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Boeing Successfully Launches Mammoth Delta-4 Heavy
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Dec 22, 2004 11:02 AM
from the yeah-it's-got-a-hemi dept.
from the yeah-it's-got-a-hemi dept.
nick-bts writes "CNN, the BBC and Space.com are reporting the first successful launch of the new Boeing Delta-4 Heavy, capable of lifting 23 tonnes into a low-Earth orbit (similar to the space shuttle). Personally I think the Ariane 5 and 'Satan' are way sexier..."
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Hungry crew (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously though, it appears the Delta 4 Heavy will primarily service military--rather than commercial or scientific--interests.
Re:Best Technology Still Western: Good! (Score:5, Informative)
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Delta-9 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Delta-9 (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait
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Re:Delta-9 (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Delta-9 (Score:5, Informative)
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NOT successful (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NOT successful (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:NOT successful (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:NOT successful (Score:3, Interesting)
Btw, Boeing is not part of the Government. How can you call boeing's spin another example of government spinning?
Re:NOT successful (Score:3, Informative)
If you read the back story of the project, Boeing built the first new launch facilities in the last 35 years in order to launch this series of rockets. Getting off the pad on the first try with this configuration seems like a success to me.
Re:NOT successful (Score:4, Insightful)
The term you're looking for is "successful failure"
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Re:NOT successful (Score:3, Interesting)
How about the Alamo? Texans cite and use it as a rallying point so often that it's easy to forget that it was a huge military disaster.
In that light the "Don't mess with Texas" always made me chuckle a bit.
(I incidentally proposed that Ohio coopt the line and make it "Don't mess with Ohio or we'll burn Atlanta down again" because while Texas lost the Alamo, we burned the south.)
Re:NOT successful (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, doesn't that make it a success? They have an opportunity to fix a problem now, and it didn't cost them as much as it could have to expose that problem.
I don't understand why people still insist on everything working 100% the first time, even though it has never ever worked that way. How did we somehow start expecting it?
Re:NOT successful (Score:3, Insightful)
Our tax dollars at work.
Would you rather that they had put another $Billion of our tax dollars into a spy satellite that would be uselessly drifting in space right now because of the partial failure of this untested rocket?
Re:Best Technology Still Western: Good! (Score:5, Informative)
"For many years almost all sources credited China as having only four DF-5s deployed in silos, including the authoritative 1992 treatement by John Wilson Lewis and Hua Di, which asserted that as of 1992 only four DF-5 missiles on alert. However, more recent estimates suggest that some 8-11 were deployed as of 1995, and that at least 13 missiles were deployed at the end of 1997. According to the National Air Intelligence Center, as of 1998 the deployed DF-5 force consisted of "fewer than 25" missiles. As of early 1999 the total deployed DF-5 force was generally estimated at about 20 missiles. By mid-2000 some sources suggested that the total force was as many as 24 deployed missiles ["Inside The Ring" By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough Washington Times July 28, 2000]."
They're progressing on their astronaut program at about twice the rate that the US and Russians did (albeit by standing on the shoulders of giants). They've been working on space station and lunar programs. Their rockets that are being developed are liquid fuelled, making them ill suited for adaptation to missiles. I could keep going for hours. Like China or not, it's a textbook example of a space program focused on civilian efforts.
If you want to make these claims again, don't post links to pages about Tibet, which is utterly unrelated to the topic at hand - post links to articles about China's space program.
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space shuttle why now? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can anyone cite a reason for continued shuttle lifetime that isn't political?
Re:space shuttle why now? (Score:3, Interesting)
Secondly, there are still missions that require both heavy lifting and human beings. For example, if NASA were to choose to repair the HST using a non-robotic mission, it would be the Shuttle that car
Re:space shuttle why now? (Score:3, Insightful)
There has never been any reason for the space shuttle, at least not as it was ultimately realized. The requirements for crewed flight and cargo are so radically different that there has never been much engineering justification for combining the two.
A sensible launch system would have at least two components: a small, crewed vehicle type with six nines reliability, and one or more larger vehicle types for lifting cargo and blowing up.
There are some economic factors that mitigate against this mix a bit,
Six 9s? Who's paying for 1 million test flights? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:space shuttle why now? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:space shuttle why now? (Score:3, Interesting)
plus, how much data do we need on this? We've been gathering it for decades now. The result: eat right, excersize, take it easy for a few days when you re-enter a gravity well.
Re:space shuttle why now? (Score:3, Insightful)
NASA says [reston.com] the shuttle costs $2.2 billion/year to have around and $85 million per flight. Since NASA had only been making half a dozen flights a year, this equates to $500 million per flight average mission costs.
That'd better be one important satellite you're trying to repair. We could have replaced even the Hubble Space Telescope for the price of the shuttle missions we've done to service it.
Re:space shuttle why now? (Score:5, Informative)
"Early in the mission, the crew deployed Spartan, a freeflying solar instrument package that was supposed to make independent observations of the sun's outer atmosphere and the solar wind. However, the equipment failed upon deployment and was unable to complete its mission. During their first spacewalk Winston Scott and Takao Doi grabbed the spacecraft by hand and berthed it in the payload bay for its return to Earth. Since landing, the Spartan satellite has been impounded for study to determine the cause of the failure."
Granted, the mission wasn't to go up and retrieve a broken satellite, but they did, in fact, retrieve the satellite and bring it back to Earth.
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Re:space shuttle why now? (Score:5, Informative)
Concur.
There hasn't ever been a shuttle mission which required taking a satellite out of orbit and landing it on earth.
Incorrect. Mission 51-A [nasa.gov] and mission STS-32 [nasa.gov] both did exactly that.
There isn't any utility in doing so either.
While I have to wonder about the cost effectivness of bringing a pair of comsats back down for refurbishment and relaunch, the LDEF experiment absolutely REQUIRED that it be brought back down.
Next time, check your facts a little closer, eh?
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Sexier??? (Score:5, Funny)
Man, you have a wierd phallic fetish going on there.
How Successful Really? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/2713 [spacetoday.net]
Delta 4 Heavy launch comes up short
Posted: Wed, Dec 22, 2004, 9:30 AM ET (1430 GMT)
The first Delta 4 Heavy launch vehicle lifted off Tuesday afternoon but a problem with the vehicle's first stage has apparently kept the vehicle from deploying its payload in the proper orbit. The vehicle lifted off from pad 37B at Cape Canaveral at 4:50 pm EST (2150 GMT), more than two hours into a three-hour launch window because of minor problems during pre-launch preparations, and initially the launch appeared to be normal. However, the Delta 4's first stage -- three identical core boosters -- shut down eight seconds earlier than expected. To compensate, the upper stage fired longer than planned during the second of three burns needed to place the primary payload, a demonstration satellite, into geosynchronous orbit, and as a result ran out of propellant during the final burn. Contact has also not been established with two nanosatellites that were deployed from the booster 16 minutes after launch. Despite the underperformance of the first stage, Boeing officials said they, as well as the Air Force, who paid for the flight, were pleased with the launch.
You need to get out more (Score:3, Funny)
I think the nick-bts needs to get out more.
Finally a new large scale US rocket Motor! (Score:5, Interesting)
The RS-68's [boeing.com]on the Delta IV Heavy are the first new big rocket motor to be designed and built in the US in a long time (The space shuttle uses motors designed in the late sixties or very early seventies).
And for the record, I think a new rocket motor qualifies as sexy . . .
Saturn 5 vs. Delta 4 Heavy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Saturn 5 vs. Delta 4 Heavy (Score:5, Interesting)
Think of what may have been if Von Braun had been allowed to proceed with Nova. It made the Saturn V look like a bottle rocket.
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Re:All Nixon (was Re:Saturn 5 vs. Delta 4 Heavy) (Score:5, Interesting)
I feel lucky that I was able to see every Saturn launch in person, the I's the V's even the Skylab and SATP. They were maginificent birds, powerful and mighty. To see one in person was to know the most awesome machine ever built in the history of humanity.
I cite Ford and Carter because even then we had *some* of the momentum from the Apollo days, and with a little push, the engineers and technicians would have come back and had us on Mars by 1990, or 2000 at the latest. Some may scoff at that now, but simple fact is that they would have scoffed at Kennedy in 1961 on the onset of the moon effort. With Nova in service, Mars could have been had. As it is now, we cannot even launch a single astronaut into LEO with American hardware. That's something Mercury could do, but not us in 2004.
Pitiful.
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Re:Saturn 5 vs. Delta 4 Heavy (Score:5, Insightful)
Something tells me that would be cheaper than the shuttle, and get more done, and be more adaptable.
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Which runway?? (Score:4, Funny)
Proof left as an exercise for Google (Score:4, Funny)
"Boeing Successfully Launches Mammoth Delta-4 Heavy"
Of course, for every stupid, bizarre, or just plain wonky idea, there already exists at least a semi-serious proponent. Proof is left as an exercise for Google [google.com]
From the second Google hit on "mammoth wooly rocket", I quote:
It gets weird after that.
I know some women... (Score:3, Funny)
"Satan is sexier..." (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah...good luck getting funding for your "Satan" rocket from the current crop of "values" politicians in Congress.
Tell the marketing guys to try "Sword of Jesus" instead; you'll be in like Ron Jeremy.
Which units? (Score:4, Interesting)
Boeing [boeing.com] is a US company, but Nick [mailto] (and the BBC [bbc.co.uk]) used the British spelling of tonnes. What kind of tonnes are we talking about?
The space.com story [space.com] provides some more useful numbers:
That would seem to be (roughly) metric ton(ne)s; there are 2,204.623 pounds per metric ton.
For comparison:
1 ton, gross or long (same as a British ton) = 2,240 pounds
1 ton, metric = 2,204.623 pounds
1 ton, net or short = 2,000 pounds
Still a few problems (Score:4, Informative)
"We had a shorter than expected first stage burn. That was compensated for by longer first and second burns in the second stage," said Dan Collins, Boeing vice president for Expendable Launch Systems,
And: [decaturdaily.com] "The delay at five minutes was due to a loss of communication between launch control and the vehicle destruct system. Boeing spokeswoman Monty Vest described this."
Why we called it Satan (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, say it with me: s-s-eighteen... ss-eighteen... s-eighteen... s-eight-en... satan. In an era when you refer to the other side as the evil empire, cool names that emphasize the whole evil thing tend to stick.
Just thought you might want to know...
First Time Gitters (Score:3, Informative)
$2800/lb to Low Earth Orbit (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I agree with the poster... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or if you want to put up some crazy, ineffective missile shield, it looks pretty good too.
I don't think that people in the market for rockets of this scale are swayed by a name.
Yeah, I know. I should get a sense of humor.
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Re:I agree with the poster... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I agree with the poster... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well then, it must all be related to your point of view. From here on the beach this one was extremely sexy.
Absolutely gorgeous day with crystal clear weather and a light breeze coming in off the Atlantic.
Pad 37 is way back up north past the end of ICBM Row and the tip of the cape, so the bottom half of the vehicle was obscured by intervening vegatation as it sat on the pad, but as soon as they ignited the engines, the flash of orange light and the discharge of smoke from the flame deflector made things abundantly obvious as to what was going on.
This particular bird rose at an excruciatingly lethargic pace, and even well after it had cleared the tower, it was still taking its sweet old time. Probably the slowest liftoff I've ever watched, and I've watched a bunch going all the way back to the 50's.
The alignment of the CBC's placed them 'face on' from my point of view, and all three of them looked quite spectacular, front lit by a late afternoon sun, each core producing a beautiful orange pillar of flame.
Finally, it really got going and started to move out like you would expect. As it did so, it reached an altitude where the LH2/Lox exhaust produced a pure white contrail that stood out in stark relief against the deep blue sky. At about the same time, the rumble arrived and it was a fine, deep-throated one that bespoke of the power being released quite well.
For those of us used to things like The Shuttle or any of the large Titan's, outboard CBC separation seemed to take forever to finally occur. The vehicle was well downrange when this happened, but with optical aid the sudden plume as they separated was easily visible, as well as the CBC's themselves, slowly tumbling end over end as the core continued to accelerate on away from them.
All in all, quite the sexy launch, if you ask me.
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Re:This doesn't seem like progress to me (Score:5, Interesting)
while it's not using antimatter or fusion or something, it makes use of "off the shelf" components to strap together a powerful rocket.
If you want more power, just bundle another couple on. You couldn't really do this with the shuttle or the Saturn. Plus, if you have different mission parameters, you can use basically the same hardware without the need to do R&D for years for a new rocket.
Yeah, it's still chemical propulsion but it seems like a better way of thinking to me. This is something that can actually get some economy of scale.
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Re:I offer my congratulations (Score:5, Informative)
Energia
Saturn V:
Delta IV Heavy
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Re:Better late then never. (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2002/q4/nr_02
Still late, but today was the first launch of a Delta IV heavy.
Re:Throttles (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Throttles (Score:4, Informative)
The point here is that by the end of a stage, the acceleration of one of these rockets (solid or liquid fueled... it doesn't matter) can be quite high, and on ICBM's it can be as high as 20 G's or more. Sometimes a payload simply can't handle that sort of acceleration (like people, but some sattelites as well), so you need to drop the amount of thurst to lower the accleration rate.
This is a mission requirement, and when you design a space payload you also specify what the maximum acceleration will be (usually in m/s^2 but sometimes in different units). When the flight profile is calculated, the rocket will have pre-programmed intervals to scale back the thrust requirements. This makes life fun and interesting, and why rocket scientists get the big $$$.
The Space Shuttle's Main Engines have this feature, and it is even more important because of the human cargo, as well as bio research materials. I believe the flight profile of the shuttle is to maintain a maximum rate of about 4-5 G's. The Saturn V, by comparison, hit about 8-9 G's at the end of the 1st and 2nd stages.
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