/sci/ - Science & Math

How do you guys think Starship OFT-1 will go?

>>15159079
Flyback boosters have a horribly mass penalty though. Something like 1/4th the booster mass is the rocket itself, compared to about 1/10 for a VTVL rocket stage.

>>14577892
Actually funny you being up the 70’s oil crisis. NASA was planning on building 60 12-kilometer wide solar power stations using gigantic fucking rockets. I am not kidding. This almost happened.

>In June 1975, NASA and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding calling for joint SPS research.
>ERDA began to plan an SPS study with NASA at the beginning of Federal Fiscal Year 1977 (October 1976), in the waning days of Gerald Ford's caretaker Presidency.
>Energy shortages coupled with the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident (March 1979), made the mid-to-late 1970s a fertile environment for alternative energy research
>If an SPS was to contribute a meaningful amount of electricity to the interlinked U.S. utility grids — and, by DOE's reckoning, "meaningful" meant gigawatts — then it would have to be colossal by normal aerospace engineering standards.
>The SPS would have measured 10.5 kilometers long by 5.2 kilometers wide and had a mass of 50,000 tons.

How would they build these beasts?

> The red, white, and blue "Space Freighter" pictured in the Boeing painting above (Image 2) was, as its name implies, meant to serve as the main cargo launcher for SPS construction.
> Fully reusable to cut costs, it would have comprised at launch an automated, delta-winged Booster with a piloted, delta-winged Orbiter on its nose.
> After separating from the Orbiter, the Booster would have either landed downrange (if it were launched from a site in California, Arizona, New Mexico, or western Texas) or would have deployed turbofan engines and flown back to its launch site.
>Its would have delivered up to 420 metric tons of cargo to a staging base in low-Earth orbit (LEO).
>For comparison, the largest single-launch U.S. Earth-orbital payload, the Skylab Orbital Workshop, weighed 77 metric tons.

>http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2016/12/energy-from-space-department-of.html?m=1