Codraroll

This is blatantly wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to begin.

Eight hundred launches to rid the Earth of all radioactive waste products produced so far? In a scenario where one Starship can be prepared for launch every day, it'd take less than three years to clear the storage? That's great news if true. Or less than three decades if you launch one-tenth the amount at a time, to shield it in containment units in case of RUD-ing. Heck, you could divide by ten again, and possibly once more, and it'd still not be too shabby considering the alternative is to maintain storage sites for many millennia. Then again, as @Terwin says, the radioactive energy left in the waste could potentially be put to use rather than throwing it all away. Parking it in high orbit for future prospection would probably be more useful than throwing it into the sun.

Yeah, I was suspecting there could be similar issues surrounding Baikonur, but with so few people around, the same doctrine of indiscriminately discarding rocket stages would result in more acceptably low risks of somebody getting hit. The problem, as such, is not so much "people in the way" as "enough people in the way that discarded rocket stages will land near them quite often".

Great if true. If not for the hullaballoo, it might have been a real kick in the pants. But now some challenges have been taken on that might cost more than a bit extra funding to fix. It is the Russian Launch and Mission Thread, after all. It is on-topic to discuss the state of the Russian space program in here, don't you think?

Throwaway lines tend to work well in sci-fi: "It fulfills three of the five conditions on Édouard's list of exceptions to the Amended Roche Theory, and can thus stay in a stable orbit" or something like that. Similar wording can even justify workarounds to the laws of thermodynamics. Just hint towards the discovery of exceptions, without going in greater detail of what those exceptions are all about. I wrote something similar once, about a ship that hovered in place above the far side of the Moon, at a distance way too close for any orbital mechanics to make sense. The exchange between two characters went something like this: "What is the deal with our orbit?" Jonas asked. "I didn't think a ship could stay up here without going sideways really fast, but we're not moving relative to the surface." Seth frowned, trying to remember the explanation he was given when he asked about the same once. "Imagine the gravitational field of the Moon is like a river, streaming towards the surface. The ship like a stone in the river. The stream splits before it, goes along it and reforms on the other side, but does not drag it along. In other words, we are not affected by gravity." Jonas looked puzzled. "But what keeps the stone, er, ship, fixed in place to the riverbed?" "That's where the analogy breaks down, and things get a little complicated. I won't even pretend to understand it."

There's a simple way to find out, namely by asking: "Are they?" After all, a fair few countries are launching spacecraft over land. What happens downrange of those places? My knowledge is limited in that area, but I can't remember many reports of stuff falling down on people. Granted, those inland launch sites tend to be surrounded by vast amounts of pretty much nothing and similar amounts of secrecy, so it could be that similarly indiscriminate rocket dropping has occurred elsewhere, but with fewer houses in the way nobody has been hit (or been able to tell the world about it).

I do not think "but what about the US" is a good argument when discussing the state of the Russian space program. Let us stick to what happens in Russia instead of going back and forth over what NASA or SpaceX or anybody else are or aren't doing. That is one way to see it, true. But the program was launched with higher ambitions than taking ten years to build a mockup. The fact that it's still on the mockup stage isn't really compensated by the relatively small sums of money spent in the process, from a project management perspective. If the objective was to not waste money, the whole project could have been shelved instead without much difference on the hardware side of things. That much is a success, at least. But still, there have only been five launches across a period of eight years. Angara has yet to become a "workhorse" despite a very long development period; it still remains on the testing stage and it will take a long time before it will carry people. It remains to be seen if it can be produced in sufficient numbers, at sufficiently low costs, to get out of the testing stage. Given how complex and problem-riddled of an activity spaceflight is in general, that money is a quite necessary ingredient if one wants to get anywhere, however. Ambitions are fine, but achieving them tends to be expensive, and that discrepancy between ambitions and funding is the whole crux of the problem. The know-how is obviously there, but it's not supported by the boatloads of currency required to make the nice plans reality. That is probably what will happen, indeed. A shift of focus towards missiles while the crewed space program is put on the back burner. Given the recent hullaballoo and the aforementioned lack of boatloads of currency, I have my doubts that a space station can be realized in the same time frame as an exit from the ISS. Without any other destinations for crewed activities, it's reasonable to wonder whether they will keep flying.

No need for Orel itself, that much is true. But the pace at which it is developed is indicative of a few "hiccups" in the organization, as it were. If that project hasn't even gone beyond the not-to-scale-mockup stage well over a decade into its development, I'd say it's unreasonably optimistic to assume a space station would be ready in just a few years. The situations are different. The US had a destination, but lacked a reliable shuttlecraft. Having a project partner with an available shuttlecraft, it was decided to shelf the unreliable STS and hitch a ride with the partner's shuttlecraft instead, until a domestic alternative could be developed. Russia without the ISS would have a shuttlecraft, but no destination for it to go, and thus nothing practical to use it for - and then nothing practical for the astronauts to do, since the Soyuz is too small to serve as anything but a shuttlecraft. Again, different situations. Starship and Orion have hardware on the launch pad undergoing active test programs. Orel has, what, a plastic mockup at two-thirds scale they sometimes drag out for PR purposes, most of the design details still far up in the air, a project management team shifting people faster than the revolving door of the average hotel lobby, three name changes and counting, still no launch vehicle, and a budget that has mostly gone towards buying dachas in faraway sunny regions. LOP-G is a terribad idea, though. But that's quite far removed from the current discussion. Politician: "... and we'll be out by 2024, to make our own space station! With card games, and seamstresses!" Engineer: *whispers something in politician's ear* Politician: *threatens the engineer with a reassignment to Siberia and an accidental fall out of a seventh-story window* Engineer: *keeps whispering* Politician: "Uhh, make that 2028! For now!"

Well, here's to the end of the Russian crewed space program, I guess. Given how Orel has fared over the past decade, and the general state of things, there's no way in heck they can have space station hardware flying by 2024. Without access to the ISS, there's literally nowhere to go. The Chinese space station flies at a too low inclination, and the Soyuz is too cramped for any meaningful orbital crew activities to be conducted in it. The remaining option is to hitch a ride with the Chinese, I guess, but that would require launching on Chinese vessels from China, possibly a rideshare with a Chinese mission, where the mission language, to put it like this, probably won't be Russian.

That is the frustrating part, I think. Everyone else seems prepared to pay this price. A deorbiting mechanism weighs a bit, but it's a small margin on the large weight of a rocket stage anyway. That little bit of sacrificed payload capacity is generally considered to be worth it for a "guaranteed" safe deorbit of the rocket stage, judging by how common they are. But whoever designed this rocket stage apparently didn't concern themselves with such trivial things as the safety of other people. There might be some merit to the idea that the world is big and mostly empty, and that the overwhelming odds are in favour of it not landing anywhere near people. But unlike everyone else, they did not bother to do that little extra effort to make sure. That makes them come across as quite reckless and not very emphatic.

This comment on Ars Technica's article on the story is too good not to quote:

OK, let me put it this way: Has any responses to this thread in any way indicated that it can be done?

If you have the funds and the technology to make this thing (remember the necessary size of the ramp), you're long past the stage where SSTOs could net you any savings whatsoever. You could possibly launch the ship in chunks carried by the freakin' SLS, and assemble it in orbit, and throw the entire ship away at the end of every mission, and still come out with lower operations costs. But they are pretty much essential if you want to get out of or into the atmosphere in any other way than a conventional rocket, which you keep on insisting. That "a lot of wing and the magnetic underbelly" would require a lot more concessions to cargo space (and importantly, mass) than the propellant required for a powered thrust landing. Never mind the runway.

Not sure how much more could be brought to the topic, but perhaps I can try a summary? @jimmymcgoochie said it, but I think it bears repeating: I think this is a really important crux of the whole matter. Moving stuff to/from surface to orbit is a specialized task, moving stuff between planets is another specialized task, and trying to make the same craft do both makes it kinda bad at either job. Barring magic technology, of course, but ... nah, possibly even then. SSTOP (Single stage to Other Planets) is like building a container ship that takes cargo between two inland cities without navigable waterways. It would be a quite crappy land craft, and the modifications required for it to even work on land would make it a bad seafaring ship as well. And for the sake of the analogy, the shipbuilder insists on staying within the realm of surface travel even when everybody shouts "just use aircraft!" at the top of their lungs. That is not saying SSTO isn't necessarily useful, it could definitely be as long as it only hauls as much mass as it has to. It must be specialized to go to orbit, nothing more. Of course, SSTO shouldn't be an end goal in itself, efficient transport to orbit should. As far as current engineering limitations are concerned, that means multiple reusable stages à la Starship or a space elevator, but if you can handwave a good reason why the ship can haul its entire first stage to space without losing performance, go for it. Cargo and passengers should then be transferred to another craft that is specialized for transport to other planets, but that doesn't need all the complicated stuff required to navigate an atmosphere, land on a surface, and take off afterwards. Of course, if you want Star Wars-level craft that can take off from one planet carrying hundreds of tons of cargo and fly it to another planet, then exchange its load and fly home with a different set of cargo, possibly without refueling on its way ... then you can of course do so, but you have to accept that it's as much of a stretch of reality as the Force is. [snip] The answer is always "Yes, in sci-fi you can pretend it works, but in real life this and this and this and this and this and this would make it a terrible idea", and the only form of acknowledgement seems to be "Oh, so it's a good idea if we just ____", with "____" being something that was never brought up among the counterpoints at all. The insistence on discussing these topics in the context of real life physics, but constantly failing to acknowledge the limitations of real life physics, gets a bit exhausting over time. Especially when the threads usually revolve around the same few topics too.

All of them notable for using the ground effect principle, though. That's a fine principle with lots of interesting applications, but I'd say it's a little optimistic to use it for travelling to space.

How big do you envision this ramp to be? And how steep? I guess the idea is something like the barrel of an artillery gun, where the vessel builds up speed along a straight portion and exits it fast enough that the ballistic trajectory takes it into space. However, this would require the ramp to be several kilometers tall and hundreds of kilometers long. And capable of withstanding a live load of 8000 tons ... needless to say, that is foolery. Alternately, it could work like a skateboard ramp, where speed is built up horizontally, then the ramp curves to direct the trajectory upwards. This would run into the same effect as rollercoaster trains do in loops: G-forces perpendicular to the direction of travel, which again necessitates an absolutely colossal ramp. And of course, there's the whole thing with gaining speed while in the thickest part of the atmosphere. How do you envision a runway landing without wings? No wings means you'll be on a ballistic trajectory. And that means gaining a vertical velocity component of 9.8 m/s2, courtesy of gravity. If you plan to use RCS thrusters to cancel out this, you need those thrusters to be powerful enough to lift the whole thing vertically, which means packing a VTOL engine on board anyway. If cargo is brought to its destination planet using a shuttle, the ship can be stocked at its orbital shipyard of origin using a shuttle, and you will never need the whole thing to land in an atmosphere anyway. Again, I ask, what is the point of making the heavy ship an SSTO? In atmosphere? Aerodynamic forces are not your friends in that situation. And engineering the ship to withstand them (and perform a flip in atmosphere) means adding lots of mass and a large amount of other design constraints you can easily be without. Again, just build the dang thing in orbit. Consider the necessary length of the runway and the ludicrous amount of infrastructure you're proposing for this ordeal. Any engineering assessment would conclude, in the first thirty seconds, "just ditch the SSTO concept to solve the problem instead". Why do you insist on examining the physics from a realism standpoint if you're going to make exceptions for something as ludicrous as a heavy SSTO in the first place? Physics says, in flaming letters a thousand feet high, that IT'S A BAD IDEA. And you seem intent on trying to find new ways to ask "But is it a good idea if we just ... ?". The answer will still be the same. Again I would point out the similarity to trying to improve horseback riding as a means of transport, by making powered rollerskates for the horse.

Once again, I see this curious fixation on a really unrealistic/unreasonable solution, and trying to invent a problem it can solve. Like the modern revival of the Zeppelin, it's an answer on a futile search for the right question. The base concept has massive drawbacks, yet you keep inventing new complications to justify it, rather than doing something about the fundamental approach. Which, again, is fine for sci-fi if that's what you want, story first and all that, but you seem to want to evaluate the concept in terms of realism, in which case reality keeps throwing more hurdles in your way the more you try to walk around them. Every "but what if we do it like this?" will give several handfuls more problems on top of the ones you already have. And yet, here we are at "but what if we do it like this?" thread number countless +1, still seemingly without willingness to adjust the base concept. The big conceptual question is: "Why single-stage?" What is the benefit of bringing this thing in one piece to and from the surface if it already needs to be compatible with a shuttle for personnel and cargo? The technology required to launch this thing would be overwhelmingly more advanced than an orbital shipyard anyway. And if it's only going to be used as an orbit-to-orbit cruiser, why must it ever land? Just service the thing in orbit. Second, you seem to have realized one drawback of SSTOs, which is that they demand a very low mass fraction of cargo for the rocket equation to be forgiving in any way. But you don't seem to have taken into account that they also need to carry everything required to withstand aerodynamic forces as they travel through the atmosphere, both when ascending and re-entering. In this case, you seem to base the concept on horizontal velocity at low altitudes, which means oodles of drag, and you need the design to provide aerodynamic lift to get airborne at TWR < 1, which means large control surfaces, which once again add mass like crazy. And as you know from making aircraft in KSP, achieving the right balance for stable flight is no easy task either. And it has to survive reentry, even. Then there's the "fun" job of carrying something that weighs 8000 tons on wheels, at takeoff speed. Never mind landing. And making the runway capable of withstanding "fusion pulse detonations" strong enough to push 8000 tons of mass up to takeoff speed. Lose some horizontal velocity, you mean. When re-entering the atmosphere at orbital speeds, your problem is excess horizontal velocity, in spades. Unless you somehow make a vertical re-entry profile, of course, in which case other problems will present themselves (and barely get past "hello" before you get to the crater phase of the confrontation). And these are just the problems I can think of off the top of my head. They are not small and trivial problems with easy workarounds. The base concept has enormous flaws if examined through the lens of realism (as you seem to insist on doing). To be blunt, I am honestly a bit flabbergasted that this idea could be thought through by someone with a basic (KSP-level) grasp of engineering without the problems being immediately apparent as deal-breakers.

Huh, I guess some experience with rocketry would be nice to have, in a position so exposed to their receiving end. Seems to me that they're looking to send somebody "high up" for the prestige of the position, but not somebody indispensable, in case things go sour for the person in question. Gotta wonder if Rogozin wants the position (having spouted the government line so much he might actually believe himself to be safe) or if he simply doesn't have the clout to negotiate his way out of it.

Doesn't sound like they are too happy with his performance, then. Receiving a post in an active warzone is hardly a promotion over a cushy administration position of a prestigious state agency. It's almost as if they want to set him up for a fall, to put it like that ... "Comrade, seeing your success leading the space agency, we are promoting you to a special operator role. Here is your flintlock pistol, your flag, and your fluorescent orange jumpsuit. Now sprint across the open fields over there and destroy the enemy brigade entrenched there. We will await your glorious return."

"And the rocket's somewhat-orangey glare, fuel bursting in air, Gave proof through the afternoon that some issues were still there ..."

Lots of systems have to work perfectly for the rocket to even get off the pad and into the air. Whatever issue occurred happened mid-flight, but it was clearly just severe enough to shorten the flight time rather than RUD-ing the rocket. I'd say it was a good enough first try. [snip]

Why the heck is the Presidential administration the entity that will release the pictures, and not NASA itself?

That, plus buses are heavy. In a collision between two cars, there might easily be multiple fatalities because they bring each other to a standstill or roll-over. While a bus colliding with a car will slow down quite bumpily, but its passengers are not likely to die in the collision. Buses colliding with other heavy vehicles is rare too. Overall, it's just very uncommon for a bus accident to have multiple fatalities.

Nice to have in case the Yetis refuse to submit to the tyrannical authoritarianism of the unelected Beijing regime, I suppose.

It should also be noted that the Sprint missiles didn't achieve their awesome acceleration because they had a "magic" rocket booster. It was more because they placed a dinky little payload atop a honking great booster, and the missile didn't consist of much else to weigh the setup down. If you (somehow) attached a bigger payload to a Sprint missile, the results would be a lot more mundane.