Delta IV RocketCam Videos

dmaas writes "High-quality RocketCam videos from the inaugural launch of Boeing's Delta IV rocket have just been made available (in MPEG-1 and Quicktime formats). Of note are the spectacular strap-on solid rocket booster separation, the extension of the second-stage engine nozzle, and the red-hot glow of ablative material in the second-stage engine. (disclaimer: my company prepared these videos for Ecliptic Enterprises, maker of the RocketCam system)" We did RocketCam photos for model rockets a few weeks ago, if you want to compare.

Comments

Obligatory

[Freston Youseff]

Amateur rocket link.

Temporary Slashdot effect?

[YuppieScum]

Looks like the Gates Bros. Rocketry from last months story is still down.

503 Service Unavailable
The requested URL Bandwidth is temporarily unavailable.

Perhaps "temporarily" now means "not while Slashdot still has a link to it"?

Wow...

[trotski]

Hey those rockets are VERY cool.... I am impressed. I wonder.

It looks like right now they're using them for sattelite launches. I wonder, since space shuttles are gettin' kinda old and are and always have been rediculously expensive, will these Delta rockets eventually serve as the american's main launch vehicle for astronauts? That would be very cool.

To remain a little bit more on topic, they videos look great, all of this is very exciting.

Re:Wow...

[Mister Transistor]

They don't carry enough payload. They will carry up a 500-1000 pound satellite, but 2 people plus all the life-support crap necessary to keep them alive would weigh about the same. Not too economical to just send 2 people up, with no cargo. Also, they're not re-useable, nor cheap enough to be more economical than a re-useable vehicle. We need to send more than just people into space; we've been there, done that. Cargo capacity is the most important consideration, but cost is also important - the Shuttle holds lots of cargo, but it's too expensive to use for everything we want to send up.

Re:Wow...

[Soft]

I am not a rocket scientist, but I always thought the whole point of the shuttle was that it is resuable, thus saving money in the long run.

That's the idea on paper. However, this only works if the vehicle flies again and again; the current shuttle flight rate is about four to six a year (all four vehicles combined), and it requires a standing army of several thousand people to rebuild each one between missions - it is not a matter of "fueling her up, checking the oil, cleaning the windshield", more like swapping out the engines, replacing thermal tiles, and so on. And the airframes are aging, fast.

This puts the price tag for each flight in the $300 million range, or $10,000/kg (payload mass, not counting the hundred-ton shuttle deadweight). With that kind of performance, the expendable launchers are more economical. Or you could say that the current shuttles are not, in fact, reusable.

Many space advocates believe that we now have the technology and know-how to cut those costs by a large factor, but that NASA and the big players have no interests in doing so. Check this previous /. story about "How the West wasn't won".

Isn't NASA working on a next generation shuttle for human missions?

They have just relaunched an orbital spaceplane program to alleviate the ISS' dependency on Russian Soyuzes; this would be a small (reusable?) vehicle housing up to ten people, launched either by a shuttle or a Delta 4 Heavy, to be used mainly as a lifeboat for the ISS so that more than three people can stay there for extended periods.

Other than that, the SLI program is more or less aimed at replacing the shuttle in a two or three-decade timeframe, and will probably produce yet another expensive all-in-one monster vehicle, if anything.

Forward

[denisonbigred]

Approximately 37 minutes after liftoff, the rocket deployed the W5 spacecraft to a geosynchronous transfer orbit with a perigee of 539 kilometers above the Earth.

Kind of makes your 37 minute commute to work seem slow, doesn't it?

37 minutes

[isorox]

Approximately 37 minutes after liftoff, the rocket deployed the W5 spacecraft to a geosynchronous transfer orbit with a perigee of 539 kilometers above the Earth.

But will the web server last that long?

Wow

[Warin]

I wonder how the politicians that feel the space program should be cut can watch something like this and not be moved... Sure the space program is expensive, but in spite of how trite it sounds, space really is the final frontier. We've explored pretty much all of surface of our planet, and short of being into submarines (which isnt anywhere as cool as the Space shuttle!) earth orbit and beyond are the last frontier for exploration. All of human history has been about going beyond the next hill... seeking out what we dont know. It seems awfully short sighted to expect that drive to just fade away... Sometimes a concept is worth more than money.

Wastefulness...

[neksys]

All this video did (besides impress me to the point of breathlessness) is reinforce the need for a cheap, reuseable launch vehicle. Watching 80% of the rocket fall away in stages - all those millions of dollars in raw materials - just goes to show how wasteful our current launch systems are. Even the shuttle sheds a large part of itself soon after launch - not to mention the fact that the shuttles are aging, inefficient behemoths that deserve a proper rest. We need to develop a fully reusable, inexpensive, efficient launch vehicle. No, there isn't any oil in space, and yes, it is terribly expensive to retrieve raw materials from off our planet, but the value of such a craft cannot be measured in dollars or tons - its value instead is found in the history books of the future, proclaiming it the first step in bringing the stars to our doorstep.

Re:Wastefulness...

[prisoner-of-enigma]

You'd be amazed at how wrong this conventional "reusable" wisdom is; not that you haven't put some thought into it, but history and current events shows it to be wrong.

Take, for example, the Saturn V moon rockets. This behemoth rocket, standing who-knows-how-many stories tall, and all you get back is this teensy little capsule with three astronauts in it. Wasteful, eh?

Well, yes it is, but engineers plan that wastefullness into the system. For example, the massive Jupiter engines that were on the first stage of the Saturn V were designed to work once, and only once. As such, you immediately can dispense with one of the largest expenses of the shuttle fleet -- namely, the tear down and inspection process following every launch. There's nothing to inspect when your launch system is expendable. Ironically, the shuttle costs more per pound of payload than the Saturn V did, even taking inflation into account, and the inspection procedures are a large part of this.

Take it a step further and you'll see that reliability comes into play. How many shuttle launches have been delayed or scrubbed due to equipment failure? Quite a few, and it's because the shuttle has sacrificed much to the altar of reusability. Weight, the evil bugaboo of the space program, has been ruthlessly trimmed to the point where things aren't as overengineered as the were in the Apollo days. Such cuts had to be made or the shuttle wouldn't be able to carry as much as a postcard into orbit. Apollo, by contrast, was rarely delayed because the equipment wasn't being pushed as hard as the Shuttle is. Again, Saturn V's were designed with finite lifetimes, and the engineers used that to build cheaper, more reliable, but somewhat less efficient systems.

Lastly, reusability comes at a heavy cost in payload capacity. The shuttle can only reach low earth orbit, and only a few orbital trajectories at that. Why do you think so many companies still use Delta's for satellite launches? It's cheaper and it's more reliable, otherwise you'd bet that companies would be bashing down NASA's door trying to get space on a shuttle launch.

I'll leave you with a good analogy from the motorsports world: drag racing. A Top Fuel dragster is designed to do one thing -- run the quarter mile as fast as possible. To that end, the engines are designed to be torn down and practically rebuilt in between runs, and are junked after a very few runs. Why is that? Well, parts designers realized that to design a longer, more reusable lifespan into these engines would either diminish their competitiveness (heavier components last longer but hurt performance) or cost an unholy amount of money in exotic materials and technologies. The analogy is not complete, of course, since drag engines still cost a fortune, but you get the picture as big, dumb boosters do not cost a fortune with respect to the shuttle.

The shuttle is, and has been, a political jobs program. It should never have been made, and should not be continued. Manned spaceflight to LEO could be just as easily accomplished with cheaper, expendable boosters like the ones we were using forty years ago. In fact, with the technology advances of today, those yesteryear boosters could be much cheaper to operate today than they were then.

Server Down - Straight DL from Boeing here

[Knunov]

Their server is down already.

Download a movie directly from Boeing here.

QT format. The site also has Real Audio format.

Knunov