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Bigger Rockets For 'Heavy' Lifting
msslave writes, "A local news station in Dallas reported that a Texas company, Beal Aerospace has tested the second stage of its BA-2 rocket. Designed for the "heavy-lift" market, these engines are intended for increasing demand for satellite launches. And they have spent only a half a billion dollars to get this far.
"
[*] Water vapor is the most important of the greenhouse gasses and easily contributes over 95% of the Earth's greenhouse effect heating. Funny how environmentalists never speak out against water vapor, isn't it?
I hear you. I can't help but laugh at every tree-hugging nitwit I see out here (here being the American NW), protesting over this tree or that bird or someother nonsense. It's bad enough that they have disrupt people who actually have *real* jobs, but all the whining and fussing has been lowering property damages recently. I don't know if I'll ever be able to sell the other house now that we moved into a bigger place. It's right by some forest where a whole gang of these hippy nuts come and harrass the owners and workers at the logging mill. Don't these people have something else to do?
I mean, there are more acres of forest in the U.S. now than there was at the time of the Revolution, so we must be doing something right. As for these so-called "endangered" species, they just keep dropping them of the "list" that they keep locked up in Washington, so it makes me wonder whether such a thing truly exists, or whether it's just more eco-bullshit like the kind we've been fed for years.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a real liberal guy, but this whole thing has gone too far. First nuclear test bans, and now you can't so much as step on the grass for fear some nutcase will chain themselves to your house as a punishment for your "ecological destruction". If we had these nuclear tests, we could have interplanetary travel, but as usual, the "Earth-first" loonies played on the prejudices of Congress to get it banned. Presumably, they'd prefer that we don't get off Earth so they can keep the money flowing into their coffers, based on eco-FUD such as the greenhouse effect, global warming, pollution, etc. If you knew how much money went into the EPA in order to pay of these people (some of whom, incidentally, actually worship the Earth as some sort of diety, much like Bruce Babbitt), you'd probably realize how much the wool has been pulled over our collective eyes. Remember when there was screaming about the defense budget and how it was being sqaundered by corrupt offcials supposedly fighting a non-existent Red Menace? Where do you think all that money went? Right into the EPA to fight the new, and equally-nonexistent Green Menace.
Think about it, folks. It'll make you wonder.
i am not an engineer, but i think that's the difference between NASA and an entrepreneur: the latter tries to sell a "launch service" at a competitive cost, and NASA tries to push the border and do research. Even if NASA is not as cost efficient as private industry would/will be in space transportation, the benefits of research should be obvious. There is probably no company which builds ion engines...thats where NASA excels (if they would just abandon those non-metric units)
hnc
Not especially. There are two groups who generally oppose the current ISS program. One is the traditional "Not one dime spent on this silly 'space exploration' nonsense until every person everywhere is well fed and happy and there is no suffering anywhere in the world and everyone is happy happy happy all the time and then, and only then, provided the sun doesn't explode first, may you consider this 'space' thing" crowd, and the other are seriously hardcore space exploration nuts (not unlike myself) who point out that the current space station design is badly compromised in such a way that makes it useless as a springboard for further expansion into the solar system and even calls into question its usefullness towards its stated purpose of scientific research.
Or India, etc. The need to put up satellites doesn't go away just because rocket launches are decreed "bad for the environment". It'll just mean more launches from other nations; nations that won't even try to use cleaner burning rocket engines. Does banning or restricting the number of launches really end up helping the environment the way you think?
Please, whenever you see Microsoft or their products (most of which I doubt you've ever used), resist the urge to start screaming about BSODs or other garbage. It'll make the world a better place, albeit cut down on the constant self-congratulatory mode here on Slashdot (how much have you contributed to technological progress, dear reader?), which I'm sure would make this much less exciting for some of you.
Hey, cowards that ask for me by name! Hi, Mr. Coward, please reply again when you can sign your name!
I wish I had a day job. I don't even know if McDonalds is ready for me. The early shift is just too early. I'm still working on handling those 10am classes...
Anyhow, how could I resist? I mean, "B.A.". Heck, maybe one day I'll even have a "B.A." of my own. Maybe I was just jealous...
Look, guys, "jealous" has an OUS in it, just like anonymOUS! I must have been wrong about that humor thing, it needs that OUS, so I can be humorOUS! Yeah, that's why my post wasn't funny, I didn't spell my Subject line right! Thanks, all you nameless individuals. Peer review is what slashdot is all about...
---
pb, #1020
Posting anonymously because
I don't have a cool "Score -1 Bonus"
No, I was merely saying that I find all these lame MS-sux0rs!!!!! posts to be trite. It really doesnt reflect well on the community that the only form of humor we can create is bashing the dominant players.
That's a lot of quarters. Every parking meter in the country.
Don't Click This
This is a very kewl idea. Some references to other site about this and other satelite issues are here
and us earth first loonies aren't getting a damn thing done cause the govt. and the rest of the populace are as dumb as you. i belive you are the one who have been brainwashed. my congratulations to the mind programing power of the public schools.
I've been voting for Natalie as well, just so you know
--80md
<AOL>
me too!!!!!!!1
80md == TROLL GOD!
</AOL>
The shuttle's solid boosters mainly produce Al2O3 dust as exhaust. It's basically Thermite. It's bad for the local environment, minimal impact on the atmosphere though because it all falls out very quickly. What these guys are proposing is peroxide / aviation fuel, which should be pretty clean.
I'm glad to know I'm appreciated. Now you need to get to work trolling a very special new website. It's going to be the new slashdot. All the trolls are leaving slashdot and heading over there. It's Kuro5hin.org when we get through with it it's going to suck more than slashdot ever possibly could.
--80md
- humor instead of humour.
- color instead of colour.
- favor instead of favour.
- behavior instead of behaviour.
- honor instead of honour.
- center instead of centre.
- flavor instead of flavour.
- neighbor instead of neighbour.
While the English are quite anal about their language (as are the French, so I hear), Americans are basically word whores. Although the American language is based upon English, it borrows heavily from other languages, most notably Spanish, French, and the Native American languages. So quit your whining, it could be much worse -- Benjamin Franklin proposed an entirely new phonetic aphabet for the American colonies. For more fun reading on this subject, try English as a Second Language for Americans.It's not our fault that the most joke-worthy products happen to also be the dominant players. In a few years when Microsoft is in third or fourth place, we'll still be telling jokes about them. The difference is that then, when we laugh about the time we almost lost our jobs due to Windoze's instability, it will be with good-humored hindsight, rather than the nervousness, terror, and helplessness that the laughter currently hides. I hope it will be ok to bash MS then, without Miss Manners jumping in and telling us how uncool it is.
you dumbass motherfucker. can't you understand the simple fact that without the environment, we cannot survive?
Ah. Resorting to name calling. Is that what they teach you in the re-education camps?
Guess what? We have the "environment" (a catch-all phrase which can mean anything, of course), and it's not going anywhere.
Where is this proof of destruction or damage? I don't see a new ice age, floods, or any of those other catastrophes set forth by ecological pseudo-scientists years ago. We can easily debunk your claims. There has not yet been one single bit of evidence of lasting environment damage produced *anywhere*. Surely, if you knew of some, you would have posted it, rather than resorting to childish attacks.
and us earth first loonies aren't getting a damn thing done cause the govt. and the rest of the populace are as dumb as you.
Yes, the people are getting smarter, and after years of corruption and deceit from fruitcakes like yourself, have finally come to realize what a sham it all is. And I applaude them for it. Since you have been to busy crying for money and lying to the public with shoddy "research", the public has at last decided that all this eco-talk is about as real a problem as the "dangers" of desegregation were in the 50's. Or don't you want people to know the truth? That's what it seems like.
i belive you are the one who have been brainwashed. my congratulations to the mind programing power of the public schools.
Your "beliefs" here, much like your beliefs in nature goddesses, are as full of holes as an old sock. Firstly, I attended private school, in California at that. Secondly, my arguments are based on objective fact, not wishy-washy "feelings". There is no proof of ecological harm. Period.
And if you ever read the Book of G'Quan, you would know that we need a serious spacefleet to counter the Centauri and Shadow aggression. When they come to stripmine our homeworld, then it will really be time for your jihad, dude.
i remember when the clown ate me... it's not so bad after the fourth or fifth time; It's the resulting rampant psychosis that's not so fun.
Technically, you americans needed the expertise of german transfuges (werner von braun, not to name him)to go to the moon. At the time, it was desired that it be a pure american project - but they could not do it.
the russians already had korolev (they only needed to rcall him from the goulag...)
the katioushkas (soviet missile launchers of WWII) are an absolute proof of the US lagging behind at the time (they still lag behind now, but as they have such a nice toy as the shuttle, it doesn't appear too much)
maybe I can take the big rocket to Mars and finally be safe enough to get some sleep.
And what happens when a certain unnamed nation continues to ignore the Kyoto treaty and does nothing to prevent Earth from heating up?
Polar ice caps melt, and all that radioactive dust will end up in the oceans and our dining tables.
I say that if they're going to lauch such things, take it to orbit with chemical rockets and install the engines (or the "fuel") in orbit and fire it up in outer space, NOT on Earth.
Eco-nut!!! I sure hope you're a troll...I mean, heck, re-read that post!
Good points, good link, but every once in a while you need to rent that truck even when you usually drive a Chevette. I'm glad to see the era of the Big Dumb Booster isn't over yet. It's too bad they didn't open source the Saturn V when they still had all the blueprints.
Hear! Hear!
We know where the bottom is, and it's always going to be there.
I want to see how high those stairs go...
just don't run any softwre on it
I thought the Saturn 5 used LOX/kerosene for the booster stage and LOX/liquid H2 for the upper stages.
Four flew from Woomera in South Australia, the last putting up a satellite called Prospero that's still in orbit. This was only a couple of weeks after the British government cancelled the project...
It was yet another example of the terminal idiocy of British postwar aerospace policy up until c. 1970 (Miles M52 cancellation, selling Rolls Royce Nenes to Stalin, the Bristol Brabazon and Saro Princess, doing nothing with the Fairey Delta 2, the 1957 White Paper on Defence, cancellation of Fairey Rotodyne, cancellation of the TSR2 and Pll54, cancelling the new aircraft carrier the same year, the Spey Phantom, Concorde, pulling out of the Europa project and then cancelling Black Arrow). They persisted with white elephants and scrapped the stuff that looked promising.
Hey, lets keep the ball rolling... I'm not going to loose by bet that the next reply uses the word loose incorrectly.
As far as satellite recovery, it almost never happens. If a satellite doesn't deploy properly, you sell it to the insurance company that insured the launch. The insurance company doesn't have any repo men for satellites, so dead satellites generally become space junk. It may not be the utopian approach, but that's the way it works in real life.
--- Software rule: "Just because it works, doesn't mean it's not broke."
does anyone else reguard these two statements as a contradiction in paradigms?
A-
At the W2K launch, Bill Gates announced that the average uptime for a Win98 workstation was 2.1 days. So, it's official right from the horse's mouth -- Win98 sucks. Lets move on.
Two questions: can I install it remotely? And what's the "install" radius? I.e., if I dislike a certain neighbor down the street... :-)
Looks like perl isn't such a hot language after all. The AI just went to pieces with that last post. Someone should page the researchers in charge and tell them that I broke their toy.
Just one of those frustrating little things - hydrogen has a high energy to mass ratio, but a really crappy energy to volume ratio. Even at cryogenic temperatures, hydrogen has about 60% the energy content of gasoline per unit volume.
oh yeah and it's spelled HUMOUR.
damn...forgot my password...any how...i have a seiko kinetic auto relay...tis self winding...and i'm damn sure that the glowing things in this is some how powered...cause it just never turns off...i've been in situations where i have worn it for hours in the dark...and it still glows...
the russian space shuttle is currently in australia...tis going to be here for 2 years...open to the public...
make a big launchpad in Antarctica
But you would kill the penguins! Get ready to change Linux logo.
The problem is, if you go back and look at issues of things like "Popular Mechanics" from the late 1940's - 1950's, people actually did seem to think that things like nuclear powered steam cookers and toasters would be a really good idea!
Just something to keep in mind if your in a library with a good archival collection of magazines from that time and an afternoon to kill. You might find it interesting reading.
Their jobs section is looking for a Visual C++ programmer geek. But it'll be OK, they're using UML, that M$ code will be fine on launch day. Oooohh, I wanna ride on that...not. Remember the Yorktown!
We'll be fine as long as we don't piss off the Minbari too much and can find a Johnny Nuke'em Sheridan.
Let's subject it to such impossible emissions regs so as to effectively ban it!
Peter, don't quit your day job. Comedy isn't ready for you yet, and besides McDonalds needs someone willing to work the early shift.
Only if you go with H.T.Orbit, I think it's like 13 days at 1g... Heinlein did a simplified comparision. The only reason you'd use H.T.O. is becuase it's cheaper on fuel, and can be done. So instead we use M2P2 (for the return journey, or to gain speed to sling around a gravity body) or an ion drive - neither of which can't *launch* a vehicle from the bottom of a gravity well, but can provide lots of continuous thrust.
:)
Much faster.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
'Nother nit...
But they're used to get the stuff we need into orbit. Fact of the matter is that we need to put a lot of stuff into orbit if we want to go Mars. I doubt we can launch something (using current technology) that will be able to go to Mars and back from bottom of gravity well, to bottom of gravity well.
We're probably going to have to launch a few (2+) to several (3+) heavy lift vechiles full of fuel, and one or two of spacecraft parts.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
$500 million!! Holy crap!! With all the poor, starving children in the world!
Think of all the children we could have saved with that money! Lets forget about space until we get our problems fixed down here....
(sorry, had to post the obligatory "think of the children/waste of money gripe....)
I guess that you've never used a MS product either. The computer I'm using right now has Win98SE on it and it doesn't crash so much as the performance degrades if it's been running more than a few hours and internet explorer starts responding very strangely to the wheel on my Microsoft Intellimouse with IntelliEye. Linux works a lot better with my mouse, and the internet access is faster and the GUI is more responsive (Red Hat 6.1 w/ GNOME and sawmill) This however is just my experiences. These do not necessarily reflect the truth.
Nascantur in Admiratione. (Let them be born in Wonder)
I've been voting for Natalie as well, just so you know.
Yeah, but I've voted for her over a hundred times since I saw that today. See, that's commitment. That's why Natalie won't mind so much when I force her to be my Demon Bride after the Apocolypse.
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
Well thank you, Jesus. You have my support, please continue.
"Have you eaten your
The whole idea comes from Andy Beal, a banker who is spending more than a quarter of a bilion dollars of his own money
and
There's no government money in this project.
And it's in Waco. No doubt this Beal guy is mixed up with some sort of ant-government astro-cult like everyone else in Wacky Waco is. Place is loaded with loonies.
And 1/4 bn is a quarter billion, Hemos. Don't let the kooks tell you otherwise.
Pulling out the plans for the Saturn V would be quite a trick. Supposedly all the mechanical drawings and all existing tool and die setups for building Saturn V's were destroyed on orders from Nixon as a political favor - to ensure that NASA got funding for the Shuttle.
Does anyone find it ironic that NASA is "throwing money away" on the ISS, but a manned mission to Mars is a necessity?
Then, as Heinlein first noted, you're halfway to anywhere!
Beer and the BA-2 rocket are incompatible, due to their inability to perform "heavy lifting", or operate heavy machinery with too much beer. Sorry guys, no beer in space, you'll have to brew it on the Moon after you terraform it first!
In other news, The A-Team is suing, for dilution of their "B.A." trademark. Their spokesman was saying, "I pity the fool who think he can lift more than Mr. T!"
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well #1 is nature as it regards the Earth. And I don't really enjoy having Skylab fall out of orbit either, although there are suprisingly few satellites that are likely to make it through the atmosphere, so it's not a *huge* deal.
But #2 has nothing to do with nature - only people who want to exploit space find it to be a problem. Please don't go claiming that congested orbits are pollution or anti-environmental or something.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Now, now. There is IIRC a story about Oppenhimer which seems relevant here. Apparently during the early nuclear tests (probably the first - Trinity), just before the bomb went off, he espied a small parabolic reflector sitting around.
;)
He positioned it so that it faced the bomb, placed the end of a cigarette at the focus and retreated to the shelter.
After the bomb was detonated, he came out and picked up the now-lit cigarette.
So it's kind of apocryphal, and impractical, but you too can light cigarettes with nuclear technology
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I hate to break it to you, but there's nothing particularly nice about Nature outside of the Earth. Please don't say that you're worried about harming the environment on Venus or something. That's just ridiculous.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
There have been lots of talks about manned mission to Mars.
Do you know that we still CAN NOT do a manned mission to Mars? Unmanned, yes. Manned, no.
To put a human being on the spacecraft, you have to add on lots of LIFE SUPPORT, and those things add to the weight.
Add to that the duration of the flight - to Mars and come back, ALIVE - and you are talking about a HUGE VESSEL to put all the air, water and food.
Let us not talk about manned mission right now, let us think of unmanned mission - more than the NASA's silly robot type of mission, but SERIOUS unmanned mission to explore the Red Planet.
I have hope that within my lifetime something like that will happen, that is, of course, World War III doesn't happen first.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The one who hide behind the AC handle or the one who have put up a quarter of a billion dollars?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
> They'd protest that for our polluting space with
> deadly radiation.
> Ahh, human intelligence.
Sometimes I really wish I am not a human being, and _that_ one qualifies as one of those "sometimes".
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
>> make a big launchpad in Antarctica
> But you would kill the penguins! Get ready to
> change Linux logo.
Silly Linus. Of all the cute animals in the world he chose the Penguins.
I mean, he could have chosen the koala, or the dodo bird, or the bluefin tuna, or Willie, the-killer-whale-who-had-a-movie-to-his-name.
Hmmmm.....
Ah, well... move the penguins to the Artic, and damn the Antarctica !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
> Now, now. There is IIRC a story about Oppenhimer
> which seems relevant here.
> Apparently during the early nuclear tests
> (probably the first - Trinity), just before the
> bomb went off, he espied a small parabolic
> reflector sitting around.
> He positioned it so that it faced the bomb,
> placed the end of a cigarette at the focus and
> retreated to the shelter.
> After the bomb was detonated, he came out and
> picked up the now-lit cigarette.
> So it's kind of apocryphal, and impractical, but
> you too can light cigarettes with nuclear
> technology
That would be way cool.
I mean, to use a radioactive device to light a cancer-causing delivery system.
Yeah... who says Humans aren't intelligent?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Sigh. Anyone want to invest five million dollars in Rotary? That's all they need to complete the first prototype and do a manned launch. They'll probably give you a free trip up, too...
This is actually more important for its interplanetary implications.
A heavy-lift booster in this class could throw a pretty good-sized payload to Mars for a "Mars Direct" type of manned mission.
Actually, the BA-2 would be able to place only about 6,000 kg into geosynchronous orbit, on a par with existing "heavy-lift" boosters (like the Ariane 5) but far short of the requirements for a Mars Direct type of human mission to Mars.
However, if the BA-2 can provide launch services at a lower cost than existing boosters (without sacrificing reliability) it may be able to capture not only a significant fraction of the commercial GEO communications satellite market, but become a viable option for robotic solar system exploration missions, such as Mars sample return and outer solar system spacecraft.
Of course, Beal has to build the rocket and find a place to launch it first...
Most payloads, especially telecomm satellites, are under 7000 pounds. Unlike Beal's proposed vehicle, the Roton is reusable and manned. It takes off and lands on its tail, like God and Robert Heinlein intended :-). And not only can they deliver your payload to orbit but, unlike Beal, they can bring it back! Never throw away another satellite!
Beal and Rotary (as well as other RLV startups, like Kelly and Pioneer) serve complimentary markets. The 7,000-lb. maxmium payload of the Roton C-9 is for low-Earth orbit, not GEO. That makes Roton useful for LEO satellite constellations like Globalstar (and Iridium if it survives!) but not for the GEO communications satellites, which are growing larger to accomodate additional, more powerful transponders. The HS 702, a new GEO communications satellite developed by Hughes, has a launch mass of 5,200 kg! This is a market for the BA-2 as well as other existing and proposed expendable launch vehicles. (Although some large RLVs, like VentureStar and Space Access' proposed vehicle, could also service the GEO market.)
Small RLVs like the Roton might one day open the space tourism market, if they can get the price-per-kg (or price-per-pound :-) down dramatically. That's something the BA-2 will never do, although boosters like it might one day launch the structures in orbit that future space tourists could visit!
You forgot a big consideration:
Hydrogen and fluorine combine to make HFl, also known as hydrogen fluoride. Mixed in water it is called hydrofluoric acid. It's very corrosive and after just a couple launches your launch pad would resemble modern art.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
What they could do with their first two launches, which are sending up dummy payloads, is to launch tanks filled with water. They're going to have to pay the launch costs anyways, so they might as well put something up that has a low cost on the ground; but, a high value in orbit. The International Space Station will need a lot of water once it's operational, Beal could have the water waiting for them.
The specific impulse of various propellants in seconds in vacuum is:
m e ad.htm
compressed nitrogen 80
compressed steam 130
hydrogen peroxide 190
kerosene / hydrogen peroxide 310
kerosene / liquid oxygen 375
liquid methane / liquid oxygen 445
liquid hydrogen / liquid oxygen 520
liquid hydrogen / liquid ozone 600
Hydrogen peroxide information:
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/SSC/H2O2CONF/jgay.ht
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/SSC/H2O2CONF/jwhiteh
Space links:
http://msia02.msi.se/~lindsey/spaceLinks.html
This is really off topic now, but I wish they hadn't quit putting radium into watch faces.
As far as I know, the radiation risk to the wearer was insignificant. You see, I have a really cool automatic mechanical watch (self winding) with no batteries or electronics at all. The only problem is reading it in the dark. It uses some sort of glow-in-the-dark paint that "charges up" in bright light, but that doesn't last long enough to be really useful.
Bring back the radium watches!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Just wanted to point out - The Beal engine they were discussing was for the *second* stage... The first stage engine is supposed to be 5 times as powerful. That would be ~4 million lbs of thrust. Very large indeed, and that would probably allow a first stage with 3-5 engines with some pretty hellish lifting capacity.
And while I agree in part about funding Energia restart, they weren't exactly known for reliability.
However, I do have to concede the point that the scalability is unproven, but I *hope* the first stage tests go well - it would be nice to get beyond the shuttle's lift capacity for a lot of things.
(Hmm.. I aimed at Preview but hit Submit? Ouch.)
Some people are racing to orbit, to be the first stop to space. Some people are racing to the moon, where there are convenient solid surfaces to fasten things which like vacuum or low gravity. Some people are racing to be first to mine an asteroid, while driving accounting experts nuts trying to figure out what the market price for gold might be with double the supply. Some people are just racing to get some of our eggs out of this basket.
>> Also, usually several smaller engines is better, because this way you can stabilize using rotation along the main axis.
:)
Ah no. Spin stabilization is only practical on sold fuel rockets. The liquid fuel would tend to be drawn to the side of the the tanks and would not feed correctly. Delta, Atlas, Titan, Saturn, and Proton do not spin.
>>Also, on the space shuttle, during launch if one (or even two) engine fails, they can still land safely -- provided it is after the short risky period immediately after launch. Imagine if you had one huge engine instead and it failed
Again on the Saturn and the Titian. If you loose an engine on lauch you where doomed. That is why they had an escape tower on Saturn and ejection seats on Titan for maned launches.
Using one engine makes so much sence for unmaned launches. It means the rocket is more reliable, Cheaper to build, and lighter.
>>Basically your booster will just fall on the ground and explode. This will not be safe for astronauts or bystanders.
I wonder if you have ever been to the cape. Safe for bystanders, ha ha. Why do you think that we watch the lauches from miles away. Big rockets can make big booms. And yes I have seen boosers fall to the ground and make a mess. They usually had more than one engine also
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There are two basic problems getting people to Mars, or L4/5 or the moon or even the Space Station. One, getting people there, getting the stuff to support them there. If you want efficiency they should primarily be done on seperate systems. The Shuttle does little better than the Saturn for a hybrid system. People need fewer Gs and a generally safer ride. Stuff (a general other category) could most efficiently be launched via a linear acclerator. Bucket size is restricted and you need a system for catching in space but if Quark could do it why can't NASA.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
One of the big advantages of using cryogenic propellant is that it doubles as a coolant. All of the liquid oxygen flowing into the F1 engines of a Saturn V first passed through pipes that wrapped around the nozzle and combustion chamber . . . to keep it cool.
The F1 engines even went one step further and injected raw liquid oxygen along the boundary layer of the nozzle. That way, a narrow layer of very cold (but soon to be very hot) fluid shielded the nozzle from the hot exhaust gas.
Did you ever wonder why in some photos and movies, the exhaust plume from a Saturn V's first stage is _dark_ for a few feet as it exits the nozzle and then suddenly becomes brilliant? That's partially because of the cooling layer of cryogenic oxygen that gets injected into the boundary layer halfway down the exhaust nozzle. If you're ever in Huntsville or Houston, take a look at a real Saturn V. They're really awesome
Here's a listing of some of the propellants used in the first stages of various rockets:
V2: LOX / alcohol
X-15: LOX / ammonia
Redstone: LOX / alcohol
Atlas: LOX / kerosene
Delta: LOX / kerosene
Titan: nitrogen tetroxide / aerozine-50
Saturn: LOX / Kerosene
Proton: nitrogen tetroxide / usymmetric dimethyl hydrazine
Soyuz: LOX/ Kerosene
Ariane 4: nitrogen tetroxide / unsymmetric dimehyl hydrazine
Ariane 5: LOX / liquid hydrogen
What's the best fuel for a rocket?
flourine and hydrogen.
Why does no one use it? cuz it's toxic and hard to store. So it's not always about pursuing the theoretical best. liquid oxygen and hydrogen is a good trade in terms of specific impulse for a shuttle-type launch.
I would question NASA's rockets costing an order of magnitude more than Russia's. Sure, Shuttle is expensive, but even with all the extra overhead in that over a proton launch, it's not an order of magnitude more...
At last. A privately funded means of getting the space race off the ground again. Moon shots hera we come.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
No, wait, it says we need DirectX 6.0, but we're running NT! Where's that 486 I saw the other day....
Insert mind here.
There may be an cost factor here. It may be significantly cheaper to use a less efficient rocket design if you don't plan on reuse. The cost of building multiple engines maybe prohibitive verses the cost of using more fuel. Not only that but there may be an issue with decreasing reliability as they complicate their somewhat simplified rocket design.
Oh, look at their job's page! They are looking for a Vx/Works software guy with Linux experience.
Oh, I see, so we shouldn't put anything into space (for cheap) because eventually it will become floating space debris and... get in the way of putting more incredibly useful stuff in space?
Honestly, cheap heavy lift is part of the solution to this because now you can afford to put something up in orbit to CLEAN UP THE JUNK!!! Of course, who pays for it becomes another interesting question - but if you really want to put something up there, you sure can afford to clean up anything that's in the way...
And... when did mother nature move up above the atmosphere???
Cyano
The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
Talk about Mars. I am waiting to see that new movie I think it's call "Mission to Mars" now that in my opinion would be better than Phantom Menace. I love SCI-FI but Star Wars has lost it's flare.
Good is never enough, when you dream of being great!
Nuclear-powered Watches (They used to mix Radium with the glow in the dark paint on the dials so they would glow all night)
My high school physics teacher used to talk about this. He once owned one of these watches. He said he once had rather red inflammed skin directly underneath the watch after he wore it for a significant amount of time...
For anyone out in the Los Angeles area, Boeing (formerly Rockwell Internation/Rocketdyne) has an F1 on display out in front of the Rocketdyne facility. It's on Canoga Avenue between Victory Blvd. and Vanowen Street.
Take the 101 into the San Fernando Valley and go north on Canoga.
Those F1's sure were big suckers.
I just thought that people might like to see one of these puppies!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Didn't the Saturn V use Kerosene and LOX?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I'm worried that the same physics that are sending rockets into orbit could cause earth's orbit to be altered. Already we have calculated a small but measurable change from the sling-shot effect of sending our deep-space probes out by near-earth fly-bys. If we do it too much we're going to fall into the sun. Also, the proposed "rail gun" launch technique of achieving orbit applies a force at an angle that could alter our rotation period. I suggest that all future launches be coordinated to have a net zero effect on the earth, maybe by launching only in pairs from opposite sides of the earth. (Even then we're changing the earth's mass, but maybe the constant barage of meteorites we get is making up for it.)
Actually, from the figures you just posted, they're selling the wood at twice it's actual value. Your figure for a long term contract ($1.50/board foot) works out to a total of $1500/thousand board feet. If the wood is actually worth $700/thousand board feet, where's the problem?
Care to elaborate? Or post correct figures?
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
On the surface, that's downright horrifying, and tends to speak of the mismanagement our government has been engaging in for most of the century. However, to be fair, there are two points that need to be made.
1) The 50 year contracts were signed in the 1950s, which means they are due to expire in this decade. Any idea exactly when they were signed? This tends to limit the actual future damage implied by the author's choice of words. However, something to look at would be whether or not there are plans to renew this contract, and at what cost. If the plan is "as is" then publicizing this widely before it can happen is necessary. I am not a tree hugger, but the public should receive fair value for the private use of public lands.
2) What was the going rate for timber half a century ago? It's distinctly possible that when you take into account inflation, higher demand, and any other possible economic factors, $1.50 per thousand board feet was actually a reasonable price.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Hey Dan Bob, watch me while ah do this!
Seastead this.
Yes, Control we have entered the new coordinates but a dialog is asking me if I want to "restart" for the new settings to take effect...
for the Windows 2000 product launch! If Microsoft could put a copy on a BA-2 and send it hurtling towards the sun. Then, they can honestly say it finally got off the ground, really flew, and had blazing performance!
And isn't HFl the acid that doesn't feel like it's "burning" you, but instead it gets absorbed into your skin, and hours/a-half-day later as your bones begin getting their calcium burned out of them you experience severe amounts of pain?
Ummm, everything else being equal, Mr. Walker is probably correct. But, analogously, I sure building Volkswagens is more efficient, but sometimes you need a truck.
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Complementary market niches. Think of Rotary Rocket as a taxi-cab service and Beal as a long-haul trucking company. We're going to need both if we're seriously going to get off this rock.
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Why do some people seem to think satellites are the only application space is good for?
Think space stations (big space stations). Think lunar colonies (plural). Think Mars colonies. Think asteriod mining. We're going to need cheap, heavy-lift boosters.
It reminds me of the elderly woman who said, "Man wasn't meant to fly. He should stay home and watch TV like God intended".
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IIRC, and if I'm thinking of the right project, Orion was basically a spaceship with a big flat plate in the back. Blow up a bomb behind it. Ride the shock wave. Pretty simple.
Constitutionally Correct
Nyet, 4-5 million lbs isn't impossible. Remember, the first stage of the Saturn V put out 7 million lbs thrust.
t lec.htm
For cheap heavy lift, check out the Shuttle-C. It's the external tank from a space shuttle with two solid rocket boosters mounted to it, again, just like a space shuttle. But instead of the shuttle itself, you have a cargo pod w/ 2 SSME's. You can boost over 77,000 kilograms to a 28 degree orbit, and even though the cargo pod never comes back, the launch still costs less then a single space shuttle launch (shuttle costs $500 million to launch, while Shuttle-C could cost maybe $200 million (all while putting 3-4 times the cargo into space!)
http://www.friends-partners.org/~mwade/lvs/shut
At the risk of souring public opinion, we should be advocating nuclear propulsion. Chemical propulsion has it's limits in terms of specific impulse and those limits will tell on the missions. More is better. The NERVA project proved the viability of a simple and direct application. The Scientific American article "How to go to Mars" had a nice write up on interesting electric propulsion engines, but they would of course require a power source.
Nuclear power must be de deamonized if advancements are going to happen. The risks have to be clearly stated and put into persective. The current irrational fear of all things radioactive will prevent utilization of all these propulsion sources.
Radioactive dust is not radioactive forever. There is a certain period of time after which most of the radiation is gone. Theoretically, if they see the ice caps starting to withdraw, they would stop launching so that the radioactive dust decays. You know that the Bikini atol that was a testground for the US is now pretty much radiation free and there are fish again in the waters there. The point is, it doesn't take too much time for radioactive dust to become harmless.
On the equator the rotational speed 500m/s if you launch due east. So on a mission that has a total deltaV of say 8000-9000 m/s it is significant, but not overwhelming. We were talking about nuclear rockets which apparently give you twice higher specific impulse, but pollute, so the rotational factor would not be that significant. Another problem would be that you can only launch in polar orbit in this case so you need to do a large plane change in orbit. The deltaV for this will be very high, so it all depends on the comparative efficiency of nuclear vs. chemical.
By the way they launch from Florida not just because of the assist due to spinning earth, but because it gives you more choice for what inclination you want for the orbit, From Florida you can do anything from 28.5 to 90 degrees without doing a costly plane change in orbit. From Maine obviously you can do from about 45 to 90 degrees which is less choice.
the problem with launching from the poles is the lack of angular momentum to assist on the jump off the planet. ... because it cheaper, due to the assist of the earth's rotational velocity.
that's why they launch in florida, instead of in maine
in addition to that, there's weaker gravity at the equator, because the earth is slighly larger in diameter there (although this is probably ignored, b/c its so insignificant)
You'll be lucky :) you been reading 'Fountains of Paradise' (Arthur C. Clarke)
:(
I read something a the net about a sub-orbital tether platform which would be quite a bit easier. Sorry, I can never remember the URL
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Directly from the book now, with no extractions:
"... access to large quantities of ancient timber for an average price of a dollar and a half per thousand board feet."
So, the wood is sold to the privatized corporations for $1.50 per board foot, when the worth is $700 per thousand board feet. I didn't actually how shocking that was until you made me correct it. A dollar and a half spent for roughly $700 worth of raw materials... Damn.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
I won't speak for you, but I don't particularly find attractive the possibilities of thousands of 17-ton satellites dying and either plummetting to a fiery death in our atmosphere or continuing to float around derelict and contributing to the growing problem of satellite collision. It is precisely the attitude that "space isn't Nature" that will help companies justify space pollution.
enmity.
So we've got industrial buckyfibers, and nano-tech is coming along nicely... so maybe an elevator to the gravitational well-top in 2061 ?
If everybody went nuts over Cassini having 80 pounds or so of plutonium, can you imagine the spectacle of a vehicle spitting nuclear bombs out its ass?
You're right - maybe you could get the masses to accept it as interplanetary - but no way as a lift vehicle.
Man, whenever I think of satellites I think of little boxy things. With 13,200 pounds, that's like sending up 5 large cars.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Soon at Toys rrrrrr Us, the "E" class model rocket engine. Equivelant to 50,000,000,000 "D" engines!
No, there already is a "E" -about the same as two "D"s. And the "F" is two "E"s, etc.
What you probably want is a "EE"...(W,X,Y,Z,AA,BB..)
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
There is even more detail on the X-33 RLV at this NASA site.
Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin.
A choice of masters is not freedom
...on the commercialization of space, and means of getting there, check out January's Wired issue.
"This instrument contains 0.9 microCuries of Americum -241"
That's a transuranic.
It came out of a Nuclear reactor.
Why don't we let the Greens know about this and see what they do? The idiots would probably set up a campaign to ban smoke alarms.
Anything that makes them more ridiculous weakens them.
So we have rockets that can lift heavier objects, perhaps even such things as parts for a space station, or extensive search equipment for Mars. Maybe with these we'll be able to finally build large enough platforms in our orbit or on the moon to be self-sufficient.
Hopefully, we won't go bankrupt in getting there. Hopefully, NASA will work on developing more efficient methods to lower the cost, before they spend billions and billions of tax dollars before the price comes down, unlike it did with the earier rockets. Only time can tell.
-Múñk¥D-
Yeah, Zubrin's Mars Direct calls for either the resurrection of the Saturn V, something rather impossible given the lack of necessity/space race today, or the use of the russian Energia.
A privately funded Mars mission would, with the cost of reviving and using two Energia launches, plus the various other necessities, weigh in at about 4-6 billion dollars -- 35 Billion less than a NASA venture.
Mr. Gates could set up a few bases on Mars in the name of free enterprise.
Talk about tragic misallocation of valuable resources.
Beal's booster seems more of a satellite launch vehicle than anything, capable of high capacity launches to LEO and HEO...
Uhh, that looks OK. We haven't seen that number yet.
I have chatted with the man about lecturing at a local community college. He seems like a nice guy.
:-) But I do know that in the back of Director Dan Goldin's mind, he's thinking about building Mars rockets. And he has looked at Zubrin's ideas and even funded some small studies for in-situ propellant manufacturing, among others.
I look forward to meeting him at this year's Mars Society conference.
The OLD NASA, yes.
True, they've put a bit of money down for in-situ propellant manufacturing, but it seems to me that it isn't really being done with an objective in mind. The same research was being done at Lockheed Martin by Zubrin years ago. As for NASA's Faster. Cheaper. Better, great, but from here it looks like that means more robotic exploration than any human Mars expeditions.
At least it's nice to see NASA bending and trying to adapt something in the tone of a Mars Semi-Direct plan. Although it's doubtful that they could do anything within the next ten years, without any real incentive or urgency.
The way I see it, the only way anyone's going to Mars any time soon is through a privately or a joint private/government funded mission, and right now, there don't seem to be many contenders. Zubrin proposed an interesting reward system where the government would award a certain sum of money for each progressive milestone accomplished by a company in relation to Mars exploration. The proposed reward for a successful human Mars mission using Mars Direct was something like 20 billion dollars. Surely enough to justify a 4-6 billion investment.
Uhh, that looks OK. We haven't seen that number yet.
Eeek. Scary.
;-)
By the way, Mars Direct is actually designed for an Ares booster system, which is basically two main Shuttle boosters and 5 Shuttle engines stuck together.
But, you could just be cool and use the Energia. So much more fun
Uhh, that looks OK. We haven't seen that number yet.
Soon at Toys rrrrrr Us, the "E" class model rocket engine. Equivelant to 50,000,000,000 "D" engines!
--Chris
Because either you're thinking this is funny, or serious. And the more I think of it, the less serious I can imagine you being. Maybe if we used the slingshot effect to put SEVERAL SMALL MOONS into interstellar trajectories, we might have a noticable effect on the earth's orbit or rotation.
It figures that a rocket far more powerful that anything NASA has would be built.After all,NASA has to pad it's budget for some on the black projects the pentagon has
Geek Hillbilly
I disagree to an extent. You are right about lots of small lauches being more efficient for putting large numbers of small payloads (like single satellites) in space. That's pretty much what we are doing now. Howver, here are some reasons why I think this company has a prayer of succeeding.
First, I suspect that Beal's eventual goal is acheiving lots of big launches. I.e., acheiving a similar rate of launches per site as the smaller rocket competitors. That makes the economics work out. Second, he's the only commercial company in that niche. It's much better than being one of the crowd, especially with more skilled competitors out there. Many of them are probably going to come out with a big rocket at some point. By developing large rockets now, Beal has a chance of beating the competition to a big market.
Finally, there will be a trend towards much larger structures in space than we currently have. Putting lots of small things up there is a job for small rockets, but big things like space stations are going to need a mix of big and small launches. The problem is that construction in space currently is vastly more expensive for this type of project than any other part including launching costs. Launching big components means less work putting it together. You'll need small launches for resupply missions.
Here's why construction in space is expensive. First look at the direct costs of building the Internations Space Station in space. Many teams of astronauts will need to go up there to complete the station. I couldn't figure out how many trips are required from the NASA website. Maybe 30? more? I'm not clear on the training that an astronaut goes through for a *single* mission but it is tremendous, possibly up to a year in length.
Add that the station now has to be *designed* to be put together in space by people in bulky, inflexible spacesuits who can only stay there for two weeks at the absolute maximum and you can see how come the price tag for the station is so steep.
Currently, the biggest heavy launch competitors are governments (US, Russia, and the ESA at the moment). I believe that these will fade as private companies take over. By 2050, we'll see the vast majority of lift capacity in private hands.
Sure, various militaries will maintain a "merchant marine" ability (i.e., the potential to lift lots of stuff from earth to orbit), but this won't have a commercial impact. And if we're stupid as usual, we'll have a military arms race in space as well. But most lift will be in private hands. On the other hand, most launch sites probably will be government-owned.
What this digression means is, that whoever can get a piece of the earth-to-orbit market and stay in business, can be a player in one of the emerging markets of the next century. Dare we invoke "millenium"? :-) This could be bigger than single-click shopping!
I've got a friend who will soon be interviewing for a job at Beal Aerospace. He's an MCSE (pity the fool) and they want him to play NT for them. I suspect the real story is they need test pilots. PETA won't let them use monkey pilots anymore. MCSEs are plentiful and expendable.
Their employment section mentions they need a software engineer. Here is a copy of the Req's:
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
> we speak American. So, just to name a few
> differences:
> humor instead of humour.
> color instead of colour.
> favor instead of favour.
> behavior instead of behaviour.
> honor instead of honour.
> center instead of centre.
> flavor instead of flavour.
> neighbor instead of neighbour.
I'm afraid you are not quite right. The REAL AMERICAN speak sounds something like "Darn !" or "Howdy y'all !!"
:)
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
How exactly would a large satellite "clean up the junk?" Would it eat the dead satellites? You can't just clean them up. They have mass, they take up space. The only way you can get rid of them is to push them into the atmosphere. However, do you want to be the president of a company that starts pushing 17-ton satellites into the atmosphere hoping that they burn up on reentry or land in an ocean?
<P>The best two methods for long-term cleanup of Earth orbit are Solar Thermal Rockets for large junk and an "Orion"-type pulse laser for the paint flecks and other small stuff. Instead of "getting rid of" the junk, it should be melted down, and either placed in commonly agreed-upon parking orbit, or smelted and solid as raw material directly. A well desinged STR should even be able to pick out the electronics and tankage for later reuse without melting it down.
<P><i>Why does everyone insist that Nature exists only on Earth? </I>
<P>"Nature" in the sense of a working ecosystem, does only exist on Earth, as far as anyone knows. Space is DEAD, there's nothing there except radiation and raw materials. We should use those materials (and energy) to improve the lives of people on Earth. The corollary of this is that, by improving standards of living on Earth, using space-based resources, we can radically reduce the impact of human existence on the biosphere.
<P>J05H
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
A heavy-lift booster in this class could throw a pretty good-sized payload to Mars for a "Mars Direct" type of manned mission.
Ehhhhm. One problem: The "heavy lift" of these guys lifts around 37400 pounds into LEO (low earth orbit). That's almost 17 tons.
Compare that to space shuttle: 23 tons, magnum: 80 tons (The rocket they are developing for mars direct), and Saturn V: > 130 tons (the requirement for a mars-direct type mission).
Roger.
ObTopic: Heavy lift is great except when it all goes to shit. Loral tried to use a Russian heavylift to save a few bucks on sattelite launches, but they looked pretty dumb when the rocket burst into flames, destroying all six birds.
-jwb
IIRC the scientists involved estimated about 1 person dead somewhere from fallout per launch. I call that unacceptable.
I note also that Freeman Dyson, one of the strongest supporters at the time of Orion, later admitted that he thinks that it was probably right to stop the project.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
What worries me is that this thing could seriously reduce the demand for a better surface-to-LEO RLV than the Shuttle, and that is something that we really really need much more than yet another giant booster.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You forgot Proton (30 tons low orbit, maximum elevation - stationary orbit), Energy (above 100 tons low orbit) and the unimplemented 4xEnergy - above 400 tons low orbit.
The only merit the project has is that it is private. And that is about it.
Otherwise I see no merit whatsoever. It has been proven mathematically and experimentally a number of times that above a certain size a set of Nx engines is more effective than a single booster. Increasing the engine ad finitum size is trying to climb up a staircase leading down.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
What's the best fuel for a rocket?
The answer is: "Hydrogen, because it has the most energy per weight." So they build huge complex engines with tanks to keep the liquid hydrogen (EXTREMELY EXPLOSIVE) and liquid oxygen safe. The engines are also extremely complex because they have to handle liquid helium temperature liquids at one end and blast furnace temperatures at the other end. And engineering difficulties and complexities that continue on and on. Always adding weight. All because hydrogen was the best fuel in theory.
When an entrepreneur asks this same question, the answer comes back: "What do you want to do with it?". "Well, I want to put it in a rocket to launch satellites with." "Well, if you use H2 you'll have all those temperatures to deal with...jet fuel is much better than H2 in every respect except for power/weight ratio. But with all of the weight we'll save in the engines and the tanks and the handling, it'll more than make up for it..."
Outlined above is the type of reasoning that leads to NASA's rockets costing an order of magnitude more than Russia's. It also shows why, IMHO, Beal Aerospace Technology has a pretty good chance of revolutionizing the satellite launch market.
Daniel Lee
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Oh, like wow. Not.
We had "HEAVY" lift capacity decades ago, not in chemical but in nuclear rockects. Capacity which never got past early tests (despite the simplicity and robustness of the drives) because of the Neuclear Test Ban Treaty that Kennedy signed. (They Qualified)
With those babys, we could have gone to Mars in the '80s, but you'd have a hard time even lifting one, let alone launching one, in the current political climate.
The treaty also stopped Project Orion, which was REALLY cool, but probably impractical for lift/landing, though it'd be great for interplanetary thrust.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Average possible or acheived, I wonder? Not that many people bother trying to run a 9x box 24/7, IME.
I did last year, though. As we all know, it can aoccasionally get in a strop and crash repeatedly, they taking down the mean. But when it was running, it'd usually run for a day or so before it (or an unprotected application) did something silly and forced me to reboot due to substantially degraded performance.
I'd love to know how to get 9x stable enough to produce an average possible uptime of 2.1 days.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I don't think that's even the dominant form of humour here, TBH - though it does come up relatively frequently.
Work with MS products for any length of time, though, and you'll discover fairly rapidly that the system crashes - or degrades performance far enough to force a reboot - fairly frequently. They can blame the third parties or the device drivers all they like, but neither should be capable of doing that much damage and the main reason they play up is the daft DLL problems.
Yes, some of it's exaggerated but you realise how bad it can be when you have to live with it. It's not that far from the truth IME.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Maybe these guys should hook up with NASA and get the ISS launched a little quicker (rather than one piece at a time in the shuttle).
I sure hope they have some better real estate than what they have in Texas, though. I don't think they'll be making any launches from there, and the FedEx bill to ship a rocket to Cape Canaveral of Vandenberg is a bit steep.
Nope. They're all on microfilm at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
We simply do not have the infrastructure to build any more Saturn rockets. It's like asking Chevrolet to suddenly convert their assembly lines and start making 1965 Impalas again. Yeah, there's nothing stopping us technically.
Also, all of the maintenance and launch facilities for the Apollo program have been abandoned or converted for other uses. We use the old Saturn launch pads to launch the Space Shuttle now. It would actually be much cheaper and more efficient to design a brand new heavy lift vehicle
The Apollo program was a rush job and despite all of the amazing achievments, there were also a lot of cut corners and dust swept under the carpet. Ever wonder why the use those gigantic crawler-transporters to carry Saturns and Space Shuttles from the VAB to the launch pads? It's because in the 60's there wasn't enough time or manpower to lay railroad tracks or dig a barge canal. And so, to this very day, we use funky Jawa sand crawlers to move the Shuttle around at the Cape.
There's a lot more to launching rockets than just the rockets. You also need huge dedicated facilities and people to support the operation.
One such technology being worked on right now is plasma engines. A proposed 2002 mission that would test this type of engine is mentioned at http://www.qu est.arc.nasa.gov/space/team/journals/petro/01-29-9 9.html. Also mentioned is an ion engine. A bit more about the plasma (or RF) engine can be found at http://www.ornl.gov/orcmt/success/rf- eng.html.
I've heard engineers at NASA refer to the plasma engine as the engine that'll take us to Mars.
Augh!!!!!
/. reader could use something called the World Wide Web to research an urban legend before posting it. The plans for Saturn V exist on microfilm. The tool and die setups may have been destroyed, but how many tools and die setups from other products of the 1960's still exist?
Pulling out the plans for the Saturn V would be quite a trick. Supposedly all the mechanical drawings and all existing tool and die setups for building Saturn V's were destroyed on orders from Nixon as a political favor - to ensure that NASA got funding for the Shuttle.
Supposedly, a semi-intelligent
To summarize from the sci.space.FAQ, the microfilm plans exist, the launch pad and Vehicle Assembly Building have been converted to shuttle use, and much of the specialized hardware (they mention guidance equipment) would have to be built from scratch.
George
Actually, a complete Ku-band satellite, including parts, assembly, and launch, is about 250 million. This goes for NASA, or the French, or the Russians. So a quarter of a billion dollars for startup costs is not that much money in perspective.
Telecom satellites are cheaper, but they're also in a much lower orbit - a few hundred miles up as opposed to 23,000 miles up. But they are launched in clusters, because they are not geostationary. So the payload is generally larger than the weight of 1 satellite.
I am a strong believer in unmanned satellite launches. They are safer, just as accurate (because once you're in the ballpark, you fly satellites with telemetry anyway), and in the long run, are cheaper.
As far as satellite recovery, it almost never happens. If a satellite doesn't deploy properly, you sell it to the insurance company that insured the launch. The insurance company doesn't have any repo men for satellites, so dead satellites generally become space junk. It may not be the utopian approach, but that's the way it works in real life.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
That was an impressive picture you provided...
However, the dot representations aren't quite to scale, are they? If they were, you wouldn't be able to see them. All your picture illustrates is that with a crude enough scale, you can make anything look alarming.
I would say IMHO that the overerlming majority of the actual useable volume that we are talking about is empty, not filled with debris like your picture indicates.
Nuclear-powered toothbrushes (removes plaque... and everything else).
Nuclear-powered cigarette lighters (I don't understand this one - you'd probably get cancer anyway!)
Nuclear-powered cell phones (ditto)
Nuclear-powered laptops (Uranium is just a tad too heavy... but the battery life is good).
Nuclear-powered Minivans (you could just *laugh* at all the people paying $1.50/gallon)
Nuclear-powered Linux installer (if you screw up, not only does it trash your Windows partition, it trashes your house... but don't worry Corel is working on a user friendly front-end for it: Selecting this option will destroy your neighbourhood ).
Unfortunately X-33's turning into same-old, same-old NASA project, over-time, over-budget. It's already late, it's so overweight it can't met it's original design objectives. Lockheed's talking about X-33A, which will be "New and Improved" (and lemon scented, presumably).
If I were a cynic I might point out that Lockheed has the Shuttle maintenance contract, which is a cash-cow for them. Arguably they might not want a cheaper, easily maintained replacement for it. Being paid to make it fail is just a bonus.
// TODO: fix sig
I must have missed that.
Man, 4 million pounds of thrust would be an amazing.... AMAZING accomplishment, but it sounds impossible to me! :-)
Man! I don't know if we have materials that are up to those levels of performance. It would certainly be an amazing engineering accomplishment. I've been waiting for a new heavy lift vehicle to incorporate the latest materials and technology, maybe this will be it.
I remember in the late 1960's some crazed NASA engineer drew up simple sketches and ideas for a super-heavy-lifting vehicle that essentially clustered together 5 (!) Saturn V 1st stages (S-1C) to make up one first stage!
I remember that they initially planned to keep the launch pad 20 or 25 miles away over the horizon so that shock waves wouldn't destroy EVERYTHING. A vehicle with 5, 4-million pound thrust engines might require something similar.
I would be something to behold, wouldn't it? :-)
Ignore Alien Orders
Right... with five engines. These guys were talking about putting out 4 million pounds of thrust with one engine. To me that sounds unlikely.
Ignore Alien Orders
I thought I remembered that. I'll have to re-read the book.
I have chatted with the man about lecturing at a local community college. He seems like a nice guy.
The OLD NASA, yes. :-) But I do know that in the back of Director Dan Goldin's mind, he's thinking about building Mars rockets. And he has looked at Zubrin's ideas and even funded some small studies for in-situ propellant manufacturing, among others.
It'll probably not happen for a while, but it's nice to see that he seems to care about exploration, and doing it cheaply.
Absolutely, since we prove that you don't need heavy lift to launch LEO satellites every time we use a Delta to place a satellite... or launch a small vehicle to Mars.
Ignore Alien Orders
First, as someone who grew up in the Great Northwest, I suggest you take a flight over the state of Washington sometime. You'll see what no statistic can ever show - that the majority of forest land is GONE. There is a three foot buffer zone around highways to give the appearance of forestry, but an aerial view does much to bring it all home.
In British Columbia, clear cuts have stretched 180 square miles. It is a bald patch visible in SPACE. Ever wonder why the salmon industry vanished in the Northwest? Because clear cutting effects rivers and rivers effect salmon and thereby 5 million people lose their jobs when the natural salmon runs vanish. Ho Hum.
Here's a short excerpt from Carl Safina's (a director of programs for the National Audobon Society and professor at Yale) book Song For The Blue Ocean, a year long study to examine the truth behind ecological warnings. Bear in mind that Safina is an avowed fisherman who is concerned about people keeping their jobs, not a hippie tree hugger by any means. A read of this book will prove so. He examined such issues as the spotted owl and deforestation in the Northwest with as open a mind as possible, interviewing people representing all viewpoints, in order to assest in hindsight the truth behind these issues.
"In Alaska's panhandle, the 17 mil acre Tongass National Forest is the continent's last resovoir of ancient timber. Fifty year contracts signed in the 50s guarantee two companies (one Japanese owned) access to large quantities of timber for avg. $1.50 per board foot. The wood is worth $700 per thousand board feet. The Tongass sells more timber and loses more money than any other national forest, forty to sixty million dollars a year. In some years, it has lost 99 cents on every dollar it spent to sell trees."
In other words, it short sells ancient timber from parklands (public land) at a loss to private corporations. Ho hum.
Here's some facts for you:
"In nice round terms, a century of logging eliminated 90 percent of the ancient salmon forests of Oregon and Washington. About 5 percent is protected. All the remaining ancient forest on US soil in the Pacific Northwest will be gone before 2010 unless specifically protected."
As for the basis of these facts, I urge you to read the book and check his biblography, which is more than esteemed, all information coming from eminent scientific publications and journals. As for yours, where do they come from?
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
How exactly would a large satellite "clean up the junk?" Would it eat the dead satellites? You can't just clean them up. They have mass, they take up space. The only way you can get rid of them is to push them into the atmosphere. However, do you want to be the president of a company that starts pushing 17-ton satellites into the atmosphere hoping that they burn up on reentry or land in an ocean?
Why does everyone insist that Nature exists only on Earth? Does it not bother anyone that the 10,000 pieces of man-made debris surrounding the earth looks like this? That the University of Chicago and NASA launched a satellite in January 1999 to monitor the debris? That an international committee(the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, of which NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Chinese Space Agency are a part) has been formed in order to manage the garbage? That each piece of debris, moving at tens of thousands of km/h, poses a threat to future satellites? I'm sure people would care if we started trashing the moon, but that's even farther away. Just because it's vacuum doesn't mean it's not worth taking care of.
enmity.
According to the Goddard Space Flight Center, over 3500 satellites (active and dead) are already in orbit. In April 1991, the Atlantis shuttle carried the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory satellite into orbit, which, weighing in at 17 tons (38,000 pounds or 17,273 kilograms), was, at the time, the heaviest shuttle payload ever launched. The full BA-2 rocket, according to Beal's site, has the capacity to carry a 37,400 pound payload into low earth orbit or 13,200 pounds to geostationary transfer orbit.
As Donald Robertson states in a 1995 article on commercial satellites,What's going to happen when media conglomerates decide to upgrade their orbiting infrastructure with a new, 2000-era mindset of "bigger is better, and hell, now it's cheap too?"
It's long been known that large companies care little about such problems. Many agricultural companies care little for the land they desecrate, and I doubt that media companies will show any more compassion toward the limits of Nature (whether terrestrial or in orbit). It seems our only hope lies with governmental regulations, but I fear that in the future the mighty dollar may prove to be greener than Nature.
enmity.
This article doesn't really have much detail on their project, but I know that Lockheed Martin has been working on a whole vehicle for delivering things into "outer space".
It's called the X-33 Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) and information is available here. This page is slightly out of date, but it has more technical detail than that article.
Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin.
A choice of masters is not freedom
I used to work for the Rotary Rocket Company; I was part of the team that was developing the main engine. It was one hell of a cool company and one hell of a cool project. And, most significantly, we had a great team that included the best engineers that I have ever had the privilege to work alongside.
SSTO is a very ambitious goal -- there are "experts" (mostly in NASA) who still say that practical SSTO is impossible -- but that team had the Right Stuff and might have actually pulled it off. Unfortunately, the company ran out of money and has cut staff back to a bare skeleton crew. In particular, the entire engineering team is gone.
As somebody who was on the inside, I can tell you this: the main problem was, as always, a lack of money. But lack of management at the very top was a close second. Gary Hudson (Rotary's CEO) is a great visionary, but the man does not know how to manage an engineering project. Alot of the progress that was made at Rotary occurred despite Gary, rather than because of him.
The current state of affairs is that Rotary has a whole lot of hardware, but nothing in the way of a team. Hudson got more seed money -- by at least two orders of magnitude -- for this project than any cheap space advocate has ever seen in one place before. Unfortunately, he blew it. Rotary Rocket is, I am sad to say, effectively dead, and no amount of money is going to revive it, unless that money comes along with a major reorganization (i.e. get a new CEO). And Gary will not allow that to happen.
However, work continues. The former head of Propulsion, the chief engineer, and a couple of my ex-coworkers have created a company, X-Cor Aerospace , to develop rocket engines for commercial applications. Currently they are seeking customers and/or investors who want to support their work. And they have built a small rocket engine, literally in their garage, using their own money. Their ultimate goal is to gather the resources necessary to build a cheap commercial launch vehicle, and succeede where Rotary failed. But at the moment, they are struggling to survive.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Everyone has been commenting about the importance of these rockets for possible Mars missions. As an astronomy major, I can say Beal's new rockets mean very little.
Beal's BA-2 rockets use iquid hyrodgen as fuel. However, there are diminishing returns for the amount of fuel you pack into a rocket. The more fuel you have, the more thrust you need to lift it off the ground. Now this isn't too much of a problem for lifting sattelites into orbit. But for a Mars mission - you have to pack along a hefty amount of fuel for the return trip. Chemical reactions are not efficient enough to make this a reality.
NASA's got lots of issues with the Mars mission. Check out these numbers:
* The Mars trip would take 259 days - ONE WAY. There's no getting around this. It's called a Hohmann Transfer Orbit, and it's just not worth getting there any different way.
* Being a science major, I work in metric units. So for all you nerds out there - it would take 2.11x10^11 Joules of energy to get a 1000kg shuttle to Mars. Now, I'm not sure how long the Beal rocket can sustain it's 810,000lbs thrust (stoopid Standard units), but that's A LOT of energy. That's not to Mars & back, just to Mars. And let's face it, they're going to have to carry a lot more than 1000kg (about 1 ton) of fuel for the return trip.
My guess is that alternative fuels will be used to travel to and from other planets. Ion drive technology may actually become a reality for large-scale projects in the future. Who knows. But I think it's safe to say that Beal will be using their rockets as advertised - for commercial sattelites, not for Mars.
Seems not to be well known that Beal may be launching from Guyana - a small English-speaking country in South America just south of Venezuela. We are just 5 deg N of the equator and the site they have been testing would allow lauches N and E over open sea. Manufacturing would take place elsewhere. Would be great for us here in my opinion. They seem willing to help develop local talent where feasible - not many rocket engineers here right now... ;) For the eco-concerned there is a functioning EPA here & there will be an EIA etc. Has been quite a bit of discussion in the local press. The identified area is a small part of a large area of sparsely inhabited swamp. For links to local press see: http://www.sdnp.org.gy/guylinks.html If the pages are a bit slow have patience with us - we only came on the net in 1996.
A heavy-lift booster in this class could throw a pretty good-sized payload to Mars for a "Mars Direct" type of manned mission. The fact that the boosters exist will probably give an extra push to the manned Mars project (if NASA can ever stop throwing money away on the Space Station).
I hope to see colonists on Mars before I die, but at this rate they need to get moving -- the space program hasn't done anything really visionary since Neil Armstrong walked out onto the moon.
In any event, it's good to see that a less expensive heavy lift booster is making it to the market. I wonder what NASA has planned next -- maybe toss a few dozen comm satelites into orbit with one big booster to facilitate talking to earth....
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Nuclear-powered Watches (They used to mix Radium with the glow in the dark paint on the dials so they would glow all night)
Nuclear-powered souviners (The Atomic Bomb museum in Oakridge had a cool machine, you put a dime in it, and it bombarded the dime with Neutrons, Creating a souviner Radioactive Dime.)
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Did anyone really read the article and Beal's site?
:-)
This engine is going to be used for the second stage. I would say that 810K lbs. of thrust is very good for a private launch firm.
Their first stage engine is targeted to produce 4.1 million lbs. of thrust. It will be interesting to see how those tests go.
They look to be targeting LEO/GEO satellite orbits instead of something as ambitious as interplanetary exploration.
On a side note, I've some experience with hydrogen peroxide. As an undergrad (I have a BS in aero engineering from Purdue) I worked with some grad students on a project of theirs. They were doing some testing with a H2O2/styrofoam and H2O2/polyethylene engines. It was awesome to say the least. Peroxide is a very safe propellant, we were using it for over a year and still have all our fingers, eyes, and toes.
One of the guys happened to work at Beal for a bit as their chief propulsion dude. He has since left and is working elsewhere.
A quarter of a billion dollars? Why is this guy trying to recreate NASA? You don't need Saturn-V-class vehicles to get the majority of payloads to orbit. What's more, it looks like his vehicle is disposible, which is an unnecessary waste. And that launch site looks ridiculously impractical; how are you going to get what might be an extremely delicate, sensitive payload to that island?
Check out the Rotary Rocket Company. They have a working prototype, the Roton, undergoing tests in California's Mojave desert.
Maximum payload capacity: 7000 lbs.
Estimated cost per launch: $7M
Price per pound: $1000
NASA's price per pound: ~$5000
Most payloads, especially telecomm satellites, are under 7000 pounds. Unlike Beal's proposed vehicle, the Roton is reusable and manned. It takes off and lands on its tail, like God and Robert Heinlein intended :-). And not only can they deliver your payload to orbit but, unlike Beal, they can bring it back! Never throw away another satellite!
Right now, all they need is investment capital. For half of what Beal has spent to date ($120M), they can complete the Roton and start delivering payloads to orbit. Unfortunately, Rotary Rocket has had difficulty securing investment capital. Unlike most .coms -- which typically get twice what Rotary Rocket needs -- they have an actual working prototype, and they will make money.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I noticed this in the employment section of there website...
"Applicant should be capable of developing command/response serial communications software on
WinNT using Visual C++.
"Roger, we have lift-off, hold on I have a blue screen, abort! abort!"
AdFuel
John Walker wrote a piece on the economics of launch systems that says, basically, it makes more sense to launch a lot of little rockets frequently than it does to launch a few big rockets occasionally. The argument is that recurring costs of industrial processes go down with volume more than enough to make up for any economies of scale that might be lost by launching only one satellite per rocket. Certainly microelectronics in low earth orbit requiring frequent "on demand" replenishment launches is at odds with the large booster approach.
John Walker isn't the first to make this argument. Since the early 80s aerospace professionals know have been pointing out that rocket engines have materials limits and tolerances no more demanding than a VW engine made in Brazil costing under $1000 per unit. The big difference is volume production. So this seems obvious to a number of very intelligent folks.
I've never seen a good refutation of this argument. I really wonder why Andy Beal et al chose the big booster approach. What were they thinking?
Seastead this.
Every now and then someone mentions that at the moment it's not actually possible for man to land on the moon - and to do so would mean getting out the old Saturn V plans, and rebuilding 30 year old technology.
Now with this series of rocket being developed by these guys, despite the fact that they are being built with the main objective of deploying satellites, could they be modified to perform moon-landing-type missions? It would mean that a) development of the necessary hardware wouldn't have to start from the ground up, and b) it isn't being built using 30 year old technology (based on maybe, but you catch my drift.)
I realise that the base model of rocket would have to be modfied to stick on the lunar module etc. but is this conceivable? I would just think that this would perhaps make any NASA, or any other space agency for that matter, prick up it's ears regarding picking up moon development where we left off a quarter-century ago.
Bottom line, I think they've done a great job so far, but to do any real heavy lifting you need more thrust. They claim this engine is scalable, but we'll see. Getting more thrust out of it now will probably require massive investment, if the engine is capable of any more.
I may not be remembering correctly, but even Bob Zubrin's Mars Direct plan called for some serious heavy lifting. And I think he mentioned the Energia Booster.
You can cluster more engines to get more thrust but the Soviets learned that that isn't always the best solution. I think the first stage of their Saturn V equivalent (sometimes known as the G-1, but also know as something else, N1?) used 30 engines, and they had problems keeping them all working. They even managed to blow a few of them up.
So I question whether these are up to the task of real heavy lifting. I hope they prove me wrong.
Heck, just bust out the plans for the F-1 and start making those again. Sure, all of the tooling is gone but you could probably re-start the production of that engine for very little.
OR, get with the Soviets and re-start their Energia Heavy Lift program. THAT was the most powerful heavy lift vehicle ever built.
Just because those were government sponsored programs doesn's mean private industry couldn't take over (though I don't buy the whole argument that the private sector necessarily does things more efficiently than does government).
Ignore Alien Orders
http://www.roadrunner.com/~mrpbar/rocket.html
Basically, as an alternative to chemical rockets, we were developing a nuclear rocket called NERVA.
By the time the project was terminated, their prototypes were giving about 850 seconds of specific impulse, and the engineers believed it wouldnt be too difficult to raise that to about 1200. The theoretical maximum for chemical rockets, however, is something like 400 seconds of specific impulse. If the project hadn't been canned, it is quite possible that our rockets would be three times as efficient as they are today.
The downside was that if a rocket failed during launch, it would be pretty catastrophic. But, as was already mentioned, rockets like this would be great for interplanetary travel.