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Getting Into The Private Space Race
powerbarr writes "This article has an excellent description of the issues of getting into the rocket industry without government funding and focuses on one startup that is doing it. Sea Launch is a subsidiary of American, Russian, Ukrainian, and Norwegian companies that has cheaper, more accurate, and more reliable launch system that is trying to compete with all the government sponsored systems that are more expensive and less reliable."
This private venture is 40% owned by Boeing
Methinks there might be opportunities for British Aerospace and Concorde to start launching space missions...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
As for the weight differential you are right, it would .
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require an enormous amount of lift to pull it off
even with hydrogen balloons
The credits for the information aka references were at
the bottom of the page
Of course you already knew that as you read the whole thing
real fast and rapid fire responded to me
Oh well
As for for the transfer of forces, the ballon platform is
not capable of moving at mach speeds, and also E=MC(squared)
so the mass of the platform, MANY tons is greater than
that of a 450kg projectile like the US is already planning to
launch from a mountain based rail gun
Furthermore planes already fire incredible weapons at
sutained cyclic rates , like the A10 warthog , and they
can stall if fired long enough
This is going to have one helluva kick for a fraction of a second
As you read the entire large article soooo fast you already
knew that too
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Actually, Boeing is leaving the company out to dry because of how cheap they are. They directly compete with Boeing's much higher cost Delta rockets and Boeing really wants the company to fail. This is because of their merger with Lockheed Martin that got them into the rocket business after Sea Launch was set up.
I was not aware that Burt Rutan is working on large rocket engines to enable geosynchronous orbit. The article is about the commercialization/privatization of space and how it compares to the airline industry (still heavily government subsidized in some cases) which found cheaper ways to do things in order to bring it down to costs the public could afford.
Actually, they've had one failure so far out of eight with another launch to occur on June 10. Still while only a few launches, this is pretty good start considering their competition and their costs are way less. Both XM Radio and Direct TV have used them to launch satellites.
Here is a link to past launches