Armadillo finally won L2 already.
Masten and Unreasonable are still flying for second place I think (I’m not 100% clear on the rules) today!
Spacetransportnews is the place to watch all this. (Or it has the links collected.)
It’s historical in a sense. These rockets will serve as the basis for reusable sounding rockets, possibly high altitude tourist [...]
Archive for the ‘Suborbital’ Category
Lunar Lander Challenge 2009
Posted in Architecture, Homebuilt, Lunar, Motivation, RLV:s, Suborbital, industry, tagged Armadillo, lunar lander challenge, Masten, rocket, Unreasonable on Wednesday 2009.09.16 | Leave a Comment »
Airline vs Spaceline Safety
Posted in Architecture, Homebuilt, RLV:s, Suborbital, Transportation, engines, industry, tagged Suborbital, XCOR, Lynx, Ethanol, Methane, Safety, Airline on Wednesday 2009.08.19 | 1 Comment »
62 mile club has a writeup of a beta “customer qualification program” for XCOR’s Lynx suborbital craft. This highlights the differences and current state of play. Rocketships will not be as safe as airliners in the near future, and they don’t need to be. There are millions of things that are less safe than airliners [...]
Hydrocarbon Scramjet Already Flown
Posted in NASA, RLV:s, Suborbital, airplane, engines, industry, tagged atk, hydrocarbon, hypersonic, scramjet on Tuesday 2009.08.11 | Leave a Comment »
By ATK in 2005. Shows how little I know.
EDIT: Spaceref had the details, Mach 5.5.
(Scramjets are still not a space application.)
Augustine Panel First Hearing
Posted in Architecture, Depot, Models, NASA, RLV:s, Science, Spacecraft, Suborbital on Wednesday 2009.06.17 | Leave a Comment »
Ongoing.
Norm Augustine
You can stream NASA TV with VLC, just paste this link into it:
http://www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows.asx
What NASA Should Do
Posted in Architecture, Depot, ISRU, NASA, RLV:s, Spacecraft, Suborbital, industry on Tuesday 2009.04.21 | Leave a Comment »
And partly what this blog is about (I realized in the middle that I’m typing like in a slide show, so I changed it into bullet points, as it’s an overview and not a deep text). I present my vision that should be aimed for:
What should NASA do?
In the near term, NASA should change to [...]
A Secret Finnish Rocketry Project – or Two!
Posted in Architecture, Demotivation, Humor, Motivation, Suborbital, Uncategorized, tagged Finnjet, Kuravesi, Silli on Wednesday 2009.04.01 | 1 Comment »
You read it first here!
In the sixties, with the cold war at its tightest and the threat of Soviet Union the greatest, Urho Kekkonen, then president of Finland, with inside info about the coming world politics problems, ordered a crash program of massive air defence developments. That included very long range very fast missiles. Since [...]
Optimum Rocket Cruise
Posted in Architecture, Demotivation, Humor, Motivation, RLV:s, Science, Spacecraft, Suborbital, Transportation, Uncategorized, tagged cruise, hypersonic, hypersonic cruise, rocket on Friday 2009.03.20 | 2 Comments »
With some caveats. Let’s assume a rocket is launched, and accelerates to constant speed v_c. Then it stays cruising at this speed and at a constant altitude. Landing is disregarded.
The cruise
We must modify the rocket equation slightly for the cruise: dm/dt is mass flow, v_ex is effective exhaust velocity, F [...]
Skylon
Posted in Architecture, ESA, Energy, Motivation, RLV:s, Science, Suborbital, Transportation, airplane, engines, industry, tagged liquid air, sabre, skylon, ssto, varvill on Tuesday 2009.03.03 | Leave a Comment »
Nice video explanation of the SABRE engine by Richard Varvill.
In a sense, it boils down to the problem of changing the hot fast low pressure intake air flow to a cold slow high pressure flow.
In the Sabre engine, techniques somewhat similar to liquid air plants are used: there is a compressor, that is coupled to [...]
Suborbital is Next to Useless for Point to Point Travel
Posted in Architecture, Demotivation, Models, Motivation, Science, Spacecraft, Suborbital, tagged ballistic, narrow surborbital ballistic corridor, point to point, Suborbital, transatlantic on Tuesday 2008.11.04 | 3 Comments »
Spacetransportnews has a link to another in the long list of nontechnical space dreams.
Earth’s radius is about 7000 km. The Van Allen belts start somewhat above 500 km from Earth’s surface. Hence, ballistic arcs have to be either very short or then very shallow. And shallow arcs mean high speed. Close to orbital. New York [...]
Congratulations to Paul Breed
Posted in Models, Motivation, RLV:s, Suborbital, Uncategorized, tagged hover, paul breed, unreasonable rocket on Monday 2008.09.22 | 1 Comment »
Unreasonable Rocket
