Graham Sutherland / Polynomialdrove for nine hours today.
now sat in a hotel room in Aberdeen, watching old BPS Space videos.
Andrew Zonenberg@gsuberland enjoy the bepis
I wonder what his next project after the karman line program will be.
There's two obvious options: cubesat or a full orbital launch vehicle program. But both are likely beyond YouTube channel budget
@azonenberg moon landing
@gsuberland LEO first, baby steps
@azonenberg YOLO (yeet only to lunar orbit)
@gsuberland me and a friend a while back did some rough calculations. With reasonable state of the art liquid propellants (RP-1 and LOX or so) and engine Isp values and a two stage design, if you just wanted to put a cubesat in LEO and didn't care about being commercially viable wrt payload capacity, IIRC you could build a launch vehicle roughly the volume of a 40ft shipping container (but slightly taller and skinnier)
@gsuberland California youtuber phones the Vandenberg public affairs number to ask how much renting a pad for a weekend is
@azonenberg then, if you have all the time in the world, you use a homebrew ion drive to veeeerrry slowly slip out to the Lagrange point.
@gsuberland https://appliedionsystems.com/ has you covered
@azonenberg yupyup! are they on here? I definitely followed them back on the bad site
Ignas Kiela@azonenberg @gsuberland Astra's rockets seem to fit into a shipping container? (at least they claim the whole launch system would be transportable in them)
@ignaloidas @gsuberland I think they would be >1 container just "transportable by road". No way they're only 40 feet long.
And maybe our proposed design was only a TEU? It was a long time ago I just remember "you can go way smaller than e.g. a falcon 9 if you only want to launch a kilo rather than tons of payload"
@azonenberg @gsuberland some images show what appears to be the rocket in the container, some showing the engines, some showing the cone, though it's not clear enough whether it's the whole rocket or just a top/bottom half. The height of the rocket is reportedly 43ft so with a slightly less common 48ft container it should work?
@ignaloidas @gsuberland 53 foot containers are a thing too.
Maybe our concept was overly conservative or they get better engine performance or something? If they can make a commercially viable launch vehicle that size, I expect you could go quite a bit smaller if you just wanted to launch a cubesat
@azonenberg @gsuberland I mean it's not like they carry that much, they say 20-50kg to SSO, so a just a bunch of cubesats (tho the success record isn't great for them, only 2 successful launches out of way more attempts)
@ignaloidas @gsuberland ah, ok so this is probably the same OOM scale of what we were talking, when you add in vehicle and engine mass I doubt the difference in rocket size and fuel tank volume between 2 and 20 kg payload is too big
Michael@azonenberg @gsuberland I think he’s been wondering that too haha
At one point I think he thought he might be done at that point, but I seem to remember he had some ideas of what to do after
My hunch is he will do something with liquid propellant - he did say he’s getting more and more scared of solid motors. Or maybe he does more of the control stuff
Rory McCune@gsuberland ah you could’ve dropped in at Securi-tay on the way by!
@raesene couldn't make it unfortunately, we had plans.