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Orbital Pizza Station


Jonfliesgoats

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Imagine an orbiting, automated pizza satellite.  It launches stocked with frozen dough and all the common toppings.  Pizza orders are radioed up to Pizzasat and requested toppings are assembled on the frozen dough.  The pizza is then loaded into one of, say, fifty conical,  reentry vehicles.  Metal conductors radiate some heat into our reentry vehicle to cook the pizza during its ten minute reentry.  Your pizza then slams, at a few times the speed of sound, through your roof and right onto the gps/ins coordinates of your dinner table!

I know this is impractical, but could we have pizza-oven reentry vehicles that deliver hypersonic, artisanal pizza to our own, shattered rooftops?  Is this technically feasible?

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9 minutes ago, Jonfliesgoats said:

Imagine an orbiting, automated pizza satellite.  It launches stocked with frozen dough and all the common toppings.  Pizza orders are radioed up to Pizzasat and requested toppings are assembled on the frozen dough.  The pizza is then loaded into one of, say, fifty conical,  reentry vehicles.  Metal conductors radiate some heat into our reentry vehicle to cook the pizza during its ten minute reentry.  Your pizza then slams, at a few times the speed of sound, through your roof and right onto the gps/ins coordinates of your dinner table!

I know this is impractical, but could we have pizza-oven reentry vehicles that deliver hypersonic, artisanal pizza to our own, shattered rooftops?  Is this technically feasible?

I would argue that far more ridiculous things have been suggested in these forums. Early re-entry vehicles for warheads often used a big conducting block (copper or similar) to store and then radiate re-entry heat. The only technical difficulty you're going to have (for the sake of argument we'll ignore the obvious, massive danger to the lives of everyone on Earth) is getting the landing site accurate enough. All re-entires work within a corridor of accuracy, so your pizza could well be delivered completely on time, just in the next town 50 miles down the road

Edited by Steel
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China have developed ballistic missiles capable of hitting a moving target the size of a ship, utilising GPS updates and terminal guidance (most likely radar but possibly teamed with IR), with modifications, it should be capable of hitting a house under non-combat conditions, launching from a satellite already in orbit would seem to remove some sources of inaccuracy too. You may want to ask customers to install a radar reflector on their roof, or even an active transponder.

The biggest problem I forsee is not triggering any nuclear launch warnings, considering this would be almost indistinguishable from a warhead. Given that this projectile will likely have to be actively guided, it may be able to outmaneuver some ABM systems though. However, the pizza will have to be protected somehow from the 100-odd G's experienced during evasive actions. Be careful of political fallout.

With a large enough constellation you should be able to keep the delivery times below 30mins though.

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2 hours ago, Jonfliesgoats said:

I know this is impractical, but could we have pizza-oven reentry vehicles that deliver hypersonic, artisanal pizza to our own, shattered rooftops?  Is this technically feasible?

This wins the internet for me, today. LOL.

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1 hour ago, p1t1o said:

China have developed ballistic missiles capable of hitting a moving target the size of a ship, utilising GPS updates and terminal guidance (most likely radar but possibly teamed with IR), with modifications, it should be capable of hitting a house under non-combat conditions, launching from a satellite already in orbit would seem to remove some sources of inaccuracy too. You may want to ask customers to install a radar reflector on their roof, or even an active transponder.

The biggest problem I forsee is not triggering any nuclear launch warnings, considering this would be almost indistinguishable from a warhead. Given that this projectile will likely have to be actively guided, it may be able to outmaneuver some ABM systems though. However, the pizza will have to be protected somehow from the 100-odd G's experienced during evasive actions. Be careful of political fallout.

With a large enough constellation you should be able to keep the delivery times below 30mins though.

No matter if stuff lithobraking in your lawn is a red hot pizza delivery system or a ICBM  warhead. Either way, investing into a nuclear shelter in your backyard looks like a very good idea.

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So I was mulling this over on my way to my next assignment.  There are technical challenges before we even deliver the pizza.  For customer defined reentry pizza, we need to find some way to make a pizza in orbit.  

If we have our automated PizzaSat prepare a pizza at 0g, how do you get the toppings to adhere to the dough?  Either you would need an adhesive of some sort on the dough combined with a pepperoni and cheese gun or you would somehow have to "paint" all our potential toppings onto the pizza with some sort of food-grade sauce-jet printer.  This still doesn't address all the floating pizza stuff getting the mechanics of Pizzasat.

Another workaround for this is to spin Pizzasat fast enough that the pizzas are constructed under 1g or more.  In this situation the automated pizza construction becomes a relatively simple affair, but deployment becomes problematic.  The reentry pizza-ovens would now destabilize Pizza sat if they separate asymmetrically and some sort of ballast would be required to stop Pizzasat from tumbling wildly.  My recommended solution is this:free breadsticks!  You just don't know how many breadsticks you will get because the breadstick dough is portioned out specifically to balance Pizza sat at the moment the reentry oven is deployed.

The reentry vehicle itself could Correct for whatever trajectory it's on when it separates from spinning, Pizzasat.  As a prerequisite, our reentry oven will now need some sort of orbital maneuvering capability to Deorbit itself.  It would not be a bad idea to make it a hypersonic glider in order to maneuver in the atmosphere.

As others have suggested, reentry and maneuvering would subject the pizza oven and pizza to five, tens, or even one hundred g plus.  While this sounds abusive to pizza, imagine how thin and crispy the crust would be as our reentry oven blazes straight down through our tables, basement and house foundations!

Edited by Jonfliesgoats
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22 minutes ago, Scotius said:

red hot pizza delivery system or a ICBM  warhead

They put a raw dough and condiments inside the re-entry vehicle shell, launch, and when it lands it's hot red, with crispy crust.

 

Edited by kerbiloid
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I guess a constellation of PizzaSats would be required so you can receive a piping hot star-pizza in a reasonable amount of time.

Just now, Jonfliesgoats said:

I guess a constellation of PizzaSats would be required so you can receive a piping hot star-pizza in a reasonable amount of time.

 

30 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

Depending on the inclination, you might have to wait several days for the satellite to line up. Domino's is faster.

 

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

China have developed ballistic missiles capable of hitting a moving target the size of a ship, utilising GPS updates and terminal guidance (most likely radar but possibly teamed with IR), with modifications, it should be capable of hitting a house under non-combat conditions, launching from a satellite already in orbit would seem to remove some sources of inaccuracy too. You may want to ask customers to install a radar reflector on their roof, or even an active transponder.

The biggest problem I forsee is not triggering any nuclear launch warnings, considering this would be almost indistinguishable from a warhead. Given that this projectile will likely have to be actively guided, it may be able to outmaneuver some ABM systems though. However, the pizza will have to be protected somehow from the 100-odd G's experienced during evasive actions. Be careful of political fallout.

With a large enough constellation you should be able to keep the delivery times below 30mins though.

With regard to orbital pizza and false, doomsday alarms, we need to put some kind of "Not a doomsday weapon!" transponder on our reentry ovens.  We would make sure that no nefarious actor abused the pizza transponders by assigning each pizza order a discrete code distributed via one-way datalink with spacefaring, nuclear capable nations.  The Pizza transponder codes would be held by a devoted, multinational team of scientists, non-proliferation experts and pizza chefs.

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6 minutes ago, Gordon Fecyk said:
6 minutes ago, Deadpangod3 said:

but would it even cook properly with reentry heat?

I suspect not.

Why not? RV body gets burnt, crew body stays wet. So, you just find a correct position for the pot between these two boundaries.

(It's simple: First spit on the pot and measure with clock when it gets dry.
Then spit several times on the cabin walls and floor and watch where the saliva gets dry with required speed.)

Edited by kerbiloid
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How about the reentry vehicle being a hypersonic spaceplane, like someone else suggested? It flies to right above your house and paradrops the pizza in a small capsule before returning to orbit for the next delivery. This avoids the problem of property damage by what could be called a "Tasty Kinetic Orbital Bombardment Strike".

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Randall didn't account for the reentry oven (RevenTM), he assumed the steak dropping was exposed to air stream. With careful design of the RevenTM, using thermal conductors, accumulators and radiators, we can assure the best and consistent heating with optimal heating profile and perfect serving temperature.

Regarding the sauce and toppings, I don't see an issue. sauce jet sounds doable, but a simple squirt gun will suffice for the sauce. The toppings can be placed and stuck to the dough and sauce via a high velocity rail gun type delivery system that would shoot the toppings through various meshes and knives with geometries that will spread the toppings evenly. The sauce will provide the stickiness needed to keep them on the dough.

What I'm worried is, if we can't assure accurate delivery on the premises of the individual who placed the order, that might lead to my neighbor getting my tasty space pizza, and I don't like my neighbor.

Regarding the nuclear strike alerts being triggered by the pizza reentry, just imagine the fallout the Gov would get if the newspaper front pages screamed "A Family of 5 Goes Hungry as Government Wastes Multimillion Antiballistic Missile to Destroy a Pizza".

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*scratchhead*

Yeah, it belongs in the lounge, like many others. I have the feeling this is the reason why this thread was started, of course i might be wrong.

"Ketchup-Thrusters ready for suicide burn" :-)

 

Edited by Green Baron
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I think the toppings could easily be squished on with a pressure plate, and reentry heat could be conducted through metal wires into the capsule and converted to IR radiation to cook the pizza nicely on the way down. Accuracy is a hard one, but if we can scale down the sort of tech SpaceX uses on their Falcon 9 it could actually be feasible (well, as feasible as putting any complex machine in space is). I don't see any reason why this should be impossible, aside from the fact that nobody wants to pay for a bunch of rocket launches and satellites just so they can have their pizza delivered in a fiery 9 km/s oven. Drone delivery will be only slightly less exciting.

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