sh1pman

It’s going to be awesome one way or another

Must’ve eaten a few billion nearby stars to grow this big.

Utility >> looks. I’m sure there’s a reason why they painted the interstage this time. May have something to with extra hot reentry.

Probably a stupid question, but is it possible for SLS to launch with more than 2 side boosters?

How? RL10B-02 has 12 seconds more ISP than RL10C-1 (462s vs 450s), and 5m DCSS has more props (27.2t vs 20.8t). Centaurs dry mass is slightly lower, though (2.5t vs 3.5t). Centaur can only outperform DCSS with the lightest payloads (<1t) on super high energy interplanetary trajectories (where lower dry mass matters the most).

How very surprising and unusual. Breaking news. Someone at Roscosmos forgot to share with the attorney-general?

Are side boosters new or reused?

He paid money for it, right? In my book that counts as being a “commercial customer”. SpaceX use that money to make Starship that will be able to go to the Moon, Mars, etc. This is the example of a commercial passenger benefiting future exploration goals of other SpaceX customers like NASA.

Ok, I didn’t really want to participate in this debate, but... @ZooNamedGames, come on. First you say this: Then, when you’re told about Yusaku Maezawa and his flight, you dismiss it as “not pushing exploration forward”. He is a person that has an interest in utilizing Starship/Super Heavy rocket. Here’s your answer, there is a demand for such a rocket. Why bringing up exploration here? That’s a very different topic which doesn’t help you support your original statement (that SS/SH has no commercial customers).

New Glenn is going to be very busy. Jeff is seemingly trying to kick SpaceX out of every business they’re trying to do.

This guy. Is going to launch rockets with people in them. To space.

Is there a thread for LinkSpace? Looks like they did a hop.

Block 5 FH should have no problem lifting Orion to LEO, but why would you want it there? The stack is supposed to be sent to the Moon, and I don’t think that even Block 5 expendable FH has that kind of capacity.

Numbers!

Blasphemy! UPD. Also, (if I didn’t screw up my calculations) it appears that a fully refueled Starship in a highly elliptical orbit (~GTO) can send ~100t to Pluto. Unreal.

It’s OneSpace (China), not OneWeb

Well, that bullet’s energy needs to go somewhere. It’s better than nothing. The next logical step would be to expand the herd, purify more protein and make an actual vest out of it.

Awesome. This is actually right up my alley. I also purify recombinant proteins for research, but we use transformed bacteria instead of goats. Synthesizing proteins in transgenic animal milk gives much higher yields, but bacteria are way, WAY easier to create and work with. P.S. They’re not spider goats, they’re goats with one extra gene that encodes silk protein.

Is there a problem?

They aren’t. It’s a bad translation from Rogozin’s interview. He said it WOULD require additional investigations in orbit, not that they’re actually going to do it.

RIP Yuzhmash?

It's actually easily explained by a combination of the law of conservation of impulse and the law of conservation of energy. Conservation of impulse means that the impulse gained by a ship equals to the impulse imparted to exhaust gases by its rocket engine. If the exhaust velocity is the same (it usually is) and the burn time is the same, then the impulse gained by ships at periapsis and apoapsis is also the same, resulting in the same velocity gain. Next, conservation of energy. The change in kinetic energy of the exhaust must be equal to the change in ship's kinetic energy. Remember that kinetic energy of stored propellant is not zero, it scales with the second power of ship's orbital velocity. Kinetic energy lost by the propellant equals to dE = 0.5*M*(V1^2 - V2^2) Where M - mass of the burned propellant, V1 and V2 - its orbital velocities before and after the burn. Let's say that V2 = V1 - dV. Then, dE = 0.5*M*(V1^2 - (V1 - dV)^2) = 0.5*M*(V1^2 - (V1^2 - 2*V1*dV + dV^2)) = 0.5*M*(2*V1*dV - dV^2). As you can see, kinetic energy lost by propellant scales with V1, orbital velocity at the start of the maneuver. The faster you go, the more kinetic energy loses your propellant when it's burned by your rocket engine. Conservation of energy means that your ship gets all kinetic energy lost by the propellant. Which, in turn, means that the faster you go, the more kinetic energy you can extract from your propellant. That's Oberth effect.

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