Ultimate Steve

I notice that Elon listed "Control fins" and "Landing gear" separately in his tweet. Might this be a hint as to the redesign?

I will hopefully get back to you all soon. I am glad that this is receiving attention, but I have a lot on my plate right now. If I don't reply tomorrow, notify me.

I am pretty sure that orange is the color of the insulation, not paint, but I may be wrong.

Yeah, and I kinda like those stripes. It's not that much, just 2 stripes per booster, especially when they were originally going to paint the whole thing white and black.

There have been several suborbital sounding rockets launching from there. And it appears that they host an annual lower-altitude rocket competition. Also, SpaceX started building a pad there for F9RDev2 (but never used it as I said above). Nothing Orbital is going to get out of there, but suborbital, definitely.

To be fair, there are far worse ways to spend that much money (but definitely a lot of better ways) and Spaceport America was supposed to have had a lot more business by now. This is mostly due to the tenants and not the spaceport itself. At one point, among others, SpaceX was going to do landing testing there.

Somewhere in an alternate/mirror universe: Journey: The Last Notice. The humans find an alien species, the Kerbals. However, this race is tremendously silly. They must give them a test to see if they can become serious enough to join the United Federation of Planets. All Kerbals are teleported to Earth where they must travel to Mars, Phobos, and Deimos and back using 1950's-2010's era human technology. Starring protagonist Obbury Kerman and his love interest Degrid Kerman. Also on the mission are humans Elon Musk, Buzz Aldrin, Peggy Whitson, and Richard Branson. Halfway through the mission, the galaxy is attacked by extremely silly aliens who threaten the integrity of society with their sillification rays.

Speaking of, an electric cycle might work for a rocket of this size. It is larger than electron, but only has to manage suborbital from a balloon. Edit: assuming they use a single engine, it would be bigger than the Rutherford likely.

Not an expert, but it is my understanding that turbopumps are very, very difficult and require many high temperature, high precision parts. Even Copenhagen Suborbitals is going pressure fed, at least on Nexo, and probably Spica as well. It would probably be a bit less complex to have a third propellant like HTP driving the pumps to do away with the need for some of the plumbing. This is what the V-2 and many other early rockets did.

Peroxide is definitely one of the least dangerous monopropellants though. The only other thing an amateur might be able to do is a bipropellant pressure fed engine or some sort of hybrid solution. Edit: Maybe solids as well

I know that one guy is still on a trip (I think resonantwaves) and Yeet is having a few teething issues. Not sure about johnster. But yeah, the more the merrier!

Thank you! Doing a space race in another scale/planet pack would still require KCT at the very least to limit build times so it would actually be a race, and probably something else to keep up the difficulty. I'm not sure how effective RP-1 would be in non-RSS, if it works at all. If you want to do it you can, and I can provide advice if need be. Or you can join this one if you want.

I can lick my elbow.

From the article: Hmm, so they do have a dev plan to get to space. I mean, I do think that this guy is pretending to be a crackpot for the money. That's actually not a bad plan as far as homebuilt rockets go. Hydrogen Peroxide, from a balloon. I kinda want this to happen now, but 2.8 million dollars is a lot of money, even from crackpots and hookup sites, his current sponsors. Truth be told, if it got me to space, I'd probably sell advertising space on the rocket to literally anyone who would give me the money.

Notebook Space Program - 1956 A pretty slow year, but with pretty fast rockets.

I was told to move the main counterargument to this thread. Mainly, the act of capturing the exhaust would negate the effect of the engine unless the thing catching the exhaust was not attached to the craft. If you allow magic to slow the exhaust down without negating the engine's thrust on the craft, the engine works fine. Howevermost of us think that such a magic device cannot exist under our current understanding of physics. Chief maintains that using angles and redirecting the exhaust sideways it can be done with current technology. That sums it up so far, I do not have much intention of sticking around any longer.

If you eventually slow the exhaust down to zero forward and backward momentum, and deflect it so it only has sideways momentum, something has to cancel out that forward and backward momentum, and that something is most likely on the craft. We have taken the thread waaaay too off topic. If you would like to continue the conversation I suggest creating your own thread with a proper diagram and explanation of the device in the OP. The last thing I wish to say on this matter in this thread is that if it was that easy to accelerate without using propellant, someone would have done it already. Although I do admire your sincerity and desire to understand. I am glad this has not devolved into a shouting match.

Slowing down something completely without a "drag" equal to the momentum of the propellant is impossible without the said magic device or a new revolutionary discovery. I do not see how my responses conflict. In the first part, I said it's impossible without that magic device, in the second part I say that it is impossible without a new discovery, akin to the magic in the first response.

Yes, this works! The problem is the magic part, which, unless we discover something completely new to physics, can't be done in reality. There is no known way to produce a net positive thrust while recapturing the propellant, as to produce thrust you have to either expel something permanently (be it hydrogen, iron, or photons) or invent a device which can slow something down using less energy than it should take to slow it down, or zero energy.

And yes, once we start talking about photon rockets, your design does produce thrust if you alter it to expel the photons more efficiently. However, at this point you are better off replacing the propellant with something that glows very brightly when heated, and having a tank of that and photon director (mirrors) on one side of the craft. You end up with a design that works on a completely different principle than the design you started with, but the design could never hope for even the TWR of ion engines.

Apologies, I phrased that last part badly, but you are correct that gas would expand when heated, and this can be exhausted to create thrust. That was stupid of me to say, and completely incorrect. I apologise. However, so we have a high pressure gas. How do we use that to add momentum to the table without expelling it?

So we want to convert the vibrations of trillions if molecules, moving rapidly in every conceivable direction (heat is just the vibration of particles), into movement in one direction. Nobody has found a way to do this yet. Extremely low thrust, I would imagine. You are expelling photons backwards. The thrust from a lightbulb is almost nothing. Scale that up to the largest photon emitter we can build, it's still almost nothing. Note, I am not well versed in photon rockets, so that might be wrong. Yes. This will give you thrust and a net force on the vehicle. All is fine until you recapture the propellant. As we have been trying to explain, stopping the propellant after it exits the engine using a collector connected to the engine would negate the force of the engine.

And the act of recapturing the propellant would negate the thrust gained. So you want a way to recapture the propellant and slow it down enough to be reused without negating all of the thrust. So you want to give something a certain amount of momentum and then slow it down so it has zero momentum so you can reuse it, and still have momentum left to push the craft forward. So you want to, in effect, get more momentum out than you put in. If you can do that, congratulations, you have a free energy machine.

Correct. But if you hold on to the table, or grab the table right after pushing off if it, eg recapturing the propellant, you and the table will be slowed back down to whatever velocity they started with. Exactly. The impact slows the bullet down, transferring it's energy to the gun. How it is slowed down doesn't matter, only the fact that it is slowed down completely by the thing that launched it or something attached to it. Converting heat into usable propulsive energy without expelling any matter you started with, or directly converting heat I to matter to then expel is what you appear to be proposing, no?