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China has big plans for its massive new rocket
Researchers are developing a rocket that would be more powerful than any U.S. spacecraft, Chinese state media reported Monday. Phys.org reports that the Long March-9 rocket, set to be complete by 2030, would be capable of delivering 140 tons into low orbit.
NASA's upcoming Space Launch System, meanwhile, aims to deliver 130 tons, and the Falcon Heavy from SpaceX launched 64 tons toward Mars earlier this year. China is reportedly hoping to surpass its American and European competitors, planning to spend billions of dollars developing its space programs.
Full reusability for the Long March-9 is not mentioned.
As a point of comparison, the Saturn V rocket:
The Saturn V was launched 13 times from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with no loss of crew or payload. As of 2018, the Saturn V remains the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful (highest total impulse) rocket ever brought to operational status, and holds records for the heaviest payload launched and largest payload capacity to low Earth orbit (LEO) of 140,000 kg (310,000 lb), which included the third stage and unburned propellant needed to send the Apollo Command/Service Module and Lunar Module to the Moon.[5][6]
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:25AM (5 children)
Probably not. Its a delicate balance of cost/risk/reward. Some time we are bound to reach a point where its just too dangerous or expensive ti keep build bigger. Don't know when that might be.
Its pointless to make faster and faster processors when you can achieve the same thing with more and more of them instead.
Its pointless to make bigger and bigger railroad engines when you can just lash 5 or 10 of them together and pull a 16,000 double stacked train at 90mph across the entire country.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:35AM (4 children)
Well, sure, there is some upper limit, beyond which a bigger rocket will make little sense. But, space flight is in it's infancy, so we have little idea what that limit might be.
And, rockets are really all we have, until we get anti-gravity working. A space elevator would make a nice interim solution, while we wait for anti-grav. But, even with the elevator in place, we'll still have to depend on rockets to move around.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:38AM (3 children)
Since we have zero reason to believe antigrav is possible, I'm not pinning too many hopes on it.
Meanwhile, the traditional space elevator is fraught with difficulties, not least of which at a minimum length (for Earth) of ~36,000km it would be by far the largest engineering project ever attempted. And the fact that even flawless carbon nanotubes are an order of magnitude too weak to support their own weight with even normal safety margins doesn't help.
However, there are several other options that actually offer greater long-term potential as well. For example spinning tether/pinwheel skyhooks act as highly efficient angular momentum-batteries, allowing the momentum of a landing spacecraft to be transferred to a launching spacecraft at some later time, as well as being able to "charge up" using highly efficient but low-thrust ion drives, or even geomagnetic drives and then rapidly transfer that momentum to a payload under very and moderate and smooth acceleration. They do require that you navigate the atmosphere on your own, but that's only 10% of the journey to orbit, and means they could enable far less extreme versions of other launch technologies such as airship-to-orbit, pneumatic or lighter-than-air super-towers, spaceplanes, or launch loops (active maglev rails whose internal momentum lifts them above the atmosphere).
And of course, once you're in orbit and no longer have to fight against gravity and friction losses, ion drives blow traditional rockets out of the water. But we're not going to really see them deployed until we reach the point that it makes sense to build spaceships that will never land on a planet(oid).
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:45AM (2 children)
Don't forget runway to orbit.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:22AM (1 child)
Naah, Runaway won't get into orbit ever.
Oh, wait...
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:27AM
I dunno. Sometimes he seems a bit spaced out.