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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
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
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 :)
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.
"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!
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.
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...
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.
Energia was flown twice: 1987 May 15 and 1988 Nov 15. Check http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/energia.htm
It will probably never fly again.
More bits and pieces from Astronautix:
Atlas V 551 20,050 kg to LEO 28 deg
Proton 8K82M LEO Payload: 21,000 kg
Ariane 5G LEO Payload: 16,000 kg. to: 407 km Orbit. at: 51.6 degrees
Zenit-2 LEO Payload: 13,740 kg. to: 200 km Orbit. at: 51.4 degrees.
Titan 4 LEO Payload: 17,700 kg. to: 185 km Orbit.
Delta IV Large LEO Payload: 25,800 kg. to: 185 km Orbit. at: 28.5 degrees.
Satana AKA Dnepr-1 LV is less than 4,000 kg to LEO: http://www.kosmotras.ru/energ2.htm
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.
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!
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.
I can't comment on the design attributes of the Delta series. For the shuttle, throttling allows the reduction of the SSME's down to 2/3 of their normal thrust during the region of high Q - i.e. when you're still in enough air to create high loads on the vehicle - presumably this might be part of the Delta 4 design.
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).
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Premature shutdown of an engine is usually a polite way of saying it exploded.
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
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.