Space on the cheap

[Jay-qu]

Your 97 year old Grandmother wouldn't have thrown in the towel. And you accuse us of being thin skinned..............................Infy

Right you are there infy - it takes a bigger man to stay and face the truth, then to just walk away and ignore it!

[CraigD]

Space can be had on the cheap. How? Simple. Design a solid fuel disposable heavy lift earth to orbit booster. I would just enlarge the shuttles SRBs for the first stage, in a cluster, and use existing hardware for the second and third stage. All solid fuel….

Such a booster sounds a lot like the all-solid fuel M series of boosters Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has been flying for over a decade. It’s latest, the M-V, is not only the largest all-solid fuel rocket, but the most capable and reliable all-solid fuel system to date. It masses 140,000 kg, and can put 2,000 kg into low Earth orbit, about 1/10th the payload of the US Space shuttle, or Titan-5 disposable rocket.

 

Although rockets like the M series show that solid fuel is a viable alternative to liquid fuel, I don’t believe it’s the panacea that Rsade suggests. Although, due to their simpler design and construction, solid fuel rockets are less expensive per unit of energy, they have about half the specific impulse (200 vs. 450 seconds, typically) – that is, twice the mass of solid fuel is needed to produce the same propulsive energy as a liquid fuel rocket. For this reason, designers have favored them as first stage or strap-on boosters only, using more efficient, more expensive liquid fuel rockets for the upper stages. Also, larger, more advanced solid fuel rockets require increasingly stringent manufacturing controls, increasing their cost.

 

:Exclamati Another often overlooked concern with solid fuels rockets is their environmental impact. Although nearly all use a fairly now-impact hydrocarbon fuels, most pure sold fuel rockets use Ammonium perchlorate as an oxidizer. At high altitudes, the chlorine in their exhaust has an ozone-depleting effect similar to the now greatly-reduced emission of Chlorofluorocarbons. Although the relatively infrequent launches of spacecraft like the M-5 appear to have little to no negative environmental impact, a substantial increase in the use of such systems might not.

[GAHD]

I agree, with enough bucks private space-flight is definatly possible. At least One is proven flyer.

 

My thoughts on the matter turn more towards viable methods of keeping astronaughts alive once they're up there. Oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen are the big things to worry about, with a renewable food source coming up close behind. Solar radiation poses a unique problem once you get your but up in space, even more unique once you leave the cosy space protected by earth's big magnet of a core. A lot of acceleration systems would be wasteful and by volume they would screw you over time, which again poses a unique problem once away from our lovely little planet. Some say there might be unique solutions to unique problems.

 

What about Hull breaches? How can we handle Explosive decompression well? Can we really hope to dodge everything of substantial size coming our way? Are there any hidden costs in solid boosters? I mean hell I don't like what we're putting into our air as-is.

[Tormod]

To administrator, please delete my account as soon as possible or point me in the right direction to do so. Any e mail from this forum will be considered Spam and be deleted unread.

 

Done.