from orbit. And I'm really not sure if standing up is how I want to deorbit either...

That said, this looks like a better, safer and more boring alternative for about the same mass.

Skynet went online on 1969. It continues to serve the UK military to this day. They're up to series 5, but it doesn't seem self-aware yet.

Saturn Vs were hugely expensive to build and fly. http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saturnv.htm says $431mil in 1967 dollars, which is just over $2.8bil in 2010 dollars! Saturn 1Bs lifted 18.6 tons for $107mil in 1967 dollars, which is $702mil in 2010 dollars. That's worse performance and cost than STS, which averages around $600mil/flight (Shuttle launch cost estimates are harder to come by than for traditional rockets) for more mass, more crew volume and more mission time. Launching a huge space station on 2-5 Saturn Vs would've allowed design choices that aren't currently possible, but there's no way it would've been cheaper in the general sense.

The Apollo spacecraft was at the end of its life, too. Pure Oxygen, non-standard docking, no solar panels. It needed to be replaced with something no matter what. STS was originally envisioned as fully reusable and somewhat smaller and would've been a good replacement in my opinion. The development budget wasn't there for it and the military was forced to be on board. That's why the cargo bay is 60ft long and it has huge wings. The former was useful on occasion (Kibo only just fit in the bay) but the cross range of the wings was never used. When the military projects were merged with STS, that was part of their trade studies so a vehicle which couldn't do it was unsuitable for their requirements at that time.

At this point I consider NASA first and foremost a red state jobs program. That's not necessarily their fault, but it makes it impossible for them to run a space program per se. If they get downsized to $5-$7bil and made into a pure blue sky R&D and science organisation, maybe that's not such a bad thing. At least it'd stop this game of rocket musical chairs.

It's also known to be wildly successful for the Soviets too. The N1's problems were less due to clustering than due to lack of proper engineering and testing and a deeply flawed assembly, checkout, and launch flow.

I count 20 large nozzles (plus a considerable number of control nozzles) on a picture of a Molniya-M rocket near the bottom.

They'll have to develop a complex and sophisticated thrust structure that can take the thrust and (when maneuvering) side loads of all those engines without having any nasty vibration modes. (And it has to handle a large number of arbitrary modes where one or more engines are shut down.) Making that job even harder is the need to route a complex and sophisticated piping system to deliver the fuel and oxidizer in the required quantities without flow problems or their own nasty vibration modes through that thrust structure. And the piping system has to handle startup transients gracefully, fail gracefully when engines shut down in arbitrary numbers and locations, and handle shutdown transients at end of burn gracefully regardless of how many engines are running and in what locations.

When you put it that way, it does sound difficult.

It might be vastly cheaper, it might not be. It might be capable of carrying far more, or it might not be. It's a paper rocket, and paper rockets are always wonderful. There's a lot of really big "if's" and unknowns both known and unknown between here and there.

I guess SpaceX will have to bend metal, turn the unknowns into unknowns, and deal with the big "ifs". Or not as the case may be. It's worth noting that SpaceX's paper rockets have fared much better than NASA's paper rockets.

This may be our chance to get our space program back on track from when it derailed in the 70s.

There's two huge unspoken assumptions buried in that statement:

First, that there's some preordained or ideal course for our space program.

Second, that choosing a course based on political expediency back in the 60's and abandoning slow step-by-step development in favor of Big Stunts (I.E. the course you want to return to) wasn't itself a derailment of a reasonable space program.

I agree with the termination of Apollo and the discontinuation of the Saturn V launch vehicle. That tempo was unsustainable and unaffordable in the long run. But look at what they replaced it with. Another huge vehicle that NASA could barely afford on its reduced budget. Between the Shuttle and the ISS, they burned far more than the cost of Apollo on a dead end launch vehicle and a six man space station. I think that was far more foolish. At least, Apollo had some useful national prestige goals and credible lunar science. That's "big stunts", your last complaint.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, assuming it ever leaves the paper rocket stage to become a real, well-used vehicle, is priced far below anything that NASA is attempted. This can be the US government's opportunity to abandon the space launch business altogether. In place of big stunts, NASA can go to novel ground, say, launching frequent, cheap, serious missions to a variety of destinations, develop space-based technologies for private enterprise to exploit, and support the establishment of US private enterprise in space.

I apologize for implying that there is a preordained or ideal course. But NASA has at time indicated future intent. For example, several times it has claimed a desire to send humans to Mars. What progress to that goal has been made?

There's little development of propulsion and power systems that could make the trip more survivable and tolerable such as nuclear or solar electric propulsion. We don't know the effects of Mars-level gravity on any organism, much less humans. We really don't know much about what's on the surface, particularly, what tox

I'll give that comment a 50/50 agreement. More details here:

http://www.astronautix.com/engines/ssme.htm

Saying the engines have to be "replaced" is a bit deceptive. "rebuilt and inspected" is more accurate, though they don't say but I'm assuming they have one extra set on hand and simply swap them out while they get to work rebuilding the set they pulled.

(that article above has at least one technical error, so take it with a grain of salt)

That's called a "rockoon". First tried in 1949. Works OK, payload rather limited.

Back in 2004, JP Aerospace was pushing the idea of a permanent station at the edge of space which was really a balloon.They're still sending up balloons, but they're basically repeating what the USAF did in the late 1940s.

Accelerating a fragile airship to orbital velocity at the edge of the atmosphere is a fantasy. If there's enough air to get lift, there's enough air to get drag.