Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (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. :)