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Souped-up sounding rocket lifts off from Japan with tiny satellite
A modified sounding rocket originally designed to loft science instruments on high-altitude suborbital arcs blasted off Saturday from the Uchinoura Space Center in southern Japan and soared into orbit to become the world's smallest satellite launcher.
[...] Standing just 31 feet (9.5 meters) tall and spanning around 20 inches (52 centimeters) in diameter, the SS-520-5 rocket was modest by launcher standards. With Saturday's successful flight, the solid-fueled booster became the smallest rocket to ever put an object in orbit around Earth.
A student-built shoebox-sized CubeSat named TRICOM 1R — weighing in at about 10 pounds (3 kilograms) — was mounted on top of the SS-520-5 rocket for liftoff from the Uchinoura Space Center in Japan's Kagoshima prefecture.
[...] The SS-520 is designed to propel more than 300 pounds (140 kilograms) of science research instrumentation to an altitude of nearly 500 miles (800 kilometers) for a few minutes of exposure to space before falling back to Earth. Engineers added a third stage on top of the basic SS-520 booster to give it the capability to reach orbital speeds of more than 17,000 mph (27,000 kilometers per hour).
Also at The Verge.
Related: Rocket Lab's Second "Electron" Rocket Launch Succeeds, Reaches Orbit
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday February 05 2018, @07:09AM (4 children)
- missile.
I don't recall what that kind of missile was but it had to be small enough to have fit under the deck of a ship while standing vertically.
The cover story was that the wayward satellite's hydrazine would be quite dangerously toxic should it survive reentry. I never believed that, not even a little bit.
Not long before that the PRC shot down one of its own satellites. Without a doubt the US shot down that satellite to convey a diplomatic message.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by aim on Monday February 05 2018, @09:04AM
You want to look up ASAT [wikipedia.org], and specifically the ASM-135 [wikipedia.org] missile. You were thinking of the RIM-161 [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Monday February 05 2018, @05:28PM
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 05 2018, @06:07PM
> Not long before that the PRC shot down one of its own satellites. Without a doubt the US shot down that satellite to convey a diplomatic message.
The rest of the world was very happy when the dick-measuring contest stopped after those two samples.
"Before you to the Moon and Mars" targets are a lot less disruptive to actually useful LEO sats.
(Score: 3, Informative) by darkfeline on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:12AM
Getting to "orbit" "height" is much easier than getting to orbit speed.
It's quite trivial to get something to "orbit" "height".
Obligatory xkcd What If? https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ [xkcd.com]
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 05 2018, @07:20AM (1 child)
Can I buy such a rocket from a toy store?
(actually I wonder what the cost for the launch may be? How does it compare with launching heaps of nanosats from a heavy rocket?)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @10:59AM
Nanosats... ouch... just the ticket for someone who wants to take out satellites... just steer a nanosat into its path.
(Score: 1) by mmlj4 on Monday February 05 2018, @12:39PM (1 child)
"A student-built shoebox-sized CubeSat named TRICOM 1R — weighing in at about 10 pounds (3 kilograms)". Apparently a Japanese kilogram is 3.3 pounds? Good to know. I wonder if I can figure out how to short-sell and make a bundle.
Need a Linux consultant [joeykelly.net] in New Orleans?
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday February 05 2018, @02:22PM
That conversion makes sense if the reporter (or whoever made the conversion) used a well-versed conversion system, a libra (lb) (the original pound) is about 329g which would make it (3 / 0.329) ~ 9.11 pound, and then add some agressive rounding away from zero...