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Space Stations, Space Shuttles and Beyond - The Aerospace Discussion Thread
JoeCovenant:
Those who matter remember her...
(IE - Us geeks! :)
(And those of us born 4 days before she actually did it!) :)
Thomas-Covenant:
Has anyone here any further FACTS (not political screeds, not competition talkingdown points, nor hyperoptimistic featherheaded mouthings) about the proposed SpaceX "Lunar Dragon" flight or flights?
I'd like to get out of the bottom of this Well... but I'm too bloody old. Seeing Humanity get Up High and Out Far is about as much as I can ask for and hopefully see happen.
If some of the folks here might remember a TV show back in the late 70's called SALVAGE 1... I'd love to see someone getting up in the LEOs and start catching the junk up there for salvage
or just plain getting it out of the lanes. The movie GRAVITY, while not particularly my dose of diaminodiphenyl sulfone, has shown the atrocious result of cluttering up orbits and at orbital speeds. Kingman event, I think they call it. A cross between spheriical table no-gee billiards and running a minefield. Start shooting up spacecraft with large blocks of aerogel strapped to their front to start snagging the small stuff, and get VULTURE class craft up there to grab and tow the bigs, or even rework them in-situ. Sort of what SLS, did but a bit more vigorously.
Musk was talking about developing parts of Falcon Heavy to be self landing or at least retrievable. I wonder if he is gonna go sun-never-sets on SpaceX... Eastern tip of Brazil, Woomera, Heck, maybe even Galapagos. heck, it'd be stunning if he could manage coast to coast launches at the same time.
BenRG:
Fully reusability is critical for Musk's plans for Mars colonisation. The proposed Interplanetary Transport System would require perhaps six Saturn V-class launches just to ship propellent into orbit over less than a day for every primary launch to Mars. That is impossible with any conventional rocket design. The only option is to have rockets that go up, come back down again and can be turned around airliner-style in a matter of hours.
Akima:
I'd have thought that Woomera was too far south for a good launch site to LEO, assuming you wanted to launch or land in Australia. Admittedly China's Jiuquan (酒泉 pron: jio-chuen) launch facility, and Baikonur Cosmodrome are both further from the equator, but a commercial operator, unconstrained by political/nationalist considerations might want to consider one of the islands off the Cape York Peninsula, or somewhere on the north coast of Western Australia.
Torlek:
Woomera has been used as an orbital launch site before. Actually, if you're shooting for polar or sun-synchronous orbits (some of both of these tend to be retrograde), a higher latitude can be helpful. Any where in South or West Australia would be horrible for any low inclination, prograde orbits though. You'd absolutely want somewhere near Cape York for that (overflight of the Solomons and New Guinea would be a problem though, best bet would probably be somewhere around Cairns or Townsville and try to shoot the gap between the Solomons and Vanuatu). You can actually be a little lax with your latitude if your target is a Hohmann transfer trajectory (you can make up some inclination error in your Earth escape burn), but launching eastward near the equator is always the best option because of the free velocity boost. As for SpaceX setting up launch sites in other countries, that's probably going to be very difficult due to ITAR. I'm not sure if the rocket engines are subject to the technology transfer rules since they were developed in house (though a vengeful regulator may try to put them under MTCR rules) but I know that the heat shield material on Dragon capsules is absolutely covered and I think even the fairings may be covered (yes, ITAR is kinda stupid).
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