sevenperforce
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Posts posted by sevenperforce
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4 hours ago, Rhomphaia said:
I have not done it with only demo parts, but have made a stock manned solid rocket orbit and landing. It did use a Kickback for the launch and sepratrons for the landing (Splashdown actually, easier to time when you know exactly where the surface is).
I do have some ideas though, If anyone has a list of the parts available in the demo I could give this a go.
Flea, hammer, basic stack decoupler, basic radial decoupler, RCS thruster pod and roundified monopropellant tank, small reaction wheel, basic landing legs, basic frame pieces, basic struts, capsule.
At least that's all you need for this.
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4 minutes ago, Kobymaru said:
So it seems that this time, the weather was really good so they could follow the rocket with the ground camera way up high.
Before the stage separation, they switched the cameras to the internal view about here, but I was wondering if there is the footage of the stage separation from the outside? Or maybe even the boostback burn or something?
I am assuming that because the boostback burn takes place entirely outside of the atmosphere, it would be washed out by Rayleigh scattering and invisible from ground cameras.
6 minutes ago, FancyMouse said:I know they're likely to succeed given how close last time is.
But still I burst to tears when watching it live.
Good excuse to have some good stuff tonight.
Already cracked the Basil Hayden's.
12 minutes ago, Frida Space said:If it ever is going to be reused. Don't forget these are experimental landings, and SpaceX doesn't have a full refurbishment platform in place just yet. The booster that landed back at Cape Canaveral a few months ago will go in a museum rather than being re-used. I suspect the same thing will happen with this one, although obviously SpaceX will want to study thoroughly both boosters before archiving them.
The first one was not intended to be reused, simply due to its nostalgic value. This one, however, is absolutely slated for reuse.
1 hour ago, viktor19 said:With your permission, I will land this in my sig
Gladly granted...'tis an honor.
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I wonder what the earliest time we could see this booster being reused is.
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I wish I could have seen the live reactions from the ISS. Where I am sure they must have been watching live.
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1 minute ago, HebaruSan said:
I chose my words poorly. Are they going to re-use this one, or the one that landed previously? Will they tell us how much it costs? When do we find out whether they've done re-use right and made it worth it? We would have thrown a party in 1981, too, but the shuttle's problems only became apparent with time.
I bet @illectro is scrambling to upload something just to shut up the thousands of people asking him for his opinion.
Touche, but then again, I chose my words carefully too. SpaceX would never have gotten into the rocket launch business if not for the possibility of rapid reuse. Given that SpaceX is already way, way cheaper than the shuttle program was, it is already a success.
To your other question, though, they were never planning on reusing the first recovered stage. Very high probability that they will reuse this one, though. SES already offered to buy it. Apparently the first recovered stage was virtually "refuel-and-relaunch" ready so there's no reason to expect anything different in this case.
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Wait, I can only give twenty five likes per day?
MADNESS!
They need to relax that restriction on SpaceX launch days.
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Buddy at work walked in while I was watching the replay for the 5th time.
"What launch is that?"
"It's not a launch. It's a landing."
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Just now, HebaruSan said:
When do we find out whether it's more cost effective than this was?
It already is.
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Then the barge whispered, "Of course I still love you." And the waves rocked the rocket to sleep.
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4 minutes ago, DMagic said:
So... how do they keep it from falling over after it lands?
Long legs.
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YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
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1 minute ago, KerbonautInTraining said:
It's always bothered me how the MVac nozzle extension jiggles...
It's twice the thickness of a soda can, so no wonder.
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Gravity turn.
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2 minutes ago, sgt_flyer said:
SpaceX webcast just started
You beat me to it.
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Propellant flowing.
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51 minutes ago, Hodari said:
I'd suggest reading the Challenge Submission Guide and thinking this one through a bit more. Without parachutes, this one seems pretty nearly impossible. Getting to orbit with just SRBs would be easy enough, though doing it with on;y the demo parts would be a lot harder. Coming back is a problem though. With no thrust control, you'd need an absolutely perfectly timed suicide burn in order to survive. And that's assuming that the SRB can survive re-entry in the first place.
It doesn't need to be too perfect. You just need to parallel-stage Fleas in duplex around your capsule, with decouplers in separate stages. You can use RCS to maintain retrograde attitude and suicide burn with a pair of Fleas, then decouple them while they're still running when you no longer need them. Subsequent pairs can then be used, giving you several chances at the suicide burn.
Re-entry would probably require that you hold on to the empty SRBs and use them as disposable heat shields.
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12 minutes ago, fredinno said:
Inside the starclipper is actually apparently a regular LRB. The StarClipper is just a casing used to reuse the booster, which allows for modifications (but is also heavier)
Then by all means let's replace it with an SSTO-capable airbreathing VentureStar.
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1 hour ago, fredinno said:
The difficulty is that this is not a constant-acceleration trajectory.
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27 minutes ago, Kerbart said:
What?! A SpaceX launch is being delayed? *feints shock and disbelief*
No indication yet that the launch is actually scrubbed.
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4 minutes ago, Kerbart said:
Not if the beam is narrow enough and, at a distance, you can still capture all of the beam. It's not like the beam loses energy, the 1/r2 loss is in intensity per square unit. As long as you recover the entire area of the beam, you're compensating by capturing r2 more area which will offset your reduced intensity.
Right. Beamed power would assumptively be coherent/in-phase (think laser). So power drops off due only to scattering, not as any consequence of geometry. That is why I was thinking that dropping power by 1/3 over the course of a Martian transfer would possibly correlate to the gradual attenuation of a beamed power arrangement.
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10 hours ago, fredinno said:
Starclipper I think would actually have been more safe, Columbia was destroyed due to a hit on the RCC tiles, not the normal heat shield tiles, which could survive holes and reenter safely, as shown by STS-27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27
How have I not seen StarClipper before? That is beautiful.
More beautiful would be a StarClipper setup, but with an airbreathing VentureStar core and a pair of F9 boosters in place of the ET.
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4 minutes ago, lobe said:
Would this be even possible? I mean, I think at even 0.3 g acceleration continuous the craft might accelerate beyond the ideal velocities along the route.
The ideal velocity is what gets you there fastest. And you don't thrust prograde the entire way; you thrust prograde to the halfway point and then thrust retrograde to brake the rest of the way. At least in a constant-thrust brachistochrone. This is different; hence the mathematical conundrum.
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I think SpaceX has a decided advantage due to the versatility and flexibility of their launch platforms. Between Falcon Heavy reusable, Falcon Heavy expendable, Falcon Heavy core expendable, and the various options for Falcon 9, they can service just about any combination of launch requests. They are also small, and are able to fit their launches to the specific requests and requirements of their customers, as evidenced by the last mission.
Price per kilogram isn't everything, or we would already be using Big Dumb Boosters. A better metric would probably be price per kilogram for a specific mission profile.
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The thought occurred to me that if you had an engine with sufficiently high energy to pull a brachistochrone (thrust prograde halfway to your destination, then retrograde until you arrive) to Mars, the ideal plan for a manned Martian mission would be to start from LEO at 1 gee, then gradually taper off thrust through the full transfer to 0.3 gees to Martian orbit. That way, your crew would be smoothly acclimatized to Martian gravity and have no adjustment period. The same could be done in reverse, starting at 0.3 gees and thrusting harder and harder (no innuendo intended) until you reached Earth at exactly 1 gee retrograde.
Unfortunately I have absolutely no idea how much dV would be required for such a maneuver, nor how long the transfer would take. It would require like four nested integrals, and trying to set it up for iterative solution in Excel would be a nightmare. I don't even know if outgoing dV would equal incoming dV, due to the influence of old Oberth.
Any ideas on how to calculate that?
Notably, such a thrust profile would be a prime candidate for beamed power...
Alternitive to the Outer Space Treaty
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
As far as possession/exploitation/resource acquisition is concerned, I think it is pretty clear that people will take what they are capable of taking.
We do need to specify that the ban on weapons in space is about intent, not technical specifications. Project Orion does not fall foul of the ban because the use of nuclear explosives for propulsion is not the same as putting warheads in space for use against targets. Anything can be a weapon. SpaceX could very easily smash a Falcon 9 first stage into any spot on the globe with devastating effect.
I do find it deeply amusing that the military capabilities of private peaceful spacelaunch corporations in the United States vastly exceed the launch capabilities of the entire state of North Korea.