Subject:
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Re: NASA IS GOING BACK BABY
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.space
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Date:
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Thu, 8 Feb 2007 03:07:38 GMT
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Viewed:
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6276 times
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In lugnet.space, Mike Petrucelli wrote:
> > LEO orbital velocity = Mach 25 or so. Ouch.
>
> On the other hand "Space Ship One" already surpassed NASA in
> efficiency with the use of a "carrier plane" to get a much
> higher start.
Yep, but it came no where *near* orbital velocity - about a factor of 30 to low
in energy. I agree, it's a nice mechanism to get away from the atmosphere
problem, but so do balloons (for a far lower cost, actually). no offense to
Space Ship One, it's an amzing achivement... but it's not nearly a "spaceship"
as I usually think of them. "Encounter with Tiber" that I mentioned earlier has
a nice series of steps to get humans into space, that includes a much scaled up
version of the "piggyback" principle.
> Eventually I can see tethers being the preferred method
> of getting there but the inital construction would really
> be far easier to "drop" the tether down to earth.
That's the only way to do it (you can't build them from the bottom up - "space
elevators" hang down, they are never in compression). But it doesn't
neccessarily take a bunch of rocket launches... IMS, a couple of Titan-class
(and this is before the upgraded Titan triple-core launchers) would do it for
the intial (very thin) cable, at which point you do build them from the bottom
up by adding strands with "spiders" or other climbers.
> I prefer to see the station and the town/city, even though
> the scale would be completly off.
Well, you could always have a multi-part MOC: base (perhaps with mountain or Sea
Launch like facility), spider part way up, and station (with asteroidal
counterweight if you wanted to go that way). Displayed together, they would make
a nice themed display, even if not technically one MOC (due to scale issues).
Actually, just talking about how looong are realistic MOC-scale space elevator
would be would be educational in itself (including the weight in LEGO
required... I should run some numbers).
--
Brian Davis
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: NASA IS GOING BACK BABY
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| (...) On the other hand "Space Ship One" already surpassed NASA in efficiency with the use of a "carrier plane" to get a much higher start. Building a plane specifically designed for high altitude super sonic launching of "rocket ships" is one easy (...) (18 years ago, 7-Feb-07, to lugnet.space)
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