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ULA launch and discussion thread


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On 10/22/2023 at 4:04 PM, mikegarrison said:

Also, any KSP player quickly learns that you can't do an orbital insertion with aerobraking. You can do a capture, yes, but you will inescapably (pun intended) end up with an unstable orbit that is going to quickly fail. You need another burn at the new  apoapsis in order to avoid that.

One of my kOS scripts, given an initial aero brake altitude and a desired final circular orbit altitude, will keep braking and adjusting the brake altitude at successive APs until at the desired AP altitude, then circularize.  Not fancy math, just incrementally adjusts each time around.  Used for tankers from Minmus. 

I wish I could run it in the background instead of waiting it out though.  I'm really hoping the Lua scripting in KSP2 ends up with the ability to control background craft to a useful degree

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1 hour ago, Spaceception said:

There's a Vulcan AMA starting later today on reddit, and taking questions now. I asked him where he thought Vulcan would go in the future, but I figured you all might find it interesting to read, or have questions yourself.

 

Thanks! I hit him with a couple of technical questions.

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That last one is quite interesting. In another response, he also mentions that he wishes they had anticipated how much LEO missions would grow, and how that would've changed Vulcan's design. Possibly something closer to Falcon 9 than Atlas. Bruno's response in bold.

"In another comment you said ULA would like to have anticipated the explosive growth in LEO.

How would Vulcan look different in that scenario?"

"Would have considered a more LEO-optimized variant of Vulcan.

Much lower staging altitude at booster burnout."

 

Taking in both of these statements... Next evolution of ULA's vehicles might be friendlier to reuse?

He also talks about how he hopes Vulcan will be used for Cislunar transport, so CL-1000 still seems to be on the back of his mind.

And after my thoughts on what a reusable system from ULA might look like, they might incorporate Centaur by having it as a 3rd stage for high energy payloads in 1 launch, like New Glenn's 3 stage design. From his comments, it sounds like they have many upgrades planned for it, including ACES related ones.

Edited by Spaceception
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Yeah, Vulcan is in the vein of Atlas V, and Atlas V really was optimized for high-energy missions, and high-energy missions really make upper stage reuse challenging.

Just look at Starship -- it can deliver 100-150 tonnes to LEO but I believe it is only slightly better than FH for GTO. I'm not sure that it can even do GEO missions at all.

If Starship is successful then I could see the growth of transporter ferry spacecraft that pick up individual comsats from LEO, take them to GEO, then aerobrake back down to LEO to refuel and repeat.

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