Battle of the Heavy Lift Rockets 211
schwit1 writes: Check out this detailed and informative look at the unspoken competiton between NASA's SLS rocket and SpaceX's planned heavy lift rocket. It's being designed to be even more powerful than the Falcon Heavy. Key quote: "It is clear SpaceX envisions a rocket far more powerful than even the fully evolved Block 2 SLS – a NASA rocket that isn't set to be launched until the 2030s." The SpaceX rocket hinges on whether the company can successfully build its new Raptor engine. If they do, they will have their heavy lift rocket in the air and functioning far sooner than NASA, and for far less money.
Competition is good. (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been way too little competition in this area the last decades. Considering that the Russian RD-180 engines designed in the 70's&80's are still seen as state of the art it is obviously a stagnant situation.
No miracles (Score:5, Informative)
There are no miracles in rocket engine design. The RD-180 has pretty much the best performance to be wrung out of a sea-level-to-altitude LOX/RP-1 motor in terms of efficiency. SpaceX is still playing catchup in that area, trading off the lower cost per Merlin motor for a lower Isp from a simpler design.
As for the Raptor the "new" liquid-methane/oxygen fuel mix it will burn has the potential to produce a higher Isp than the current mainstream LOX/RP-1 mix used in motors like the Merlin, the RD-180 etc. but it comes with downsides -- it means a redesign of the rocket structure to support fully cryogenic tankerage (although not requiring the sorts of extreme temps or processing LH needs), launchpad facilities for fuelling and defuelling rockets will need to be revamped, liquid methane is half the density of RP-1 so the tanks and the rocket structure need to be larger and heavier to contain equivalent amounts of fuel and so on.
Re:No miracles (Score:4, Interesting)
Efficiency is irrelevant when fuel makes up about 1% of the cost of a launch and bigger tanks are cheap. When you're throwing engines away every time, and they make up a large fraction of the cost of a launch, a low-cost engine that burns 10% more fuel can be a massive win.
Government rocket engineers have been fixated on efficiency because they rarely have to worry about cost. They can just steal more money from taxpayers.
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Until the larger tank and extra weight then means you need an even larger (or more) rocket motor(s) to get off the ground and into orbit.
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Another thing to remember here is that risk taking isn't automatically a good thing. As the grand parent noted, because government d
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The thrust to weight ratio of the rocket motor only really matters near the end of a burn when the motor weight becomes a significant part of the total vehicle mass at that time after hundreds of tonnes of fuel and propellant have been expended. It's a good thing to have a lightweight motor but shaving a hundred kilos off the motor mass isn't as important as boosting the Isp by, say, ten seconds as that boost improves the performance all the way through the burn and has a much bigger impact on payload to or
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Just wait until you find out how old screwdriver and pliers designs are...
The rest of the world does NOT resemble IT. Stability is a good thing. If you've got a 99% efficient rocket engine that's reliable and cheap to produce, you should stick with it as long as you possibly can. The real shame of the US space program is that we stopped making Saturn V's... If
Re:Competition is good. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Competition is good. (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's government "progress" for you. Compare 60 years of spaceflight technology from 1955 to 2015 (OK, the years were cherry-picked) and it's still basically the same: LOX/Kerosene or LOX/LH2 and some engines are bigger and some are smaller.
It's short of amazing that you can attempt to attack the evul guvmint on this one. And be so mind bogglingly wrong at the same time.
There are many different types of engines out there. Aluminum perchlorate mixture engines, Hybrid nitrous oxide/polymer engines, some really interesting combos where the fuel is paraffin and with mixed other additives like Al, or Li. Hydrazine rockets, Ion thrusters, solar sails, there are hundreds of designs. Many of which haven't happened yet due to one or another limitation.
The Kero-LOX and Liquid Hydrogen-LOX rockets are just examples of the most powerful liquid fueled rockets.
Lot's of different types of rockets out there.
And lack of any new and more powerful engines that exist that exist are almost certainly not caused by jackbooted thugs, just itching to put loyal citizens in FEMA Death camps while installing a new world order. where we all pay 300 percent of our salary in taxes that go to urban thugs.
It is a matter of physics, which turns out to be remarkably resistant to the invisible guiding hand of the free market. We can build the biggest, bad-assed, Chuck Norris rocket engine that we can dial up the power the whole way to 11, but if we can't pump in the fuel quickly enough, or the resultant temperatures are beyond the melting point of any available material, And neither Grover Norquist not Ayn Rand can fix that.
Maybe the answer is in teaching Intelligent design in school?
Anyhow, I went off the deep end on your idea to illustrate just how silly the idea that the government is holding back progress on rocketry. Hopefully humorously, but that's for others to judge. None of the engines in use by the commercial outfits are some dramatic new design, and it's all physics and material design, not ideology. Now look at aircraft development from (another cherry-picked 60 years): 1910 to 1970. That went from wooden biplanes to the 747. Sure, there were a few "helpful" eras in between - like 2 major wars and lots more lesser ones, which kicked development up by several notches. But those developments were still the result of commercial companies, just as NASA contracts out work, today.
Re:Competition is good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyhow, I went off the deep end on your idea to illustrate just how silly the idea that the government is holding back progress on rocketry.
Like the US banning private launch vehicles through to 1984? Or maintaining a launch oligopoly funded on the public dollar through to the last decade? Or paying a few tens of billions to develop a huge rocket while not paying a few billion to get someone like SpaceX to develop said rocket.
Re:Competition is good. (Score:4, Informative)
Or maintaining a launch oligopoly funded on the public dollar through to the last decade?
It took two world wars and one cold war to get us to where we are today.
Feel free to complain about the oligopoly, but don't pretend like Boeing, North American, and Douglas were going to build the Saturn V rocket on their own dime.
Or paying a few tens of billions to develop a huge rocket while not paying a few billion to get someone like SpaceX to develop said rocket.
"Or paying a few tens of billions to develop a huge rocket " to who?
Boeing is the prime contractor for the design, development, test and production of the launch vehicle cryogenic stages, as well as development of the avionics suite. [boeing.com]
You had a three sentence post and two of them were full of ignorance.
Re:Competition is good. (Score:4, Interesting)
You had a three sentence post and two of them were full of ignorance.
I was disabusing the previous poster of some pretty misguided notions. I guess you need some help as well. I notice, for example, that you don't actually disagree, you just choose to characterize my short observations as "full of ignorance". Do you have a reason why you think so?
I'm quite aware how NASA operates - by writing large checks to private contractors who make sure the money gets spent in the right congressional districts. But that sort of activity hasn't resulted in a viable launch platform since the 70s, when the Space Shuttle was developed.
And rather than continue to do something that hasn't worked in around four decades (and really, the Space Shuttle and the Apollo programs were just money sinks) maybe we could look at things that do work, like SpaceX's approach?
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And rather than continue to do something that hasn't worked in around four decades (and really, the Space Shuttle and the Apollo programs were just money sinks) maybe we could look at things that do work, like SpaceX's approach?
Apollo succeeded because the politicos (those in power) realized if Soviets land on the moon first, they will plant the Hammer and Sickle flag on the surface that will enslave the world in Communism (not really but that's what they thought). So with that in mind, do whatever necessary to prevent that from happening otherwise their goose is cooked (strong motivator like 25 years before when threatened by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan).
Then after what next? Shuttle was left over from more ambitious missio
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Fast forward to 21st century and progress made by SpaceX and others is result of wealth inequality.
But wealth inequality is bad and stuff. The government should steal all Musk's money and give it to people on welfare so they can buy bigger TVs and stimulate the Chinese economy.
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Hey, those guys are stealing our stolen money!
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"plant the Hammer and Sickle flag on the surface that will enslave the world in Communism"
Command of space ( not necessarily the moon, but earth orbit for certain ) would be a huge strategic and tactical advantage.
If the Soviet Union had managed LEO or the moon, do you think they would have not used it?
Finland, 1939
Poland, 1939
China, 1941, 1945
Support for NKorea, 1950
Hungary, 1956
Support for NVietnam, 1961
Czechoslovakia, 1968
Afghanistan, 1979
One can argue Crimea, 2014, but that isnt "Soviet Union".
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If the Soviet Union had managed LEO or the moon, do you think they would have not used it?.
Of course they would use it, like they used Sputnik and Gagarin to show superiority of communism and those were countered with NASA and Apollo. When these were successful, they were reduced (we abandoned going beyond LEO, and NASA struggles). Look at current "threats" which are not from USSR so the agency with one less A than NASA gets unlimited budget and authority, and can skirt the US Constitution.
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If the Soviet Union had managed LEO or the moon, do you think they would have not used it?
This is sort of a confusing sentence. The Soviet Union _did_ manage LEO in just about every way you can "manage" LEO. They also got probes, but not people, to the moon.
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wealth inequality.
If you look at census data, wealth inequality across gender and race has massively dropped, all while median incomes (adjusted for inflation) have nearly tripled.
Rather than just saying "you're wrong", id rather encourage you do look this stuff up before repeating it further. You've obviously heard if from somewhere, but there is an onus on you to make sure your own words are accurate.
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If you look at census data, wealth inequality across gender and race has massively dropped, all while median incomes (adjusted for inflation) have nearly tripled.
Why the sudden mention of race and gender? Is that because only white males invent rockets or something?
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But that sort of activity hasn't resulted in a viable launch platform since the 70s, when the Space Shuttle was developed.
I'd argue that it didn't result in one then, either.
Re:Competition is good. (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA: "However, it is clear SpaceX envisions a rocket far more powerful than even the fully evolved Block 2 SLS â" a NASA rocket that isnâ(TM)t set to be launched until the 2030s."
The difference isn't private/gummint. All companies strive to make money.
The difference is in the objectives of the organizations involved. The objective of Congress is to get re-elected by keeping the pork flowing. The objective of Boeing is to take as long as possible to build anything because the longer it takes, the more pork flows in. Congress doesn't give a fuck if it ever flies. Boeing would be delighted if the project is funded to 2030, and even more delighted if cost overruns and delays pushed it out to 2050. Everybody has well-paid jobs for life!
The objective of SpaceX is Mars, bitches.
Musk needs an HLV long before 2030 if he is to live long enough to be able to retire on Mars. Because he is effectively self-funded, he not answerable to the whims of Congressmen and their pork allocations. Because he is interested in living long enough to see it fly, he is not interested in delaying things to pull as much pork out of the project as possible. He will build the fucking thing himself, and it will fly.
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NASA should wait until July/August 2015 before proposing a new launch system. That's around the same time the New Horizons space probe NASA launched back in 2008 will be reaching Pluto. I believe, hopefully, that the pictures from Pluto will capture the imagination of the public and, by proxy, Congress. That way NASA can propose a totally Giga launch system and get it approved.
Frankly SLS is lame. We're going to be stuck with whatever launch system for a few decades -- possibly longer given politics, so we
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We need to be looking to build something that can scale to sustainable colony establishment class stuff.
A bigger rocket won't do that for you. A starter factory that can self-expand to a diverse production capacity will. Put one in Earth orbit that mines returned asteroid rock, and spits out fuel, habitats, and *another* starter factory. Send the second one to Phobos, and spit out fuel, habitats, and a *third* starter factory. Land that one on Mars, and remote control it from Phobos, and start building your colony. When enough stuff is ready, send the people down.
Being able to produce fuel and habitats a
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It took two world wars and one cold war to get us to where we are today.
Let me translate this for everyone:
..and this true statement without the fucking spin is a far cry from negating any argument about how government held us all back yet again. The government did in fact hold us back.
"Yes, the government really did outlaw private space flight, and when the ban was lifted it still used its influence in order to raise barriers to entry to prevent competition with the oligarchy, but I think that it had a good reason to."
The facts are that a private company can come along
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I'm sorry, you're attacking Musk because car parts wear out eventually? And he's extending the warranty for some of those parts?
Re:Competition is good. (Score:4, Informative)
Like the US banning private launch vehicles through to 1984?
I'm not allowed to have an unshielded reactor in my backyard either. Fucking liberals.
Yours is just more of the Science as ideology. How about a couple minutes for you to understand exactly why it wasn't allowed.....playing that time passing song....
Times up, BZZZZT! - No it wasn't evul democrats or Beyonce flashing the Illuminati sign at a burning man festival. Not even free birth control for women.
1. Understand that the amount of energy let loose in even a small rocket launch is pretty impressive. So it sort of makes sense to limit especially early private launching, as failure was not only an option, it was pretty likely.
Note of course, if you support second amendment rights to own artillery and hand grenades, you might have an argument there. I mean come on - Just assault rifles does not make for a well armed militia. Sheesh - next thing you know, we won't allow little children to mess with fully automaitic weapons.
Sorry - had one too many cups of coffee this morning. But rocketry is dangerous work, kinda accidentally kills people once in a while. That's no biggie, but it might level a job creator's house, and then the economy will fail , you betchya.
2. There were some hatey people who wanted to kill us, thad they were launching these flamey explodey things. Perhaps we were a little afraid that we might accidentally set off World war 3 when an early private launch of our own, unfettered by government regulations, failed and wiped out a town?
Eventually though, we'd all settle back down and figure out the sticks and stones we were going to fight World War 4 with.
Or maintaining a launch oligopoly funded on the public dollar through to the last decade? Or paying a few tens of billions to develop a huge rocket while not paying a few billion to get someone like SpaceX to develop said rocket.
So what you are telling me is that for some odd reason, despite private rocket launches in their own facilities using their own rockets is now considered okay, and done on a regular basis, you are still in a white hot seething astrorage anger and feeling much butthurt because of the way it used to be a long time ago?
Do you have any newsletters about the evil radical-diabolical Communist Franklin Delano Roosevelt and how he is spreading soclialism from his gravesite? It's important to get that news out.
Think I'm making fun of you? You got that right.
Re:Competition is good. (Score:5, Informative)
How about a couple minutes for you to understand exactly why it wasn't allowed.....playing that time passing song....
It was because NASA needed funding for the Space Shuttle. It had nothing to do with safety. Merely, requiring private companies to post bonds prior to each launch covers your safety concerns without requiring a decade long ban.
Further, it's worth noting that many of the companies which by your reckoning can't be trusted to run a safe commercial launch vehicle are the same ones that were building and running NASA's Space Shuttle (as well as having decades of launch experience under their belts).
Further, it is monumentally stupid to claim that commercial launches can be confused with a nuclear attack. One launch isn't going to take out the USSR. For example, here's a story [heritage.org] written shortly after the fall of the Shuttle monopoly.
Some of the agency's likely tactics are already evident. One strategem, reported by several observers close to the Shuttle/ ELV controversy, has been to apply pressure on contractors sup- plying major components to NASA to keep them from entering the ELV business. Although nothing has appeared in official docu- ments, it is said that NASA officials have suggested to possible private competitors that their contracts for Shuttle components might be endangered if these firms engaged in private launches. Another tactic has been to try to delay implementation of "full cost recovery," so that NASA could charge Shuttle customers less than the full cost of launches for long enough to capture the market, with the cost picked up by the taxpayer. This could close down production lines for a number of the components needed to construct and launch ELVs, making their later development far more expensive than would otherwise be the case.
What is most disturbing is that NASA's anti-competitive activities could undermine the President's broad initiative on space commercialization by undermining private sector efforts before they can acquire a firm financial footing. The agency would thereby undercut a number of key benefits for Americans that the initiative would otherwise yield.
The first thing you should do before writing stupid drivel is ask yourself, "Gee, is there really a problem here?" But no, you just had to get that anti-libertarian straw man in without regard for the history.
So what you are telling me is that for some odd reason, despite private rocket launches in their own facilities using their own rockets is now considered okay, and done on a regular basis, you are still in a white hot seething astrorage anger and feeling much butthurt because of the way it used to be a long time ago?
And you should too. Because history has a habit of repeating itself. What's going to happen when NASA has the SLS supply chain and SpaceX has the Falcon Heavy, a cheaper and more reliable competitor?
Well, that SLS supply chain, being better connected politically, are going to use their connections to sabotage SpaceX, just like Space Shuttle proponents did commercial space launch back in the 70s or the launch oligopoly did to various would-be competitors in the 80s and 90s.
They're already playing games with the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program which was an attempt by NASA to encourage commercial launch services, including SpaceX, to supply ISS with supplies and personnel. The number of competitors was reduced from six competitors to two by interference from Congress [spaceflightnow.com]. There's also fishing expeditions for "anomalies" [spacepolitics.com] from recent Falcon 9 launches. Notice that nobody else was targeted by that demand for info
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I get tired of people failing to see the problems and instead shoehorning things into their favorite ideology.
Sadly, confirmation bias, especially where politics is involved, is not the exception. It's the norm.
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Great post.
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With apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer
The outlook wasn't brilliant for the student march that night;
The quads were filled with rent-a-cops and not a picket sign in sight;
With Cooney busted for possession, and Barrows, the riot laws;
A sickly silence fell upon the supporters of The Cause.
A straggling few got up to go, in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which "springs eternal in the human breast;"
They thought, If only Gay Ol Olsoc could be rallying that mob,
We'd put up even money now, with Ol Olso
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Oh! somewhere there's a campus town where they drum and chant all night. They protest for the rain forest, and demand the polar bear’s rights. And somewhere bongs are being passed, and somewhere radicals shout; But there is no joy at Old State U -- Gay Ol Olsoc has Wiped Out!
Wow. That's kind of cool, Hanzospam!
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Look, if it upsets you that much, post your address and I'll be glad to mail you a hankie. A nice pink one to go with your politics.
Upsets me? No. I liken you litmus testers as material for public ridicule. I'd be lost without idiots like you to make fun of.
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just itching to put loyal citizens in FEMA Death camps while installing a new world order
Seriously... just because all that happened before (umpteen centuries ago... alright, a few decades, at least) and just because Fascism is clearly on the rise again... doesn't mean it's relevant to this topic, you know. :)
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Anyhow, I went off the deep end on your idea to illustrate just how silly the idea that the government is holding back progress
unfortunately when you went off the deep end, you missed the pool completely.
This was never about government consipracy. It was simply that governments have no need of improved performance or improved efficiency - when they have (as near as dammit) infinite amounts of money available to "solve" the problem with.
The commercial aircraft makers, being subject to both competition and finite resources *had* to make things better to stave off their competitors who were in the same race for betterment and profi
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unfortunately when you went off the deep end, you missed the pool completely.
So tell us all about the likely age of Space travel with zero (read inefficient and bad) Government involvement. Where will we be?
Remember, none allowed, all free market. Every other nation does as it will, but all our efforts must be by private business.
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Anyhow, I went off the deep end
And got modded insightful in the process, well done.
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Re:Competition is good. (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone pointed out, the physics of building rocket engines hasn't significantly changed in the last 60 years. That's why the F1 engine is still the most powerful rocket we've ever designed. What has changed are manufacturing techniques like sintering laser 3D printing techniques and computer modeling to allow us to build F1 engines that are slightly more powerful and a lot cheaper than what was built for Apollo. And yet somehow we don't build them. Why? Because there's no demand for it.
There has been a lot of demand for faster, more agile, and more fuel efficient aviation - from combat aircraft for wars to civil aviation in the face of rising fuel prices. That pressure isn't as significant for the launch market because: a) there are only so many safe, useful orbits for satellites where they aren't going to interfere with eachother (in terms of signal transmission - which is what many are used for) and a lot of them are already in use; b) fuel costs are a small portion of launch costs.
So the moral of the story is a) development happens according to demand and changing requirements/conditions and b) supply-side economics is BS - consumption is limited by demand.
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While I agree in large part, that little has changed in physics over the last 60 years, there is the one wrinkle of the soviet accomplishment in perfecting oxidizer rich engines as in the RD-180s. It took a lot of work finding materials that would stand up to high temp + high pressure oxygen and they deserve more praise than they got from the achievement.
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fuel costs are a small portion of launch costs.
Really? What is the expensive part then?
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fuel costs are a small portion of launch costs.
Really? What is the expensive part then?
Engine development/manufacture, mostly. The shuttle used 610 tons of oxygen and 100 tons of hydrogen which cost approximately $200,000 based on market prices. The cost of the solid rocket booster fuel is unknown, but one estimate is about $2,000,000. The cost to launch that bird was $450,000,000, so the fuel was half a percent of the launch costs.
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Even a small percentage increase in fuel efficiency results in a significant increase in the payload that can be boosted.
Which, as I said elsewhere, is irrelevant if that 'small percentage increase' doubles the cost of the engines. It's like putting a Lamborghini engine in a truck so you can pull more cargo.
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or some other boringly predictable rant.
Argh - I forgot that one. I do understand though, that the faith based physics rocket launchsite hereafter known as the "Palindrome" will be based at the Cliven Bundy Ranch.
It will consist of approximately 500 million Estes rockets inside a drainpipe all timed to go off at once. Coupled with a lot of prayer, this should go like gangbusters.
The first test pilot will be Mitt Romney's dog - the one that traveled on top of his station wagon.
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"Spaceflight" technology goes back to 1926.
And the 747 still burns kerosene. Progress in that respect has remained static since the first steam engine. However, think about the fact that man spent thousands of years on horseback, makes the present rate of progress look pretty good.
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Most new airline designs are slower than 1970s models (and that's not including Concorde and the Tu-144 either), for fuel efficiency reasons. They're much more reliable and safer, can carry more passengers and freight further per tonne of fuel, cheaper to operate and cycle gate-to-gate, cleaner, quieter etc. but not faster.
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"But those developments were still the result of commercial companies"
At least with respect to WWII, commercial companies produced the aircraft, but it was military and government leaders seeing a possible need for more advanced aircraft that lead to the advancements. With the possible exception of the B-17, industry was asked for the advancements, mainly to meet what the Germans ( and English ) were doing ( what the Japanese had managed came as a sharp surprise )
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Certainly not in Quebec, where he's going to get eaten for lunch.
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Define Heavy? (Score:3)
Mr. Mueller then later updated his numbers at a follow-on conference to portray 6,900 kN of sea-level thrust, and 8,200 kN of vacuum thrust.
That took me 20 seconds to find.
Come on, its Slashdot, at least give us some technical information to back up the story.
My money is on SpaceX (Score:2)
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NASA never had agility. Vision sure, but the entire institution was intentionally designed to be scattered and resistant to change. It's difficult to be institutionally agile when you're operations are spread out into as many political jurisdictions as possible.
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NASA went from the first suborbital manned flight to putting men on the freaking Moon in eight years. They were pretty agile back then.
Now they're spending longer than that just building a rocket that largely uses existing hardware, and has no funded missions that would require it.
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Talent isn't leaving NASA for SpaceX. The talent is never getting to NASA in the first place. A number of high-profile candidates courted by NASA have declined job offers in favor of positions in private space flight companies.
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They have the vision and agility that NASA lost in the sixties.
I get smacked down here for suggesting that NASA is no longer the best agency for moving the space program forward. SpaceX soft-landed two boosters in the ocean and are ready for a land trial. They did that in their spare time. It would have taken NASA 10 years and $20 billion dollars to replicate that achievement. NASA also relies on contractors with obscene overhead rates.
SpaceX is living proof that NASA wastes billions.
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In October 2003! Do you still believe that SpaceX is really that "fast" and "agile"?
They have demonstrated they are by developing two launch vehicles and several rocket engines in that period of time - for about a tenth the estimated NASA pricing of the task in question.
And I find it odd how you can't figure out that your quote is completely irrelevant to your implied assertion that SpaceX isn't "fast" or "agile". We would expect them to run tests. We would expect some of their tests to fail. This sort of thing is independent of how fast or "agile" they are.
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And then it took over 9 years of former NASA employes work to build a functional rocket.
No, it took 9 years from the end of 2003 to build two rocket vehicles and three rocket motors and conduct 9 launch attempts in that time - 5 of which were successful and 1 partially successful.
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You're replying to the Anti-SpaceX Nutter, who really appears to believe that every one of their launches was a failure. I'm guessing he thinks those satellites SpaceX launched are just faked in the Arizona desert.
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They have had a string of failures.
Yes, they've consistently delivered their primary payload, and even the secondary payload would have been delivered to the correct orbit if NASA had let them.
But that's clearly a string of failures in Anti-SpaceX Nutter World.
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NASA has a much longer list of failures if you're including test rockets and launch delays.
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Yes. Aside from delivering all their primary payloads, and only being unable to deliver one secondary payload because NASA said they weren't allowed to, SpaceX has been a complete failure!
This is the Congressinal Rocket not NASA. (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA never wanted to build this rocket. It was forces in them from Congress. Plus NASA doesn't build rockets it overseas other aerospace contractors.
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Probably not, if the pictures of Pluto returned back by the New Horizons mission are still fresh on people's minds.
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Re:This is the Congressinal Rocket not NASA. (Score:4, Informative)
And in it's place we got the commercial cargo and commercial crew programs, which have been highly successful so far. So much so that NASA is now looking to duplicate the process in other endeavors: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1407/27marstelecom/#.VANoxEi0b0c
Meanwhile the Orion capsule, which was the part of the constellation project that actually put humans on top of those rockets to get them into space, was kept. It's still over budget, under speced and years off from putting anyone in space.
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Why does it take so long? (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean seriously, look at the SLS, it's almost entirely composed of re-used space shuttle parts. It has the main engines on the bottom of the tank re-purposed from the shuttle. it has solid rocket boosters which already exist from the shuttle -- it entirely looks like it could be cobbled together in a few month's time because it uses almost entirely existing components.
So what exactly requires so many years to make it al work when it's all basically existing tech from the shuttle? I hate to say this, but this ain't rocket science.
Re:Why does it take so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike in Kerbal Space Program, when you stack rocket components on top of each other you have to reengineer the bottom one to hold up the top one; they say that they're reusing the main tank, but that might be true in a narrow sense if they reuse the H2 tank inside the orange Space Shuttle External Tank. Then you have to engineer the manufacturing processes and factories for producing any new components (and there will be lots of those), plus the modified one (easier, but still plenty to go around), plus you have to engineer the test facilities for all the components, and you have to test the test facilities, and then test the components, and then test-launch the vehicle, etc. Don't forget to document everything, and to design training procedures so that you can hire new people to build these things, and test them, etc, etc. It actually is rocket science.
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Market size.
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Re:Why does it take so long? (Score:5, Informative)
For the most part it's a difference in magnitude. The speeds the rockets achieve are much higher than any airplane, let alone car, ever manages. The thrust of the engines is stupendous, the liquid H2 and O2 fuels are cryogenic, the flame temperatures in the engine are extreme. In fact, they're so extreme that the engines use precise control over the flow fuel and oxidizer entering the engine to create a layer of cooler gasses around the inside of the engine nozzle, so that it doesn't melt or ablate entirely away. Everything has to work in vacuum and at ambient air pressure and at max Q during flight.
All of this and more adds up to a much harder design problem, much more stringent test requirements, much tighter manufacturing tolerances, etc. The principle is the same, however; any change to one component of a system may require changes to every other component.
The one thing that all forms of engineering from (whether software, civil, aerospace, or other) have in common is the management of complexity. The automotive engineer designs the engine mounts in your car to accept a wide range of engines, so that they can manufacture several variants of the same car with different engines without having to redesign every component. Similarly, SpaceX has greatly reduced their cost and risk by reducing the complexity of their rockets; one way they did this was to use the same engine for both the first and second stages of their rockets (the first stage simply uses more of them). Another way was to avoid cryogenic fuels; they have a lower specific impulse (fuel efficiency), but a much greater space efficiency (liquid H2 is very light; that orange tank is huge, and 80% of it is for the H2 tank) plus you avoid having to deal with cryogenic fuels, and the complicated materials engineering that goes into designing the tanks to hold them.
If you want to know more, MIT has some great lectures on the subject, even ones suitable for non-engineers. A good one is An Electrical Engineering View of a Mechanical Watch . The description of this lecture only touches on superficial matters; Sussman's real point is that the means of abstraction present in an engineered system can be applied to any other engineered system, and that it's only by designing the right abstractions that engineers make continual progress in designing newer and better systems. He states this directly in the first two minutes, which is quite handy. You might also check out the video lectures for the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs , the first lecture of which goes into much the same topics in the realm of software engineering.
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I got distracted and broke my links. An Electrical Engineering View of a Mechanical Watch is at http://video.mit.edu/watch/an-... [mit.edu], and the SICP lectures are at http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/ele... [mit.edu]
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That was not fair! I should have been done with my five-minute /. break an hour ago!
In other words, thank you for the Mechanical Watch link. That professor is amazing.
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Yes, he is amazing. He gives half of those SICP lectures as well, trading off with Hal Abelson, another great engineer and lecturer.
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It's almost like this is "rocket science" or something...
Re: Why does it take so long? (Score:5, Interesting)
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So what exactly requires so many years to make it al work
It takes as long as it does, because that is the amount of time (or money: same principle applies) than is allotted to the project. Finishing sooner makes no sense as you'd just be working yourself out of a job earlier. There is also no pressing need to have such a vehicle. It's not as if there was a killer asteroid heading this way that would spell doom - and worse: upset NASA's carefully crafted timetables.
In that situation, where there was a deadline to be met (and not a vacuous political one), then ye
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Because the primary contractor's business is cobbling stuff together designed and built by others.
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Remember, this is the organization that needed half a billion dollars to put a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launch it into the ocean. There was a very brief period when NASA did cheap unmanned missions under the 'cheaper, faster, better' slogan, but that was long ago now.
No Competition Here! (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason SLS exists is to keep the congresscritters from the former shuttle supply chain districts happy. That's it. NASA is desperately trying to keep funding going, and they ain't interested in pissing that money away on designing big dumb rockets, but politics says that they must to survive. Rockets are rapidly becoming a commercial technology, which is a good thing.
NASA would be very happy to buy rockets from Elon Musk and/or whoever else can put up competing articles. NASA would much rather be doing and spending its hard-fought budget on things that they do well, pushing the envelope on technologies for hard problems, like getting our asses to Mars, and science missions.
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NASA would much rather be doing and spending its hard-fought budget on things that they do well, pushing the envelope on technologies for hard problems, like getting our asses to Mars,/quote Elon Musk may very well beat NASA at that, too
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Nasaspaceflight.com (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Delay is good. congress operating as designed. (Score:4, Insightful)
'One spectacular explosion' - One explosion would be 92% reliability. (one failure in 12 launches)
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The shuttle had several very near accidents in its run.
NASAs current criteria for man-rating would - for astronauts that fly six times a year be safer at work than:
A) Deep sea fishermen
B) Lumberjacks
C) Librarians.
Hint: It's not the first two.
(actual figures from US statistics).
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A rocket is a mass driver, and all of the "scifi" types of propulsion break the laws of physics one way or another. Space elevators would be pretty nice, but we still haven't found a material strong enough. Carbon nanotubes are the current hope, but we can't make them long enough yet; they'd have to be very long indeed to make a strong enough elevator. Short nanotubes have to be glued together and then you're down to the strength of the glue.
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Space elevators would be pretty nice, but we still haven't found a material strong enough
That is only true for Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's 1895 space elevator design, which is seriously out of date. A segmented elevator is perfectly feasible with current carbon fiber. This uses a small one in low orbit, and another small one in GEO. You use orbit mechanics to transfer from one to the other. The combined cable length is 50 times less than the original version. That makes it more economical, less exposed to impact damage, and able to be built incrementally.
Unfortunately, the only pictures you s
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