51–58 of 58 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tilting the rocket didn't work as intended though, so something did go seriously wrong.
The rocket started oscillating before. I believe it was pure coincidence that the launch termination system kicked in when they started the pitchover manoeuvre.
Is this rocket „dual use“?
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…
https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...
Snippet:
Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and WENA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up, when Uncle Milty warned, "Hold it- the acid valve is leaking!"
"Go ahead - fire anyway!" Paul ordered.
I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started backing gently away, like so many cats with wet feet.
Howard Streim opened his mouth to protest, but as he said later, "I saw that dog-eating grin on Doc's face and shut it again," and somebody pushed the button. There was a little flicker of yellow flame, and then a brilliant blue-white flash and an ear-splitting crack. The lid to the chamber went through the ceiling (we found it in the attic some weeks later), the viewports vanished, and some forty pounds of high-grade optical glass was reduced to a fine powder before I could blink.
I clasped both hands over my mouth and staggered out of the lab, lo collapse on the lawn and laugh myself sick, and Paul stalked out in a huff.
When I tottered weakly back into the lab some hours later I found that my gang had sawed out, carried away, and carefully lost, some four feet from the middle of the table on which the gadget had rested, so that Paul's STIDA could never, never, never be reassembled, in our lab.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.
I found it quite interesting. They are taking two very different approaches.
The first orbital launch attempt from continental Europe, and the first of Europe’s batch of newspace commercial launch startups. I hope they figure out what happened and iterate quickly!
I think that should be "first commercial orbital launch attempt from continental Europe". Commercial is required to exclude launches from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, orbital is required to exclude the Miura 1 attempt, Europe is required for obvious reasons & continental is required to exclude the LauncherOne attempt, and attempt is required for obvious reasons.
Also to exclude a few hundred launches from French Guiana, which is politically part of France and the EU (but certainly not geographically in Europe).
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.
If someone built a space port in the Canary Islands that would actually be at a similar latitude to Cape Canaveral, though the latitude of French Guiana is hard to beat (and the Canary Islands are technically part of Africa, not Europe).
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…
Also, I mean, Europe has SLBMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M51_(missile)
France never deployed land-based ICBMs, only IRBMs, though the M51 has ICBM-ish range.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone built a space port in the Canary Islands that would actually be at a similar latitude to Cape Canaveral, though the latitude of French Guiana is hard to beat (and the Canary Islands are technically part of Africa, not Europe).
Morocco might also not be very happy with this. Generally, your ideal site for equatorial launches has ~nothing to the east, for a long way. There's a reason that ESA uses the (on the face of it ridiculously inconvenient) French Guiana facility.