Originally posted by One Bad Pig
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Largest Plane in the World - to launch Shuttle
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The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.
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Originally posted by Christianbookworm View PostI thought space shuttles had ridden planes only in movies. Did they actually do it before in real life?
shuttle.jpgThe first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.
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Originally posted by Leonhard View PostI'm not sure the point of that type of rocket launch is to take heavier loads. By the sounds of the actual amount of cargo going into low earth orbit might be little more than eight tons.
It seems the point of this launch system is that it would be weather independent and more flexible in terms of where you launch from.
What will truly bring prices down is the full and rapidly reuseable rocket concept that SpaceX is developing.The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.
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Originally posted by Leonhard View PostI'm not sure the point of that type of rocket launch is to take heavier loads. By the sounds of the actual amount of cargo going into low earth orbit might be little more than eight tons.
It reminds me of the old Air Force joke about an F-4 Phantom ---- "living proof that you put enough engine on something, you can make a brick fly!"The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.
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Originally posted by Cow Poke View PostLemme take another stab at this --- I'm not a rocket scientist, nor do I play one on Tweb but the real advantage is that, with a horizontal launch, you get the benefit of lift in addition to thrust. Meaning you need a lot less thrust to take off. With a vertical launch, you are relying solely on pure thrust. (The thrust-to-weight ratio of a shuttle is more than 3 times that of a fighter jet.)
It does get a significant boost from starting at 400mph, but on the other hand its a much smaller rocket than a typical Falcon 9. Big as that plane is going to be, the specs call for a rocket weighing no more than 500.000 pounds, and I'm guessing about 10-15.000 pounds will be cargo. That's roughly half that of the Falcon 9. So its definitely not for heavy cargo, though maybe the advantages will work out and it'll get closer to the 26.000 of the Falcon 9.
Its advantage definitely seems to be reliability and versatility. I've seen a lot of countdowns aborted due to weather conditions hours before launch. I don't have a real statistic but it seems to be 20% of them, and that's for those where the weather forecast had been relatively positive. Using this plane you can simple fly up to an altitude where the weather is always beautiful.
As for reusability, I really hope Rutans rocket here will get that. He's partnering up with SpaceX and Elon Musk, so it might just have that. Otherwise Elon's rockets will be a lot cheaper in the long run, and this concept won't be as important.
It reminds me of the old Air Force joke about an F-4 Phantom ---- "living proof that you put enough engine on something, you can make a brick fly!"
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Originally posted by Sparko View Postit says to launch satellites, not shuttles.Last edited by Cow Poke; 06-22-2016, 04:37 PM.The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.
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