Based China

[Anonymous No.9859129]

>more thrust than bfr
>larger payload fairing than bfr
>proven fuels: rp1 & hydrogen, rather than meme fart gas fuel
>efficient staged-combustion hydrogen engines (ORSC, never been done before with hydrogen)
>can launch humans to moon in one (1) launch rather than 11 launches for bfr
>parts commonality to reduce manufacturing costs by an order of magnitude
Are you afraid yet, America?

[Anonymous No.9859147]

>>9859129
It's China, so no.

[Anonymous No.9859154]

>design concept

[Anonymous No.9859158]

>>9859147
China invented rockets. Chinese rockets helped the Mongols conquer half the world's population IN THE MIDDLE AGES. China briefly had the world's most powerful rocket and soon they will reclaim that prize.

[Anonymous No.9859160]

>>9859158
t. chink

By the time this is out of the paper, BFR will be in its second or third revision. Good luck catching up.

[Anonymous No.9859163]

>>9859154
>design concept
>engines not even tested, compared to the Long CZ-9 engines which have been tested

[Anonymous No.9859164]

>>9859158
Congrats on potentially doing something the US 50 years ago?

[Anonymous No.9859167]

>>9859160
bfr is already running at peak performance whereas various upgrades to CZ-9 could easily push it into the 300-400 ton payload range

[Anonymous No.9859171]

>>9859129
>can launch humans to moon in one (1) launch rather than 11 launches for bfr
Surely you aren't comparing max BFR payload to and from lunar surface to a vehicle that can't even put a third of that in orbit around the moon, let alone land, let alone take off again.

[Anonymous No.9859173]

>>9859167
>already running at peak performance

Neither is running at all.

[Anonymous No.9859175]

>>9859171
bfr can't even do a Lunar flyby on empty tanks without refueling

[Anonymous No.9859177]

>when your communist shithole is given a run for its money by a guy who thinks he's iron man

[Anonymous No.9859179]

>>9859177
>$5 billion in US taxpayer dollars for SpaceX alone

[Anonymous No.9859188]

>>9859179
invoiced for services rendered. its called enterprise son.

[Anonymous No.9859189]

>>9859179
look mommy, I posted it again

[Anonymous No.9859215]

If it's not reusable then it's fucking garbage.

>Hydrogen fuel

Oh dear, they definitely won't be reusing that to any meaningful degree.

[Anonymous No.9859218]

>>9859215
>Hydrogen fuel
>Oh dear, they definitely won't be reusing that to any meaningful degree.
embarrassing

[Anonymous No.9859224]

>>9859158
>China invented rockets
They also invented getting conquered by the British due to being regressive retards.

[Anonymous No.9859294]

>>9859218
That's not a real rocket, it's a suborbital toy dildo whos same company is pursuing Methane fuel for their big rockets because it is the logical choice for reuse because Hydrogen embrittlement is a bitch.

[Anonymous No.9859455]

>>9859129
150t fully reusable to the lunar surface is not really comparable to 50t expendable to LTO.

[Anonymous No.9859521]

>>9859179
>if the government pays you to do something you're stealing money! >:(

[Anonymous No.9859548]

>>9859129
>staged combustion engines on an expendable vehicle

Why not just do a high pressure gas-generator engine, since you can achieve >430 Isp with a gas generator using hydrogen? Staged combustion only gets you up higher by about 20 Isp but with the drawback of much higher costs to manufacture. Since these engines will only ever operate in vacuum and in regimes without high gravity losses, actual thrust is not as important so that's the other main advantage of staged combustion out the window.

Furthermore, why the reduction in diameter between the first and second core stages? Keeping the diameter the same all the way up means you can get a better mass fraction on the second stage (making both propellant tanks more spherical) and use a much wider faring. The third stage should be put inside the payload faring and have its own tanks resized to be more spherical as well, and the dry mass further reduced via lighter construction enabled by not needing it to withstand aerodynamic forces.

[Anonymous No.9859557]

>>9859163
>>engines not even tested
keep telling yourself that buddy

[Anonymous No.9859562]

>>9859129
>expendable launchers

[Anonymous No.9859565]

>>9859557
>m... muh scale test article

[Anonymous No.9859571]

>>9859565
not scale, full size
test article of production model

[Anonymous No.9859573]

>>9859163
least they have tents

[Anonymous No.9859577]

>>9859571
I was making a joke. People criticize raptor because "it hasn't been tested full scale" as if anything will change. models aint a shit

[Anonymous No.9859579]

>>9859573

[Anonymous No.9859582]

China btw is also copying Musk’s Falcon too.

[Anonymous No.9859584]

>>9859577
it's hard to differentiate at this point

[Anonymous No.9859585]

>>9859582
they're also shooting themselves in the foot by making it much smaller and giving themselves much tighter margins for errors in structural mass and flight performance. Bigger is definitely better when it comes to reusable rockets.

[Anonymous No.9859587]

>>9859582
"China" ≠ a small Chinese space startup (LinkSpace). When CNSA starts showing renders of a big rocket with landing legs and waffle control surfaces then I'd admit that they might be a future completion. But a RocketLab killer isn't something to get excited over, imo

>>9859585
true, but their engine does have crazy-low throttleability. Under five percent!

[Anonymous No.9859590]

>>9859587
>Under five percent!
that's pretty extreme, though it probably really hurts their specific impulse as a consequence. Any time spent hovering at 5% throttle will probably chew through almost as much propellant as 50% throttle.

[Anonymous No.9859602]

[Anonymous No.9859604]

>>9859179
How many billions of taxpayer money have been given to roading contractors? Those fucking leaches.

[Anonymous No.9859607]

china is launching a lot this year.
China leads the U.S. 19 to 18 for launches. Their record is 20 in one year. And it's not even August.

[Anonymous No.9859609]

>>9859129
>Literally the SLS Block 2 Chinese edition
>expendable
>140 tons to LEO payload capacity, which is 10 tons less than a BFR doing RTLS
>First flight estimated for 2030

ONONONONONONONONO LOOK AT THIS COMMUNIST SCUM!

If this was just competing against the SLS, then maybe it would be a threat against American dominance; but unfortunately for the Chinese government it isn't.

[Anonymous No.9859610]

Reminder that China would really benefit from reusable boosters because they don't use coastal launch facilites and instead drop boosters over lightly populated areas and hope for the best.

[Anonymous No.9859611]

>>9859610
*hypergolic boosters
nasty stuff. But it's China, so they don't exactly care

[Anonymous No.9859619]

>>9859129
>parts commonality to reduce manufacturing costs by an order of magnitude.
CZ-9 has two fuels and three engine types, vs one fuel and one engine type for BFR. Does that make BFR an order of magnitude cheaper again?

[Anonymous No.9859620]

>>9859619
bfr has a vacuum-optimized raptor, but your point still stands

[Anonymous No.9859627]

>>9859619
Not to mention that the core, second/third stages, and boosters are all a different diameter.
>We will achieve commonality by making everything as different as possible!

[Anonymous No.9859635]

>>9859611
Sure, hypergolic makes it even worse but dropping even more and bigger stages isn't going to improve things.

[Anonymous No.9859685]

>>9859177
>china
>communist
pick one

[Anonymous No.9860012]

>a new expendable launch vehicle that will be in service in the 2030s
lmfao do they have a revolutionary new horse buggy too

[Anonymous No.9860019]

>>9859129
When that rocket fails to work, the astronauts will have a long march back from the launchpad.

[Anonymous No.9860035]

>>9859627
Expecting creativity from insect people...

>>9860019
ba da bish

[Anonymous No.9860318]

>>9859620
Yeah but all the actual hard stuff (pumps, combustion chamber injectors, hydraulics etc) stay the same. The only major differences between the vacuum optimized and sea level optimized engines are in the nozzles once you get past the converging part.

[Anonymous No.9860336]

>>9859609
>>Literally the SLS Block 2 Chinese edition
I won't lie, it's actually a better rocket than SLS. With some tweaking it'd shit all over SLS in performance.

SLS is a booster-sustainer design, which is what the very first orbital rocket ever launched (R7) used. In this design the core stage has a thrust to weight ratio much less than one on the pad, and can only lift off because of the extra thrust afforded by the boosters. This design is very old because when we were first figuring out how to make rockets we were not sure if in-flight engine ignition could possibly be reliable enough to work for launch vehicles, so the goal was to light every engine on the pad. This design has significant drawbacks compared to in-line staging, mainly the extra dry mass of the core stage since it needs to be strong enough to handle the lateral forces of the boosters, plus it's simply much bigger than a high performance upper stage would be. Also, it's impossible to have perfectly vacuum optimized core stage engines with this design setup, which further hurts performance.

SLS is only a booster-sustainer design because that's what Shuttle was, and Shuttle was a booster-sustainer because it was originally going to be a two-stage space plane but the first stage vehicle concept was scrapped because it'd be too expensive to develop. Instead the Shuttle got a huge external tank and a set of solid rockets to give it the thrust it needed to climb out of the lower atmosphere.

The Long March 9 rocket on the other hand operates much more like a Delta IV rocket, in that the vehicle can launch with a varying number of boosters or no boosters at all. This means LM-9 can be more flexible in terms of launch profiles, launching with just the core stage with smaller payloads and only needing all four boosters for the largest of payloads.

[Anonymous No.9860338]

>>9860012
>tfw not sure if you mean LM-9 or SLS

[Anonymous No.9860339]

>>9859163
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb2IEU1taFs
>Engine not tested

Full pressure version is now being assembled on theststand in texas while chinks will take next 12-15 years to get CZ-9 going.
By that time Bezos will provide Lunar Prime and will be finishing his O'Neill cylinder
>>9859548
GG is wasting few % of energy that propellant has that adds up to significant difference especially when someone has such shit structural mass as china

[Anonymous No.9860345]

>>9860339
At the rate they're going, Blue Origin will finish testing their first stage engine design in 12 years and start producing in 15.

[Anonymous No.9860368]

>>9860339
>GG is wasting few % of energy

I know, the thing is that with hydrogen that barely even matters because even a gas generator engine can achieve >430 Isp. In fact that number is higher if you fully optimize the engine for vacuum. The example I'm looking at, the Vulcain 2, can still fire at sea level meaning it isn't fully vacuum optimized yet gets 432 Isp in space. You could probably bump that to 440 for an upper stage GG.

By contrast on of the only staged combustion hydrogen engines to operate in vacuum, the RS-25, had a max of 452.3 Isp. It was also not fully vacuum optimized, so call it 460 Isp if it were. That's really only a difference of ~20 Isp, is it worth an engine that costs several times as much to develop and build?

Just look at SpaceX. It may be apples to oranges, but their Falcon 9 rocket uses a kerosene GG engine design on both stages yet directly competes with the Atlas V, which uses a staged combustion kerosene engine on the booster and an expander cycle hydrogen engine on the upper stage. That has a little to do with the low structural mass as you mention, but it is much more a result of SpaceX being able to simply build a bigger rocket and use more engines WITHOUT incurring massive added costs. Merlin 1D is a cheap engine to produce, which means even though Falcon 9 is a much bigger rocket that technically 'wastes' a lot of energy with its less efficient engines, it still costs less than even the cheapest Atlas V rocket configuration, which it also out performs easily.

The difference in design philosophy here is that SpaceX takes reducing component and overall costs more seriously than anyone else. For other companies, chasing a small performance increase for a large cost increase is deemed worth it, but for SpaceX the opposite is true. You may think 'but BFR will be so expensive to build and use such complicated engines!', however SpaceX would not touch BFR with a thousand foot pole if it weren't fully reusable and cheap to fly.

[Anonymous No.9860373]

>>9859129
>can launch humans to moon in one (1) launch
wow! can't wait to see them actually do it

[Anonymous No.9860377]

>>9860345
They seem to be making progress by firing it once a month at roughly 1% higher throttle every time.
I feel like they've become a little gun shy since their incident where they blew up the power head. I think they'd be better off building multiple engines and rotating them through testing while performing upgrades as they go. Once they've done all they can on one engine without requiring very large component overhauls, try to fire that engine at close to full thrust and see what happens. If it fails, oh well use more of your infinite money to fix the test stand (if it actually explodes again) and if not then hey you have good data now.

[Anonymous No.9860381]

>>9860373
lol
when that one launch costs 20x as much as a single round trip with BFR plus all the refueling flights combined, what's the point?

[Anonymous No.9860395]

>>9859129
>hydrogen

enjoy your embrittlement, boil-off, cryogenic temperatures, low density and low thrust

[Anonymous No.9860405]

>>9860395
literally the only good use for hydrogen fuel is for orbital transfer stages, it's shit for first stage launch and not that good for second stage orbital insertion. LM-9 would be better off using sub-chilled methane and oxygen (denser than kerosene-oxygen and more efficient) on the boosters, core stage, and second stage, and only use hydrogen on the third stage for sending payloads to the Moon.

[Anonymous No.9860441]

>>9860368
>difference of ~20 Isp
That is a colossal difference like between M1D and rd191 and in GG part of propellant provides 0 or nearly 0 thrust because it is not used in the nozzle

[Anonymous No.9860464]

not even mutt but literally anyone can brag and boast about shit without delivering anything
how's their space station going?

[Anonymous No.9860467]

>>9860464
deorbited

[Anonymous No.9860468]

>>9859685
is this the new level of shitposting here?

[Anonymous No.9860472]

>>9860464
they have enough space junk floating around that you could walk on it, that's kindof like a station

[Anonymous No.9860533]

>>9860441
>GG part of propellant provides 0 or nearly 0 thrust because it is not used in the nozzle
yeah that's where the ~20 Isp difference comes from dummy.

>that's a colossal difference
Not really, it's a difference of about 4.5%. It's a proportionally bigger difference for something less efficient, but by the time you're over the 420 Isp mark a difference of ten or twenty Isp here and there matters less. Of course being more efficient does provide better delta V, I'm not saying it doesn't, but my point is that using an engine that is ~5% more efficient but costs 500% as much is stupid because it's going to limit how often you can launch your rocket inside a given budget, and thus actually hurt payload mass delivery over time. Consider the SLS which will only be able to launch once per year maximum with a price tag of around a billion dollars, and is effectively useless despite its highly efficient engines because they can't afford to do any missions with it.

[Anonymous No.9860536]

>>9860533
(once per 18 months actually)

[Anonymous No.9860541]

I've seen enough rekt threads to know what happens when China has to actually engineer something.

[Anonymous No.9860557]

>>9860468
china is communist on paper only

[Anonymous No.9860563]

>>9860557
it is the new level of shitposting, isn't it
goddammit

[Anonymous No.9860565]

>>9859129
This is probably a stupid question, but where did you guys learn so much about rockets? What resources can I get to become knowledgeable on rockets and space industry?

[Anonymous No.9860566]

>>9860541
christ, moon face is real

[Anonymous No.9860577]

>>9860565
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com

This is where all the space autismos and industry insiders lurk, it's probably the only place on the western internet where you can talk to people who actually know a thing or two about rockets and space travel. Also, just watch some YouTube videos about Rocketry, I'd recommend Scott Manley for beginners.

[Anonymous No.9860579]

>>9860565
Any gas dynamics text will take you through the basics of nozzles and thrust. The rest is just being mechanically inclined

[Anonymous No.9860583]

>>9860565
youtube and wikipedia desu

[Anonymous No.9860585]

>>9860577
also try centauri dreams
unmannedspaceflight forum
extrasolar visions II forum

[Anonymous No.9860588]

>>9860577
read books

[Anonymous No.9860590]

>>9860577
Thanks friend. I'll start lurking nasaspaceflight and I just subscribed to Scott Manley. Since youtubers came up, I would recommend Isaac Arthur on Youtube. In-depth videos about futurist ideas that are at times a bit far-reaching, but they are well researched. Thanks again

[Anonymous No.9860594]

>>9860565
Literally read wikipedia articles about rocket technology and vehicles that have been either built and used or are conceptual. Build up a general knowledge base to the point that you are starting to ask more specific questions (like why is rocket efficiency measured in seconds of specific impulse) and then actively seek out answers for those questions. Eventually once you have an understanding of all the engineering basics you will start to figure out the economic side of things, where more efficient doesn't always equal better for example, and things are generally more hand-wavy.

After enough of this you'll intuitively understand why the Saturn V had three stages instead of two or four, why rockets like Soyuz and Ariane are fundamentally different compared to Atlas V and Delta IV, why the Shuttle was a shitty design, why the Soviet Shuttle was objectively better in certain aspects, and so on.

[Anonymous No.9860595]

>>9860565
Probably both considered meme-tier but for anyone who has no basic intuitive understanding of space/rocketry, KSP and the overview bits of project rho.

[Anonymous No.9860599]

>>9860595
Kerbal is unironically a fantastic intro to rocketry

[Anonymous No.9860614]

>>9860590
>Isaac Arthur
He talks too much about meme-tier fantasy technology and basically never about real world stuff we can actually feasibly do. Most of his videos are essentially thought experiments rather than potential future developments.

Never forget that he's completely incorrect about orbital rings and how they function; they cannot be inclined with respect to the parent body's rotation and they cannot be elliptical if the parent body rotates through any frame of reference. The only possible orbital rings are equatorial with zero eccentricity and zero inclination, otherwise the torque produced as the planet drags the ring around would destroy it.

That's just one example of a megastructure he gets very wrong. He also gets more fundamental things wrong, like stating that miniature fusion reactors can be built at all, let alone proton-proton fusion reactors which are pretty much impossible since they require a multi step fusion process to release energy. Smaller than a certain size, the amount of force each magnet needs to produce is higher that the molecular binding force of the materials of the magnet itself, so it would simply explode. Before even reaching that point the heat generated by the magnets would be too much for any cooling system to keep up with and they would warm up enough to stop being superconductive, at which point they would flash-heat to the point that they would vaporize and explode.

Isaac is a future science fanboy who subscribes to the idea that technology has no fundamental limits except for the base laws of the universe, which is simply not true. It's far more useful to consider what we can do with technology we already have or know how to build, than to keep wishing upon a star that we one day invent high-thrust open cycle fusion engines or magic ultrastrong ultralight materials and so forth. The Falcon 9 for example is set to be the worlds first economically reusable launch vehicle yet uses no breakthrough technology.

[Anonymous No.9860615]

>>9860599
literally this, you will understand orbits better than most students several years into university classes. Just with what you learn from Kerbal you can incorporate the other more complex ideas (like lagrange points and so forth) really easily.

[Anonymous No.9860624]

>>9860615
it's a shame ksp is permabanned from being discussed on /vg/.


I remember when KSP first came out, as a free alpha. There was no moon, no timeworn, only like four parts, and no map view. I had to leave my computer running for an hour just to verify that I was in a stable orbit. Was fun following the initial year of progress or so with the game

[Anonymous No.9860626]

>>9860624
*no timewarp

[Anonymous No.9860629]

>>9860614
(cont)
>The Falcon 9 for example is set to be the worlds first economically reusable launch vehicle yet uses no breakthrough technology.

In fact the engines it uses are pretty run-of-the-mill in terms of efficiency. The only two really impressive things about them are their ability to reliably light in flight multiple times and their thrust to weight ratio, which is better than any other engine.
If you told any engineer from the 90's that we'd have a high performance reusable vehicle using conventional gas-generator engines and kerosene fuel in a couple decades they'd laugh and say it was impossible. The old space idea has always been that major technological breakthroughs either allow a vehicle to be lighter or allow its engines to be more efficient. They had been convinced that the only way to do interplanetary manned missions was by developing nuclear thermal engines or even nuclear detonation propulsion, that the only way to make a reusable chemical launch vehicle was to use extremely high performance hydrogen burning engines for maximum performance, and so forth. Turns out that we've basically had the propulsion technology to do what the Falcon 9 does almost since we started building rockets. We don't need engines with many times higher specific impulse, we don't need ultralight structures, we just need to build a vehicle large enough that the performance leftover after adding reuse hardware is more than enough to serve the launch market.

Someone could build a rocket as capable as BFR using kerosene if they wanted, it'd just have to be significantly bigger. However, even though it'd be bigger, if it was also completely reusable then it'd still be cheaper to operate than an expendable rocket. It just makes sense. Using more efficient methane propellant helps the vehicle be a little smaller and makes it much easier to reuse because methane doesn't coke up, but you also avoid all the handling and materials issues you get with hydrogen propellant.

[Anonymous No.9860631]

>>9860565
shitpost in these threads until you learn the trade for yourself :^)

[Anonymous No.9860633]

>>9860629
Merlin engines are cutting edge in every way except the combustion cycle, my dude.

[Anonymous No.9860634]

>>9860624
I still have the first version of Ksp with the Mun (also the first I ever played) on my machine. I like the challenge of doing a landing there and returning with all the limitations.
First time I landed I lost my shit, pic related

[Anonymous No.9860636]

>>9860633
they're cutting edge in the sense that the marginal cost of producing one merlin engine is $500,000, and the minimal refurb. They're cutting edge in the sense that it took great specs and wrapped it in a usable package.

They were never cutting edge due to some specific characteristic which was 10x 'other' rockets. It's just a great overall piece of tech

[Anonymous No.9860650]

>>9860633
What I mean is they are not even close to the most efficient engines ever made, which is what every engineer used to think would be required to even approach a reusable space vehicle.

Sure, for a kerosene gas generator they're pretty goddamn efficient, but in absolute terms against all other engines they have pretty shitty Isp. Also, like I said earlier, the whole point of the Falcon 9 is that it doesn't rely on its engines being super efficient, it relies on having enough of them and being big enough that it can still serve 90% of the launch market while recovering the first stage.

A 1970's Falcon 9 would have to have more engines on account of them probably having a lower thrust to weight ratio and efficiency, heavier structural materials, and slower computer control translating to less efficient landing burns, but it'd still be doable and would still most likely end up cheaper than a fully expendable vehicle. If they kept on developing the vehicle as they flew it like SpaceX did, then they would have probably approached actual Merlin 1D levels of performance as well, and could have eventually included technologies like carbon composite structures and tanks if they wanted.

[Anonymous No.9860652]

>>9860624
>>9860634
>tfw remembering the good old days of KSP
>tfw the summer of 2013 was the hardest time in my life and KSP was my one escape
Such a shame the company started pandering to mechpleb tweens and the general morphed into utter cancer. Here lads, take a screenshot I took back then

[Anonymous No.9860653]

>>9860636
>They were never cutting edge due to some specific characteristic which was 10x 'other' rockets.

Exactly, and the '10x anything else' performance increase was considered a requirement for a breakthrough launch vehicle for a long time. SpaceX has proven everyone who thought that wrong with Falcon 9.

[Anonymous No.9860663]

>>9860636
>10x 'other' rockets
literally no such thing for rocket engines

[Anonymous No.9860670]

>>9860652
It's too bad I can't press a button to forget how rockets work and experience learning how to get into orbit all over again. Nowadays rocket launch is so routine it feels like a grind, but I also get tired of planning interplanetary missions halfway through, so I end up faffing aroudn with prototype landers and stuff until I get bored and do something else, feels bad man.

At least RSS+RO is challenging, but I'm dreading the design process of a manned Lunar landing, let alone Mars or other.

[Anonymous No.9860671]

>>9860652
why did the mods nuke /kspg/?

was it the snake autist?

[Anonymous No.9860708]

>>9860614
>>Never forget that he's completely incorrect about orbital rings and how they function; they cannot be inclined with respect to the parent body's rotation and they cannot be elliptical if the parent body rotates through any frame of reference. The only possible orbital rings are equatorial with zero eccentricity and zero inclination, otherwise the torque produced as the planet drags the ring around would destroy it.

Well fuck man the first time I saw the video I thought the inclined ring was strange. I thought I was missing something. I didnt dig in to it more and now that you said that it makes perfect seance. Thanks annon

[Anonymous No.9860712]

>>9860614
>The only possible orbital rings are equatorial with zero eccentricity and zero inclination, otherwise the torque produced as the planet drags the ring around would destroy it.

What would be the climate on such a station?

[Anonymous No.9860978]

>drumpf abandons the ISS and international partners along with it
>China surges ahead with their own new station, already has agreements with Europe and Russia for its use
C H I N E S E
E
N
T
U
R
Y

[Anonymous No.9860983]

>>9860614
I don't know how small you mean when you talk about a miniature fusion reactor, but the concept for the SPARC reactor is pretty fucking small and if the following criteria can be met then they can absolutely be made very small, not pocket sized obviously, but well within the size and weight for a small ship to carry no problem.

>he3 fuel or some other kind of aneutronic fusion so you can get rid of fucking Neutron shielding
>Some kind of betavoltaic or similar panels to avoid fucking victorian era steam turbines


The kind of forces imposed at the molecular limits of magnets are fucking insane and you can get away with well below that, the SPARC concept uses basic stainless steel ribs and stainless steel is hardly the strongest material we could use for this. Even just the use of he3 fuel would definitely be fine if you had a larger ship to sacrifice weight on to put in stupid turbines because you can eliminate all the neutron shielding bs with complicated molten salts and just run a standard steam cycle. A 200 or so megawatts of output power which is what the SPARC reactor is meant to produce would power a LOT of ion drive.

he3 is legit magic fuel, we just need a reliable source.

[Anonymous No.9860991]

>>9860565
Best place to start
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6cce/fa84a00b396c5b50b66063772f4851392b8f.pdf

[Anonymous No.9860995]

Blue Origin and SpaceX should just abandon the US and move to China to get obscene amounts of Chinese funding to further rocket technology

Just sayin

[Anonymous No.9861006]

>>9860653
Merlins are 10x cheaper than any alternative and on top of that they are amazing as booster engines and nearly match top ORSC RD0-124 isp due to stupidly big nozzle
>>9860663
Except for RS25 price
>>9860983
Isac is talking about things like fusion reactors that basically fit on a desk.SPARC is still a few hundred t machine and with modern tapes you will make this reactor even better with SPARC+ running recent 50T tape you could fit ITER power into tiny volume.

[Anonymous No.9861007]

>>9860995
There are good ideas. There are bad ideas. And then there are awful ideas.

[Anonymous No.9861015]

>>9860995
Yeah definitely, the amount of insane beauracratic regulations in the US hampers the fuck out of space exploration and Elon is always raging about it and fairly enough. Whereas if he moved to China he could be scaling up operations hugely for minimal cost.

>Oh yes very good very good we give speciaru deal Eron friend just for you
>Here free raunch site we redistributed from dirt farmers for grorious space mission
>De orbiting? What that?
>Regurations? What that?
>We invest 500 birrion dorras if you raunch CCP payroads as priority.

[Anonymous No.9861018]

>>9861006
>mfw 50T tape

Holy shit that's fucking crazy, I thought the 20T tapes they are using is cutting edge.

[Anonymous No.9861021]

>>9860995
Pretty sure they legally can't do that to begin with, but even ignoring that what a terrible idea.

For one, neither is desperate for funding, and the chinks aren't dying to pay for anything that they could steal instead. Second, Space-X would rather build rockets in California and send them across the US (or through panama for the BFR) than even move construction to the east coast. How much do you think they want to move all the way to china? 0% my man

[Anonymous No.9861044]

>>9861006
what? ARC is like 10T max

[Anonymous No.9861177]

>>9860712
?
In space you're either in direct sunlight or no sunlight, angle of incidence is always 90 degrees so I guess you're always in a tropical environment? Idk man, it'd be a space station. You'd most likely be in comfortably room temperature spaces no matter where you went.

[Anonymous No.9861183]

>>9859129
You left off
>expendable

[Anonymous No.9861185]

>>9859548
>Furthermore, why the reduction in diameter between the first and second core stages?
So it's more stable on the launchpad, duh.

[Anonymous No.9861186]

>>9860983
>he3 is legit magic fuel

If you ignore the fact that helium 3 is harder to fuse than any other viable fusion fuel alternative except for boron-proton reactions, then still no. He3 is extremely rare except for in the atmospheres of the gas giants; the Moon does have some, but you need to process approximately 100,000 tons of Lunar regolith to yield a single kilogram of He3, which when fused releases about as much energy as two kilograms of uranium being fissioned.

Fusion is so overhyped it's ridiculous. Fusion is nuclear power just like fission, and while you do get a few times more energy per kilogram of fuel than you do with fission fuel, fission fuel doesn't require any input energy to make it react unlike fusion fuel which requires huge amounts of power to keep the fusion conditions stable. The only tangible advantages to fusion over fission are the relatively low amounts of radioactive waste produced. Even then, there are fission reactor designs that would produce nuclear waste at nearly the same amount per megawatt electric compared to fusion, while also being far easier to mass produce and using fuel isotopes far more common than conventional U-235.

Fusion isn't bad but it's not magic. If anything it's a convenient way to power large facilities in the outer solar system where solar power is not an option and fusion fuel is relatively abundant compared to fission fuel.

[Anonymous No.9861188]

>>9861186
the only time uranium is ever fully fissioned is inside a bomb, idiot

[Anonymous No.9861191]

>>9861006
>nearly match top ORSC RD0-124 isp due to stupidly big nozzle

Merlin 1D Vac gets shit all over by literally any hydrogen engine. My point is that efficiency isn't everything, dumbass. You're supporting me but you think you're arguing with me.

I'm saying that everyone thought we'd need nuclear powered rockets to do anything interesting but SpaceX is doing those things using rockets which aren't even as efficient as a shitty hydrogen engine from 50 years ago. That's the great thing about SpaceX, the focus on effectiveness rather than straight up performance or efficiency.

Skylon is an example of performance over effectiveness, with super cutting edge propulsion and structural tech but which would still end up with a $1000/kg minimum payload transport cost. BFR will be objectively less efficient and use less advanced technology than Skylon would yet will achieve an order of magnitude cheaper per-kilogram prices and deliver more payload at once to LEO than any rocket ever before.

[Anonymous No.9861205]

>>9861188
>the only time uranium is ever fully fissioned is inside a bomb, idiot
no idiot, bombs never fission all their fuel. At best they can achieve a high percentage by using a fusion secondary which produced the neutron flux needed to react the remaining fission fuel before it can expand and escape.
A fission breeder reactor with liquid fuel can continuously add new fuel and remove fission products, resulting in a 100% burnup rate over time. Non-fissile U-238 or Th-232 are loaded into the reactor blanket, where the neutron flux from the reactor causes it to eventually change into fissionable Pu-239 or U-233, respectively. This fuel is then separated from the breeding blanket and fed into the reactor vessel, where the neutron moderator present allows the fuel to fission and release energy. The products of fission are either insoluble in the liquid fuel or are removed via chemical processing.
The cycle is continuous and breeds more fuel than it burns, though of course it's always using up the fertile material which must be continuously replenished. Luckily U-238 and Th-232 are many, many times more common than naturally fissile U-235, and do not need to be isotopically enriched, which removes the most energy intensive and difficult step in the entire process. The total amount of thorium by-product of rare earth metal mining alone is dozens of times more than we would need to power the entire world at its current level of energy consumption.

[Anonymous No.9861212]

>>9861205
If it's such a magic bullet and comparative to fusion then why is there not a single Thorium/other isotope reactor in existance? It doesn't require any advanced confinement technologies like fusion does.

[Anonymous No.9861213]

>>9861205
>A fission breeder reactor with liquid fuel can continuously add new fuel and remove fission products, resulting in a 100% burnup rate over time.
A literal fantasy, and even if a prototype were built, greentards would never allow it to become part of the grid.

[Anonymous No.9861218]

>>9861212
>If it's such a magic bullet
I didn't say it was, I'm saying it's far more feasible and viable as a large scale power source than fusion will ever be. Anything you think is too hard about liquid fuel breeder reactors, meme thorium or not, fusion is way way harder.

>>9861213
Tell me what is fantastical about it. We both agree greentards would have a shitfit about it, but they're going to have a shitfit about fusion anyway because it's still nuclear and they want nothing but muh sunshine and muh wind, which ironically rely on industries that have put more toxins into the environment than anything nuclear ever has, including the major 'disasters'.

[Anonymous No.9861223]

>>9861183
Do they plan to lash together any big expendable chunks that end up in orbit? Like a space raft.

I gotta imagine there's lots of comfy room in those empty boosters.

[Anonymous No.9861234]

>>9861223
An empty booster is a really shitty living space. No insulation and multiple vents that need to be perfectly sealed before you can renovate.

[Anonymous No.9861237]

>>9861212
>why is there not a single Thorium/other isotope reactor in existance
Development was artificially stalled. Thorium isn't shitty for energy it's shitty for weapons

[Anonymous No.9861276]

>>9861234
> No insulation and multiple vents that need to be perfectly sealed before you can renovate
Lave tubes on mars are no different and everyone is jerking off about those.

[Anonymous No.9861283]

>>9861223
(anon, it's a edited meme image to showcase the futility to ULA's attempt to enter the reusable rocket promised land)

[Anonymous No.9861286]

>>9861283
It's a reddit image, meaning you're a retarded reddit invader and you have to go back.

[Anonymous No.9861290]

>>9861286
reddit is great for specialized discourse, don't be so conformist to 4chan 'norms'.
If you care so much about reddit invaders you won't reply to me, but we all know that won't happen. You like the anger. It soothes you.

[Anonymous No.9861292]

>>9861276
Lava tubes are nice because they are a quick path out of deadly radiation, not for those properties.

[Anonymous No.9861296]

>>9861292
there are just too many variables with habitats that utilize the structure of the planet itself. We're going to have artificial, probably inflatable domes or whatnot on mars for a very long time.

That is, unless Elon has a trick up his sleeve with some magical TBM tech

[Anonymous No.9861297]

>>9861276
>Lave tubes on mars
>mars

[Anonymous No.9861301]

>>9861297
plenty of evidence out there for martian lava tubes. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032063309001603
I don't think anyone doubts that they are there, only the usefulness of them

[Anonymous No.9861305]

>>9861296
There are fewer problematic variables with lava tubes than there are with the surface itself. You can get similar benefits with tunneling or packed ground, but at least one of these methods will be necessary for long term habitation.

[Anonymous No.9861309]

>>9861305
it is slightly worrying that SpaceX hasn't shown any progress on in-house mars *surface* hardware yet. I guess the rocket has to come first, but there are a lot of pieces of the whole mars living puzzle which still exist only in papers.

[Anonymous No.9861324]

>>9859129

I'd be more afraid if I were a small chinese village nearby the launch pad

[Anonymous No.9861330]

>>9861324
the locals can get suuuuuper close to the launches and sometimes share video of it. can't fine one but they're out there

[Anonymous No.9861358]

>>9861286
It's literally a 4chan image because I made it a few months ago.

[Anonymous No.9861361]

>>9861237
this desu
though it's more that pesky U-232 by-product that's almost impossible to separate from U-233 that killed the thorium fuel cycle for weapons development.

[Anonymous No.9861363]

>>9861276
You can put a big tent in a lava tube and you don't have to worry about radiation or micrometeors. The volume of your living space would act as insulation in that case, and the tube itself would prevent any significant temperature swings through the seasons and from day to night.

[Anonymous No.9861371]

>>9861296
>We're going to have artificial, probably inflatable domes

Why not artificial lava tubes, also known as tunnels dug through solid rock, which can be conveniently arranged and would have smooth walls easy to seal with a thin layer of sheet metal or plastic, like what you could dig with a sort of boring machine . . .
wait

[Anonymous No.9861376]

>>9861309
Maybe it's because it isn't difficult? Literally a bunch of prefab bolt-together parts, an interior bladder, and a set of scaffolding inside can form a basic surface habitat. Cover it in dirt and furnish it inside with lights and chairs etc and you've got a comfy Mars house. Connect a few dozen to start with as a base of operations and a staging area for more serious construction projects like vaulted stone block buildings and so forth.

[Anonymous No.9861385]

>>9861376
the perfect place to go completely fucking stir-crazy.

[Anonymous No.9861398]

>>9861385
I dunno, there's gonna be a shit ton of work to do at the Mars colony. Remote controlled loaders and bulldozers, ISRU plant operations, hydroponic farms for fresh veggies, exercise regimes, problems to solve with programming and machinery, repairs to be made, etc.

This is before we even get any steel mills or large scale tunneling projects started on Mars. If you think it's going to be some catered faggy camping trip you're incorrect.

[Anonymous No.9861410]

>>9861385
Good thing that the diversity pussies that get sent to Mars will either accidentally kill themselves through stupidity or kill themselves because they are pussies. I would cheerfully sell my soul to live in a tin can for the rest of my life for a chance to be among the first on Mars. It's not like there won't be rapid expansion of living spaces anyway, you won't be stuck in a tin can for more than 5-10 years before they start 3d printing ice houses or working on sealing a lava tubes to deal with expanding populations.

[Anonymous No.9861440]

>>9861410
>ice houses
literally a meme, ice houses don't and wont work. It's far more practical to just make buildings out of blocks of stone, it achieves the same thing except is not going to sublimated in sunlight, plus it's stronger and there'd more rock around than ice by many orders of magnitude.

[Anonymous No.9861453]

>>9861223
This has been studied for both the Saturn V second stage, and the Shuttle External Tank.

[Anonymous No.9861456]

>>9861223
Wet workshops are just too much effort. Skylab was a dry workshop. MOL would have been a dry workshop too. The wet-dry conversion is just overtly difficult.

[Anonymous No.9861464]

>>9861218
Thats the big joke, fusion will never compete on cost with fission, and will run into all the same show stoppers

also FUCK google captcha

[Anonymous No.9861497]

>>9861456
There was very little chance to actually produce a wet work shop
Naturally you can't use upper stages on various eliptical orbits for missions being sent to GEO
The Saturn V only had that one launch for Skylab
The Shuttle naturally would refuse to attempt to use either it or its fuel tank because thats the nature of that program...

[Anonymous No.9861500]

>>9861497
yeah, and the future of rockets will be 100% reusable anyways. there won't be any junk to throw away in the first place

[Anonymous No.9861525]

>>9861015
>>9860995
The entire Chinese space program's budget is under $2 billion a year, retard

[Anonymous No.9861529]

>>9861330
I think he's talking about incidents like this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_708

"Get killed by falling rocket in your own home" is another one of those magical Only in China things - bigger rocket, bigger villages they can destroy

[Anonymous No.9861564]

>>9861191
Comparing hydrocarbon with hydrogen is aburd these are different classes.I used the example of MVac to show that merlin is a really advanced engine not a "simple gas generator like in the 60s" as some people like to say also structural mass of F9 is the best in industry and BFR will be off the charts.BFR will use a brute force approach and it is perfect for LEO but beyond that things like ACES start to shine because of how much energy is stored in kg of hydrogen (it takes a shitton of space).The long term future is nuclear hopefully fission fragments or fusion fragment that would be ideal but is so far a space magic tech.

[Anonymous No.9861603]

>>9859129
Silly North Korea, should have said their missile program was for space exploration. Just gotta put a sacrificial soldier on it

[Anonymous No.9861684]

>>9861564
you're trying reeeeally hard here to miss my fucking POINT which, again, is that you don't need magic technology to do new and better things with rockets.
Merlin 1D is a good kerosene gas-generator, but you don't need even something as good as that to be able to build a cheap partially reusable launch vehicle that can put 20 tons to LEO. In the 70's if they wanted to they could have built a decently efficient gas generator and a big Falcon 9 style rocket with a worse mass fraction and worse thrust to weight ratio and efficiency BUT it would have still worked, so long as they could build the computers and software it'd need.

[Anonymous No.9861774]

>>9859129
Forgot a detail: it's not up for operational use until the 2030s. It's still at LEAST a decade off. BFR launches should happen by late 2020.

[Anonymous No.9861912]

>>9861191
>BFR will be objectively less efficient
Cost efficiency drives the world anon. It's called capitalism.

[Anonymous No.9861915]

>>9861912
Literally his point

[Anonymous No.9862466]

>>9861529
I thought all the new Kerolox rockets were going to launch out of their new Wenchang launch facility/theme park, heading east out over the ocean.

[Anonymous No.9862489]

>>9861410
there are lava tubes big and wide enough you could put small parks and gardens in them.
Also some parts of Mars canyons could be covered and pressurized to create Earth like conditions.

[Anonymous No.9862504]

>>9860381
>hurr durr we can do it b-but it costs t-too m-much.

[Anonymous No.9862510]

>>9859224
they invented that?

[Anonymous No.9862698]

>>9861529
>That CCP spin

Kek that rocket crash would have nuked that whole fucking village for sure, probably only a handful of maimed people were dragged out, everyone else would be dead. But seriously why don't they launch from the east coast? They have a fucking huge stretch of coastline to work with and it's where the majority of their people and infrastructure is.

[Anonymous No.9862801]

>>9859602
That's so cute, sweetie.
Welcome to 25 years ago.

[Anonymous No.9863170]

>Americans:
all talk, no walk

>Chinese:
results
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=144&v=vnpkpt4sJQ0

[Anonymous No.9863185]

>>9859129
>China
>Creates >$800,000,000,000 per month out of thin air
>are you afraid, America?
Not really, no

[Anonymous No.9863398]

>>9863185
Americans don't get to talk shit about debt and fiat currency, you are by FAR the worst.

[Anonymous No.9863400]

>>9863398
big difference. US bonds, debt, etc are all public and ACCURATE. China is fucking around, pumping money everywhere and hiding the truth.

[Anonymous No.9863453]

>>9863400
Ah well so long as it's public, being 21 Trillion dollars in debt is allgood then.

[Anonymous No.9863974]

*blocks your path*

[Anonymous No.9864027]

>>9860563
you're retarded mate. there's no wealth redistribution anymore. don't talk about things you don't know about.

[Anonymous No.9864037]

>>9860614
>The only possible orbital rings are equatorial with zero eccentricity and zero inclination

equatorial low Earth orbit is a special place for another reason - it is the only known place in space where you do not need significant radiation shielding

http://space.alglobus.net/papers/RadiationPaper.pdf

this means that your space station can be an order of magnitude lighter and still good enough to raise children in

[Anonymous No.9864045]

>>9861296

>We're going to have artificial, probably inflatable domes or whatnot on mars for a very long time.

This will not be viable for anything but quickest flag and footprint missions because of cosmic rays. Some kind of equipment to create underground habitats is crucial for any space colony.

[Anonymous No.9864046]

>>9863398
>by FAR the worst
Objectively false

But the best joke is the fact that US gov. has "lost" 21 TRILLION dollars outside the books just between 1998 and 2015, thats equal to total debt of USA... which means that black budget spending is through the roof and the state is corrupted beyond beyond belief.

[Anonymous No.9864340]

>>9863170
>all talk, no walk
Wang go to sleep
https://youtu.be/Rux24PCFSjw?t=66

[Anonymous No.9864437]

>>9859129
>humans to moon in one (1) launch rather than 11 launches for bfr
Wtf are you talking about, BFR (if it's ever built) will go to Mars with 2 launches.

[Anonymous No.9864439]

>>9859179
>if the government pays for a service it's no longer business
retard

[Anonymous No.9864444]

>>9864437
no it does take ~7+ launches if you want to land 150t on Mars with BFR. Depends on how quickly you want to get there

[Anonymous No.9864648]

Chinese five (5) stage long march 5 variant that could put 3 humans on the Lunar surface in 4 missions.
50t to LEO

[Anonymous No.9864651]

>>9862510
No, just alt-right poo in loos being poo in loos.

[Anonymous No.9864655]

>>9864648
3 launches
I'm a retard

[Anonymous No.9865085]

>>9864648
>5 stages
>Five stages
>FIVE STAGES

[Anonymous No.9865099]

>>9859129
>>can launch humans to moon in one (1) launch rather than 11 launches for bfr

Only takes like 8 launches if you refuel in lunar orbit, and you land 150 tons of payload on the surface, not just a tiny tin can.

[Anonymous No.9865660]

>>9865085
NASA should troll them by proposing a 10 stage design.

[Anonymous No.9865682]

>>9865660
What part of this don't you understand? If three stages is good, and five stages is better, obviously ten stages would make us the best fucking rocket that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the rocket game by clinging to the three-stage industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, ten stages is the biggest chance of all.

[Anonymous No.9865906]

>>9865085
>kerosene boosters
>LH2 core stage
>LH2 stage 2
>LH2 stage 3
>LH2 TLI kicker stage
What's the problem?

[Anonymous No.9866384]

>>9865906
Too many staging events to make up for shit structures that China can make

[Anonymous No.9866824]

>>9866384
>what is sarcasm