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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.
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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if your goal is lifting a manned habitat to a Mars intersecting trajectory it's pretty damn sexy.
Or if you want to put up some crazy, ineffective missile shield, it looks pretty good too.
I don't think that people in the market for rockets of this scale are swayed by a name.
Yeah, I know. I should get a sense of humor.
Blaze a trail to the New World
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.
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.
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
"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.
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...
Well then, it must all be related to your point of view. From here on the beach this one was extremely sexy.
Absolutely gorgeous day with crystal clear weather and a light breeze coming in off the Atlantic.
Pad 37 is way back up north past the end of ICBM Row and the tip of the cape, so the bottom half of the vehicle was obscured by intervening vegatation as it sat on the pad, but as soon as they ignited the engines, the flash of orange light and the discharge of smoke from the flame deflector made things abundantly obvious as to what was going on.
This particular bird rose at an excruciatingly lethargic pace, and even well after it had cleared the tower, it was still taking its sweet old time. Probably the slowest liftoff I've ever watched, and I've watched a bunch going all the way back to the 50's.
The alignment of the CBC's placed them 'face on' from my point of view, and all three of them looked quite spectacular, front lit by a late afternoon sun, each core producing a beautiful orange pillar of flame.
Finally, it really got going and started to move out like you would expect. As it did so, it reached an altitude where the LH2/Lox exhaust produced a pure white contrail that stood out in stark relief against the deep blue sky. At about the same time, the rumble arrived and it was a fine, deep-throated one that bespoke of the power being released quite well.
For those of us used to things like The Shuttle or any of the large Titan's, outboard CBC separation seemed to take forever to finally occur. The vehicle was well downrange when this happened, but with optical aid the sudden plume as they separated was easily visible, as well as the CBC's themselves, slowly tumbling end over end as the core continued to accelerate on away from them.
All in all, quite the sexy launch, if you ask me.
Is it fascism yet?
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
Not true, one of the main conditions on most planes built is that they have to look cool. If a design will you give you X amounts more lift, but makes the plane look terrible, the "sexy" looking design will win out. The stealth fighter had to be black, even though that is not the most condusive colour for stealth activities. Also, Boeings design for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) was ripped on because it wasn't as sexy as Lockheed's. This isn't the only reason Lockheed won out, but it was a contributing factor. And anything that can help land a $200 billion contract does come into play. Especially when the people handing out these contracts don't understand 90 % of the technical differences between the two rockets, but can look at both of them and decide which one looks better.
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.
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 grasp of the history is 100% correct.
I feel lucky that I was able to see every Saturn launch in person, the I's the V's even the Skylab and SATP. They were maginificent birds, powerful and mighty. To see one in person was to know the most awesome machine ever built in the history of humanity.
I cite Ford and Carter because even then we had *some* of the momentum from the Apollo days, and with a little push, the engineers and technicians would have come back and had us on Mars by 1990, or 2000 at the latest. Some may scoff at that now, but simple fact is that they would have scoffed at Kennedy in 1961 on the onset of the moon effort. With Nova in service, Mars could have been had. As it is now, we cannot even launch a single astronaut into LEO with American hardware. That's something Mercury could do, but not us in 2004.
Pitiful.
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