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posted by martyb on Monday August 22 2016, @06:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-fast-cheap-pick-two dept.

The European Space Agency has about 2,000 staff and spends €365m a year on human spaceflight. Commercial spaceflight company SpaceX employs more than 4,000 staff and raised about $1bn in funding in January 2015. Common wisdom has it that this is the kind of organization, and money resources, you need to get humans into space.

Now a rag-tag team of about 50 volunteer physicists, engineers, mathematicians, software developers, sysadmins, pyrotechnicians and even a deep-sea rescue diver attempts to challenge that wisdom, by sending a manned capsule 100km above sea level, past the Karman line dividing Earth's atmosphere from outer space.

Their materials: anything they can salvage, off-the-shelf equipment, a 300 sq metre hangar at a closed shipyard near Copenhagen [Denmark] and a launchpad in the Baltic Sea. Their timeline: 5 to 10 years from now. Their budget: about €175,000 annually.

Rocket science is still rocket science, but since the golden age of spaceflight from 1950 to 1970, much of the theoretical basis has become public. There is still a long way from textbook to a flying rocket, but with enthusiasm, solid engineering skills and good craftsmanship, we make the impossible possible. (from their website)

Of course it is ridiculous to presume Copenhagen Suborbitals, the name of this collective, will ever succeed. When hell freezes over, turkey and apple pie will fly directly into my mouth, manna drops from heaven etcetera -- these guys are delusional.

Yet Copenhagen Suborbitals has already managed five rocket launches, more than a hundred engine tests and four versions of its space capsule since 2008. Maybe, just maybe, the right methodology matters more than the available budget. So, what if, against all the odds, this bunch of nerds manage to launch a human into space using open source software and off-the-shelf hardware, on a shoestring budget?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Monday August 22 2016, @08:57AM

    by ledow (5567) on Monday August 22 2016, @08:57AM (#391525) Homepage

    Whatever you do, however you do it, if you want something practical for anything other than pretty pictures, you need to approach or beat escape velocity.

    It doesn't matter if you slow-burn or fire-up, or do it in stages, or whatever.

    To get out of the Earth and do something interesting, you need to approach 25,000 mph.

    That's not going to happen cheaply. There's a reason a lot of the cost of spaceflight is nothing but fuel. And that fuel is exactly the problem because you end up having to move portions of that at 25,000 mph too.

    Spaceflight, in basic principle, is incredibly low tech. Get to that speed, aim upwards and you're free to get to any planet you like. It's getting there reliably, safely, with useful payload and getting back that are the really hard parts (hence the reason the Apollo missions were astounding and yet-to-be-repeated 50 years on).

    You don't want to be doing 25,000 mph on a budget. Certainly not one that could barely build a handful of 100mph cars from basic principles. Formula One teams spend orders of magnitude more than that to get a couple of hundred mile an hour around a flat track. Airplanes and helicopters can cost that - and more - for even the basic training models that can do a few hundred miles per hour. And you're talking about a useful payload at 100 times those kinds of speeds for the same price?

    You're firing rockets, the likes of which are fired once a week or more, every week, to put stuff into space. They're suborbital, so they're not actually getting anywhere. These rockets aren't cheap but they aren't prohibitive either. But equating that with manned missions, sending people into proper space (not just some technical sub-orbital definition of it, where they can flounce about, take a photo and then end up coming back to earth almost immediately) and the future of spaceflight? That's a nonsense.

    Remember the guy who freefalled from over 40km as a private spaceflight? These people's kit barely gets 8km. They are 5 times under what people are doing for shits-and-giggles to jump out of in order to freefall back to Earth with a parachute.

    Much as I love independent enterprise and amazing cost-saving by simple application of science, this isn't it. It's people firing bigger versions of amateur rockets.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by bradley13 on Monday August 22 2016, @09:49AM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Monday August 22 2016, @09:49AM (#391541) Homepage Journal

    There's a reason a lot of the cost of spaceflight is nothing but fuel.

    We all hear this, but it's not true. Remember that huge external fuel take on the space shuttle? Cost of all that fuel was around $500,000. The cost of a space shuttle launch, averaged over the life of the program, was $450 million. Fuel comes out to around 0.1%.

    A SpaceX launch is around $60 million, of which about $250,000 is fuel, or about 0.4%.

    tl;dr: Fuel is actually the smallest part; it's the rockets and the infrastructure that drive your costs.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @07:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @07:00PM (#391813)

      That $450 million is using NASA program accounting, which is ALWAYS suspect. If you take the total cost of the program and divide by the number of launches, you get about $1.6B per launch.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 27 2016, @12:23AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 27 2016, @12:23AM (#393769)

        Why is that? Do the program costs not consider labor operating costs?

    • (Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:31AM

      by ledow (5567) on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:31AM (#392034) Homepage

      "The Space Shuttle's large External Tank is loaded with more than 500,000 gallons of super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which are mixed and burned together to form the fuel for the orbiter's three main rocket engines."

      You're suggesting it costs less than a dollar a gallon for super-cold liquid oxygen + hydrogen? And that's just the external tank.

      "The two solid rocket boosters used roughly 500,000 kg (1.1 Mlb) of a 11-star perforated solid propellant cake of Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant (APCP - a mixture of of ammonium perchlorate, aluminium, iron oxide, PBAN or HTPB polymers, and an epoxy curing agent) each"

      EACH. And, again, you're suggesting less than half a dollar a kilo for that stuff.

      Your maths is out, even if it may not be the biggest single cost.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @11:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @11:31AM (#391567)

    You don't have to reach escape velocity to go somewhere interesting. You could fly "up" at 1 mph for a long time and end up outside our solar system.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 22 2016, @02:53PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday August 22 2016, @02:53PM (#391656) Journal

      If you do that, you do reach escape velocity.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 2) by gidds on Wednesday August 24 2016, @12:02PM

        by gidds (589) on Wednesday August 24 2016, @12:02PM (#392541)

        No you don't.

        (Well, not unless you continue with constant thrust, but that's not what we're talking about.)

        AIUI, 'escape velocity' is the vertical speed that a ballistic, unpowered vehicle would need to achieve, at the surface, in order to escape the gravity well.

        But if the vehicle is powered, it doesn't matter what it's velocity is at the surface; it can keep applying further thrust as needed.  As the earlier post said, it could continuously apply enough thrust to rise at 1mph, and still escape (though of course, the total thrust needed would be, erm, astronomical).

        --
        [sig redacted]
        • (Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday September 01 2016, @01:09AM

          by ledow (5567) on Thursday September 01 2016, @01:09AM (#395970) Homepage

          The acceleration towards Earth for all that time means you need to get out of there fast.

          Otherwise you are literally just throwing fuel away to stay where you are, and then throwing a bit more away to climb at a pathetic speed.

          It's LESS efficient to sit there thrusting up slowly for even minutes, let alone hours or days. You need to overcome 9.8m/s^2 of acceleration, which requires a constant force, plus whatever you want to do to escape.

          If your escape time is two-three minutes, that force only needs to be sustained for 2-3 minutes. If your escape time is 2-3 hours, you just increased your fuel costs by a factor of 60.

          There's a reason we just don't consider anything but escape velocity - it's the cheapest way out. Even though real shuttles are fighting gravity for a while, and all the time, and aren't "ballistic" (which is just dangerous and the forces involved liable to break everything), they make that part happen as quickly as they can, throwing away weight as they do so.

          It's like saying I can escape from a violent murderer by just outpacing him by a fraction of a mile-per-hour. Of course you can. It will just take so much longer, take so much more energy overall, and the slightest miscalculation, mistake, wind gust, or unplanned deviation and you're into instant catastrophe.

          You run for your life, ditching unnecessary payload as you go and don't stop until you've got to a safe place.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @08:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @08:23PM (#391865)

      You sound like somebody who has a lot of time on their hands. :)