New answers tagged design-alternative
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As far as I know, there is no second stage that could reach orbit from a New Shepard, even disregarding the issue of size. It would need to very nearly be a SSTO. The Falcon 9 is well known for staging early, this being part of what makes it feasible to recover its booster, and for ASDS landings its booster is about 150 km downrange and moving at around 2 km/...
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I actually had that idea kicking around my head until I bothered to run the math. Materials tend to lose strength at higher temperatures to the point only a few material are even remotely useful above a few hundred C. So any energy gained from the hotter H2 would be lost by the much much thicker walls and therefore weight of the fuel tank walls. The concept ...
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You have a misconception here: "[...] the space elevator idea faces the challenge that, up to geostationary orbit height, the entire structure has to be supported from beneath [...]" This is wrong. You simply cannot support anything up to geostationary orbit, it's way too far out. Rock at the bottom of such a structure would behave more like a ...
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In addition to Mark Foskey's answer relating to the implausible strength required for this there are a number of other complications.
A traditional space elevator is placed in a circular orbit, the moon is not in a circular orbit so the system will need to change length by 42 800 km twice each month, which comes out to more than 100 kmh. Not something you do ...
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Consider, for comparison, the space elevator concept. It would extend from the surface of the Earth to a point past geostationary orbit, and weighted in such a way that geostationary orbit is where the center of mass is. This is actually conceptually very similar to your idea. For instance, it also is meant to benefit from descending loads balancing ...
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What you are describing are the header tanks, that were present in the SN8 vehicle and should be in all Starship vehicles going forward.
A header tank is a smaller tank, that holds fuel or oxidizer. The Starship's CH4 header tanks is roughly a sphere, buried in the middle of the common dome (divider between LOX tank at the bottom, and CH4 tank on the top), ...
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Apparently some people in Japan think so!
From today's BBC's Japan developing wooden satellites to cut space junk:
Sumitomo Forestry said it has started research on tree growth and the use of wood materials in space.
The partnership will begin experimenting with different types of wood in extreme environments on Earth.
and later
"We are very ...
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Consider: instead of carrying a third inert propellant mixed in with the oxidizer, you could just carry an excess of fuel. At this point, you're venting most of the gas generator exhaust as rocket exhaust and diverting some to pump the propellants: the system basically reduces to a combustion tap-off cycle engine running extremely fuel-rich.
At that point, ...
answered Dec 27 '20 at 21:21
Christopher James Huff
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