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Brazil Successfully Launches Its First Rocket To Space
thatshortkid writes "The Washington Times is reporting on Brazil's first successful space launch. Since it is closer to the equator, the task of getting up to space is easier, meaning much more cargo room over fuel. Hello commercial launch market! With this development, along with China's expanding space program, India making moves to space, and our own homegrown (ok, still growing) private space industry, where does this put NASA? Does it take a load off of them to pursue bigger endeavors, or will NASA slowly decline in relevance?"
Brazil has certainly taken over Orkut. NASA is clearly the next logical step.
Letter
You get a bigger boost from the rotation of the earth near the equater. Sort of a slingshot effect.
- The race is not [always] to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. -
Maybe NASA will actually acquire enough technology from private enterprise to actually put a man on the moon!
Talk about a growth market. Poor country, cheap ground for large launch facilities, decent tourist(y) spots along the coast... If they can attract the market, they're in to make some money.
Whose stock do I buy?
Most of the effort in getting into space is not in getting up, but in getting enough speed. You have to be going several km/sec to stay in low earth orbit. The Earth spins pretty fast, about 0.4km/sec at the equator, and getting less and less as you get farther away, finally resulting in zero speed at the poles. Every bit of speed you gain from the Earth's spin is a bit of speed you don't have to provide with your rocket. This means you need less fuel, can carry greater payloads, etc.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Looks like NASA's relevance is going the way of NASA's funding! Ooh. Zing!
...to the list of those on pace to beat the US in sci/tech within 30 or so years.
While it may affect NASA, I doubt it will cripple them. Commercial flights are going to focus on getting people in to space (for large sums of money). NASA will focus on sending large, heavy payloads in to space, like communications satellites. It may actually be beneficial for NASA to partner with, say, Brazil to get the advantages of their location (though transporting all those sensitive things would be a royal PITA), but I don't think the advantage will be so large that they'll do it.
Plus, NASA has a research focus, sending things to Mars or the Moon, which simply isn't commercially interesting right now. Maybe when we discover oil on mars (because, you know, they had dinosaurs) or some benefit that would intrigue the medical research corporations, Mars or the Moon may become interesting, but until then, nobody is going to sponsor all the research NASA does. And since experimentation in a weightless environment wasn't too terribly fascinating for them, I don't think Mars would be either.
So I think NASA will pretty much stay put, but the competition will 1) make them step up their game a bit, and 2) allow them to focus their resources on the things nobody else is currently doing.
The European Space Agency has been taking advantage of an equatorial launch site for 40 years in French Guiana. NASA has managed to remain relevant during those 40 years, so I don't foresee Brazil's recent launch changing that.
Narr
That's right. All your base.
Now, the escape velocity is the same everywhere, but you get a headstart.
It is also true that launching nearer the equator helps with orbits- it's only possible to launch to an orbit that passes over the launch site (without doing a 'dogleg' which wastes lots of fuel.) All orbits cross the equator, so it's the best place to launch from that point of view. However, the equatorial orbits don't pass over, say, Kazakhstan or New York, so you can't as efficiently launch from there to Geosynchronous orbits or other near-equatorial orbits.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Yes. Note that almost all existing spaceports are close to the equator (or as close as is practical given national boundaries). The United States launches from Florida. Russia launches from Baikonur in Kazakhstan (not all that far south, but about as far as you can get and still be in the boundaries of the former Soviet Union). The European Space Agency launches from French Guiana in South America.
Aye carrumba!!! Aye-eee!!!!
No need to mock Brazil with Mexican-ish expressions.
As if everything below Texas were some sort of uniform Hispanic cultural goo. People don't even speak Spanish in Brazil.
The US calls these sounding rockets.
Hopefully Brazil will get its satellite launch program back up and running. It was severely damaged when one of the solid rocket motors ignited in a rocket being set up on the pad for launch, which destroyed the pad and killed the technicians working to set it up.
Why are millions and millions of dollars being poured into space programs when Brazil, China and India are all considered Third World Countries. (China may be on the fence.) Wouldn't this money be better spent on social programs?
Perhaps because this will also create native technology and bring more jobs (directly and indirectly)?
I do not think that merely producing tons of sugar and coffee each year will be enough to improve the conditions in any country.
The summary is pretty bizarre. Brazil's launch is to a viable commercial launch system what the Wright Flier is to a 747. It was quite an accomplishment (coming after the previous accidents) but hardly anything more than a promising start along a 15-20 year road, with optimism. RTFA.
Additionally, the development of more commercial launch capability is essentially absurd - given that there is a huge overcapacity in commercial launch capability.
Moreover, NASA has had very little or nothing to do with commercial launch for many, many years. Private companies have been doing this essentially on their own for a long time. They use the same launchers and use Cape facilities. But NASA pays just like everybody else, when they use expendable vehicles. So the relevance of even more commercial launch capability would have no effect in any way on NASA - even assuming that this was what the Brazilians were doing - which they are not.
As far a "looking down on the Chinese" - well, given that they have had exactly one manned launch with capabilities similar to a Gemini flight from 40 years ago, (and an incredible string of accidents including dropping fully-fueled boosters into innocent villlages, destroying them almost completely, and then doing theor utmot to cover it up, and crashing a film return capsule into someone's house just last week) I thought that NASA's reaction was quite charitable. Given the problems in trying to run an international program with the highly-experienced Russians, and the apalling technology-transfer implications, it's hard to see how it would be a wise idea to jump on the Chinese bandwagon with the ISS or other international cooperation projects.
Other than that, excellent summary of the original article.
In fact Werner von Braun took some interest in the Indian space programme, in the 60s.
India's first satellite was launched 30 years ago, called Aryabhata-I named after the 6th century Indian mathematician, Aryabhata.
Also, the launching station at Thumba is right on the Magnetic Equator. A story covering this can be seen here. Also,
A map of the world's space centers is available.
Thing is, NASA absolutely knew what to do next. There was a huge vision of permanent moon bases, orbiting space stations and manned trips to Mars as a follow on to the Apollo program. All of this would be built with a reusable "space truck." Thing is, Nixon and Congress refused to fund everything but the space truck (which now had little to do), which became the highly politicized design of the space shuttle and things started going downhill from there.
I suggest reading the first couple chapters of the CAIB report. (It's available online.) They basically went back to the very beginning of the Shuttle program in order to trace everything that went wrong. It's very enlightening.
Actually, the advantages are there, but not huge... In order to achieve a typical LEO, you need (ideally) a delta-v of not quite 8000 m/s. Launching from the equator provides ~470 m/s of that delta-v, if you're shooting for an equatorial orbit, rather than pole-to-pole. Launching from Florida means you only get ~400 m/s plus the sinusoidal trajectory relative to the surface (the orbit is circular, but the axis is not the same as the Earth's). The dry-mass (empty) to wet-mass (fully fueled) ratio is a logarithmic function, so that 70 m/s translates to a percent or two of additional payload mass, but that's all.
Caveat: the actual delta-v needed is closer to 10000 m/s because of various factors. Atmospheric drag and other stuff contribute, but mostly launching straight up then kicking over means a highly eccentric orbit and the extra delta-v means not hitting the atmosphere at perigee.
Hey, I finally got some use out of my graduate level orbital mechanics class!
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
After the collapse, the Argentine economy has been growing at around 8% a year. That's what a recovery is supposed to look like. This seems to be mostly due to the fact that the Argentine government has decided to listen to everything the IMF tells them to do, and then do the exact opposite.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Orbital rockets are big, heavy, and fragile, and launching one from a stable ground platform is hugely easier than launching from a flying aircraft. The heavier structure required to survive launch from an aircraft probably outweighs any fuel savings, and the heavier structure and first stage aircraft together would almost certainly cost more...fuel is cheap.
For the X Prize, it's a big deal because all they needed is altitude...they could get about halfway to the goal on an ordinary aircraft. Orbit is a lot harder to reach, not only do you need altitude, you need a great deal of speed that no airplane can come close to achieving. Aircraft simply aren't very helpful for getting to orbit.
With the exception of the Shuttle and some sounding rockets, the launch vehicle market has been privatized for years. If you want a Delta or Atlas launch, you negotiate a contract with Boeing or Lockheed-Martin, not NASA.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
He's already pretty much recouped the money from that already via the Ansari prize and Richard "I can make money off that" Branson's interest, so expect Burt Rutan, designer extraordinaire to take the cash flow from that and the follow-up projects (space mini-buses) and make maybe a fibreglass kit build-in-your-garage Shuttle replacement or a LEO commuter plane that flings out a space-bus/space-truck at apogee while amortising the cost with Dallas-to-Europe or New-York-to-Australia passengers on the launch vehicle.
Speaking of Branson, the whole SpaceShipOne experimental program so far has cost less than one single regular passenger jet. I'm expecting Richard to notice that and wonder if Burt can turn his hand to larger aircraft, and sponsor him to do so. It wouldn't shock me to see Burt slash the cost of an airliner and make it intrinsically safer, more economical and more visually interesting all in one hit. I'd expect him to start with a cargo plane and work out, but I think there's room for an immense amount of cross-pollination between his air-breathers and what he's learned from his space work.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Hey, they're a bigger threat than Iraq was before the invasion and it's not as far to drive. Plus the scenery is better. We should've invaded those pesky Canadians first, they could deliver WMD's into the states in their sneaky submarine. Then go after Brazil second. Secure this part of the world before we start dorking around on the other side of the planet.
Why not? We can invent an imminent threat from any country we want, why settle for the dirty, crapass countries half-way around the world? The facts have no bearing on this administration, so let's invade the countries with the best looking women first.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage