Graham Sutherland / PolynomialFeb 28

drove for nine hours today.

now sat in a hotel room in Aberdeen, watching old BPS Space videos.

Show threadAndrew ZonenbergFeb 28

@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

Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialFeb 28
@azonenberg moon landing
Show threadAndrew ZonenbergFeb 28
@gsuberland LEO first, baby steps
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialFeb 28
@azonenberg YOLO (yeet only to lunar orbit)
Show threadAndrew ZonenbergFeb 28
@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)
Show threadIgnas KielaFeb 28
@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)
Show threadAndrew Zonenberg

@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"

Feb 28 at 5:37pmWeb
Show threadIgnas KielaFeb 28
@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?
Show threadAndrew ZonenbergFeb 28

@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

Show threadIgnas KielaFeb 28
@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)
Show threadAndrew ZonenbergFeb 28
@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