[extropy-chat] SPACE: Private spacecraft blast offs June 21

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Mon Jun 21 19:04:03 UTC 2004


On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 11:44:11AM -0500, damien wrote:

> Not to be a spoilsport or anything (this is a very delightful and exciting 
> event!), but I'm not sure how much can be explored at 62 miles above the 
> Earth's surface. This trip covered, let's see, 1/3850th of the distance 
> traveled 35 years ago by the govt guys who did at least manage to bring 
> back some rocks.

It's less the distance, it's how close they came to being in LEO in terms of
horizontal velocity component (gravitational potential component Mojave
surface or 100 km doesn't really figure prominently).

It was a vertical launch, with helical descent. Repeating Gagarin (or even
Shepard) will take a very different design. I'm to lazy to look up whether
HTPB/N2O hybrids are at all suitable for the task.

Still, very impressive ROI for Allent's equivalent of cookie jar money. If
they're that efficient, a gigabuck could come a long way.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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