/sci/ - Science & Math

I've been persuaded, I'm a hookfag now

I can't wait to read the fresh Musk Cultist cope for 2024. I just want you all to know, I hate you. Every last one of you rocket sucking faggots. You are what's wrong with space flight, you stupid small minded lemmings who follow idiot Elon Musk off a cliff building his retarded shiny cock rocket. Future generations will study you and your failings in school.

Elon Musk and all those who follow him are The Great Filter that will keep us from the stars. There is only one hope to escape The Gravity Well, math doesn't lie....but Elon Musk does nothing but lie. Let that sink in space losers.

CAPTCHA: g0ypmt

>>15452179
Just read this
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/wee2/docs/391Grant.pdf

There isn't anywhere near large enough traffic to orbit to justify such gigantic projects. And probably never will be.
But sperging is admittedly fun.

>>10334538
My money is on both rockets being severely damaged by the docking procedure. The delta V necessary to bring rocket A up to rocket B's speed is going to be somewhere on the order of km/s, which is on the order of the speed of sound in metals. In general, bad things tend to happen at ridiculously high strain rates on the order of or faster than the speed of sound in the materials being deformed. If you used a momentum exchange tether so that the docking is much more docile process, and the tether itself has sufficient mass, the tether ends up in a lower orbit. But tethers can be reboosted through interaction with earth's magnetic field, so it's all good

>>10315752
maybe gun launch, but it's not that practical.
https://www.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/TD/td2003/gilreath.pdf
More practical, but still semi-rocket based are momentum exchange tethers. A suborbital, and thus small rocket, can be accelerated to orbital speeds using a spinning tether. The tether is able to do this without propellant, by interacting with earth's magnetic field. We don't need any new materials to build momentum exchange tethers, but we need to understand the dynamics of tethers better. It is quite hard to deploy long tethers in space.
>>10315775
>>Orbital rings and launch loops
are memes. Launch loops are known to be unstable. Lofstrom's response to the stability issue is LOL COMPUTERS! He hasn't done any detailed studies to show that they can solve this problem. Orbital rings with tensions all around the earth are probably stable. For the time being, these are impractical. The stability of orbital rings with one or two jacob's ladders has not been analyzed well enough. I'm also calling bullshit on the superconducting magnets necessary to build orbital rings. I'm doubtful the critical current is high enough to support the mass of a fucking cruiseship
>>space elevators
one of the only reasons space elevators were seriously considered is that they may only require as much material as the golden gate bridge to be constructed. This isn't totally insane, unlike the amount of material that would be needed to make an orbital ring.

>>10221767
Momentum exchange tethers. They allow you to take even the shittiest of suborbital spacecraft and boost them into orbit without using any propellant(reboosting accomplished by interacting with earth's magnetic field)! We could get Virgin Galactic's shitty 'spaceship' to the goddamn moon!

>>8966451
Do you even know what a skyhook is? Or an orbital ring? Those two things don't even touch.

>>8557815

Space Elevators are simply too big and too complex.

Skyhooks are the future: instead of touching the ground, the end of a rotating 500km long tether occasionally enters the upper atmosphere (~50km) at designed times and locations, where a high flying spaceplane then matches velocity with the tether and hooks onto it. The skyhook then "flings" this spaceplane into a higher orbit (perhaps even escape velocity if long enough), and recovers from the orbital velocity loss of the "fling" by using high efficiency low thrust engines (ie. Ion drives) to correct itself back into its previous orbit.

All of this is possible with current materials science, and a few billion dollars of funding.

every action has an equal and opposite reaction, after so many launches, the launcher will change orbit. Also we don't have nukes that work in space.

But, we could build a momentum exchange tether with materials we have today.

We could even build one that could accelerate a suborbital spacecraft to orbital velocities.

If you make the tether electrodynamic, you can reboost it without using any fuel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_exchange_tether