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Sea Launch Success
After the spectacular failure of the last go-round, Kyle writes: "The commercial venture Sea Launch has successfully launched another communications satellite into geosynchronous orbit, restoring confidence in the floating launch system after a launch failure earlier this year. The video Webcast was entertaining, complete with hints that they threw a pretty good post-launch party out there in international waters." Reader marat points to CNN coverage of the launch. Isn't it neat how the space game is heating up?
We're way ahead of you. It would cost about 10,000 US dollars to launch a 2 kilo payload into geosyncronous orbit. But that's not the real problem.. the real problem is aquiring the bandwidth to transmit, which starts in the 10 million dollar range. Me and a few friends have been investigating landing a reflective "pad" on the moon which would be a couple kilometers in diameter and from which we could bounce laser light off of it from earth. If you can see the moon, you can receive our signal. This way you bypass the FCC. Of course, there are problems with this. :) But that'll get you started.
The deceleration would instantly turn all food into soup, which would then be cooked by the fuel as it exploded. All future space flight would have to navigate carefully around the huge cloud of orbitting bisque.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
>hello? Yes the world governments wouldn't have >any legal jurisdiction to do anything about them. >But, I don't know of any enforcable law that says >"you can't blow up other people's shit in space"
Well, IANAW (I am not a Whatever), but at sea, also international territory, if your vessel, oil platform, or what have you gets attacked, the government who's flag that ship flies is supposed to have jurisdiction over it. Attacking a U.S. boat is like attacking the united statess, and I would assume space would work the same
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
You can see the launch in slow motion at :46 minutes, it's actually a two minute delay due to camera failure. It's a nice slow motion shot though!
At 2:13 are a couple of interviews with people.
They get the signal from the satellite about 2:26:30, after which they have a speach about the launch.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ie, food + fuel. Very useful thing to be able to slingshot (either metaphorically or literally) into space, neh?
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www.crashspace.net
Sure, but bull's dead. The mossad killed him.
The problem is that any gun big enough to make space lauches cheap is a real threat to the national security of any nation that is along the line of fire. If you can get the payload into [near] orbit, then that includes a lot of land.
Actually, the biggest usefulness of the gun wouldn't be to reach orbit directly (very high muzzle velocity needed), but rather to get rid of the need for the first stage booster. I read somewhere that x% of the fuel of a standard rocket is used to get it the initial y meters/sec velocity (where x is high and y is low).
what about a really low exit velocity gun -- basically a long high speed elevator that gave your entire rocket an initial 100 m/s or so boost?
Nice and easy, w/o the mess of all the rumbling and shaking before the rocket lifts off?
What about active/dynamic/unstable/whatever-it's-called steering, like we see in the newer fighter aircraft?
Wouldn't that be a feasable solution?
Looks like we will be getting some late fireworks this year, I recommend they plan the deorbiting to coincide with the beginning of the millenium.
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The Space Access Society has occupied an important niche. What they seem to be doing with that niche is not as important as what they are doing with it.
And they hit the mark right on with that last article; it takes a billion dollar initial investment to develop a new launch system
Excuses, excuses...
It doesn't take a billion dollars to develop a new dragster.
Those boys will frequently build new engines the way the Wright Brothers did in their bike shop for their first airplane. Yeah, they blow up a lot of their "innovative" engines, but if you are so much of a pussy you can't deal with regular occurances of high energy events that produce large quantities of metal fragments zipping around hunting for your vitals, you shouldn't be into high power systems in the first place.
Of course, everyone in the US aerospace industry these days is a pussy.
Seastead this.
http://www.sea-launch.com/
All they need is for a minor German civil servent to visit them, declare themselves a soverign state and then offer expensive off-shore hosting. If only somebody else had thought of that before me. I wonder...
The exhaust from liquid-fueled rockets is many magnitudes less polluting than any internal-combustion engine. So, you might want to worry about the 825325123 cars pumping out noxious gasses and heat every day.
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
A networked satellite with a PC on it, carrying DeCSS, Napster servers, and other stuff. Outer space is counted as international terroritory right?. How much does it cost to send up a satellite and would people be interested in having a totally secure outer space co-location? I got my dibs on the first co-location on the moon
-Stskeeps, http://unrealircd.com
Such a coilgun would be most effective in launching LARGE cargo, not small. Think "space-station" sized. The second problem is the deceleration upon exitting the tube.
You have this 2 meter crossection of ceramic slamming into our atmosphere at close to 18k/s - that has a tendancy to cause things to vaporize. Not only that, but the deceleration shock would be in the several thousands of g forces.. not good for any electronics.
The third and easiest to solve problem is the EMF created by the coilgun. You have an absolutely HUGE EMF operating at high frequency. Effectively, it's a localized EMP aimed right at your electronics. Without shielding, you'll have molten slag for ICs - you absolutely must shield the equipment.
Just some thoughts...
"There is no shot you can take that I cannot simply deny." - Ertai, wizard goalie
...is a lot to watch, especially when most of it's "Well Bob, there's the rocket" "Yep Cindy, we launch in one hour".
So skip through to about 35 minutes to see the lead up to the launch. Once it gets to around 48 minutes they're back to info-graphics and repeating what the flight control crew is saying.
"We're at L+5, that's five minutes after the launch time (Ed. No shit?), and I've just heard that the flight is nominal". Argh, so did we.
If there's one thing that I learned from the Simpsons, it's that you can have a great party in international waters. :)
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...is great and all, but still think Bull's idea
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of shoting stuff into space with a huge fscking cannon was much more elegant:
http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/SGbull.h
[...]
The Israelis, in September 1988, had successfully launched their own Shavit rocket into orbit, an event that had much impressed, and depressed, the Arab League. Bull promised the Iraqis a launch system that could place dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Arab satellites into orbit. *Small* satellites, granted, and unmanned ones; but their launches would cost as little as five thousand dollars each. Iraq would become a genuine space power; a minor one by superpower standards, but the only
Arab space power. And even small satellites were not just for show. Even a minor space satellite could successfully perform certain surveillance activities.
[...]
When you combine that with SkyCorp's robust component satellite assembly system, you wouldn't have to have a floating platform and a 1000' long ship to support you launch acctivities. In fact, the average fortune 500 company might be able to single handly fund and carryout launch activities. Still, 10,000 Gs is a s*itload of force. Maybe if someone were able to develope a hybrid rail gun/megneto-levo/cannon system that would accelerate payloads at lower Gs which would then link up with inertial launch component post explosive acceleration (at the muzzle perhaps)
http://www.spaceviews.com/2000/06/11a.html
http://www.themacjunkie.com/archives/6.13.00.wi
http://www.sky-corp.com/
maybe you could even do some weird shit like putting the railrun/megneto-levitation system underwater (pointed at the surface) and use Cavitation to get the payload upto hypersonic speeds before it joins up with the inertial launch component on a platform at the equator.
Timing would be critical... I'm not sure if computers currently have the resolution required to solve those timing issues. Probably have to use some weirdo-analog-hack to get the payload and inertial components in same spot at the right place.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/23/162
The "space game" isn't heating up, just Slashdot's coverage of it is. I'd given up last year on submitting space stories to be ignored by "News for Computer Nerds", but the change of pace this summer is pretty nice. But frankly, with the progress of past years in mind, the current news is pretty depressing.
Rotary Rocket has been gutted of engineers and CEO, and their current progress is destined to be mothballed unless they find a magic money tree somewhere.
Ok, so they were a long shot. But Kistler was playing it relatively safe with their design (after ditching an initial wacky idea), didn't hit any big technical or political snags, but simply is in limbo now trying to raise the last third of their funding.
Did Timothy not read the last SAS newsletter when it got posted to Slashdot? (Big thanks to whomever did that one, by the way; I'd advise interested readers to check out the archives too). The SAS seems to be the group most interested in low cost access to space, rather than in lobbying for a larger NASA budget. And they hit the mark right on with that last article; it takes a billion dollar initial investment to develop a new launch system, there are only two aerospace companies left who can afford that kind of investment, and they've both got good reason to love the status quo.
Oh, but what about government research? The X-33 is a joke. It was never designed as a simple, cheap launch vehicle, just as a way to be a "technology demonstrator" for as much flashy stuff as necessary to win a NASA contract. Of course, except for the aerospike engine, most of that flashy stuff is looking worse and worse. The lifting body shape may need control fins the size of wings, or ballast (yes, ballast on a spacecraft) to keep the center of gravity ahead of the center of pressure. They've just about given up on a high-tech composite tank after discovering it damaged in tests, and will probably have to use plain old aluminum for their wacky, multilobed design.
And did I mention that they're running years behind schedule, over budget, and despite previous agreements that Lockheed-Martin would pay budget overruns, they may renegotiate or scrap the project anyway?
Sea Launch's success isn't even in the same class as these failures. They're trying to squeeze a few extra pounds onto the usual work-intensive expendable rocket, not to reduce the gross costs of space launch by an order of magnitude.
My last glimmer of hope is Beal Aerospace, not because they have any groundbreaking new ideas in their design, but because they've got a sugar daddy financer who can afford all the capital investment before they get up and running. And even if they get started with tried and true booster technologies, they'll be a profitable new space company with no vested interest in squeezing the largest launch prices out of the government as possible. And that might actually heat things up.
I was lucky enough to hear one of the guys who engineers for the company speak at an IEEE meeting. Apparently There are a few major advantages to launching from the Pacific. By doing there launches this way they can have all of the equipment that they need transported to a loading dock in a relatively urban setting. Additionally it allows all of the personnel to live in a relatively urban setting while they work on the rockets. But the biggest advantage is that they can transport the rocket to the launch sight by boat (and the launch sight it in international waters) Apparently the U.S. gets pissed off if you launch rockets on real estate that is even remotely habitable, Buying a launch sight and getting the rocket there would be a MAJOR expense.
There set up is also pretty cool, they have two "ships" one is an unmanned oil platform where they keep/launch the rocket, the other is a control ship where a crew of (mostly Russian) engineers controls the launch. They seem to use a lot of Russian parts as well.