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Boeing Successfully Launches Mammoth Delta-4 Heavy
nick-bts writes "CNN, the BBC and Space.com are reporting the first successful launch of the new Boeing Delta-4 Heavy, capable of lifting 23 tonnes into a low-Earth orbit (similar to the space shuttle). Personally I think the Ariane 5 and 'Satan' are way sexier..."
It was not completely successful. The two dummy satellites did not make it to orbit due to a problem with the first stage. You can read about it here: Boeing Rocket Launch
A blog like any other.
The bit I read this morning wasn't as positive as the story posted above...
http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/2713
Delta 4 Heavy launch comes up short
Posted: Wed, Dec 22, 2004, 9:30 AM ET (1430 GMT)
The first Delta 4 Heavy launch vehicle lifted off Tuesday afternoon but a problem with the vehicle's first stage has apparently kept the vehicle from deploying its payload in the proper orbit. The vehicle lifted off from pad 37B at Cape Canaveral at 4:50 pm EST (2150 GMT), more than two hours into a three-hour launch window because of minor problems during pre-launch preparations, and initially the launch appeared to be normal. However, the Delta 4's first stage -- three identical core boosters -- shut down eight seconds earlier than expected. To compensate, the upper stage fired longer than planned during the second of three burns needed to place the primary payload, a demonstration satellite, into geosynchronous orbit, and as a result ran out of propellant during the final burn. Contact has also not been established with two nanosatellites that were deployed from the booster 16 minutes after launch. Despite the underperformance of the first stage, Boeing officials said they, as well as the Air Force, who paid for the flight, were pleased with the launch.
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Delta-9 as in "Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol." Might have been a little to drug geeky for this crowd.
To answer the obvious predictable question, no, the Delta IV Heavy doesn't even come close to the Saturn V. The Sat5 could heave 118,000kg into LEO, while the 3 booster D4H can only lift 22,000kg. There is talk of strapping on even more big candles to the D4, going up to as many as 7 main engines (the core and then 6 around it), but rough extrapolation would take that only to 51,333kg, far better than the shuttle but still a far cry from the awesome power of the Saturn V.
"We had a shorter than expected first stage burn. That was compensated for by longer first and second burns in the second stage," said Dan Collins, Boeing vice president for Expendable Launch Systems,
And: "The delay at five minutes was due to a loss of communication between launch control and the vehicle destruct system. Boeing spokeswoman Monty Vest described this."
Energia
Saturn V:
Delta IV Heavy
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Actually he isn't. STS-87:
"Early in the mission, the crew deployed Spartan, a freeflying solar instrument package that was supposed to make independent observations of the sun's outer atmosphere and the solar wind. However, the equipment failed upon deployment and was unable to complete its mission. During their first spacewalk Winston Scott and Takao Doi grabbed the spacecraft by hand and berthed it in the payload bay for its return to Earth. Since landing, the Spartan satellite has been impounded for study to determine the cause of the failure."
Granted, the mission wasn't to go up and retrieve a broken satellite, but they did, in fact, retrieve the satellite and bring it back to Earth.
No matter where you go... there you are.
It's needed to build the ISS. A number of the pieces of the ISS are designed to fit into the shuttle's cargo bay and to be supported by brackets within the bay during lanuch. No current expendable rocket has the same configuration. Plus the spacearm is needed for some assembly tasks.
Boeing, though, and the development of the D-IVH, is heavily subsidized by the military. Boeing is rapidly becoming "the" defense contractor, having swallowed up McDD. Throw in some sweetheart 767 tanker leasing deals...and you can't hardly say that Boeing is anything but a large piece of the military-industrial complex. I will definately agree that it does represent a leap in technology for the USA, but is still short of the mid-80's Soviet Energia. The D-IVH can carry 28,000 pounds to geosynchronous orbit...the Energia could lift 36,000 pounds to the same path. The D-IVH can lift 48,000 pounds to LEO, the Energia could lift 200,000. So while the D-IVH is quite an accomplishment, it's not a Saturn V.
Concur.
There hasn't ever been a shuttle mission which required taking a satellite out of orbit and landing it on earth.
Incorrect. Mission 51-A and mission STS-32 both did exactly that.
There isn't any utility in doing so either.
While I have to wonder about the cost effectivness of bringing a pair of comsats back down for refurbishment and relaunch, the LDEF experiment absolutely REQUIRED that it be brought back down.
Next time, check your facts a little closer, eh?
Is it fascism yet?
I was in charge of one of the groundstations for the two student satellites that were on the Delta IV Heavy. The Delta IV Heavy had poor performance on the initial burn causing the second stage to try and compensate for the poor performance of the first stage. The two student satellites were let off at 100km instead of 188km, and DemoSat did not make it to geosynchronous orbit. More information can be found at http://www.spaceflightnow.com.
You post this almost every time, in almost the exact same words, on articles unrelated to China. Please stop it. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. China's military budget per dollar of GDP is a tiny fraction of what nations like the US spend, their military expenditures on space have been rather minimal (they have only about a dozen DF-5s, and at most two dozen - their ICBM with worldwide range); the US has 7200. Don't believe me? From the Federation of American Scientists:
"For many years almost all sources credited China as having only four DF-5s deployed in silos, including the authoritative 1992 treatement by John Wilson Lewis and Hua Di, which asserted that as of 1992 only four DF-5 missiles on alert. However, more recent estimates suggest that some 8-11 were deployed as of 1995, and that at least 13 missiles were deployed at the end of 1997. According to the National Air Intelligence Center, as of 1998 the deployed DF-5 force consisted of "fewer than 25" missiles. As of early 1999 the total deployed DF-5 force was generally estimated at about 20 missiles. By mid-2000 some sources suggested that the total force was as many as 24 deployed missiles ["Inside The Ring" By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough Washington Times July 28, 2000]."
They're progressing on their astronaut program at about twice the rate that the US and Russians did (albeit by standing on the shoulders of giants). They've been working on space station and lunar programs. Their rockets that are being developed are liquid fuelled, making them ill suited for adaptation to missiles. I could keep going for hours. Like China or not, it's a textbook example of a space program focused on civilian efforts.
If you want to make these claims again, don't post links to pages about Tibet, which is utterly unrelated to the topic at hand - post links to articles about China's space program.
We're all familiar with the tragedy of being you.
Hey Boeing isn't the only one who can screw up a first launch, the 'sexier' Ariane 5 self destructed on its first launch do to a software glitch in the primary and redundent guidance systems. Of course on their site the launch log only marks the occasion with a * with no corrosponding note(see flight 88), and the milestones for the Ariane 5 makes the brief a very brief note, "The Ariane 5 501 test flight fails."
Geoffrey Peart McMaster University Sfwr Eng Coast of Araska
Check out the Ariane 5 site from the link above. It has a user manual and an ASAP manual. Gives a whole new meaning to RTFM.
It's common to liquid rockets, particularly when you want to throttle up after achieving maximum dynamic pressure so you don't destroy your rocket against a ceiling of high-speed high-pressure atmosphere.
If we started to design a new capsule today, it would be at least eight years before it was man-rated and into regular service. But don't believe me, look at NASA's own studies. Even Burt Rutan says that designing and fabricating an orbital spacecraft is no simple task.
So your assertation of "merely design[ing] a new capsule to put on top of the rocket" is specious at best. There is no "mere" when it comes to designing, testing and deploying space hardware. You could use the shuttle as an example of that. The idea of "kludging" a Soyuz on top of an American launch platform is entirely ignorant, it would require nearly the same design considerations as an all-new platform...not to mention the cost of purchasing the latter from the Russians, and for each launch.
If we were to do that, it would probably be better to dust off and update the Apollo capsules and mate them to Saturn I-Bs for LEO. The V is far too big a beast for orbital missions only...not to mention the $3+ BILLION/US a copy it would cost to construct and operate one.
In these times, the budget requires us to make use of what we have now. The point of the shuttle being the only man-capable AMERICAN spacecraft available stands, because it is a stone cold fact.
Finally, I am no fan of the Shuttle. It was a compromise from the beginning and not what NASA wanted. Nixon required military adaptations to the proposed program such that it made it a vehicle that NASA essentially had forced down their throats. It should have been replaced after Challenger, as the Shuttle is the only American launch system in our space history to use solids on a man-rated platform. It cost the lives of the Challenger 78, and the aforementioned compromnises were essentially the problem with Columbia.
Instead, we should embark on a smaller re-usable spacecraft program that was indeed meant to ferry humans and small loads of cargo back and forth to orbit and leave the heavy lifting to expendable vehicles, one where the EVs have a 45-odd year history of success.
The purpose of a throttle is to control the amount of thrust that is expended during the flight. Keep in mind that when a rocket goes up, it is throwing out the bottom a considerable amount of mass.
The point here is that by the end of a stage, the acceleration of one of these rockets (solid or liquid fueled... it doesn't matter) can be quite high, and on ICBM's it can be as high as 20 G's or more. Sometimes a payload simply can't handle that sort of acceleration (like people, but some sattelites as well), so you need to drop the amount of thurst to lower the accleration rate.
This is a mission requirement, and when you design a space payload you also specify what the maximum acceleration will be (usually in m/s^2 but sometimes in different units). When the flight profile is calculated, the rocket will have pre-programmed intervals to scale back the thrust requirements. This makes life fun and interesting, and why rocket scientists get the big $$$.
The Space Shuttle's Main Engines have this feature, and it is even more important because of the human cargo, as well as bio research materials. I believe the flight profile of the shuttle is to maintain a maximum rate of about 4-5 G's. The Saturn V, by comparison, hit about 8-9 G's at the end of the 1st and 2nd stages.
It was Nixon all the way -- by the time Nixon left office, Saturn V production had been canceled (1968), the Saturn V production line had been closed (1970, last first stage (S1C-15) shipped to KSC), and the decision to move to shuttle had already been made.
The infrastructure for Saturn V at KSC would soon be dismantled (after the launch of the Skylab lab on SA-513, 5/73). The last Saturn Mobile Launch Platform was converted from Saturn I-B (using the "milkstool") to the shuttle configuration after the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project launch (7/75).
I know: don't feed the trolls, but I can't let this pass.
If the US space program is a purely civilian effort, why is DoD bankrolling it to such an extent?
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
It seems that the telemetry indicates the first stage ran short and shut down early. They ran the next two stages until empty and failed to achieve a GEO orbit. Seems they might have a little problem. :-)
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
I suspect that's it's not the total lifting capacity that's important, rather the cost per pound to orbit that's important.D-IVH costs about $140MM per flight. That works out to about 5k per pound to orbit. I assuem that the proce will drop over the life fo the program as we figure out how to manufacture it more effeciently. Assume a 20% cost reduction so that gives us abotu 3.9k per poound to orbit. It was harder to find costs for Energia, but I did see costs of abotu 3k-5k per pound to orbit. Here's the source http://k26.com/buran/Info/Site_F_A_Q_/buran_f_a_q_ .html
While reading this thread, I found myself wondering what some of the other well known rockets could lift. So I quickly dug up some results and decided to share for reference:
Rocket, payload to low earth orbit, payload to geosynchronous orbit
SS-18 "Satan" 8,000 lbs LEO
Atlas Centaur 10,000 lbs LEO, 4,500 lbs Geo
Ariane 5 39,000 lbs LEO, 12,000 lbs Geo
Titan IV 47,000 lbs leo, 12,760 lbs geo
Delta IV heavy 48,000 lbs LEO, 28,124 geo
Space Shuttle 63,000 lbs leo (230,000 lbs including the shuttle itself)
Space Shuttle C (doesn't exist yet) 180,000 lbs leo
Energia 190,000 lbs leo, 48,500 lbs Geo
Saturn V 285,000 lbs LEO, 107,000 lbs to the Moon
On the subject of powerful boosters, here's a long but interesting article about nuclear powered rockets. It describes a non-polluting, 100% reusable rocket powered by seven Gas Core Nuclear Reactor engines, which could lift 1000 TONS into orbit and return to a powered landing.