Author Topic: SpaceX Announces World's Most Powerful Rocket  (Read 1781 times)

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Offline trapeze

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SpaceX Announces World's Most Powerful Rocket
« on: April 05, 2011, 11:55:54 AM »
LINK

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"This is a rocket of truly huge scale," Musk said at a press conference unveiling the rocket. "With Falcon Heavy, we'll be able to put well over 100,000 pounds into orbit," he said, and possibly as much as 120,000 pounds.

"That's more than a fully loaded Boeing 737 -- with passengers and fuel" and even luggage, Musk said.

The Falcon Heavy consists of a standard Falcon 9 rocket with two additional Falcon 9 first-stage rockets acting as liquid strap-on boosters. The upgraded Merlin engines that power the rocket will generate 3.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff -- the equivalent of 15 Boeing 747s, he said.
In a doomsday scenario, hippies will be among the first casualties. So not everything about doomsday will be bad.

Offline rickl

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Re: SpaceX Announces World's Most Powerful Rocket
« Reply #1 on: April 05, 2011, 07:51:26 PM »
Oops, trap, you beat me to it.

Discussion here, here, and here.

From the SpaceX website:
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VEHICLE   INCLINATION   ORBIT   PAYLOAD TO LEO
Falcon Heavy   28.5 degrees   200 km   53,000 kg
Space Shuttle   28.5 degrees   200 km   24,400 kg
Delta IV Heavy   28.5 degrees   407 km   22,980 kg
Titan IV-B   28.5 degrees   150 km x175 km   21,680 kg
Proton M   51.6 degrees   200 km   21,000 kg
Ariane 5 ES   51.6 degrees   407 km   20,000 kg
Atlas V 551   28.5 degrees   200 km   18,810 kg
Japan H2B   30.4 degrees   300 km   16,500 kg
China LM3B   28.5 degrees   200 km   11,200 kg
Table of the world’s heavy lift vehicles, based on historical launch data. Only the Saturn V moon rocket, last flown in 1973, delivered more payload to orbit than Falcon Heavy.
(The "table" functions don't seem to work, or at least I don't know how to work them.)

SpaceX video:
http://spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=59

Press conference:
http://www.visualwebcaster.com/VWP/SkinPlayer/Player.asp?e=78041&w=320&h=310&s=False&ch=False&sm=False&c=False&c1=False&mc=&qo=False&p=False&i=False&pp=False&cp=False&v=True&mc=False&a=True&sid=141443&aid=142817&pl=&pr=&hs=&u=0&pid=1&pt=2&pc=False&cuts=6&t=Spacex

(They don't seem to be on YouTube yet.)

Bottom line, Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket in the world today, and capable of launching a payload weight to orbit second only to the Saturn V.  (The Shuttle has a higher liftoff thrust, but much of the payload is the Shuttle itself which returns to Earth in two weeks rather than staying in orbit.)

There are also ideas floating around about Falcon XX.  If that's ever built, it will be larger than Saturn V.  But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
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Offline rickl

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Re: SpaceX Announces World's Most Powerful Rocket
« Reply #2 on: April 05, 2011, 08:04:55 PM »
Like I've said before, the Space Age is just starting to get interesting.   ;D
We are so far past and beyond the “long train of abuses and usurpations” that the Colonists and Founders experienced and which necessitated the Revolutionary War that they aren’t even visible in the rear-view mirror.
~ Ann Barnhardt

charlesoakwood

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Re: SpaceX Announces World's Most Powerful Rocket
« Reply #3 on: April 05, 2011, 08:27:14 PM »
Like I've said before, the Space Age is just starting to get interesting.   ;D

 ::thumbsup::


Offline trapeze

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Re: SpaceX Announces World's Most Powerful Rocket
« Reply #4 on: April 05, 2011, 09:28:47 PM »
It's too bad that private industry didn't get started earlier. Like twenty years earlier. We would already be on the moon to stay and be in the planning stages for the asteroid belt.

That's the potentially big payoff...a whole planet orbiting the sun, already busted up into chunks for exploration and mining. Send the best chunks into near Earth orbit (or drop them on the moon) for processing.

We are way overdue to colonize space, get our eggs into more than one basket before the next dinosaur killer arrives. Lots of problems to solve but it all starts with getting off this rock and out there.

The space shuttle was at least twenty years of stunted growth re: space exploration.

Need something better than rockets, though. Rockets are good for travel once in orbit. Need a cheaper way to get out of Earth's gravity well. I'm thinking rail gun. Run it up the side of a mountain and hook it up to a nuke. A big nuke.
In a doomsday scenario, hippies will be among the first casualties. So not everything about doomsday will be bad.

charlesoakwood

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Re: SpaceX Announces World's Most Powerful Rocket
« Reply #5 on: April 05, 2011, 11:21:21 PM »

Somewhere there is an image of the one he was building for Sadaam.
the barrel was too long to support itself an was lain on the side of a steep hill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull
Quote
In the fall of 1961 Bull visited Murphy and Trudeau at Aberdeen and was able to interest them in the idea using guns to loft missile components for re-entry research, a task that was otherwise very expensive and time-consuming aboard rockets. They arranged funding for the work under Project HARP (for High Altitude Research Program, not to be confused with HAARP). The US Navy supplied a surplus 16-inch battleship gun, and a contract from the Office of Naval Research paid for the gun to be re-bored into a 16.4-inch smooth bore. The entire contract, excluding shipping, was only $2,000.he performance of the gun was so great that the Highwater site was too small to support it.
.The Martlets evolved through this period, growing in size and sophistication. As Bull later put it:
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   Martlett 2A was the first high-altitude projectile. It weighted [sic] 225 pounds. The forebody carried electronics, the aftbody carried chemical payloads. It was five inches (127 mm) in diameter, and had a very heavy pusher plate. The actual all-up weight was around 400 to 450 pounds. Then what happened was the Martlet 2C. [It] was the big workhorse, still a five inch (127 mm). Then, towards the end, we came up with the 350 pound vehicle, the same thing, only seven inches in diameter.

The idea was to find out what happens in the atmosphere from sunset to sunrise. Remember, nobody gave us grants. We had to produce tropical atmospheric meteorological [data] for the army research office, that's how we got our money. We were trying to measure everything to the top of the atmosphere, which we labeled as a nominal two hundred kilometers.
The cost of a launch was about $5,000. We did up to eight a night. We used to do three nights in a row to try to get the data.
   ”
     
— Gerald Bull,
...
The Martlet-2 was only a stepping-stone on the way to Bull's real interest, a gun-launched rocket that could reach outer space. The gun had been thoroughly tested and was well past intercontinental ranges, but needed modifying. In the spring of 1963 HARP started experimenting with the Martlet-3, a 7-inch-diameter (177.8 mm) "full bore" projectile designed to test the basic problems of launching a solid-fuel artillery shell from guns.
...
a third double-length gun was built at the Yuma Proving Grounds to continue the high-altitude measurements. On November 18, 1966 this gun launched a Martlet-2 to 180 km, a world record that still stands today.[18]
...
Space X will be such a leap forward with such tremendous weight capacity couldn't they put the parts up and assemble them in space?  And the return fuel from Mars,  couldn't they drift a drone tanker on the return flight path for in flight refueling?


« Last Edit: April 16, 2011, 04:44:14 PM by Charles Oakwood »

Offline rickl

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Re: SpaceX Announces World's Most Powerful Rocket
« Reply #6 on: April 09, 2011, 08:53:28 PM »
Need something better than rockets, though. Rockets are good for travel once in orbit. Need a cheaper way to get out of Earth's gravity well. I'm thinking rail gun. Run it up the side of a mountain and hook it up to a nuke. A big nuke.

Guns will get mass to space all right, if you want to put an artillery shell or a block of lead into orbit.  But the huge g-forces would kill any human and destroy delicate satellites.

Chemical rockets are still the best way to get off the ground and into Earth orbit, but nuclear-powered spacecraft are a must for traveling in space.  The lack of development of those is probably where we've most stunted our progress.

You need to shield the crew from radiation, but there's no worry about what comes out of the nozzle.  Space is already full of radiation from that giant unshielded fusion reactor in the center of the solar system.
« Last Edit: April 09, 2011, 11:10:19 PM by rickl »
We are so far past and beyond the “long train of abuses and usurpations” that the Colonists and Founders experienced and which necessitated the Revolutionary War that they aren’t even visible in the rear-view mirror.
~ Ann Barnhardt

Offline Glock32

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Re: SpaceX Announces World's Most Powerful Rocket
« Reply #7 on: April 16, 2011, 04:16:24 PM »
Anytime you propose reaching for the stars, some liberals start whining about the "waste" of resources because somewhere there's inevitably a wino lying in his own vomit. The implication, of course, is that every mundane want, need, or manufactured inequity on terra firma should be nurtured with OPM before pursuing anything like the wonderment of technology.

Plus a lot of that whining is a smokescreen for the fact that they hate how space exploration underscores just how very unequal human societies are. Ours literally sends people to walk on the moon, whereas much of the world is virtually indistinguishable from how it was 1,000 years ago.
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