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Paypal Founder's Merlin Rocket Engine Fires Up
Baldrson writes "Wired News reports that after 2 years of development, Space Exploration Technology Corp ('SpaceEx') successfully test-fired their new LOX/Kerosene Merlin rocket engine for the 160 seconds required for orbit. SpaceEx was founded by Elon Musk from the proceeds of the 2002 sale of his prior start-up, Paypal, to Ebay. According to Musk, 5 Merlins bundled with the first stage of SpaceEx's powerful Falcon V booster will launch 5 people to orbit by 2010, thereby winning America's Space Prize which was endowed by Robert Bigelow."
he can just sell the thing on ebay...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Amazing! They managed to get sixty-year-old technology to work!
This is great news. Now, if only they can get their valve radios to work, they'll be in business.
The parent post is clearly a troll. PayPal isn't perfect, nobody is, but making the paypal slam AND the 'up in smoke' comment in the same sentence, that's straight up under the bridge, 'gonna eat some billy goats' type trolling.
Right, but the history of "let's do better than a standard rocket by .... because we've got $x billion" hasn't been so good.
Case in point, space shuttle.
The big thing to remember is that the Falcon boosters should be signifigantly cheaper than the current crop of launchers and at least partially reusable. So, even though it's not revolutionary, there's much jumpstarting of the launch biz with what he's got.
The problem is that most of the time, you don't need a revolution, just a little evolution.
Gentoo Sucks
What are the limitations of building such an elevator? I'm guessing the stability of making such a structure would be difficult to achieve. Any chance of a self balancing computer controlled structure?
See, you don't need exotic new technologies for cheap(er) space access... just cut the NASA fat.
That just screams a FedEx lawsuit.
Any word on how they get the lucky orbiters back down? I thought NASA had great difficulty with heat shield design, implementation, etc.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Building a space elevator requires that you haul lots of mass into orbit. That's very expensive so it will never get built until orbital launches become cheap. But when we do have cheap access to space, you lose the whole point of building a space elevator in the first place.
SpaceEx was founded by Elon Musk from the proceeds of the 2002 sale of his prior start-up, Paypal, to Ebay.
Now here's one person who hasn't left the proceeds of his sale into his PayPal account. I mean, imagine that, buying rocket and space stuff like that, they'd have frozen his account immediately, for no reason, without any explanation besides "what goes on looks strange".
Well done Elon! (and when you have time, please tell your former employees to f*)(*&@$ing give me back my $150 in my account they locked up about, oh, 5 years ago...)
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Rockets might not 'feel' right to you, but they exist, are a known technology, and there's over 60 years of large scale design and construction experience behind them.
$1.5 billion is a lot of money when you're looking at buying groceries, but it's peanuts compared to the cost of developing a whole new technology (carbon nanotube, for example which might be needed for space elevators), then testing and building the new technology (literally) from the ground up.
In regards to the 'some new technology that nobody's invented yet' comment, I'd rather take one rocket now versus a hundred ephemeral fairy dust ideas of things that may or may not happen in the future. This isn't the only money that will ever be spent on private aerospace. If new technologies become promising and affordable to develop, then other companies will do that in the future.
These guys may succeed, they may fail. That's a great thing about America, you can take risks with commensurate payback. If every company needed the public to vote on whether to let them do their thing, we'd be where the USSR is. Oh yeah, they don't exist anymore.
Um, on launch the space shuttle is pretty much a big rocket. That's what the big fuel tank and boosters are for. Rocketing it into space.
The Shuttle's innovation was in the landing stage and the reuse of the rocket boosters and shuttle vehicle itself. This also allowed for large payloads such as science labs that could be carried in the vehicle and returned to Earth. In the case of Apollo or Soyuz style vehicles, only the small crew compartment is returned.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
And 1.5 billion USD is not all that much when it comes to getting to LEO.
Todays current regular human launch vehicle, the Soyuz, costs around $30m and that is a fully developed and very well tested system.
In terms of rocket development, with a new design, you could expect to spend your first 1bn USD on getting to the 'Manned rated' stage.
As for orbital tethers or 'space elevators' we're talking a whole different order of magnitude for cost. 1.5bn USD in this case would probably pay for about half of the raw materials for the ground tether station. Certainly, space elevators are theoretically cost effective for getting things to orbit but only once they are built.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Never knew that the famous RR Merlin engine was a rocket...Oh wait...
StarTux
Does that mean that they used all stolen credit cards and "frozen" account assets to pay for this ridiculous thing? That gives me a warm fuzzy feeling...
I don't respond to AC's.
$1.5 B won't even by a B2 plane these days...
Because owning a B2 bomber is your childhood fantasy?
Frankly, mine involves bras and suspenders and don't cost remotely as much.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Considering they seem like they want to be a viable commercial company - going with a proven technology seems like a good bet.
The R&D to develop something like a space elevator is HUGE. What happens if you just can't make it work? It might sound simple enough on paper, but the engineering challenges are extreme.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
In March, once the final checkouts are completed -- akin, said Musk, to software beta testing -- Falcon I will lift a Department of Defense satellite called TacSat-1 into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Do commercial entities normally do DoD satellite launches? That doesn't seem right to me.
It's the battle of the minds, and everyone's unarmed.
What is it with all of these .com executives entering the private space industry? First Bezos and now this. Do they think that since they got lucky with their investments in the web, they now are obligated to spend millions in another obscure industry? If I had the type of money these guys have, there's no way I'd waste it on something as risky and untested as private space travel.
Rockets are cheap.
Space elevator? Start thinking about building a space elevator when someone has built a carbon nanotube footbridge.
Something not yet invented? The probability of discovering a new physics is not directly proportional to the number of dollars spent.
So - we're back to rockets. Which are cheap.
NASA's rockets are expensive, because NASA doesn't care where the money comes from. (And NASA's funders in Congress don't care whether NASA's rockets even fly, so long as every district gets its piece of the pork pie.)
If you're Boeing or Lockmart, that's fine -- shuttling rich tourists to orbit and back will barely net you pocket change. So you build big expensive vehicles and you sell 'em to people who don't give a rat's ass about the cost of their ride, because they're using other people's money.
Thanks to Rutan, Bezos, and Musk, there's the possibility of a new market niche for those of us who prefer to use our own money.
The soyuz costs on average $40 million per launch. This is not what NASA is charged, NASA is charged more than this. Bigelow aerospace hopes to take advantage of this. NASA currently depends almost entirely on the Soyuz. If a private sector competitor can lower the cost to about 25 to 30 million, then a huge step can be made. NASA will have another option, which will drive the price of the Soyuz down. Nothing like a little competition...
It seems to me the original idea of NASA is actualy going to work! NASA was created in the begining to combine all of the branches of the government's space research in one location, to pionere new technologies, then, after a few decades, transfer the exploration of space over to the privite sector. Needless to say, NASA is stil in existance. What is impresive about this is the fact that someone from a company is doing a project like this. The problem with the idea of space being exploited by companies is that the inital cost is too great, and the payoffs too little. So what if it is 60 year old technology? They are still financing something that has little or no consivable payoffs for them in the short OR long run, appart from getting Paypal's name out there. True, a big rocket isnt that creative or inovative, but its better then nothing right? (also, the comparitive size of the rocket is much smaller then the older ones) Just the fact that he could actualy use that much (1.5 bill)money on something like a space flight is impresive. Its a good thing money from companies is going towards space, dont complain that its just a rocket, remember, NASA makes the new stuff! (scramjet)
but big rockets? They seem so dated
Thankfully the promise of dilithium crystals to power a new generation of warp drives is just right around the corner.
That and transporter technology will finally free us from "big rockets."
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The environmental impact of a space elevator is far less than that of the convential rockets. A space elevator could be powered in part by alternative energy sources that are both energy efficient and clean when compared to rocket fuel. The space elevator's effective footprint would be the size of its anchor facility (which amounts to far less space, in a very remote location).
First he sells PayPal and now he's wasting his money on this? It's not that the project is not worthwhile, it's just that there are more economical and efficient ways of achieving what he set out to do.
We'd like Merlin to be the best performing engine of its class (LOX/Kerosene, GG cycle turbo-pump) ever made and it looks like we have a decent shot at getting there.
Just how is their Merlin engine different from the Russian RD-180? It sounds like a rip-off which they are trying to improve and claim they invented something radically new. Renting Baikonur and hiring Russian specialists would have cost him half as much and the results would be much better, IMHO.
Elon Musk is not a founder of PayPal. Elon Musk founded X.com. PayPal was founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel. PayPal and X.com were joined "in a merger of equals" afterwards.
It just occured to me that the guys doing these space ships are like the rich guys a few centuries ago mounting ocean expeditions, as much for the exploration and adventure as for profit. We all complain about rich people, but many of them tend to be philanthropists and use their money for some kind of public good.
IF there was a more affordable, cost effective means of transport to space, don't you think it would have been done by now? It's gonna takes years to formulate and actually produce something like a space elevator. And it'll have to be placed somewhere with a distinct lack of nasty weather. Also, being kicked in the back by multiple G's is way cooler.
The linked article mentioned the "rebel billionaire" buying a new fleet of SpaceShipTwos for commercial trips to the upper stratosphere and back, which in my opinion is a prety foolish way for him to waste his accquired wealth. Unlike the Concords, which were also expensive and could actually transport you to useful places in small amounts of time, no celebrity or politicial figure would ever want to spend a couple thousand dollars just go up high in a potentially unsafe civilian spacecrat for the sole purpose of floating around in their seat and coming back down. There are easier and cheaper ways to obtain the thrills of floating in null-g that have been around for years, and not many people have expressed much interest in those, so why would anyone feel differently about the SpaceShipTwos? Don't get me wrong, I am excited about SpaceShipOne and the X-Prize (which it won), I just don't feel that this would be the correct application of the current technology.
I want to hear everyones' thoughts... please post comments!
"Paypal Founder's Merlin Rocket Engine Fires Up" ... shouldn't it be firing down? *rimshot!
Like eventually...
*ahem*
(NB, 'rimshot'!='rimjob')
Seriously though, the reason rockets are expensive is because they aren't launched very much- mass production would slash the cost. But because the cost is high, production is low, and so nobody can afford to go, so the cost stays high.
If that sounds utopian, consider that the fuel to put somebody into orbit is only about as much as to send someone on a round the world trip by jet...
Rocket hardware, contrary to popular opinion, isn't very complicated, your car probably is about as complicated.
Incidentally, the projected cost of Space Elevators is likely to be about as high as rockets- it's only if the launch rate goes really high will the initial higher R&D costs of Space Elevators cancel out.
Then there's the Van Allen radiation belts around the earth- people would get radiation sickness and possibly die if they go up an elevator. Shielding is extremely heavy and expensive, but rockets go much faster so you get less dossage and rockets can do what Apollo did, steer around the worst of the belts- but elevators have to be above the equator where the belts are, so they can't do that.
Even then, there's another fly in the ointment, the power costs of a space elevator are much higher than you would expect- currently the costs per kg to orbit are thought to be higher than the cost of cheap rocket fuel to do the same thing. This is mainly because the laser power beaming system looks like it may turn out to be about 2% efficient for various reasons (and even that's optimistic- current tech is 0.5% efficient), and other techniques aren't practical for sending power 38000 km up a nanotube rope. It turns out that rockets are if anything more efficient, and may even be cheaper in the long term. :-(
[or :-) if you like rockets, personally I like all ways to get to space :-) ]
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Is that why pay pal emailed me?
Yahoo filtered it as spam.
Good thing I check those messages as well.
Do not forget about the freenet.
http://freenet.sf.net
Peace.
So thats where my 1.9% + $0.30 go...
Peep that
I always thought that it is just not right esthetically speaking:
Take 500 tons of explosives, pile them up skyhigh, put a person on top of it in a tin can and then set the whole thing ablaze.
You can smell government / military-indistrial thinking all over it. There MUST be a better way.
Although I didn't want to encumber the story's synopsis with it, I really think Musk needs to discuss his vision of space migration with Gregg Maryniak who was the head of Space Studies Institute for sometime after Gerard O'Neill's death.
It was Gerard O'Neill who put forth the vision of space settlement after challenging his Princeton physics class with the question:
His conclusion, backed up by much subsequent research, is that the answer is a resounding, "No!"
A better statement would by Musk would be:
Seastead this.
I think the point was it's not a "conventional" rocket, it's a kludgy hybrid lash-up which never worked all that well, and is fundamentally unsafe.
The Russians got it right with their shuttle - instead of a big main engine on the shuttle, have much more payload space in the orbiter, and launch the thing with a big-ass conventional rocket. Shame the Russians couldn't afford to run their shuttle.
Oh no... it's the future.
I find their arguments convincing. It's an incremental step using existing technology, but it's a big one.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Big rockes are dieing.
NASA is getting their SCRAMJET system to work, if used on the space shuttle, it would drop its weight by 85%! That is a huge amount!
How it works, A scramjet works by extracting the oxygen required from the atmosphere is passes though, as long as it is travling faster then mach two (on earth's atmosphere) it can sustain flight. This gets rid of the need to cary liquid oxygen, allowing spacecraft to be much lighter, and to be able to go faster.
If the shuttle had a fuel tank the size of the moon, it still wouldnt even be able to get up to 1/10th the speed of light! (this is due to the mass of the liquid oxygen)
To do that in 160 seconds (2.67 minutes), you need an *average* acceleration of over 5.5g. You're also not going to get that at launch without a ridiculously overpowered engine that will crush your passengers at the end, when the ship has burned out all of its fuel and weighs a lot less. Most rocket engines aren't all that throttleable, with min thrust usually >.5 x max thrust.
For comparison, a Space Shuttle launch goes something like this:
(launch)~2g
(just before booster burnout)~3g
(just after booster burnout)less than 1g
(just before main engine burnout)~3g
The average acceleration is about 2g, meaning that the Shuttle takes around 8 minutes to go from ground to orbit.
5.5g? Average? I doubt it.
Yeah they got it right. So right it flew only one test orbital flight and unmanned at that.
Ok so that's related to economics BUT you can't really judge a launch vehicle's performance and call it "right" if it never really got a chance to do its job.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
There is no way that SpaceX would be profitable selling rockets for $6 and $12 million each if he spent $1.5 billion developing them. That's part of the reason why normal space launch rockets cost $40 to $250 million (or more...).
Are you really so naive that you think he invested the entire proceeds from the sale in developing a rocket motor? More likely, it's an investment of a few million dollars.
A blog like any other.
Hey, it could land automatically in Russian weather. Give them some credit, Buran looked to be a decent craft that died solely due to economics.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
No they never got it right.
The american's got it right, they got it almost perfect, but congress didn't give them enough cash so they had to take out a lot of things from the shuttle design to make it as cheap as possible and as safe as possible.
Actually, it's pixie dust. Soy-based, I understand.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_I (their $6 million, 670 kg payload rocket, being launched in March)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_V (their $12 million, 6020 kg payload rocket, scheduled for a November launch)
Yeah ... like in that old George Pal flick "When Worlds Collide".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I sent for a starter package on the America's Space Prize 2 months ago, and I never recieved a reply of any sort. I don't think it actually exists.
what sig?
hummmm. if you have an efficient design, why change it? Consider that Linus borrowed a lot of ideas from Unix in Linux's early days. Then as time progressed, the insides have changed and improved.
Same with the rockets. Right now, they are taking a standard design and imporving its reliability and economics. Down the road, when we are back on the moon, is the right time to test the space elevator.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
First, read this article.
Right now, launch costs are the biggest barrier to having lots of cool things (orbital hotels, factories, lunar bases, etc.) zipping around in space. According to this interview, Musk was previously planning on self-funding a mission to put an experimental greenhouse on Mars, but decided to start SpaceX when he realized that the overall mission cost would be dominated by the launch price.
SpaceX's Falcon I is designed to compete with the Pegasus rocket, which currently dominates the "low-cost" launch market. The Pegasus costs around $20 million to launch 375kg into space. The Falcon I will cost $6 million to launch 670kg into space. Stated differently, the Pegasus costs around $53,000 per kg, while the Falcon I will cost around $9000 per kg.
Things change even more with SpaceX's larger Falcon V rocket, scheduled for a launch this November. This will compete directly with the Delta IV Medium, which costs $90 million to lift 8600kg to LEO. The Falcon V will cost $12 million to lift 6020kg to LEO. That's around $10000 per kg for the Delta IV Medium and around $2000 per kg for the Falcon V.
One of SpaceX's goals is to reuse as much in terms of engines, components, and software as they build larger and larger rocket. As they benefit from economies of scale and build larger rockets, the costs will only drop.
Who's up for building an induction catapult launcher?
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
...basically build the elevator on the ground, make it long enough (say, would 500 miles long do it? 1000? I'm thinking in terms of Pak Protector scale projects here) -- presupposing you could get that much land to lay it out, etc. could you just anchor one end, weight the other, shorten the cable and let the change in the moment of intertia fling the sucker up?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I've mentioned it elsewhere in this discussion, but a couple years ago HobbySpace's RLV News had a very good interview with Elon Musk.
:)
Here's a quote:
HS: Private rocket development by startup companies in the post-Apollo era includes projects such as Truax's Volksrocket in the late 70s, Conestoga I and AMROC in the 80s, Beal Aerospace and several other ELV and RLV companies in the 1990s. They all came up short of space and many see their history as nothing but a tale of woe and failure. To me, though, they each appear to build on what was learned before them and to provide significant advancements in the technical and strategic knowledge needed to develop a rocket business from scratch.
It looks like SpaceX will be the startup company that finally makes it to orbit. When you studied prior efforts, what were some of the lessons [you] learned on what to do and, perhaps most importantly, what not to do?
Musk: Well, I have tried to learn as much as possible from prior attempts. If nothing else, we are committed to failing in a new way
The ones I'm familiar with failed on one or more of the following:
1. Lacked a critical mass of technical skill.
2. Insufficient capital to reach the finish line, particularly if an unexpected setback occurred.
3. Success was reliant on a series of technology breakthroughs that did not happen.
The above modes can obviously cross-feed one another.
HS: John Carmack has said something to the effect that the gap between what could be done versus what is being done is bigger in aerospace than in any other industry. Gary Hudson said that he was "amazed by how much easier the job of getting to orbit is today than even a few years go"..."Software, avionics and manufacturing technology have all improved measurably" and drastically reduced the number of people needed to design a launcher.
Now that you've gone through the rocket vehicle design phase and are well into construction, does your experience support their views or has the Falcon development perhaps been more difficult than you initially expected?
Musk: Well, hard and easy are somewhat nebulous terms. I think I have high standards and would classify getting Falcon to orbit as quite difficult. Overall though, I think we have had quite a smooth development so far, which is a credit to the hard work of the SpaceX engineering team.
The design tools, such as solid modeling and finite element analysis software are substantially more powerful than ten years ago, so that's a clear advantage. Obviously, most electronics have improved a lot too, except gyroscopes and flight termination systems.
Mine involves bras and suspenders... in the cockpit of a B2.
Obviously, mine is superior.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Well there are is another reasons\ besides lack of clout.
In the US there are no convent mountains. The ideal place is as far south as possible and the rocket needs to fly over WATER to the east. IE where it can not come crashing down on a school. That is why they launch sites in Kansas. There are no sites that meet those requirements in the US. The only place that might work well for this would be in Hawaii. Any guess how the greens would scream if you tired to bulldoze that track in paradise?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Dude. What precisely did they "take out"? An anti-matter warp drive? An anti-gravity generator? That is what one could reasonably expect if the shuttle got any bigger budget. It probably will come as a shock to you but the insanely overpriced abomination that the space shuttle is, costs a cool 0.5 billion greenbacks each frigging launch! Never you mind all that contented squeeling of corporate pork feeding at the NASA troff during the design phase. If it were not for the Congress putting its foot down, they will be still spending 15 billion per design only to reject it in final phase to start over.
The parent poster is absoulutely right, for 1/1000th of the design budget of the Shuttle, the Russians would have the Buran flying like clockwork and each launch would have cost 1/100th of that of the Shuttle's.
I think he's actually spending a pretty modest amount on development. From an older interview:
While Musk said he is not the company's sole backer, he said he is prepared to fund the development of the Falcon LV entirely out of his own pocket if he has to. He declined to say exactly how much he expects to spend developing the rocket, only that the figure will be "in the tens of millions" of dollars.
1.5 billion? So I guess there was no "buy it now" option, huh?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
"If every company needed the public to vote on whether to let them do their thing, we'd be where the USSR is. Oh yeah, they don't exist anymore."
:(
funny thing though -- the legacy of the ussr in this domain is the safest, cheapest and best "big rockets" in the world, while in America they can't remember how to build a Saturn V anymore
If I had the type of money these guys have, there's no way I'd waste it on something as risky and untested as private space travel.
I know what you mean -- if I had that kind of loot, I'd spend it on hookers and Chivas Regal. And a plasma TV set, wall-to-wall. And my own private submarine.
-kgj
-kgj
Check the website. There's are good arguments in favor of candidate sites, which include Vandenburg, White Sands, which both have acceptable mountain slopes, and yes, Hawaii. Carlton Meyer of skyramp.org thinks building a ramp on the barren slope of Mauna Loa may not be as big a deal with environmentalists as detractors think, and there is also the jobs issue in favor, as there aren't a lot of high-paying jobs on the big island.
Now, with respect to your point about launching rockets over water rather than land, don't space launches from Vandenburg AFB in California cross the continental United States? And now that Bezos guy from Amazon intends to start launching rockets from West Texas; those will spend at least some portion of their flight over land.
As for the old argument in favor of siting spaceports as far south as possible, what we have learned since building the installation in Cape Kennedy is that launching from sites with a lower air density (as in higher altitude) is more important than getting a little boost to velocity from a more southerly location's better angular momentum. This is why the Russian launch site in Kazakhstan is arguably better than Cape Kennedy, even though it's at like 40 degrees north. Of course, best of all would be a mountainside in Ecuador, but politics would never allow for a U.S.-funded site to be built there.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, John Carmack, and now this PayPal dude... Is there any super rich person who doesn't have his own pet space project going on somewhere?
Although it's hard to talk up the Russians when their oxygen generator keeps balking up on the ISS. Of course, NASA mission control probably won't let them thump it, which would probably work (given that it's problem seems to be bubbles sticking in the plumbing).
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Why would a space elevator need to be positioned at the equator? I'm not being facetious, I'm truly curious.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I scanned through the Spacex website and didn't see any mention of a crew vehicle or their plans of putting 5 people into orbit by 2010. While I'm sure they are somewhat serious about this plan, and there is probably a news update or two that I missed, it definitely appears that Spacex is (sensibly) focusing much more heavily on making their rockets a commercially viable lift vehicle.
I have seen no discussion at all of a crew vehicle, so it seems logical to assume that they have not addressed that detail yet. There is still a lot of work to be done, then.
Not so fast... You may want to check out the Theories of Burkhard Heim and its applications to space propulsion.
Why care what he has to say? Well - for one Heims theory apparently is the only theory which yields remarkably exact theoretical values for the masses, the resonances, and the mean lifetimes of elementary particles, as well as the Sommerfeld fine structure constant.
If his calculations are correct a flight over 10 light-years could be done in roughly 80 days - 160 days roundtrip.
Extraordinary claims that require extraordinary proof indeed. However, if I got US 1.5 Billion and would be thinking about exploring space I would not mind spending a few million to go about proving/disproving them...
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
Just looking at your post history, you have a "-1, Interesting" which caught my eye. Turns out you were spamming your (closed-source, paid) software on Slashdot. The editors probably don't like that very much.
I'm certainly not condoning their action, but it would help explain the bitchslap.
+++ATH0
Oy! Where to start?
1. The $1.5 billion is how much Musk made from his sale of PayPal to Ebay, NOT RocketX's development budget.
2. Rockets are the best and only way to get people -- or anything else -- to space and will be for the foreseeable future. Consider that ...
3. The space elevator concept is very cool but the materials required to build one do not exist. So you could say a "way" has been found but it's currently impossible to build. The materials could be developed in the not too distant future, say, 10-25 years, but they are still at the basic research phase. Cables made using bucky tubes hold promise but still hasn't been demonstrated.
4. SpaceX is not developing "big" rockets. A "big" rocket is something like the Saturn V or the Energia which can lift about 120 tons to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) whereas SpaceX's Falcon I will lift about one ton to LEO and the Falcon V about 5 tons.
5. Rockets are incredibly efficient in terms getting the most power (work? I ain't no engineer) from chemical fuels.
And ultimately,
6. There is nothing intrinsically unaffordable about rockets. You are assuming that "rockets" are necessarily expendable since virtually all current space launcher rockets are expendables. A well designed reusable rocket would be extremely "affordable" to operate but, alas, very tricky and expensive to design and develop. Note that the Space Shuttle is not well designed, not truly reusable, and most certainly not affordable to operate on a commercial basis.
In conclusion, there is little wonder that you are surprised since you know not of what you speak.
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
Well, only 3 Russians died during a real space mission: Soyuz 11, but shuttles have a pretty large death-toll: Challenger, Space Shuttle...
Old Soviet rockets are pretty reliable and cheap, mostly because they are quite simple in comparision with overcomplicated shuttles.
Well, no, the Russians did not get it right.
Their first -- and therefor arguably their last -- mistake was to build a shuttle system that even resembled the US Shuttle which is exactly what they did.
Why? There is essentially no good reason to build a large multipurpose winged reusable orbiter. In particular:
* A reusable orbiter has no business hauling cargo. It just forces the orbiter to be larger and therefor heavier and therefor able to carry less cargo. Carrying passengers and small load of equipment would be OK ... sorta -- and that is what NASA wanted to do originally.
* While debate still rages, wings on a reusable space craft are a Bad Idea®; they're heavy, don't help the spacecraft get into orbit, are useless in orbit, and ultimately drastically reduce payload. Alternatives are good ol' ballistic capsules (Soyuz, Apollo, etc) and parachutes or powered vertical landing like you see in old sci-fi movies. Check out the DC-X.
The closest anybody could have gotten to getting it right, would have been to develop reusable boosters; those are the things that the Russian design threw away! The advantage of putting the engines on the US Shuttle is that those expensive engines live to fly again and again. The rest of the US Shuttle stack is largely propellant tanks which are relatively cheap.
Ultimately, there is no "right" way to design, build, and operate and affordable rocket launcher that can provide CATS (Cheap Access To Space). If anyone is interested in actually learning more, they should check out the usenet newsgroup sci.space.tech.
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
It was a proof of concept. After they built it the political leaders realized something the engineers had said all along - "hey, it really is fundementally stupid to put wings on a rocket."
You see, they had a perfectly servicable, safe, and cheap way to get people into space already. The Soyuz was the most successful space vehicle from any perspective. Still is. The Russians didn't have enough money to use their space program as a giant welfare program for big aerospace companies and critical congressional districts. They had a job to do and they did it with a tenth of NASA's budget.
The exciting thing about commercial space is the financial discipline it provides. We should have solar power satellites and a permanent base on the moon for the money we've squandered on the Space Shuttle and ISS.
Nope. If it's 30 meters thick, yes, but if it's one centimeter thick, it will just burn up in the atmosphere.
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
I'm not really sure on this but I think it has something to do with that being where the most force is?
like kinetic energy... when it's spinning that's where the most power is.... though I could be completely wrong but I allways figured that was the reason.
How can this guy call this a Merlin Engine.
Doesn't Rolls Royce have the trademark on this?
This reality is becoming increasingly more like a weird fever dream with each passing week.
Funny part is that I think it was always like this, but the veils were pulled down tighter than they currently are.
I'm going to sleep now. Wake me up if it starts to rain. Space rocks.
-FL
Ok say you want something in space to point at some point on earth all the time. Well the closer to the earth the more gravity some the faster you need to go so in LEO you need to go mach 23. But if your far away say where the moon is go can go slower ~27days. In between those two point's there is an orbit that's 24 hours which means if your over the equator and that high up your orbiting the earth.
So if you built a tower from that point you would hit orbit no problems. You could aso build down from that orbit and hit earth now problems and when those poin'ts are connected you how your elevator.
Now over the north pole you would never hit orbit al speed becasue you would never circle the earth.
Now if you where a little closer to the equator but not on it you could build something that's not strat up and down that would be do the same thing but it would not work untill it was compleated as the orbit would not be stable untill it was connected to the ground. It would also need to be longer ect. Hell if you had a realy big rock orbiting the earth just outside of geo sinc orbit and tied it with something realy strong to a point on the north pole you could have a space elevator but it would be a hell of a lot harder and longer than building over the equator.
Shame the japaneese with billions of dollars they have couldnt have done a deal, but japan probably has rules in it that prohibit technology transfer in that domain.
So therefore, China/India should have bought it or done a combo deal.
Pitty the Russians werent such good negotiators/business people to follow on with their shuttle program and turn it in into a global enterprise with 10-50 shuttles. It chould have been done, but too many people have NO BALLS.
People should stop thinking of space as something mysterious and magical, and think of it as just another ocean to cross and place to exploit business wise.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Also think of it like this if you have a rock on a string some of that string close to your hand is moving a lot slower than the string close to the rock. But the whole thing is spinning around your hand the same number of times a second. If your standing over the equator and you put up a pole it's going to aproach orbital speed and be in the right path. If you do the same thing over DC it's going to aproach orbal speed but not an orbital path.
and where, smarty, do you get the oxygen from above 50km or so?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I would mind. I have read the talk page related to his article. While Burkhard Heim may not have been a complete crank, his supporters are certainly not sufficiently versed in physics.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Do the experiment. Take a ball, attach a string with a weight at the end. Now try spinning the ball. You will notice that if you put the attachment on the equator of the ball, you will be able to reach further with the same length of string.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I know I sound like the ultimate troll, but this guy's rocket "empire" was built via paypal's "dirty" years, when paypal froze (i.e. stole money) accounts for no reason to make it seem like they had more money on hand to lure poetential investors. Also don't forget the money laundering and federal investigations which Ebay had to buy themselves out of. Paypal ruined a lot of honest people's lives during the time period when this guy was in charge.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Sor according to the AWST article, Falcon I was supposed to have flown several times last year. The top-level subject is the engine test for Falcon V. Once I thought I read that both launchers used the same base components, just that the V had more engines and bigger tanks, etc.
Has SpaceX flown anything?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
You've all missed the real problem with Boeing and Lockmart. It's the nature of government contracts, and has NOTHING to do with NASA.
Government buys launches on a cost-plus basis. They pay the cost of the launch, and grant the "plus" so that Boeing and Lockmart get to make some sort of profit.
There's absolutely NO incentive to reduce launch cost. In fact, there's every incentive to keep launch costs as high as possible, because that maximizes the flow of dollars in.
Another way to reduce launch costs would be to adopt a different cost/profit structure. Adopt a launch-cost curve, to be fixed for some number of years, and pay that cost. That curve starts at today's cost, and then declines at some rate. Companies that can launch cheaper, make more money. At the end of X years, negotiate a new declining launch-cost curve.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That explains why ebay just doubled all of it's fees. The had to pay for their rockets! Perhaps if they bought them off ebay instead...
But the rocket is stressed to the limit. If the rocket had the same power/weight ratio as your car, it would be able to fly only as high as your car does. Space hardware isn't expensive because it's made in small quantities; it's expensive because it must be extremely lightweight and at the same time very strong. Independent of the production scale, carbon-fiber honeycomb is more expensive to make than stamped steel plate. Otherwise, cars would be made of carbon-fiber honeycomb.
Also, space hardware must be extremely reliable, because it's so difficult to go there and repair it, and that raises the cost.
The advantage in launching from sites near to the equator isn't the velocity boost, which is, as you say, relatively small. The problem is when you want to use geosynchronous orbits. Cancelling the resulting orbit inclination, which is always at least as large as the latitude of the launch site, is the big problem. Suppose you had a polar orbit, with 90 degree inclination, and wanted to turn it into an equatorial orbit. If the orbit velocity is v, you would need a 2*v velocity change. The only reason why they can launch from Baikonur is that the Russian rockets are so large. Their fourth stage is big enough to zero the orbit inclination.
"don't space launches from Vandenburg AFB in California cross the continental United States"
Nope. Vandenburg is ONLY used for polar launches. That kind of orbit is only used for recon and EOS that is why most launches are out of the cape. They do launch ICBM tests out of Vandenburg as well but those are suborbital.
Bezos is going suborbital. I would bet all of the flight path is over unoccupied land. West Texas is empty and since this is straight up it will likely go less than 100 miles downrange.
White Sands and Vandenburge are total non-starters for anything going into a normal orbit because of the population centers that you would have to over fly in boost phase. You might. And I do mean might get premission to lauch from those sites if you where using a "Proven" single stage to orbit system or a system with proven flyback boosters. But that would be a big maybe.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Why would a space elevator need to be positioned at the equator? I'm not being facetious, I'm truly curious.
It's not about the force... at least not directly as another poster said.
There is no compression material that can support its own weight for that distance. There are a few tensile materials though. Meaning that the things center of gravity has to be on the midpoint of the elevator, with both ends pulling outward.
Which means its in orbit, not fixed to the ground. There's only one class of orbits that would allow it to stay over the same spot on earth; geosynchronous orbits.
All of those orbits are 22,000 miles up... over the equator.
So to build a space elevator, it's center of gravity has to be 22,000 miles directly above the equator.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
I wondered how long it would take somebody to say that!
...Almost as much as I wondered how log it would take to comment on the unfortunate grammar: "According to Musk, 5 Merlins bundled with the first stage of SpaceEx's powerful Falcon V booster will launch 5 people to orbit by 2010"
I would've hoped for "a spacecraft containing 5 people", but sometimes you just get these thrillseekers...
*Foom* Aiiiiiieeeeeeeee...
-- Just another unsolicited opinion... from the Peanut Gallery.
This is absoultely false, the Russians are just as concerned about safety as NASA is, their method is different. While NASA tries to use primarilly bureaucracy the Russians try to use an incremental system whereby they use proven and tested stuff with small modifications. Your assertion that NASA is "over-engineering" is laughable: the Shuttle has virtually no workable astronaut escape system, while the Soyuz has an emergency escape rocket on top of the launch stack that can be used from the moment when the cosmonauts are in the capsule all the way to the point where capsule has enough altitude to land on its own in case of the booster explosion or malfunction. In other words for the most dangerous part of the launch sequence the Shuttle has no safety mechanism. And then there is the unprotected heat shielding and overcomplicated system whith the main engine in the shuttle itself etc etc. At this point in time it is Soyuz and its launch system that are "over-engineered" for safety in a good sense of the word.
Although it's hard to talk up the Russians when their oxygen generator keeps balking up on the ISS.>
ISS' main function is to be a political boondogle and I am certain that the Russians would probably have replaced the thing long time ago if it was their decision to make (and if they had funds to do so). Also banging the thing with a wrench is an acceptable solution if the unit was made to accommodate such treatment from the get go, which, being Russian it probably was.
Umm, no. It is due to the specific impulse of chemical fuel.
If the Shuttle had a fuel tank the size of the moon, and were using a scramjet (yes, it's impossible, but we can play what-if games), and the fuel tank had zero empty mass (it's a big ball of LH2, supported by our goodwill), then the deltaV of the Shuttle would be on the order of 0.33% of lightspeed.
Note that that 1/3 of 1% (of c) deltaV only required three impossible conditions to achieve.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It turns out that if you add the two sets of forces together you get a force that pushes the cable towards the plane above the equator as well as the force acting away/towards the earth.
It's easiest to see at the poles. If you imagine swinging a long cable around the north pole the rotation pulls it out in a long line, but the earths gravity would pull it down towards the equator. It would probably drag along the ground in fact; although if you built a tall tower you might be able to stop that.
Whilst you can fix the lower end of the cable somewhat north or south of the equator, the geosynchronous orbit part of the cable ends up pretty much in the equatorial plane (it will move a bit as you move the fixture point, but not much, since the cable is fairly flexible.)
If the fixture point goes too far north or south, the cable will actually drag along the ground.
If you stick a massive counterweight on the cable then the cable becomes taut and can be pulled off the ground somewhat, but you're ultimately limited by the strength/weight of the cable- making the cable tauter needs it to be stronger, which makes it heavier. So there's a limit how far north/south you can go in practice.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"That's not actually so. The Russian Proton rocket engines for example, uses a safety factor of 2.
i.e. they worked out the stress on each of the parts and then made them twice as strong as they needed to.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The difficult/expensive bits are building something 200km high, and having the ends of the string being at orbital velocity :-)
But it is theoretically possible, particularly if nanotubes are used for the 'string'.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Good points. I'd add that a rocket is a rocket (looks like a rocket) because it's the most functional form for using propulsion. Since you need a lot of propellant/fuel to launch into orbit, you need to store it somewhere. And since that propellant/fuel is usually much heavier/larger than the payload, the form of the vehicle is determined by the need to store the fuel. And what better way to do it than with a huge cylinder? Add a cylindrical (since it's going to fly through air for some time) capsule for the payload and you have a traditionally looking rocket. Adding wings, while sexing up the craft, doesn't really help something which flights straight up through the air and after that basically flies in vacuum.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I think it was also there because the Russians didn't want to let the US be able to do stuff that they weren't able to.
Like space war. The shuttle would have been able to fly up, retrieve a Russian spysat and then land again, after 1 orbit.
But, after the US wasn't plotting to do such things to Russia, they didn't necessarily need to do those sort of things to us. Therefore, because Soyuz still worked just fine, there was no point in having a shuttle-equivelent because it would be even less useful than the US's shuttle.
Gentoo Sucks
See, the Russians are perfectly capable of making safe, well-engineered stuff. It's just that we don't always recognize it.
A F-16 has a jet intake under the cockpit. Thus, it's awfully easy for it to suck up any debris on the ground while taxing or taking off. Therefore, debris control is important. They need to scout the airport every morning. Our jets need a whole mobile maintenence facility to keep them flying.
A Mig-29? It's got a screen that deploys in front of the engines and auxiliary upward-facing intakes. So they don't need to wory about operating from poorly-prepared fields. They make it such that everything needed right now for an aircraft fits on a single truck. If it's more important than that, you make sure it won't need to be replaced in the middle of your campaign.
The Soyuz has primitive components, yes. But they've got stuff that won't stop working. Like a primitive optical periscope that gives you enough margin to do a re-entry without guidance. They make sure that the systems that are important just won't fail.
Gentoo Sucks
John Walker doesn't have one (to the best of my knowledge). Maybe he got conned by Jack Sarfatti? It certainly is an interesting coincidence that the date of Walker's essay on UFO's mentioning Sarfatti is a few months after Walker had started considering support of a rocket engine developed by Roger Gregory and I.
Seastead this.
No biggie, you just have to make the bolus section long enough- like 1000km long enough :-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"...by someone using a stolen credit card via Paypal.
Basically, specific impulse (Written Isp) answers the question:
If I ran this engine with the throttle set so that it was generating one pound of thrust, how long would one pound of fuel last?
It only works in the USA, because the metric system doesn't use the same units for force and mass. GO USA!
Interestingly, Isp is always equal to (exhaust velocity) / (force of gravity). So, if the SSME gets a specific impulse of 450 seconds, then the exhaust velocity is (450sec * 32 f/s^2), or around 14,400 feet per second. For the rest of the world, that's (450sec * 9.8 m/s^2), or around 4400 m/s.
Because of conservation of momentum, the faster you shoot stuff out the back, the less stuff you have to shoot out in order to generate the same thrust, so the Isp gets higher. However, the faster you want to shoot each kilogram you shoot out, the more energy per kilogram you need. The most energetic chemical reactions top out with enough energy to get themselves moving at around 5500 m/s, but that involves nasty stuff like Lithium or Flourine. You can also get really exotic by using things like monatomic Hydrogen, which when it combines with other H atoms gives off enough energy to result in a theoretical Isp of around 1600s (!). The problem of keeping individual Hydrogen atoms from combining until they reach the combustion chamber is left as an exercise for the reader.
While true, your car uses a safety factor of at least 10, and normally near 100...
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
...really, really wants to mount a smaller one of these on my truck. Tailgaters would never be a problem again. Brakes, on the other hand, would probably need to be replaced daily.
This is not really true, in order to change your orbit 90 degrees you need about 0.5 v change (or so, I forget the exact number).
Essentially, you first change the orbit from circular to extremely eliptical. Then you change directions when you are farthest from Earth. The you circularize the orbit. It works because the energy required to change directions is a lot less when you are at the extreme edge of an elliptic orbit, because you are so much slower.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
You obviously have never driven a Ford :-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Not quite. The Zenith first stage was meant to be retrieved by parachutes + retro-rockets, as well as the second stage. While the second stage was never recovered using this mechanism, the engines of the second stage, below the main tank, were recovered in one of the test flights for inspection. But it seems the whole thing was uneconomic.
See more information here and here. Quote: