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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.
"
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.
Actually, they did loose engines on launch, for example Apollo 13's centre engine on the SII stage shutdown 2 minutes early, on a 7:30 minute planned burn.
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....
----
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.
Well... this may not be too far off the mark with lobbyist of various countries vying for their rockets and launching facilities. Cellular phones, pagers, etc. are definately raising the competition in this space. I'm just suprised Amazon hasn't patented the idea of a large cone shaped object using highly combustible fuel designed to carry payloads into space, yet.
Visit uMoo - http://www.uMoo.com/ - Talk about Bull...
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.