That was my understanding as well. A conventional multi stage medium rocket, like a Falcon 9, uses a stage 1 booster to get the much smaller stage 2 and payload up to nearly orbital height/speed and then the stage 2 does the rest. The stage 1 booster is the biggest and heaviest and most expensive bit because it has to do the lions share of the acceleration. The theory from spin launch is that this can take the place of the stage 1 booster.
Its an interesting technology but seems pretty awkward to me, with complicated release mechanism and highest speed at the worst time, when air is thickest. Guess weâll see how it goes.
My idea if I were CEO would be to bring back aircraft launch. The US has hundreds of aging but still flying f-16s and f-18s with pre-designed high reliability release mechanisms, and no issue going near vertical at 50,000 feet and mach 1.x. This system would be practically free, could probably find retired maintenance teams willing to work on it for reasonable salaries.
Iâm not enough of an engineer to comment on the practicalities there, but havenât various groups been trying that for like 20 years? Iâd have to imagine if it was that easy and a truly superior technique that someone would have at least provided a good proof of concept showing it was cheaper/easier.
Maybe true, but Virgin galactic is doing it with huge rockets and the US Navy did it I think in the 90âs. So I think one point here is for smaller satellites being more in demand these days.
That said, Iâve just doubled my total research into it to find this cool picture!
Matt_W
5620
Pegasus is still plane launched I believe.
Romalar
5621
Pegasus is plane launched, but itâs basically dead in the market now. Not long ago they even lost out on a small payload (NASAâs IXPE) to SpaceX when Pegasus was suited to the orbit and the Falcon 9 wasnât. They just didnât have their act together to meet the schedule and are so expensive that SpaceX could unusually use up most of the Falconâs capability lowering the launch inclination at similar cost. Nothing is scheduled to launch on the remaining Pegasus rockets yet.
The current truly operational plane launched orbital rocket company is Virgin Orbit with the LauncherOne using a modified 747 as the first stage (this is not suborbital space tourism like Virgin Galactic, itâs kind of a sister company). From what I can tell, they charge 30% of the Pegasus-XL for roughly similar capabilities, though LauncherOne has a short flight history. Their next launch is supposed to inaugurate expanding into launching from the UK in a month or so when the launch license finalizes.
Thereâs also Stratolaunch, but they kind of got bought up and changed into plane launched hypersonic testing instead of orbital launches. Not sure that there are any others anywhere near launch, a bunch of attempts seem to have died in development or are not at all realistic.
CraigM
5623
If you have a telescope, there are still great views to be had of Jupiter. I have been out the last few nights learning how to leverage the equatorial mount.
Man is it incredible to watch the storm bands of Jupiter.
Best $30 telescope buy ever :)
Nice setup. Iâve been enjoying Jupiter views as well - the moons are visible even in my 10x50 binoculars. It wonât be this close again for another 106 years, a fun thing to contemplate. I âindependentlyâ discovered that Jupiterâs moons orbit quickly when I got my telescope last year. I was floored as my only context was the relatively stable moon, and if I had read about the orbit time earlier, it hadnât sunk in that they change positions visibly in an hour.
Another fun mental exercise is viewing the ecliptic. You can draw a line that goes through Jupiter and Saturn, which is up to the right of Jupiter in the evening, also close enough for good views right now. Once pictured you can âseeâ the solar system and recognize that all the planets are close to that line, which arcs around to the right and sets in the northwest. Plus a bit of knowledge of the Milky Way, which currently sets in the evening to the west, at about 90 degrees or up/down orientation, and you can visualize how the angle of the solar system is way off of the plane of the Milky Way. There is no up and down in space.
I bought SkySafari Plus which is one of the better apps for astronomy and visualizing. It has a graph function that helps you pick viewing times.
A couple more weeks when the moon moves out of the way, annoyingly bright right now, and I plan to get up early to see Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn all in a line.
Sorry to geek out in this threadâŚ
CraigM
5625
Last night on top of my regular Jupiter and Saturn viewing, was also my first actual spotting of Neptune.
It was incredibly hard to spot, being dimmer than expected. Its supposedly magnitude 8 but really doesnât seem like it.
I really want to take this somewhere with a little more darkness soon. As great as the views were, you can see the very real presence of street lights at my observatory :)
Nice! I find Neptune is hard to find without the Starsense app, as itâs not visible to the naked eye and not very close to a bright star, at least from a quick look at the Skysafari app, you might tell me otherwise. I had a look on Friday but couldnât find it. I too need to find time for a trip to my viewing spot before it gets too cold.
I did buy another eyepiece, my last for awhile. An SVBony 25mm, which is lower-end but will easily outperform my factory-supplied version. I now have a high quality 7mm, 15mm, and 25mm, plus a good barlow, so am set for awhile.
antlers
5627
Yes, I think the problem with airplane launch is it doesnât scale to larger vehicles. An F15 can hoist a smart-rock antii-satellite weapon, but what sort of aircraft would you need to lift something the size of the Falcon 9 second stage to the height and velocity that its first stage does? And the Falcon 9 first stages are proving to be nearly as reusable as as an aircraft.
Not really, certainly not yet anyway. Last I checked it takes weeks (and a lot of money) to turn around a booster, whereas a plane could presumably turn around in hours or at most days. Not sure what Virgin are saying their turnaround time is theoretically, though in practice I doubt theyâd have anywhere near enough launches to max it out for the forseeable future.
This is mind boggling. The most powerful gamma ray burst detected. 2 billion years old and it still fucked with the ionosphere.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221014-astronomers-are-captivated-by-brightest-flash-ever-seen
The full size image is 152MB of glory
This is the kind of thing I wish they did a lot more of. Help out some context to the scale of what weâre seeing
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/ygq9yq/pillars_of_creation_scale/
Awesome link, @Woolen_Horde!
For those too lazy to click:
