121–130 of 136 posts
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I wanted to move to rural OR/WA a couple of years ago, but couldn't find a single property with high-speed internet. This is (hopefully) a game-changer.
You didn't look hard enough - for example big chunks of rural Okanogan county are covered by WISP services from a company called NCI. Same in many other areas.
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By "main booster" did you mean the big red thing? That was a fuel storage tank and yes, it was not re-used.
But it fed fuel to the 3 main engines on the orbiter, which were reused. The price of the tank should have been much lower than the engines.
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We lived for a year in some mountains in Mexico in an off-the-grid cabin. We became accustomed to everything (energy starvation, driving 30 mins to the nearest village, 2 hours to the nearest city, etc) except the lack of connectivity. I bought one of those huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away. It was empty after 2pm so we had 4Mbps just for ourselves all afternoo…
Where do you buy a WiFi antenna like that? Would you have any example links to what they're like?
https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Directional-Parabolic-Connect...
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I didn't know the space shuttle reused it's boosters. Apparently the two solid rocket boosters deployed parachutes after separation and were refurbished. Interesting! However the main booster could not be reused...
Unfortunately, refurbishing the solid boosters cost more than replacing them would have.
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Do you have any more details on the booster being refurbished having any impact on Challenger?
Search for "Shuttle Seal Erosion" A brief summary is here: https://books.google.ch/books?id=XsuqDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT56&lpg=PT... Edit: This one is better: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/17321/did-the-chal...
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SRB separation happened when the shuttle reached ~3,100 mph. The external tank was jettisoned at ~17,500 mph, more than 5 times the speed (or 25 times the kinetic energy that would need to be dissipated in the atmosphere to recover).
It's a serious pity they never boosted the external tanks into a safe orbit for future use as station modules.
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The main booster (all three of them) were attached to the orbiter and were re-used, though not without refurbishment. (Falcon 9 is also refurbished after each launch).
The shuttle had two boosters, not three. It also had an external tank that burned in the atmosphere. The boosters were technically reusable, but refurbishing them after the corrosive bath they've taken by their landing in the ocean was much more expensive than making new ones from scratch. You'll note that SpaceX lands their rockets on a barge, instead of landing them on water and fishing them out later - that's beca…
Also unlike the Space Shuttle, the 5 boosters did all the orbital boosting, Buran only had small orbital correction engines on board (like Shuttle OMS), all big engines were down on the boosters.
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Except for the fact that a Falcon 9 is a small fraction of the cost.
Only carries about 2/3 of the total shuttle payload to LEO when configured as reusable. Still puts it at 1/10th the cost of the shuttle tho.
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Except for the fact that a Falcon 9 is a small fraction of the cost.
Only carries about 2/3 of the total shuttle payload to LEO when configured as reusable. Still puts it at 1/10th the cost of the shuttle tho.
Total cost of Space Shuttle program (in 2000 cost mind you) was $200B for 134 launches, or $1.5B each.
And an expendable Falcon launch actually can put nearly as much payload into LEO by weight as the Shuttle, and costs around $45M (priced $63M).