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Boeing Successfully Launches Mammoth Delta-4 Heavy

Posted by timothy on from the yeah-it's-got-a-hemi dept.

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..."

4 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. Re:NOT successful by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 3, Insightful
    > "Air Force instead paid to launch a dummy payload and a pair of small research satellites."

    Our tax dollars at work.

    Would you rather that they had put another $Billion of our tax dollars into a spy satellite that would be uselessly drifting in space right now because of the partial failure of this untested rocket?

  2. Re:Saturn 5 vs. Delta 4 Heavy by NardofDoom · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The shuttle orbiter weighs in at 99,318 kg fully loaded. I'm not sure how much of that is the engines, but if we weren't busy launching bricks-and-wings into space we'd be able to lift more than 50 metric tons to LEO. For crew return we can use a capsule with an ablative heat shield, and the crew wouldn't have to worry about finding their way out of an exploding craft moving supersonically to eject, just put an escape rocket on the capsule like with early spacecraft.

    Something tells me that would be cheaper than the shuttle, and get more done, and be more adaptable.

    --
    You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
  3. Re:NOT successful by Zerbey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It didn't explode on the launch pad, and it did make it into orbit. That's a remarkable achievment in itself. This is new hardware and there's bound to be teething problems.

    The term you're looking for is "successful failure" :)

  4. Six 9s? Who's paying for 1 million test flights? by fname · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Six nines reliability sounds nice, but that works out to one failure in a million attempts. Realistically, until you've had 1 million succesful launched with only 1 failure, you could not claim six 9s reliability. That may be a good goal for an operational vehicle, but it's unrealistic for a development vehicle. We just don't know enough about what could go wrong to assign probabilities with that degree of certitude.