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A Chat with Kristian von Bengtson, co-founder of Copenhagen Suborbitals (Video)
Copenhagen Suborbitals says their mission is "very simple. We are working towards launching a human being into space." That doesn't sound so simple, really, but they're approaching this gargantuan task with an intentionally simple approach: a small team, relatively unhampered by bureaucratic hassles, who are taking advantage of existing, off-the-shelf high-tech solutions when they make sense, and low-tech solutions when possible; if the parable of the Soviet space pencil hadn't worked its way into the mythology of space technology, it could have been based on the Copenhagen Suborbitals point of view. I talked with project co-founder Kristian von Bengston about the project's progress so far, as well as what the next steps are. Among those next steps: in summer 2014, the Suborbitals team plans to launch their HEAT2X lift vehicle loaded with the TDS-80 capsule; you can download the preliminary trajectory projections for both the launcher and the capsule.
They plan on getting a living human being into space.
By phase 3, said human being will also be living after landing.
And by phase 4, said human being will also be living several (or more) minutes after landing.
Do they think they will be cheaper or more capable or exceed Elon Musk's company by any metric in 5 years?
I am assuming this is the same Copenhagen Suborbitals that was asking /. for legal advice recently:
Ask Slashdot: Legal Advice Or Loopholes Needed For Manned Space Program
That did not instill confidence in me.
Wax on, wax off baby!
SpaceX has the goal to be a successful orbital rocketry business.
These guys have the goal to noodle around and blow stuff up. Their capability is somewhere in the 1940's. Note "suborbital" << "orbital". You can go up to be 'suborbital'. If you want orbital you have to go up but more importantly around very very fast.
Orbital velocity is about 7 km/s. The plot on these guys's page shows velocity topping out at 0.7 km/s. So they have 1/100th the energy needed for orbit (and obviously they have no capability to do multi-staging which is quite non-trivial to do reliably). And if they put more fuel in, then the mass goes up even more. It's just useless hobby waste.
Thing about rocket science is that SpaceX knows it's rocket science and employs people who know the scientific and engineering experience of 50 years of rocketry. They know they actually need substantial simulation and material science experimentation. They know they need to build a rocket engine test stand and understand fundamental dynamics in many regimes including near vacuum.
Tandy made pretty awesome computers for the time. I fondly remember my first TDS-80; being excited to get each month's computer magazine in the mail with a demo-cassette full of programs to load.
Really!?
Everything is simple until it gets complex. The current industry learned this the hard way over decades of extremely expensive things blowing up.
What is hard is launching a person into space safely 100% of the time. If your passenger is willing to risk their life on a 10% failure rate of the rocket, and iffy engineering on the capsule, anyone can do it a year with enough money. I hate to say it, but until we are willing to accept that kind of level of risk, like the first biplane pilots, or the first sailors going out of sight of the coast, then this space thing will take a long long time. There's no end of adrenaline junkies looking for new ways to risk their lives. It's society's extreme reactions to any failure that is slowing us down. One craft crashes and we shut down the entire manned space program for five years until we figure out who to blame. Way to go America. I hope India and China and Denmark can jump start that next wave.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
It is nice to have a different team try low cost rocketry again, but how many different ways are there to do it? Armadillo got a reusable, pressure fed rocket, that can reach about 100 km after ~$5 million, and a decade of part time work with a team including John Carmack. SpaceX had a $100 million, Elon Musk, whom is very smart in his own right, a head engineer of TRW's rocket design with ~15 years experience at the time, and many other smart people. Originally, SpaceX was an elite rocket company with top ~2 percent, in Elon's words, of rocket engineers. In the nineties, Andrew Beal spent a couple hundred million on pressure fed rockets for Beal Aerospace. by the way, Andrew Beal made lots of money from shorting banks. Jeff Bezos has a team that has been working in secret on low cost rockets for a decade. Branson hired Scaled Composites. Let's not forget XCor, and their piston pump rockets.
In the public sector. Iran&North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, France, India, China, and Japan are trying for low cost rockets. It might be a good idea to give up on low cost manufacturing, and try to get reusability working.
"plans to launch their HEAT2X lift vehicle loaded with the TRS-80 capsule"
Wow. That is old school.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The companies you mention are all, well, companies. They are all in it for the profit, and they will protect the use of their technology as aggressively as Microsoft protect their source code and software patents. Copenhagen Suborbitals are trying to do the opposite: to make a viable rocket engine and capsule design and make it all freely available for other organizations to use and improve upon under "open source"-equivalent terms.