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Kryten

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Everything posted by Kryten

  1. Kryten
    There are multiple satellite operators that currently have better than daily coverage of any point on the planet; Google is set to be one of them in the near future. Google Maps/Earth being outdated means Google don't update them very frequently, and nothing more.
  2. Kryten
    New video from the latest test;
  3. Kryten
    Zenit from SL platform is about as capable to GTO as Proton from Baikonur. Those 56 degrees make a pretty big difference.
  4. Kryten
    If launch was really that constrained their price would not be an issue, and they're not really that far ahead of Arianespace's. They have both received commercial orders in the past couple of years, just not many.
  5. Kryten
    Not much worse than Proton these days, and people did buy them; just not enough. Difficult to go on in this current market environment as purely commercial, with no government sponsor.
  6. Kryten
    Actually the 9T limit is a structural limit for Centaur; the 5m fairing avoids this limit by redirecting some of the aerodynamic forces around Centaur. EDIT: Ground stations are for satellite control and operations and are very much a part of sat cost to the operator; they're not the same as customer terminals.
  7. Kryten
    If launch availability was a bottleneck SeaLaunch wouldn't have gone bust. Even after they have, there's still a lot of easy growth potential in that area of the launch market simply from ULA and Mitsubish's spare capability. It might be true if you're looking into the small LEO sat field, but for big GSO sats it's nonsense.
  8. Kryten
    It would not, because launch has never been a major factor in the overall price of communications satellites. Consider this; SkyPerfect JSAT are currently putting together the contracts for their next big mobile broadband sat, JCSAT 17. It will probably launch on a Falcon 9, with launch price probably somewhere below $65 million. They just signed a contract with Harris corp for $37 million for the antenna. Just the antenna. Take into account the money for upgraded ground stations, sat bus and transponders, and your launch cost is buried in the noise.
  9. Kryten
    You didn't answer my question, and it doesn't look like you really considered it. How many of the companies you're depending on for your giant space launch demand boom do you seriously think will survive the next tech bubble burst?
  10. Kryten
    Demand for space launches has never worked like that, because space launches aren't an end product that anybody wants.
  11. Kryten
    PB666, do you have any idea what happened in 90s? None of this Big LEO stuff is remotely new, Teledesic was going to use 840 sats to beam broadband to everyone all the way back in 1997; they even launched a couple of test satellites. Then the dot-com bubble burst and it all vanished like morning dew. You looked at a graph of space or internet investment over time lately? How many of the companies you're gushing over do you seriously think will survive the bursting of this bubble?
  12. Kryten
    GTO sats aren't designed for long periods of eclipse, so they're launched at times when they'll have sunlight between separation and apogee burn; given how far downrange separation is, that usually means night time at the launch site.
  13. Kryten
    I think that's a typo for Soyuz 11. The only suits on Soyuz missions prior to 11 were EVA suits, and they were stored in the orbital module during launch.
  14. Kryten
    So was Ariane 1, Falcon 1, and originally Falcon 9, but none of those actually managed to survive a landing.
  15. Kryten
    Still would've been relatively thick, not equivalent to a liquid stage. In any solid rocket the walls serve as the combustion chamber, they're going to have to be much more solidly built than tanks for liquid regardless of materials.
  16. Kryten
    Al-Li gets passivating coating, same as straight aluminium. Aside from the fact that that would expose engine elements which clearly aren't Al-Li, that would be very difficult to deal with on a purely structural level. Shuttle SRB's only managed it because they were thick steel.
  17. Kryten
    The rocket's made of aluminium-lithium alloy, it's already rust-resistant.
  18. Kryten
    Use of Gemini for lunar landing wasn't seriously considered at NASA, Gemini had only ever been intended as a bridge between Mercury and Apollo. The lunar Gemini studies are works by McDonnell Douglas (who built Gemini), not NASA. Something like that might have happened if crewed spaceflight was handed to the military instead of merged with NACA, as the military had been a good bit more receptive to growth Gemini concepts; even in our timeline they came very close to launching a crewed recon sat with Gemini as the return vehicle.
  19. Kryten
    That means there are at least four missions with six spacecraft heading towards Mars in the 2020 window; Exomars 2020 rover and lander, NASA 2020 rover, the UAE Al-Amal orbiter, and the Chinese rover and lander. Add in that the probable slips to Red Dragon and the possible second Indian orbiter, and that's six missions with eight spacecraft.
  20. Kryten
    Only Merlin-1A was ablative, the current versions are all regeneratively cooled (i.e. with fuel).
  21. Kryten
    FH core is not interchangable with F9 core.
  22. Kryten
    This is the postulated Merlin-FASTRAC connection; it's been arrived to because Merlin 1A and FASTRAC have similar performance, are pintle-based engines, had ablative nozzles, and had turbopumps from the same manufacturer, Barber-Nichols. However, Barber-Nichols say that the turbopump for Merlin-1A was a clean-sheet design relative to their earlier pumps for FASTRAC and Bantam (what later become RS-68), and there's a more obvious source for the pintle architecture and ablative nozzle; Tom Mueller and his work at TRW. Mueller was a lead designer for a series of pintle engines at TRW in late 90s and early 2000s, and went on to be a founding member of SpaceX. Since most of this work is from the early 2000s there's been a lot of link rot since, and TRW don't even exist anymore as a separate company. Older versions of the SpaceX website give some detail of his work with TRW; ( http://web.archive.org/web/20130425020246/http://www.spacex.com/company.php ) and older versions of Lockheed Martin's (who acquired TRW) website give a few more details about the engines themselves, including the pintle architecture and ablative nozzle; ( https://web.archive.org/web/20100523105238/http://www.as.northropgrumman.com/products/booster_vehicle_eng/index.html )
  23. Kryten
    If it's a new version we'll see it in the FAA paperwork. That's incidentally where the 'Falcon 9 V1.2' designation comes from, not the nonsense like 'Falcon 9 Full Thrust'. From these figures they've already increased the thrust, so what the heck do they want us to this new one? Falcon 9 Fuller Thrust?
  24. Kryten
    Explaining outperformance of Falcon Heavy relative to DIVH is much easier than that; F9H has about twice the fuel by mass at take-off.
  25. Kryten
    The oxide is mostly a thin layer of dust, you won't get much of a reaction. As shown by MSL, if you dig into it you get the grey of reduced iron.
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