Ultimate Steve

Chapter Fifteen - Homecoming

Presumably, although that's a decade or two off.

That would be a new record for patches if it happens! Currently we're tied with 1.0.5 and 0.8.5.

Throw maths at him. Throw the whole book at him. You are a rocket scientist, you can throw a lot more maths at him than he could ever throw at you. USE THE MASS*ACCELERATION, LUKE!

Yes.

Congrats to them on the successful test flight! Blue Origin appears to be creating a sense of urgency. I remember people saying that due to post-crash modifications, SpaceShipTwo no longer had the capability to get to space. I've heard people say this is still true, and I've heard people say that the next iteration of SpaceShipTwo will fix this. Anyone have any up to date information?

Okay, the tram uploaded their own video and in the description they say that the first "Boom" was actually the camera refocusing, so it's a 1 boom failure now.

https://selenianboondocks.com/2016/04/how-relevant-is-new-shepard-to-orbital-launch/

It's looking like there were two separate booms, one big one and one break-aparty one. I initially thought the failure might be because of blowback (their oxidizer is also a monopropellant if heated enough, if the fire got to the oxidizer tank it would be bad) but it's looking to me like a combustion chamber failure followed by the top section of the rocket turning sideways into the airstream and breaking apart. If it was blowback the first boom would have probably caused disintegration due to the LOX tank's central location, but with the combustion chamber being strictly at one end it had a good chance of staying straight for a while following the failure. The second event could also have been a secondary explosion caused by the oxidizer, like a blowback but not really. Actually, now that I think about it the secondary explosion was probably the flight termination system. It was a bit hard to tell on the (infared?) camera, but there's a chance that could have been the sonic shock wave and the whole thing disintegrated at max Q, but the first event looked more like an explosion then a disintegration. So if it was a combustion chamber failure, it could have been either an overpressure caused by a sudden valve opening, a crack in the propellant, or maybe something melting that wasn't supposed to, or a damaged casing that couldn't take normal operating pressure. The engine did operate for the first several seconds of flight, apparently normally, though, so the failure likely wasn't present at the time of launch and likely manifested itself during the flight. Engines like this one have also been tested many times by DARE, so they have been known to work well. This gives the aerodynamics theory a bit more merit, as that would not have been a factor during ground tests. I'd put my money on it being damage to the motor grain or casing somehow, causing the first explosion, then the FTS going off. I'd review the footage more, but right as I was recording the failure to analyze they took the stream down (I just needed 10 more seconds!) Disclaimer: These are just guesses by a high school student who has no formal training in aerospace engineering.

Well, first failure I've seen live. Although I would have preferred it to be something big and commercial instead of a student project that they were so attached to. Took them 2 years.

12 minutes to liftoff!

So say I want to build a rocket engine. I know what you're thinking. This guy is right in the middle of this graph. And you're probably right, so let's treat this as purely a hypothetical question for now, I have no concrete plans to do this yet, and will only have concrete plans if it is sufficiently legal and can be done with a sufficient amount of safety judged by many people other than myself. So, with that out of the way, say I want to build a rocket engine (and say I live in the US). The NAR and TRA seem to be against non-certified motors, solid and hybrid. The advantage of using an NAR or TRA certified motor seems to be that you don't need any permits to buy, sell, or transport them. But I can't find any concrete information on whether or not it is legal to make any non-certified motors without various explosives permits (Low permit, Manufacturers permit, etc). Which means that something will most likely say no. So, making my own solid fuel grains is probably out. Maybe even Rocket Candy, I can't even find a concrete source for that (although I was not planning on making R-Candy). That leaves 2 options, the first being liquid engines. I actually haven't found much against the legality of liquids, but I'm not stupid/smart enough to go out and build my own bipropellant engine (although I have designed a few very simple ones). That left trying a monopropellant "engine" (read: tiny thruster), and I've already gone down that rabbit hole, IIRC it's legal but hard, as the two easiest monopropellants to get are N2O and H2O2. N20 is a gas at room temperature, and gases aren't generally good rocket propellants, getting it liquid would be difficult. H2O2, you can't buy it above a certain concentration and its incredibly dangerous to purify by yourself. So, liquids are out, for a different reason than solids. That leaves hybrids, but you can't make your own fuel, so you'd need to use something else as fuel. Something commonly available... Like a plastic. Specifically, I'm looking at ABS and Acrylic. With ABS I could 3D print fuel grains, and it's relatively easy to get a large acrylic rod and drill a hole through it. The problem at this point becomes the exhaust gases, ABS products are carcinogenic, not good, and I wasn't able to find anything about Acrylic products, besides the fact that you should use ventilation of you are engraving or laser-cutting it. But it might not be a concern if I'm testing it from a safe distance, let it air out, and properly dispose of the acrylic later on (and test in a location not near anything people will eat). So basically, my point is, does anyone see any legal problem or long-term health problem with doing something like this, a hybrid motor using acrylic and gaseous oxygen? ^^^Like this but way smaller initially. It's worth saying that I only intend to do static fire tests, and maybe thrust measurements, not actual flights (I'd need a lot of certification to do that, and that's just not possible to do, especially being a non-adult).

The Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering (DARE) team is comprised of mainly university students, and they have a history of building and flying really large rockets. This rocket, Stratos III, is 2 years in the making and aims to break the European student altitude record (which is 30-ish km IIRC). It is a hybrid rocket, with a recoverable capsule section. They aim to launch soon-ish but the launch time has bounced around a lot, they have had to replace at least 2 faulty components today, and they are currently in a hold as they heat the oxidizer tank. Best of luck to them!

Read an article estimating Delta-V with the capsule to be 3300m/s. So, with the abort motor as a second stage, yes.

Also, glad you enjoyed the story, I got so caught up with the list that I forgot to say something earlier! EDIT: I have realized that I accidentally made a vague Rick and Morty reference by making Rick Kerman Mortimer's replacement.

No dice on the fairing, unfortunately.

Absolutely! There's just quite a short list of long things I need to do first. Also, I was in Europe for 3 weeks with no internet access, so that's why there's a long gap. Sorting 2,200 pictures based on who is in them, uploading them to somewhere, and sending everyone the links Writing the next chapter or two of Voyage: The Final Warning (which is really overdue). Maybe going to Colorado for a week in 1.5 weeks Attempting another speedrun of KSP, trying to go to every planet/moon and back (in career) in 6 hours or less.

Fairings off, and cool S1-S2 plume interaction!

*yawn* They said they might lose the booster due to the winds in the Pacific. The fairing is also affected, so I won't have my hopes up for that. T-10!

Hullo, fellow CST-er! I'd usually sleep, but there's an Ariane 5 launch within 30 minutes of the Falcon 9 - and I haven't seen a live rocket launch in a month. So I'll be getting up early! EDIT: within 15 minutes, actually, should everything go according to plan! *knocks on wood* *eats peanuts*

So, MechJeb can only do as good as 0.77 degrees... I can get 0.1 degrees on occasion if I'm lucky, but I usually do better than 0.7 (although the orbit's inclination is 27 instead of 51, so you have it harder). I'd suggest (against your wishes, unfortunately) to try manually flying it at least once, it's just like a normal KSP rendezvous, but a bit bigger (and you don't usually do inclined rendezvous in normal KSP). If you have a tool (MJ, KER) that tells you your angle to the ascending or descending nodes, launch when it is at about 1-0.5 or so (right before it) and make corrections during ascent to make the nodes get as close to zero. That's the method I use, at least. However, there is another way. In vanilla KSP, we're a bit spoiled, being able to have huge margins because of the small planet size. As a result, we fly with a certain degree of inaccuracy knowing we'll have fuel to fix it. In IRL this isn't really the case, most spacecraft margins are very low. So, in your case, if you really don't want to fly it manually, I'd suggest clipping an extra fuel tank into the Soyuz spacecraft. It doesn't have to be huge, even a smallish tank could double your Delta-V. Although in RO I usually give my service modules at least 400m/s because I'm a bad precision pilot. There's also a third solution. Split the plane change burn between both spacecraft so it's only 52m/s per spacecraft. That will leave 120m/s for rendezvous and return. Also, welcome to the forum! I hope you enjoy your stay!

So this is the third block 5, correct? Anyone know how many new ones we're going to have before one gets reused?

How many of those do you think are active?

The first successful landing was at night. Maybe it will be the same with fairings.

So, like this but with parachutes? https://g.redditmedia.com/ZQ42T7AwHqNR54pDWr1IwYjM4ZewD-bCc9rEJ_gPSbw.gif?fm=mp4&mp4-fragmented=false&s=d2893c316d39b870479b6a3f12cd1f3c