They save mass that conventional rockets expend almost immediately in their flight, pay a big price in aerodynamic drag instead, and additionally pack on lots of extra mass in air breathing equipment and various HOTOL related structure that they then need to take to orbit. They compensate for that and for the efficiency losses of SSTO by claiming a structure and thermal protection system that are basically magic, and gloss over all the additional operational expenses. And no, they don't avoid the need for payload integration.
SpaceX has the advantage of having a vehicle that actually exists, and they're not content to stop with first stage reuse. The successor to the Falcon 9 will be fully reusable, and far simpler and cheaper to develop, not to mention actually operate.
And one of limited real world value. LOX is dirt cheap, and launchers have to leave the atmosphere after a short amount of time in order to reach orbital velocity. They add on all sorts of complexity and losses to enable use of atmospheric oxygen. They are accepting increased vehicle and operational costs in order to reduce the tiny fraction of launch costs that come from the propellant. This simply isn't going to result in inexpensive spaceflight.
Of course, the rest of the vehicle is a fantasy structure of a carbon fiber spaceframe with gigantic liquid hydrogen tanks on the inside and an eggshell-thin ceramic heat shield suspended around it on wires, with insulation and active cooling systems in between. It might be physically possible for a structure that fulfills their requirements to exist, but can it actually be manufactured, let alone maintained and flown? (And of course, if they do manage to work these things out, the same techniques will become available to conventional rockets, along with some things like partially pressure-supported tanks that aren't usable on Skylon due to the bending loads from its horizontal launch...)
Air breathing engines are better suited for cruise than for acceleration to anything approaching orbital velocity, and with the need for LH2, it's probably not aimed at anything commercial...instead, things like hypersonic drone bombers. Skylon is just PR.
Whether it slows it down or not as an intermediate step is entirely irrelevant. Kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity. Applying a given increment in velocity (as a jet engine of any sort needs to do to produce thrust) costs more energy at higher initial velocities.
These issues arise because the engine takes in air as reaction mass and ejects it at higher speed to produce thrust...they apply to anything that breathes air. No fancy internal thermodynamic cycle can get around this. Ultimately, accelerating that flow of reaction mass by a given amount takes more power as the initial velocity of that reaction mass with respect to the craft increases. The only way around this is to not breathe air.
The fact that their engine is absolutely dependent on large quantities of liquid hydrogen is also not promising when it comes to economics...
It reminds me of Branson crowing about how environmentally friendly and efficient their hybrid motor is. "We have reduced the [carbon emission] cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York’s electricity supply to less than the cost of an economy round-trip from Singapore to London."
Never mind that spaceflight would have to scale up many orders of magnitude to be a meaningful contributor to carbon emissions, that there are few rockets that emit as much carbon for their performance as their hybrid, or that they produce fewer emissions simply because they aren't doing anywhere near as much.
It never gets anywhere close to orbital speed. SS2 is to max out at about 1 km/s. It also won't even reach the Karman line, they're aiming for the 50 mile/80 km altitude where Air Force pilots get astronaut wings via a purely bureaucratic definition.
It's a rocket plane. A rocket AIRplane. It's not a spacecraft, and the technology is not relevant to spacecraft.
If they get Skylon up and flying, they'll have a horrendously complex, expensive, and fragile launch vehicle which is utterly unscalable and inflexible in the range of orbits it can target. More likely, it'll never get up and flying, but suffer the fate of every other super duper spaceplane project, turning into nothing but a big money sink.
The horizontal takeoff and "looks like a plane" aspect is cargo cult engineering based on what looks cool in sci-fi and what works for aircraft performing an entirely different task. Air breathing buys you next to nothing in the end, and costs a great deal. Liquid hydrogen is a pain to use, it's hazardous and it's awkwardly low-density. Carrying extra liquid hydrogen for cooling and a bunch of extra air-breathing equipment and aerodynamic structures in order to use atmospheric oxygen diluted 4:1 with nitrogen which must be dragged up to the speed of the vehicle before being used, all to avoid carrying a bit of liquid oxygen, is not the path to cheap spaceflight.
You can make a reusable vehicle without using exotic propellants, without carrying wings and landing gear to orbit, without any of the Skylon's other magic technologies. SpaceX is a lot closer to doing this than Skylon is to even having a working engine.
That's not quite correct. Essentially every geostationary satellite has to make such a correction (though not all geosynchronous satellites are geostationary). The orbital mechanics involved make it easier do do for higher altitude destination orbits, though...and starting further away from the equator certainly isn't a benefit.
It would also be prohibitively costly to make a plane change for a satellite in low Earth orbit directly with rocket thrust, but such orbits precess around Earth's axis with time. If you can get the inclination right and have time to wait, it's possible to instead alter their period so they precess faster or slower and eventually reach the desired plane. This is used by Iridium to get in-orbit spares where they need to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Again, though, starting out far from the equator is only useful if you're targeting highly inclined/retrograde orbits.
The video has them all landing together largely for dramatic effect (or to avoid modeling an ASDS). For most real launches, the center core will be much too far downrange and moving too fast to return to the launch site, and will have to land on an ASDS positioned out at sea. The smaller side pads are intended as fallbacks in case the center pad is unreachable or otherwise out of commission. They'll probably use two ASDSs for the center and one side core until they get a second land-based landing site constructed.
Rockets are fragile, they can't take much mistreatment. A net would at most catch some debris...they don't want debris, they want a rocket. And in normal operation, they should be able to soft land upright on the platform, so a net would be an unnecessary complication in the best case...in the worst case, the net system gets in the way and causes a landing failure.
It's not clear that the total cost of implementation will be cheaper. Sattelite launches cost $50-250 million each...
LauncherOne is targeting $10 million per launch and would put up 2-3 satellites with each launch...it will be one of the most expensive ways to lift mass to orbit at roughly $44000/kg, and still won't be nearly as bad as you state. The Soyuz launches, with over 30 times the payload capacity, would put up many more satellites at far lower cost per satellite.
So what? That has nothing to do with whether the economics of this are workable or not.
You wouldn't have to ask that question if you'd bothered to read the entire text you were responding to. The rural population is not "by definition" small, it is a substantial fraction of the global population.
And apparently options for 100 more. 139 flights on a launcher that doesn't exist yet, from a company that has never launched anything.
Look at SpaceX...the Falcon 9 has been extremely successful, but it's not the rocket they started with. Their first launcher, the Falcon 1 had multiple launch failures and was ultimately scrapped along with the planned Falcon 5 in favor of the more efficient and capable Falcon 9. Depending on the Falcon 1 being a massive success when it was still a paper rocket would have been rather foolish.
The satellites are cheaper, more capable, and far more numerous, and there's a lot more of a market for low latency internet access that doesn't have to follow fiber links on the ground than there was for the capability to make an occasional call with an expensive, clumsy sat-phone.
And cities cover a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface. Around 20% of the population of the US lives in rural areas, and the fraction is much higher in developing countries. It's also not just people in remote areas that will be interested in this, the low, perdictable latency will be of interest to financial institutions, among others.
On top of this, these were tapes of mostly telemetry data, of which most of the interesting data had been copied for whatever it was needed for. That includes the video: it was slow-scan video which had already been converted to more useful forms for live broadcast...we could do a better conversion now if we had the data (especially for the first few minutes, where the scan converter was misconfigured), but they didn't think it was necessary, especially when we brought back reels of film from the Maurer DAC showing the astronauts working on the moon in far greater quality than any video equipment at the time could have managed, not to mention all the still photos, which were far more accessible at the time.
It's their fault that the past inadequate funding led to delays, therefore they don't deserve the full amount of funding required to meet their schedule? You're seriously making that argument? Delays resulting from underfunding are not justification for continued underfunding.
And Orion? Orion won't fly until around 2025 at best, will cost several billion to fly if it ever does (just the SLS to launch it will cost about a billion), and won't ever visit the ISS or any other space station...it would be gratuitously wasteful to use it for such a mission.
(Damn, I thought it was 250-ish each way, not round trip.)
It's 250-ish round trip to the satellite and back, but comms satellites aren't very interesting to talk to. It's 250-ish each way to the server and back. Around half a second of delay before you can get a response to a message while working over a geosynchronous satellite link.
A first stage is not an airplane. Making it land like an airplane entails adding most of an airplane to it...wings, jet engines, unfolding propellers, substantial, steerable landing gear, various covers and other mechanisms that open and close in flight, mechanisms to detach the disposable tanks, etc. This is not making things simpler.
Reusing the engines would be a significant cost reduction, but they're going about it in a particularly complex way, and their level of reuse still falls short of their competition's. By their own statements, they throw away 20% of the economic value of the stage. SpaceX just needs to make the first stage a bit oversized for the second stage. That costs them a somewhat larger vehicle (which is reused for multiple launches, so this cost only has to be paid once) and propellant (which accounts for 1% of a launch).
After 5 launches, Adeline will have cost as much in disposable tanks as an entire new first stage. A Falcon 9R might fly as many as 40 times without major refurbishment.
I think you're talking about the Jason-3 launch. That's actually a couple launches away, though it'll be their first landing attempt on the West Coast.
CRS-7 is launching June 26th (bumped back a bit, probably to let them reshuffle things to account for cargo that was supposed to be delivered on the last Progress) from Cape Canaveral. They are going to attempt a landing...maybe on land instead of the ASDS.
They've also got a geosynchronous sat launch in mid-July with the first "enhanced" F9 v1.1...that might have the capacity for a landing, which previous geosynchronous launches didn't have enough performance to attempt.
"The Airbus team concluded that SpaceX's design of returning the full stage to Earth could be simplified by separating the propulsion bay from the rest of the stage, protecting the motor on reentry and, using the winglets and turbofans, return horizontally to a conventional air strip."
Interesting definition of "simplified" they're using. They're not even recovering the entire first stage, and they're basically bolting a jet airplane onto it to achieve that much. Propellant is as cheap as dirt, they're avoiding paying tens of thousands of dollars in propellant by instead paying for jet aircraft maintenance and operations and an entirely new set of cryogenic tankage and a substantial amount of aerospace vehicle structure for each flight. SpaceX is just making the first stage a bit bigger (and looking at things like additional propellant chilling to increase density) so it has the extra capacity required.
"We are using an aerodynamic shield so that the motor is not subjected to such high stress on reentry"
Thus solving an issue that SpaceX has already shown isn't actually a major problem...they have been regularly bringing entire intact first stages through reentry and down to sea level for some time now.
As for SpaceX not "coming close"...their second attempt actually brought the vehicle to a halt on the landing pad, though with mangled landing gear, and the reasons for the control issues during the final burn are well understood. They are extremely close...odds are quite good that their third attempt (in a bit under 2 weeks) will be a success.
The process involves liquefying the protein-containing material and running it through a fluid vortex that applies strong shear forces to the individual molecules, untangling them and allowing them to refold. This process is likely to be somewhat more detrimental to brain function than the mis-folded proteins were.
In this case, it appears the same shear forces cause the cancer drug to be more likely to get encapsulated in a lipid vesicle, which protects the drug and helps get it past cell membranes. Useful, but not directly applicable to Alzheimer's or prion diseases.
The drone platforms (there's one being built for the west coast too) will still be used for situations where the core doesn't have enough propellant to return to land. Especially the center core of Falcon Heavy launches that need to make a large plane change, as the cross-fed center core goes much further and faster than the side cores.
Musk mentioned something about a thruster underperforming due to a poor propellant mixture ratio, but the Dragon was also controlling its thrust to direct its trajectory out to sea, so either could be the cause of the "puffs".
It came in surprisingly close to shore, but was also being dragged quite quickly by the wind before the parachutes finally collapsed. The altitude/speed reached are probably better indications of the actual performance.
It would make sense to primary batteries, to the point of being the overwhelmingly obvious choice. However, they aren't even using plain lithium-ion: http://www.rocketlabusa.com/ab...
"Rutherford adopts an entirely new propulsion cycle, making use of brushless DC motors and high performance Lithium Polymer batteries to drive its turbo pumps."
Lithium polymer batteries being a form of lithium ion batteries that have an electrolyte with a bunch of added gelling additives, or an actual polymer electrolyte, trading some of their capacity for flexibility in form factor and leak-proofness that makes them better for things like cell phones. I don't know why they'd choose these batteries, but it's what their website says they're using.
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They save mass that conventional rockets expend almost immediately in their flight, pay a big price in aerodynamic drag instead, and additionally pack on lots of extra mass in air breathing equipment and various HOTOL related structure that they then need to take to orbit. They compensate for that and for the efficiency losses of SSTO by claiming a structure and thermal protection system that are basically magic, and gloss over all the additional operational expenses. And no, they don't avoid the need for payload integration.
SpaceX has the advantage of having a vehicle that actually exists, and they're not content to stop with first stage reuse. The successor to the Falcon 9 will be fully reusable, and far simpler and cheaper to develop, not to mention actually operate.
And one of limited real world value. LOX is dirt cheap, and launchers have to leave the atmosphere after a short amount of time in order to reach orbital velocity. They add on all sorts of complexity and losses to enable use of atmospheric oxygen. They are accepting increased vehicle and operational costs in order to reduce the tiny fraction of launch costs that come from the propellant. This simply isn't going to result in inexpensive spaceflight.
Of course, the rest of the vehicle is a fantasy structure of a carbon fiber spaceframe with gigantic liquid hydrogen tanks on the inside and an eggshell-thin ceramic heat shield suspended around it on wires, with insulation and active cooling systems in between. It might be physically possible for a structure that fulfills their requirements to exist, but can it actually be manufactured, let alone maintained and flown? (And of course, if they do manage to work these things out, the same techniques will become available to conventional rockets, along with some things like partially pressure-supported tanks that aren't usable on Skylon due to the bending loads from its horizontal launch...)
Air breathing engines are better suited for cruise than for acceleration to anything approaching orbital velocity, and with the need for LH2, it's probably not aimed at anything commercial...instead, things like hypersonic drone bombers. Skylon is just PR.
Whether it slows it down or not as an intermediate step is entirely irrelevant. Kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity. Applying a given increment in velocity (as a jet engine of any sort needs to do to produce thrust) costs more energy at higher initial velocities.
These issues arise because the engine takes in air as reaction mass and ejects it at higher speed to produce thrust...they apply to anything that breathes air. No fancy internal thermodynamic cycle can get around this. Ultimately, accelerating that flow of reaction mass by a given amount takes more power as the initial velocity of that reaction mass with respect to the craft increases. The only way around this is to not breathe air.
The fact that their engine is absolutely dependent on large quantities of liquid hydrogen is also not promising when it comes to economics...
It reminds me of Branson crowing about how environmentally friendly and efficient their hybrid motor is. "We have reduced the [carbon emission] cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York’s electricity supply to less than the cost of an economy round-trip from Singapore to London."
Never mind that spaceflight would have to scale up many orders of magnitude to be a meaningful contributor to carbon emissions, that there are few rockets that emit as much carbon for their performance as their hybrid, or that they produce fewer emissions simply because they aren't doing anywhere near as much.
It never gets anywhere close to orbital speed. SS2 is to max out at about 1 km/s. It also won't even reach the Karman line, they're aiming for the 50 mile/80 km altitude where Air Force pilots get astronaut wings via a purely bureaucratic definition.
It's a rocket plane. A rocket AIRplane. It's not a spacecraft, and the technology is not relevant to spacecraft.
If they get Skylon up and flying, they'll have a horrendously complex, expensive, and fragile launch vehicle which is utterly unscalable and inflexible in the range of orbits it can target. More likely, it'll never get up and flying, but suffer the fate of every other super duper spaceplane project, turning into nothing but a big money sink.
The horizontal takeoff and "looks like a plane" aspect is cargo cult engineering based on what looks cool in sci-fi and what works for aircraft performing an entirely different task. Air breathing buys you next to nothing in the end, and costs a great deal. Liquid hydrogen is a pain to use, it's hazardous and it's awkwardly low-density. Carrying extra liquid hydrogen for cooling and a bunch of extra air-breathing equipment and aerodynamic structures in order to use atmospheric oxygen diluted 4:1 with nitrogen which must be dragged up to the speed of the vehicle before being used, all to avoid carrying a bit of liquid oxygen, is not the path to cheap spaceflight.
You can make a reusable vehicle without using exotic propellants, without carrying wings and landing gear to orbit, without any of the Skylon's other magic technologies. SpaceX is a lot closer to doing this than Skylon is to even having a working engine.
That's not quite correct. Essentially every geostationary satellite has to make such a correction (though not all geosynchronous satellites are geostationary). The orbital mechanics involved make it easier do do for higher altitude destination orbits, though...and starting further away from the equator certainly isn't a benefit.
It would also be prohibitively costly to make a plane change for a satellite in low Earth orbit directly with rocket thrust, but such orbits precess around Earth's axis with time. If you can get the inclination right and have time to wait, it's possible to instead alter their period so they precess faster or slower and eventually reach the desired plane. This is used by Iridium to get in-orbit spares where they need to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Again, though, starting out far from the equator is only useful if you're targeting highly inclined/retrograde orbits.
The video has them all landing together largely for dramatic effect (or to avoid modeling an ASDS). For most real launches, the center core will be much too far downrange and moving too fast to return to the launch site, and will have to land on an ASDS positioned out at sea. The smaller side pads are intended as fallbacks in case the center pad is unreachable or otherwise out of commission. They'll probably use two ASDSs for the center and one side core until they get a second land-based landing site constructed.
Rockets are fragile, they can't take much mistreatment. A net would at most catch some debris...they don't want debris, they want a rocket. And in normal operation, they should be able to soft land upright on the platform, so a net would be an unnecessary complication in the best case...in the worst case, the net system gets in the way and causes a landing failure.
It's not clear that the total cost of implementation will be cheaper. Sattelite launches cost $50-250 million each...
LauncherOne is targeting $10 million per launch and would put up 2-3 satellites with each launch...it will be one of the most expensive ways to lift mass to orbit at roughly $44000/kg, and still won't be nearly as bad as you state. The Soyuz launches, with over 30 times the payload capacity, would put up many more satellites at far lower cost per satellite.
So what? That has nothing to do with whether the economics of this are workable or not.
You wouldn't have to ask that question if you'd bothered to read the entire text you were responding to. The rural population is not "by definition" small, it is a substantial fraction of the global population.
And apparently options for 100 more. 139 flights on a launcher that doesn't exist yet, from a company that has never launched anything.
Look at SpaceX...the Falcon 9 has been extremely successful, but it's not the rocket they started with. Their first launcher, the Falcon 1 had multiple launch failures and was ultimately scrapped along with the planned Falcon 5 in favor of the more efficient and capable Falcon 9. Depending on the Falcon 1 being a massive success when it was still a paper rocket would have been rather foolish.
The satellites are cheaper, more capable, and far more numerous, and there's a lot more of a market for low latency internet access that doesn't have to follow fiber links on the ground than there was for the capability to make an occasional call with an expensive, clumsy sat-phone.
And cities cover a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface. Around 20% of the population of the US lives in rural areas, and the fraction is much higher in developing countries. It's also not just people in remote areas that will be interested in this, the low, perdictable latency will be of interest to financial institutions, among others.
On top of this, these were tapes of mostly telemetry data, of which most of the interesting data had been copied for whatever it was needed for. That includes the video: it was slow-scan video which had already been converted to more useful forms for live broadcast...we could do a better conversion now if we had the data (especially for the first few minutes, where the scan converter was misconfigured), but they didn't think it was necessary, especially when we brought back reels of film from the Maurer DAC showing the astronauts working on the moon in far greater quality than any video equipment at the time could have managed, not to mention all the still photos, which were far more accessible at the time.
It's their fault that the past inadequate funding led to delays, therefore they don't deserve the full amount of funding required to meet their schedule? You're seriously making that argument? Delays resulting from underfunding are not justification for continued underfunding.
And Orion? Orion won't fly until around 2025 at best, will cost several billion to fly if it ever does (just the SLS to launch it will cost about a billion), and won't ever visit the ISS or any other space station...it would be gratuitously wasteful to use it for such a mission.
(Damn, I thought it was 250-ish each way, not round trip.)
It's 250-ish round trip to the satellite and back, but comms satellites aren't very interesting to talk to. It's 250-ish each way to the server and back. Around half a second of delay before you can get a response to a message while working over a geosynchronous satellite link.
A first stage is not an airplane. Making it land like an airplane entails adding most of an airplane to it...wings, jet engines, unfolding propellers, substantial, steerable landing gear, various covers and other mechanisms that open and close in flight, mechanisms to detach the disposable tanks, etc. This is not making things simpler.
Reusing the engines would be a significant cost reduction, but they're going about it in a particularly complex way, and their level of reuse still falls short of their competition's. By their own statements, they throw away 20% of the economic value of the stage. SpaceX just needs to make the first stage a bit oversized for the second stage. That costs them a somewhat larger vehicle (which is reused for multiple launches, so this cost only has to be paid once) and propellant (which accounts for 1% of a launch).
After 5 launches, Adeline will have cost as much in disposable tanks as an entire new first stage. A Falcon 9R might fly as many as 40 times without major refurbishment.
I think you're talking about the Jason-3 launch. That's actually a couple launches away, though it'll be their first landing attempt on the West Coast.
CRS-7 is launching June 26th (bumped back a bit, probably to let them reshuffle things to account for cargo that was supposed to be delivered on the last Progress) from Cape Canaveral. They are going to attempt a landing...maybe on land instead of the ASDS.
They've also got a geosynchronous sat launch in mid-July with the first "enhanced" F9 v1.1...that might have the capacity for a landing, which previous geosynchronous launches didn't have enough performance to attempt.
"The Airbus team concluded that SpaceX's design of returning the full stage to Earth could be simplified by separating the propulsion bay from the rest of the stage, protecting the motor on reentry and, using the winglets and turbofans, return horizontally to a conventional air strip."
Interesting definition of "simplified" they're using. They're not even recovering the entire first stage, and they're basically bolting a jet airplane onto it to achieve that much. Propellant is as cheap as dirt, they're avoiding paying tens of thousands of dollars in propellant by instead paying for jet aircraft maintenance and operations and an entirely new set of cryogenic tankage and a substantial amount of aerospace vehicle structure for each flight. SpaceX is just making the first stage a bit bigger (and looking at things like additional propellant chilling to increase density) so it has the extra capacity required.
"We are using an aerodynamic shield so that the motor is not subjected to such high stress on reentry"
Thus solving an issue that SpaceX has already shown isn't actually a major problem...they have been regularly bringing entire intact first stages through reentry and down to sea level for some time now.
As for SpaceX not "coming close"...their second attempt actually brought the vehicle to a halt on the landing pad, though with mangled landing gear, and the reasons for the control issues during the final burn are well understood. They are extremely close...odds are quite good that their third attempt (in a bit under 2 weeks) will be a success.
The process involves liquefying the protein-containing material and running it through a fluid vortex that applies strong shear forces to the individual molecules, untangling them and allowing them to refold. This process is likely to be somewhat more detrimental to brain function than the mis-folded proteins were.
In this case, it appears the same shear forces cause the cancer drug to be more likely to get encapsulated in a lipid vesicle, which protects the drug and helps get it past cell membranes. Useful, but not directly applicable to Alzheimer's or prion diseases.
The drone platforms (there's one being built for the west coast too) will still be used for situations where the core doesn't have enough propellant to return to land. Especially the center core of Falcon Heavy launches that need to make a large plane change, as the cross-fed center core goes much further and faster than the side cores.
What we know about explosions at any scale tells us nothing about the Big Bang, which was not an explosion.
Musk mentioned something about a thruster underperforming due to a poor propellant mixture ratio, but the Dragon was also controlling its thrust to direct its trajectory out to sea, so either could be the cause of the "puffs".
It came in surprisingly close to shore, but was also being dragged quite quickly by the wind before the parachutes finally collapsed. The altitude/speed reached are probably better indications of the actual performance.
It would make sense to primary batteries, to the point of being the overwhelmingly obvious choice. However, they aren't even using plain lithium-ion:
http://www.rocketlabusa.com/ab...
"Rutherford adopts an entirely new propulsion cycle, making use of brushless DC motors and high performance Lithium Polymer batteries to drive its turbo pumps."
Lithium polymer batteries being a form of lithium ion batteries that have an electrolyte with a bunch of added gelling additives, or an actual polymer electrolyte, trading some of their capacity for flexibility in form factor and leak-proofness that makes them better for things like cell phones. I don't know why they'd choose these batteries, but it's what their website says they're using.