Falcon 1, The World's Lowest Cost Rocket to Orbit |
Falcon 1, The World's Lowest Cost Rocket to Orbit |
Nov 19 2005, 06:28 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3648 Joined: 1-October 05 From: Croatia Member No.: 523 |
I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but here goes:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=18353 http://www.spacex.com/ Looking forward to launch videos... -------------------- |
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Mar 28 2006, 01:35 PM
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14433 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
I believe earlier Ariane (Up to Ariane 4 even ) vehicles ued something similar - it looked like the thing was buckling in the middle. I'm assuming the earlier Ariane family was a derivative of the Diamant family.
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/launch...riane403950.jpg http://mek.kosmo.cz/nosice/esa/ariane/arv99.jpg Doug |
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Guest_Richard Trigaux_* |
Mar 28 2006, 06:01 PM
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#3
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Guests |
I'm assuming the earlier Ariane family was a derivative of the Diamant family. Doug There is something like that. Likely by the same teams. In between there was the Europa rocket project, but as far as I remember there was only one or few disastrous tests. Note that the emeraude launcher never made to orbit. It was rather a development model, or used for studying high atmosphere, or testing entry head (for nuclear missiles). That the falcon team tries to reach orbit from the first launch is just bypassing what took twenty years to develop for France. I f they success to the second test, or even the third, it would be a pretty nice achievement. Thanks to engineers, but thanks too to many technical progress such as computer which allow to put on a laptop what took a large control room thirty years ago. I hate to give the sour Bell any credit but I'm nearly going to have to go with Jeff on this one. I think its wrong to call Musk a space-fraud because he's the only good thing we got but the fact remians that he is attempting to sell a Falcon-9 but he has yet to get the Falcon-1 off the launch pad without blowing-up in a fireball. Even if this Falcon-I gets moving and launches a 800 kg payload he'll still be putting many tons less in LEO than Sputnik era R-7 in its config today. Keep in mind just because you put the word 'Private' in front of something doesn't mean it will work and sometimes you do need big-government for big space plans. A Russian communist government with a Soyuz type launcher set the mark back in the early days with launches of Sputnik and Gagarin. Russia leads the world in launches because they have rockets that began life over-sized, the Sputnik launcher was overkill but it was later adapted for manned Soyuz flights - the French/ESA Ariane is another leader providing great GTO payload lift. I hope the Private boys keep trying to put payloads into Space but I think we've all seen this kind of story before, new folks come along and promise us the stars on a shoe string budget but I fear it ain't gonna happen. SpaceX has to start with a small rocket, to develop their flight capacity first. A failure with a small rocket costs much less, but learns as much. |
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