The Department of the Air Force approves a new home in Florida for SpaceX's Starship.
See full article...
See full article...
Rocket Report: OpenAI’s launch overture; South Korea making progress in space
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
There's no reason for you to have heard about it yet. It's simply a plan made public to investors. They don't need any public participation any time in the near future.
As for power, it will almost certainly not pull its operational power directly from the grid. As such, it doesn't need a ton of power. It just needs to accumulate for a long while. It's entirely possible they'll set up on an island well away from shipping lanes and run their own generators.
Upvote
41
(41
/
0)
It appears to be a group of people with defense experience on interceptors. So I totally buy the hypersonic target sales pitch. Heck, that was always the most promising aspect for SpinLaunch in my opinion as well. The announcement of orbital aspirations is for ... reasons? I'm guessing it has something to do with funding availability to have dual-use technology development rather than military-only technology.
Upvote
31
(31
/
0)
Maybe Russia should call it the father of all bombs launched from the ground, that way people won't see it as a failure.;-)
Upvote
1
(4
/
-3)
Yes, cons never go out of style for long. As this, and the Altman ChatGTP pigs in space news item prove. I think it was Theodore Sturgeon, who in the 1930s wrote a "history" of the world where the nations of earth burned all of the remaining oil on earth doing flashy aerial displays--over Antarctica. I fear he overestimated our collective common sense.
Upvote
5
(11
/
-6)
That is a completely unrealistic proposal as long as we have AI companies and data centers buying them all up.
Upvote
2
(7
/
-5)
A possible reason Altman is looking to invest in a launch company is diversity for when the AI bubble bursts. I find that far more believable.
Upvote
24
(26
/
-2)
That’s not a Moonshot. This is a Moonshot.
And given which Moonshot is based on proven tech, I know which one I’d be betting on.
Upvote
3
(4
/
-1)
Well, it seems highly unlikely the ROS will ever even be built, even if Russia ever does launch another manned spacecraft.
Upvote
17
(17
/
0)
Upvote
9
(16
/
-7)
He'll just have "Roman" dropped to commemorate "a true Patriotic American Hero".
Upvote
-2
(6
/
-8)
Unless I'm mistaken they'll still have to launch an object with propulsion systems of some sort that can survive the launch to raise the perigee. A solid rocket motor could likely do the trick but either way it's not quite as simple as just firing a pod full of cargo into orbit. Alternately they could have assets in orbit to rendezvous with the cargo and tow it into orbit but that'd be pretty risky.
Upvote
22
(22
/
0)
That's true regardless of the acceleration method used to get fast and high.
Solids may not necessarily be the answer, however. One has to worry about the grain cracking at high g loading. However, turbopumps have been demonstrated to operate after being subjected to thousands of g's (decades ago), so liquid rockets aren't out of the question.
Edit: One must have a burn to achieve a low (or even up to GEO) earth orbit. However, if you want to get in the neighborhood of the moon, you can potentially aim for a gravity assist from the moon such that your perigee is raised high enough. I'm not sure that there's a large market for payloads to be sent into what would amount to a lunar cycler orbit , I think.
Upvote
27
(27
/
0)
Upvote
13
(14
/
-1)
Upvote
23
(25
/
-2)
I find it interesting that even a heavy-duty ICBM only qualifies as a "small" rocket these days.
Upvote
22
(23
/
-1)
The Peacekeeper LGM-118 (former the 'MX') is only 88 tonnes. A Falcon 9 has a launch mass of 550 tonnes. The new Sentinels (LG-35) are only intended to be ~38 tonnes.
ICBMs aren't large. They're expensive enough as it is and you need lots of them.
Upvote
37
(37
/
0)
I've been dealing with fiber-optics too much - when I read that Moonshot's launcher would be powered by electromagnetism, my first thought was that they were using lasers (as in "electromagnetic radiation")
<<SIGH>>
<<SIGH>>
Upvote
4
(7
/
-3)
ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
And the mosquitos - which are basically bird equivalents.
But - there is the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak. Of course, that is set up for more typical rockets. There is a lot of stranded natural gas there and unless Trump actually manages to bulldoze a pipeline through half the state it is just going to get flared. So you could put up a NG turbine for power (if you wait a bit for the turbine).
The extant railroad system in Alaska tends to get wiped out by ground subsidence more than earthquakes and you could engineer around that. You don't have too many neighbors to worry about.
Compared to Israel it's a playground but otherwise doesn't make lots of sense.
Upvote
15
(16
/
-1)
Upvote
2
(4
/
-2)
The "rail system" in this case would have to be in a vacuum tube - at least to a partial vacuum. As such, I'm fairly certain the rails will be able to maintain straightness within the tube regardless of how the outside shell moves.
Upvote
11
(11
/
0)
This Week’s Additional Launches
(since orbital insertions don't end at launch; they're probably trying to get everything in place by the beginning of February)
Trying to clear the docket before the Lunar New Year EvacuationTM
(since orbital insertions don't end at launch; they're probably trying to get everything in place by the beginning of February)
Upvote
5
(6
/
-1)
Something the diameter of CERN would only require 500 g's of acceleration to release at 8 km/s. Of course, that's a bit expensive and probably way too fast for ground-level release.
Upvote
10
(10
/
0)
Why would Canada care? You'd launch north (or south) to polar or SSO orbits.
Upvote
25
(25
/
0)
Careful, your bias is showing; I'm a former resident myself, so I tend think that Alaska is only the bulk; I always tend to forget about the archipelago, and the state capital is located in the panhandle in Western Canada.
But my understanding is that some of the Aleutians are pretty tropical, and launching from that island chain would give some flexibility in direction (some of them are as far south as ~50 deg.)
No help for power availability or earthquakes (Pacific Rim, right?), but you don't need high power load, you just need high voltage, large capacitors, and time. Rail guns work on massive current and voltage, but its for a very short period of time.
Upvote
20
(20
/
0)
Of course...you re correct. Iran and the RF have a lot of missile co-operation.
Upvote
-2
(1
/
-3)
Which one? Frankly, I couldn't be bothered to look more into either company apart from the initial name confusion, so both could be equally bogus or not. Ta.
Upvote
-4
(1
/
-5)
That the ancient Sarmatians were Iranian peoples has nothing to do with the naming of the ICBM, and neither does any Iran‑RF relations today – it's just the usual Russian Empire cultural appropriation of any peoples historically living within its currently imagined borders (imagined since Sarmatians inhabited Ukraine as well). And they were perceived as war‑like nomads, hence probably the cultural appropriation of the ICBM's name.
To add insult to injury, the Russian Empire pretty much tried to genocide some of the Iranic peoples genetic descendants in the Caucasus, and actually utterly genocided other Iranian tribes still living within the Caucasus Imperial Russia in the 19th century (with a few remnants surviving in exodus in Turkey).
Russia is not a country – it's a cancerous genocidal empire – one of the only two or three remaining never having decolonised itself in the 20th century. Muscovites? The Moscow oblast? Now that could potentially count as a country. Even if the various "Kyivan Rus'" states they falsely claim heritage from were either Swedish or Ukrainian or both...
Upvote
34
(34
/
0)
I'm so glad that OpenAI isn't trying to take over Stoke Space! Sure, Stoke is going to need a heck of a lot of money to really deploy, but it should come from someone who knows something about the space business. Aiming for a market like orbital data centers just layers lots of technical difficulties on top of an already difficult problem of second stage reuse. Don't add more technical stress!
Upvote
4
(5
/
-1)
You may be correct about the various space gun attempts, but that is an unfair assessment of Orion, and in fact Orion development was shut down largely due to the nuclear non-proliferation treaties of the time.
No, Orion was an honest program by truly inspired engineers that could only work in an atmosphere of non-nuclear aggression, so so much for that.
Upvote
18
(18
/
0)
I think it's also important to look at how atomic devices were considered for all sorts of industries at the time. The actual Orion propulsion program was contemporaneous with those non-warfare investigations.
Upvote
30
(30
/
0)
Of course, research into shaping the energy output of a nuke into something other than a sphere did produce one weapon concept - the Casaba Howitzer
Upvote
15
(16
/
-1)
Aside from the Sarmatian connection, your initial guess is also semantically incongruous. The Russian term for king in chess, is korol' (король), not tsar (царь). Note also that while tsar starts with the letter ц (making the 'ts' sound), Sarmat starts with с (which sounds like 's') - so there isn't even much of a phonemic or syntactic similarity to begin with (the r in tsar is also softened, whereas the r in Sarmat is the normal hard r - these two sounds are quite distinct to the Russian ear.)
The "tsar" word is only ever used in reference to Russian kings in the past (as in over a century ago, and so is a bit archaic) or in fairy tales, and nowhere else - so mixing it with "mat" as in mate (chess meaning) makes no sense. By contrast, the word "korol'" is also used to refer to modern kings (e.g. the current king of UK), aside from the chess piece. There's is also no meaning for 'mat' in Russian, that has anything to do with death: its specific use in chess is imported without any further reinterpretation or elaboration, and is confined to chess only (though can be also applied to analogies or metaphors involving chess - but basically always has the meaning of, "game over; you lose".) But there's another meaning for "mat" in Russian, outside of chess: it denotes the act as well as the linguistic subset of cursing (as in, crass and foul language); but that's neither here nor there.
Last edited:
Upvote
27
(27
/
0)
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
Come for the rockets, stay for the Russian grammar lessons.
But seriously I appreciate posts like this. I like picking up new knowledge and it's fun when people share their expertise even if it's only tangentially related to rockets.
Upvote
41
(41
/
0)
I am unsure why modern Russia wants to be associated with the Swedish slave traders called the Rus, but there you go.
Though at the time there wasn't an Ukraine - it just means "borderlands". The Hebrews are just one of many peoples with a fictional national creation myth.
Upvote
-14
(4
/
-18)
LOL:
"The name comes from the casaba melon, a variety of honeydew, because the lab was "on a melon kick that year," naming various projects after melons and having already used up all the good ones."
Upvote
20
(21
/
-1)