Boeing Successfully Launches Mammoth Delta-4 Heavy

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..."

Re:This doesn't seem like progress to me

[bjomo]

It isn't so much about progress as it is about reclaiming capabilities that we let slip away. The US did have a heavy lifter outside of the shuttle, since we had let the know-how from lifters like the Saturn V slip away. Now we will have a heavy lifting launch vehicle that doesn't require a manned mission.

Re:NOT successful

[mOoZik]

Yeah, another example of the government spinning an almost failure into a success. Had it exploded on the pad, they would have said, "Despite the absense of take-off, we believe the launch was a success. We are ready to commit billions of tax dollars on this rocket. I think they are so optimistic because Boeing had trouble finding commercial customers for the maiden flight, so the govt. had to finance almost the whole thing. As a result, they don't want to admit that it was a partial failure.

Re:NOT successful

[Waffle Iron]

> "Air Force instead paid to launch a dummy payload and a pair of small research satellites."

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:Saturn 5 vs. Delta 4 Heavy

[NardofDoom]

The shuttle orbiter weighs in at 99,318 kg fully loaded. [astronautix.com] I'm not sure how much of that is the engines, but if we weren't busy launching bricks-and-wings into space we'd be able to lift more than 50 metric tons to LEO. For crew return we can use a capsule with an ablative heat shield, and the crew wouldn't have to worry about finding their way out of an exploding craft moving supersonically to eject, just put an escape rocket on the capsule like with early spacecraft.

Something tells me that would be cheaper than the shuttle, and get more done, and be more adaptable.

Re:space shuttle why now?

[radtea]

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, like the high, relatively fixed per-launch costs. But I'd be surprised if the big-picture economics didn't line up with the engineering on this one.

The shuttle exists as it does because of politics, not engineering or economics.

--Tom

Re:NOT successful

[Zerbey]

It didn't explode on the launch pad, and it did make it into orbit. That's a remarkable achievment in itself. This is new hardware and there's bound to be teething problems.

The term you're looking for is "successful failure" :)

Six 9s? Who's paying for 1 million test flights?

[fname]

Six nines reliability sounds nice, but that works out to one failure in a million attempts. Realistically, until you've had 1 million succesful launched with only 1 failure, you could not claim six 9s reliability. That may be a good goal for an operational vehicle, but it's unrealistic for a development vehicle. We just don't know enough about what could go wrong to assign probabilities with that degree of certitude.

Re:space shuttle why now?

[rcw-work]

And sometimes your satellite will need repair, so you gotta get it down somehow.

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:NOT successful

[whynotme]

Think of this launch as a release candidate that uncovered a serious bug that could only be found in a live production environment. The "production environment" in this case includes the effects of operating three of these core boosters side-by-side, as well as the throttling that is done by the central booster -- it runs at relatively low thrust while in the triplet, then runs up to maximum power after the two side boosters drop off. It's a whole new thing, and the only way to test what happens is to launch one.

It would have been great if it'd been a total success -- but finding out that there was a problem (that's presumeably fixable; we'll probably find that out within days) without risking a multi-billion dollar satellite is just as valuable in this situation as finding out about a critical bug before the software has been shrink-wrapped and shipped to the customer. The cost of the launch to the customer (us) was only $125 million.

NOT a success!

[Anonymous Coward]

OK let me get this straight:

The D4 Heavy sat on the pad stewing in the flaming rocket exhaust longer than expected, roasting the TPS off the three common core boosters.

The D4 Heavy strap on boosters burned out 8 seconds earlier than expected, and sepereated.

The microsats were misdeployed and have not been heard from.

The upper stage tried to burn longer to compensate for the less than planned boost from the second stage, but then ran out of fuel for the geo orbit insertion burn.

The resulting demosat orbit was 10,000 miles -lower- than planned.

The only way you can count this as successful is if you say "It didn't blow up on the pad and actually flew into space."

If that is what passes for successfull at Boeing these days, then it is a sad, sad day for Boeing!

Re:Best Technology Still Western: Good!

[R2.0]

It is ironic that you chose Boeing's aquisition of McDonnel-Douglass to illustrate your point. McDD was driven out of the market by Airbus, which is heavily subsidised by European countries. And as I recall, Boeing was "encouraged" to buy McDD by the Defense Department so as to not lose the capacity for fighters. So it basically seems that, at least in this case, European subsidies trumped US subsidies.