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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..."
Seriously though, it appears the Delta 4 Heavy will primarily service military--rather than commercial or scientific--interests.
Sigs cause cancer.
Who cares how much weight a rocket can lift into space? If it isn't sexy, it ain't getting my business.
I'll just take my satellites to russia.
I'm waiting for the Delta-9. That would be waaay more heavy, dude.
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.
So what reason is there for the space shuttle now? all the heavy lifting can be done by these things and the personnel can get up in a Soyuz. These things seem "cheap" and from what I've read, this paradigm can be used to just strap on a few more rockets to get to the Moon or Mars.
Can anyone cite a reason for continued shuttle lifetime that isn't political?
Blaze a trail to the New World
Guess my mother-in-law is going to be here for Christmas afterall. :(
Personally I think the Ariane 5 and 'Satan' are way sexier...
Man, you have a wierd phallic fetish going on there.
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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"Personally I think the Ariane 5 and 'Satan' are way sexier..."
I think the nick-bts needs to get out more.
The RS-68's on the Delta IV Heavy are the first new big rocket motor to be designed and built in the US in a long time (The space shuttle uses motors designed in the late sixties or very early seventies).
And for the record, I think a new rocket motor qualifies as sexy . . .
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.
It isn't so much about progress as it is about reclaiming capabilities that we let slip away. The US did have a heavy lifter outside of the shuttle, since we had let the know-how from lifters like the Saturn V slip away. Now we will have a heavy lifting launch vehicle that doesn't require a manned mission.
This is a new approach.
while it's not using antimatter or fusion or something, it makes use of "off the shelf" components to strap together a powerful rocket.
If you want more power, just bundle another couple on. You couldn't really do this with the shuttle or the Saturn. Plus, if you have different mission parameters, you can use basically the same hardware without the need to do R&D for years for a new rocket.
Yeah, it's still chemical propulsion but it seems like a better way of thinking to me. This is something that can actually get some economy of scale.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Delta IV is composed of 5 vehicle configurations.
:)
First stage powered by the RS-68 engine.
Delta IV second stages are derived from the Delta III second stage.
Confused yet?
Anyone who's spent time listening to air traffic control radio near a major airport has certainly heard large aircraft identify themselves as " heavy" so my first thought was that "Delta 4 Heavy" sounded like a 747 instead of a rocket.
"Boeing Successfully Launches Mammoth Delta-4 Heavy"
Of course, for every stupid, bizarre, or just plain wonky idea, there already exists at least a semi-serious proponent. Proof is left as an exercise for Google
From the second Google hit on "mammoth wooly rocket", I quote:
It gets weird after that.
who'd love these rockets :)
I know this kind of event is not as sexy and media-worthy as the Scaled Composities flight, but IMO if it wasn't for NACA/NASA (as flawed as it is) and their supporting contractors, SC would not have had the base of knowledge to work from to have their flight be a success. So I offer my congratulations to the people who tackled the inherent technological and engineering challenges and made this test flight possible.
(BTW how does the D4H compare to the Energia? I read a while back the Energia was more powerful than any current American booster but was still not as powerful as the Saturn 5.)
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
Yeah...good luck getting funding for your "Satan" rocket from the current crop of "values" politicians in Congress.
Tell the marketing guys to try "Sword of Jesus" instead; you'll be in like Ron Jeremy.
Boeing is a US company, but Nick (and the BBC) used the British spelling of tonnes. What kind of tonnes are we talking about?
The space.com story provides some more useful numbers:
That would seem to be (roughly) metric ton(ne)s; there are 2,204.623 pounds per metric ton.
For comparison:
1 ton, gross or long (same as a British ton) = 2,240 pounds
1 ton, metric = 2,204.623 pounds
1 ton, net or short = 2,000 pounds
-Rich
Seems like they're a bit behind schedule.
e ase_981016a.html
"First launch of the Boeing Delta IV is scheduled for 2001 and support projects are well under way."
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/1998/news_rel
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
The Russian Energia rocket (http://www.russianspaceweb.com/energia.html) is still more powerful... Is this to be a new pissing contest? :)
"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."
People just don't appreciate good navigational humor these days.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
The signal telling the flight control computer that fuel was about to run out was instead somehow interpreted to be fuel has run out. And since it didn't blow up and everything else worked very well, it's a success. /what I've heard...
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.
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.
Didn't that big bad space cannon weigh 23 tons?
It's probably just a coincidence.
-- This SIG was zapped to you from space...
What, like the USA is a startling success for combating poverty?
5 million+ people directly rely on the govt for food aid, plus god knows how more that have 'fell out of the system' and are struggling to eat.
Not to mention Russia's education system is far superior to the USA one in terms of catering to all, even though it's the most expensive in the world in terms of $/student:
US Literacy rate: 97%
Russia Literacy rate: 99.6%
Make your own conclusions from that.
Anyway, what if Russia's space exploration program ended up making a breakthrough in fusion rocket technology, which allowed Russia to generate Gigawatts of power and export it to the rest of the world, making huge sums of money and easily feeding their populace?
If you always cater to the lowest dominator in society, you will fail.
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Every rocket you add, adds risk of failure.
So a quadruple strapped rocket is four times more likely to fail. More, if you factor in the possible failure that strapping will add.
The Saturn has (had) 4 times more power...
Is this a common feature of modern expendable rockets or something unique to the Delta series?
www.lonseidman.com
Our space program was initially a military effort as well, primarily within the confines of the USAF and Navy until NASA's creation. Blowing people up more effectively has always been a boon to the space program, in any society.
So then why are you in America. Russia is obviously the place to be. I mean literacy rates are a large factor in determining where to live.
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.
So to speak...
Calling an RS-18 missile "Satan" was a (basically US) military thing-- sorry to burst the "cool name" bubble. They (then Soviets) referred to the RS-18 as the "Voyevoda," a noun that refers to a leader-- a leader whose power is achieved by being the toughest kid on the block. It's like the west calling a tank "Patton," etc. The US/NATO used "SS" instead of "RS" to refer to Soviet missiles, so the RS-18 becomes the SS-18 in NATOspeak. Here's where the fun starts.
OK, say it with me: s-s-eighteen... ss-eighteen... s-eighteen... s-eight-en... satan. In an era when you refer to the other side as the evil empire, cool names that emphasize the whole evil thing tend to stick.
Just thought you might want to know...
Nope. The rocket is only engineered for what is attached. There is a base in place to perhaps attach a few more rocket motors. But more components means a greater percentage of failure. This route has been taken before with the Soviets.
The sad thing is that it will still be cheaper just to pay the Russians to throw something up into space. Perhaps the more realistic and effective use for NASA's money would be to invest and manage (by customer requirements) the operations end of Russia's launch facilities. In other words, outsource.
You still need to put money into a D-9 program for domestic considerations (the military). Also, with an active rocket program, you have an infrastructure to propel development of rockets to take care of unique missions which the Soviets would not be interested in developing.
The worst thing is that the average American voter is a crippled mind. Not just is it substandard in science knowlege, but now Americans lack imagination and vision. The answer to a future space launch platform is not rockets. Its the space elevator. You're not going to colonize planets or develop an extended presence in space with rockets.
Its as doable now as thermonuclear weapons were back in the '40's. NASA should outsource launch facilities, maintain its current scientific missions, and put the bulk of its money into engineering a space elevator. If its too expensive, get the rest of the world to kick in for its development. Get those cheap Indians and Russians crunching out the numbers, and let the Americans specialize in the design and engineering.
Even if you keep the project in-house, think of the boon it would be for American infrastructure. Hey MIT, Caltech, Los Alamos, etc., here's a billion dollars, go engineer a space elevator. Then put it out to bid for Lockheed, Boeing, etc. to actually build it. Nope, Americans are too stupid to see the economic utility and importance of scientific investment. No vision.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Keep in mind that many of Boeing's current heavy-lifter projects are joint efforts where Boeing builds the chassis/bodies and Russian companies provide engine technology. So this is more of an opportunity for appreciation, not gloating. I for one am glad that at least in this instance the better technologies are chosen in preference to politics.
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.
US Literacy rate: 97%
Russia Literacy rate: 99.6%
That is really amazing considering that they are learning Russian.
And with that crazy Russian alphabet.
They must be geniuses!
These comments do express the opinions of my employers, and, personally, I think they're complete rubbish.
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
It's worse than that. Components working together have higher risks of failure, in general, than they do alone. For example, as Mythbusters demonstrated: fire off one ancient chinese bamboo rocket, and it's fine. Strap 4-5 dozen to a chair, and they all detonate like a bomb, because the cumulative heat allows for chained failures.
Another example is the shuttle's solid rocket boosters' O rings. It was initially (incorrectly) assumed that the chance of both O-rings at a particular joint failing was the product of the failure rates of each joint. This turned out not to be the case; when one O-ring failed, the other was much more likely to fail as well.
In a case like this, you're going to be looking at problems related to things like vibrational load, unplanned structural stresses and temperatures, etc.
We're all familiar with the tragedy of being you.
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.
This comment is useless without some sort of metric for comparison in other countries . . . how many people receive aid from the government in other countries? How many "fell out of the system" in other countries? How about presenting the data per capita. Without meaningful comparison, its hard to know whether the US is making significant progress or is doing well compared with the rest of the world.
Not to mention Russia's education system is far superior to the USA one in terms of catering to all, even though it's the most expensive in the world in terms of $/student:
Again, there isn't enough information here to draw any meanful conclusions . . . Basic literacy is only one measure of educational success . . . how many people receive basic college degrees and advanced degrees? How many people attend trade schools? And how many of these people are able to apply this in the world after getting their education? If few people can apply their knowledge then the educational system may be promoting literacy, but it may not be meeting the needs of the people and the society.
Make your own conclusions from that.
The key problem is that based on the sketchy data presented in the post, I can't draw any reasonable and logical conclusions except that I would need more information to draw rational conclusions . . .
When we are mining asteroids, we'll need something like the shuttle to land loot on the earth. Don't laugh. Rocket costs are falling to where a 50,000 lb cargo of gold and platinum could pay for the mission.
This is my sig.
That statement is much older than that. According to WikiPedia, that's the phrase that gave us the term "Pyrrhic Victory".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
OK let me get this straight:
The D4 Heavy sat on the pad stewing in the flaming rocket exhaust longer than expected, roasting the TPS off the three common core boosters.
The D4 Heavy strap on boosters burned out 8 seconds earlier than expected, and sepereated.
The microsats were misdeployed and have not been heard from.
The upper stage tried to burn longer to compensate for the less than planned boost from the second stage, but then ran out of fuel for the geo orbit insertion burn.
The resulting demosat orbit was 10,000 miles -lower- than planned.
The only way you can count this as successful is if you say "It didn't blow up on the pad and actually flew into space."
If that is what passes for successfull at Boeing these days, then it is a sad, sad day for Boeing!
Even with 1 million launches and only 1 failure, it's not statistically valid to say that you have .999999 reliability. That would be demonstrated reliablility. But given what you said, it would be 0 reliable and get more reliable if the first launch failed and then 999,999 after that were successful. The reliability of the system can be predicted in several different ways. Including simulation, parts count, part-stress analysis, physics of failure, all of which are generally a combination of test and theoretical data. To have a predicted reliability of .999999 from only test, you'd have to have well in excess of 1 million successful launches and 1 failure. (At least with any degree of statistical confidence).
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).
And so what? The space elevator will have to survive hurricane forces to be practical. A ton of aluminum crashing into it would unlikely be able to take it down. And even if it could, its a problem solved with an air corridor with a pair of inteceptors in range to shoot the plane down.
Again, scientifically ignorant, stupid, racist American. Why the f**k do you even bother reading stuff on
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Figures from space.com, $140 million and 50,000 lbs, allow one to estimate the cost/lb to LEO of the Delta IV at $2800/lb when the payload bay is packed to the gills.
Seastead this.
Your post demonstrates both your inanity and your life as a poseur.
This was the initial test launch of a new Delta configuration. The "failure" was the apparent premature shutdown of one of the three first-stage engines. To compenstate, they ran the second-stage longer than planned. The dummy satellite entered orbit successfully, but at a lower orbit than planned.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
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
Actually, I think the parent comment has been unfairly modded down into oblivion. At the very least it's interesting.
We do in fact have a new reality in work here, where scientific facts, objective truths, and reasonable conclusions from those do not seem to matter anymore.
So when Boeing and the DOD spin the launch as a complete success, with absolutely no mention of facts that indicate that there were some problems seen in the launch's first stage, I do see a parallel with the Bush Cabinet and the ignoring and elimination of dissenting voices.
Before modding ME down into oblivion, do this test that I always find useful: pick any current text description of a political situation and swap the words "Republicans" and "Democrats". Now how do you feel about the core issue? There's your objective truth.
One simple rule for its versus it's
Read much lately?
The Shuttle is to be phased out over the next 6 years, to be replaced by expendable boosters, perhaps derivatives of the Delta that launched yesterday,
The first initial reason that the Shuttle is not phased out immediately is that no expendable boosters are currently man-rated. I.e., they're falure rate is not low enough to manned flight.
Two, Shuttle payloads are designed to fit the Shuttle cargo bay. Moving them to the Delta would require years of redesign and rebuilding, it it was possible at all.
To successfully phase out the Shuttle by the target date of 2010, man-rated derivatives of the Delta, or the Atlas, or some new vehicle, need to be developed and tested. NASA needs to select one as the vehicle it will use for manned flight. Post-2010 Shuttle payloads need to be redesigned.
The paradigm of strapping on "a fe more rockets" is a bit more complicated than you make it sound, and, in any case, isn't exactly new. It's been in use on various vehicles for more than 40 years.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
23 Tons And Whatta Ya Get? Another Day Older, And Deeper In Debt....
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for the are subtle and quick to anger.
"Damn, I should'nt have tried to put that 32 bit number into that 16 bit variable. I always just got an ERROR message before...."
Note: That's basically what really happened.
How would a comparison between what we had and what we have now, be meaningless, if it's exactly that which we want to compare? If that reasoning would be hold up consistently, then any historical analysis and comparison with modern techniques or products is meaningless.
Furthermore, the premise that because something is gone, it becomes meaningless is rather strange, and potentially dangerous.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
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. ---*
It's a good day for Boeing all around. They also sold 50 of their new 7E7 planes today. That tops Airbus's sales of their new 'bigger' plane.
That may be true, but when you're talking about lifting multi-million dollar satellites into a specific orbit, you don't want to use technology that does not perform absolutely perfectly.
I was talking with a guy in-the-know, and he said that if the parts in your launch vehicle didn't boast some ridiculously high MTBF(mean time between failures), nobody with a satellite would even consider contracting your services.
Taking that into consideration, the shortcomings are quite serious now, aren't they? I don't think this rig is ready for prime-time yet...
espo
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
It's disturbing to me that the government descends into double-speak whenever it suits their purpose when it comes to space programs. Space flight is a very unforgiving discipline, and it sets a very bad example, IMO, when the government terms things "successful" when it's fairly obvious they are NOT successful.
Billions have been spent on the stillborn missile defense program. IMO it's a collosal waste of money and resources. Many tests have outright failed but a launch vehicle practically has to blow up on the pad before the governemtn will even begin to think about the word "failure".
Now a new rocket - and the Delta IV is a cool rocket - fails to put its primary payload into the proper orbit and the government terms the flight a "success". WTF is wrong with these people? While there are successful aspects of the flight, you can't call it a "trmendous success" when the primary payload is left in a useless orbit! You just can't. If this were a test, it might have scored a 75 or maybe an 85. To qualify as a "tremendous success" it needs to get at least a 95 IMO.
What is it with this double-speak lately? It's downright scary when truth begins to matter not.
Six nines? Hell, if they managed two nines they'ld be doing way better than the Space Shuttle.
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
One could infer six nines by testing individual critical components to that degree, and extrapolating the same reliability to the integrated vehicle.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
can you imagine a beowolf cluster of these
Lots of your info is off.
For one, as others have pointed out, the Russian name refers to a leader position.
It's also not the RS-18 in Russia, it was either RS-20 or R-36M depending on who you ask.
The name Satan is mostly because all NATO designations of Soviet surface to surface missiles begin with "s"- Sapwood, Sasin, Saddler, Satan, Scud, etc.
Japan's seems to have been developed without taking out large populaces from a distance being in mind. It's not the most successful, but it is there.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I hardly think that the US would spend $140 million to launch a dummy satellite "demosat" into orbit. I haven't seen anything on what they are going to do with this "demosat" after it reaches orbit which leads me to believe that it is going to be doing something that "they" don't want us to know about. The best way to keep something top secret, is to just lie and say it is something else.
http://cryptojoe.blogspot.com
They come out with similar reliability ratings now; I believe the shuttle had a rating of 99.9%. It might have been even higher before Challenger.
My point is, in an extremely complex structure like the shuttle, different components may interact in ways that aren't anticipated. It's the nature of a developmental system that your failure rate is essentially unknown. Even in modern aircraft this can occur, as demonstrated by the Concorde crash-- a type of failure no one had anticipated. But in the end, you can't extrapolate a reliability unless you know how every subsystem may fail, and how these subsystems may interact. How many flights did it take to get to six 9s reliability in commercial US air traffic? Expect it take just as many launches to achieve the same.
I wonder how the Roman Abramovitch 'Buy Success In Football' programme compares in cost with the Russian government's space programme?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
How about calling it the "Turbo Space Penetrator Mark 69"? Would that sex it up enough for you? What if they painted the fuselage (shaft) of the rocket pink and the nosecone (head) purple?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
After Challenger, Feynman calculated the shuttle's reliability to be two 9s (ie. a 1 in 100 chance of failure), and he seems to have been about right.
The overall safety rate for commercial airliners is about six 9s (a crash every million flights), so space travel is a long way from that. Keep in mind that flying is safer than driving, crossing the street, etc.
There is more to a launch vehical than lift weight. One is cost per kg to orbit and other is reliablility. The Energia I believe only had two or three launches before it was mothballed. We have no idea how reliable it would be. The Delta 4 should be very reliable and the cost per kg is very good. Now why when they where developing the RS-68 they did not make it an aerospike I just don't know. Now that would have been cool :)
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
:US will never ever compete with France or India in space technology.
lol
Being paid to produce a product isn't mutually exclusive with the deal being a subsidy. In fact, in my mind subsidies do require that you produce something, just at at elevated artificial profitability (thanks to taxpayers).
Not having a wide range of companies competing for contracts makes deals more likely to be, essentially, subsidies ("name your price, any price!").
Here's a conclusion you might draw: It's a waste of time to feed the trolls.
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
Sounds to me like a plan for a new space station. Why would they need a rocket that can handle all that weight? Think about it.
"And for the record, I think a new rocket motor qualifies as sexy . .
I know you mean "sexy" as in "technically impressive". For the record, only sex qualifies as sexy.
Also, think of this: It is your tax dollars at work doing something you will not be told. It should scare you that you can't know what your government is doing.
It is ironic that you chose Boeing's aquisition of McDonnel-Douglass to illustrate your point. McDD was driven out of the market by Airbus, which is heavily subsidised by European countries. And as I recall, Boeing was "encouraged" to buy McDD by the Defense Department so as to not lose the capacity for fighters. So it basically seems that, at least in this case, European subsidies trumped US subsidies.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
At the last minute they could have 'swapped' the demo sats, with a real experimental mil sat, and launched it to a good LEO with no one knowing. Maybe thats why it launced slowly, they probably loaded it up to the max or more than usual. Trust the military? no way.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If you're using the CIA figures, that 97% literacy rate is for 1979. I have yet to see a more current estimate of literacy rates in the US. My suspicion is that we're signficantly lower than 97% now.
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.
Yeah... I was there..
x ?T=1&S= 10&Z=17&X=2702&Y=15712&W=3&qs=%7ctitusville%7cfl%7 c
;-)
In fact I was at the end of the pier that parallels the jetty at Jetty Park.
Here is a link (if you zoom out you can get a better idea of where I was in relation to the AFB):
http://terraserver.microsoft.com/image.asp
or long: -80.58652 and lat: 28.40918 if you want to do it manually.
I flew in on Monday to Orlando... it was great.. the humidity was very low thus the haze was at a minimum. From 10,000ft (AGL) over Ocala I had a very very very clear view of the VAB out at NASA. It was awesome (especially after coming from 16F weather in Nashville).
I was calling my friends back in Nashville letting them know I was in sandals and shorts on the beach while they were in parkas. I don't think they appreciated it
Libertas in infinitum
The follow on to this is deciding, is this form of subsidy a good thing, or a bad thing? Depends on if you view the military need as real, and wether you believe in free markets. Those are discussions that belong over in the politics threads.
Uh ... because civilian tax dollars pay for the DoD, not some magical military company which makes money selling gumdrop houses to little elves?
Dumbass.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
Ahem!
The first country to officially use some early form of this alphabet for all official documentation was Bulgaria. Check your history. The initial versions of the alphabet were developed by two scholar brothers, Cyril and Methodius, whose father was a Byzantine stategist, and their mother was a slav from the nearby lands (close to Bulgaria). The purpose was to baptize the lands of the mid-European slavs, mainly in the lands called Panonia, and give those people preachings in a language much like their own. The language was different from the one spoken in Panonia, because the brothers were fluent in the southern dialects, such as those spoken in Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire. That made the translations of the holy scripture perfect for use in Bulgaria, and our king Boris-Michail did his best to take the alphabet and the survivors of the failed Panonian mission. Thus, he achieved some sort of independence from both the Byzantine and the Roman Churches (which were all Orthodox/Catholic at the time).
When the turks arrived and wiped out every trace of the great education system here, the scholars fled to the north, to Romania and Russia. The rest is history.
And yes, it is true that the present-day cyrillic has little to do with its original form from the seventh century A.D., and that the Russians introduced many widely accepted changes to the alphabet.
Credit where credit is due.
I don't live in America. I live in the UK. I am just pointing out that while the USSR was a nasty, oppressive regieme, it did result in huge improvements to the quality of education and living for most Russians.
It's not just as simple to say that Russia is backwards and they should suddenly drop spending on their space program.
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