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Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

nasaspaceflight.com

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Re: Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

#41

Post by iSnow »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #36
perihelions wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your enemy is your employer and their launchpad infrastructure—yes! Less jokingly: liquid-fueled rockets aren't very practical weapons, especially ones with cryogenic fuels like liquid oxygen. I highly recommend Clark's Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants for a history of the space and missile races, as understood from the point-of-view of a propellant chemist who worked in them. There's an…

To be specific, the challenge with cryogenic fuels is that you can't really keep the rocket fueled up all the time, so you need to spend a bunch of time fueling up the rocket, reducing the responsiveness of the system. There were generations of hypergolic liquid fueled ICBMs. Those are typically pretty reasonably responsive (and reliable). Unfortunately the fuel is toxic as hell. Europe does have native solid booster…

The boosters of the Ariane 5 were also developed into the French M51 SLBM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M51_(missile)

Re: Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

#42

Post by senko »

jumploops wrote: post #25

As a software engineer, this might sound like a failure, but launching plus 30s of flight time means a lot of things went right. If you’re curious about commercial launch vehicles, there’s a decent documentary about the challenges these aerospace startups face called Wild Wild Space[0]. Just getting the thing off the ground is a huge milestone. I wish them the best in future launches. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w…

The book the show is based on / related to, When heavens went on sale (by Ashlee Vance) is well worth a read, as are Liftoff and Reentry (by Eric Berger).

Re: Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

#44

Post by 3ple_alpha »

Too bad all European spaceports seem to be so awkwardly placed for the purpose of spectating launches. Main one in one of the most remote areas of jungle in the world, there's one in Sweden (been focusing on suborbital launches) far to the north where only moose live, now this. Americans are really lucky in that regard.

Re: Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

#45

Post by panick21_ »

apples_oranges wrote: post #27

Is this rocket „dual use“?

All rockets are "dual use" in theory. Lots of the technology, such as guidance and so on, is the same. But this rocket is about as far on the 'launch sats to orbit' side as you can build a rocket.

Re: Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

#46

Post by panick21_ »

iSnow wrote: post #41
icegreentea2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be specific, the challenge with cryogenic fuels is that you can't really keep the rocket fueled up all the time, so you need to spend a bunch of time fueling up the rocket, reducing the responsiveness of the system. There were generations of hypergolic liquid fueled ICBMs. Those are typically pretty reasonably responsive (and reliable). Unfortunately the fuel is toxic as hell. Europe does have native solid booster…

The boosters of the Ariane 5 were also developed into the French M51 SLBM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M51_(missile)

With Ariane 6, they switched to Italian soilds. This was basically France buying of Italy so they would side with them to build Ariane 6, rather then Ariane 5 ME that Germany wanted.

Re: Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

#47

Post by panick21_ »

nw05678 wrote: post #10

I would love to invest in this.

Why? Rocket companies are a horrible investment and almost all of them fail. The small rocket market is tiny, and requires huge investment. Pretty much all companies have given up on that market completely and are moving to bigger rockets.

RocketLab is still flying electron, but they never produced much profit from it and are themselves moving to a bigger rocket.

Re: Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

#48

Post by panick21_ »

toni wrote: post #16
nw05678 wrote: post #10

I would love to invest in this.

Launching a rocket from Earth surface looks like such a complex challenge not completely solved, and companies consider a 30-seconds journey a great success. I have sincerely no intention to trivialize this, but would we ever see rockets launched from Moon or low Earth orbit? It seems so inefficient to launch like how we do now.

Why would we launch from the moon to LEO, we are building sats (and humans) on the earth?

Assuming you mean getting materials from the moon, such as ice, the problems is that it would take 100s of billion in investment on the moon to do that practically. Everything from mining robots, transport and launch infrastructure. Plus infrastructure in LEO to refine that stuff.

If you do the math, assuming you have something like Starship, for those 100 billion to pay for itself, you likely would require an absolute absurd amount of materials from the moon. And on earth we have all the materials, refining capabilities and so on. Far, far cheaper to just launch it from earth in its final required form.

Unless you really want to build a fleet of inter-generational spaceship to explore the outersolar system, this is unlikely going to be make sense.

If you really, really want to transport stuff from the moon to LEO (for some reason), as long as it is basically ice, then its better to use some kind of mass accelerator.

Re: Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

#49

Post by piker »

SR2Z wrote: post #33
pc86 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, it didn't fall into the ground, but into the water. Ah yes very important distinction this

I cannot tell if you're joking or not, but a rocket crashing into water vs on land is easily the difference between "no big deal" and "property damage + loss of life."

See also the V2 Rocket.

Re: Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

#50

Post by fifilura »

belter wrote: post #14
perihelions wrote: post #2

Launch video with timestamp, https://youtu.be/bykfQ3J4NNc?t=2049 edit: And different camera angles here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlAgenP2RxM https://tv.vg.no/nyheter/se-den-historiske-rakettoppskytning...

Gorgeous landscape.

Norway is like that.

Almost everywhere along the coast.

Just breathtaking.

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