Onwards and sidewards [Video]


Reminder: Our mission objective is fly a sub-orbital trajectory travelling over 3000km across Africa, putting us in Egypt (or thereabouts). Our payload is not expected to survive re-entry in to the atmosphere. Just a video this time, I don't want to spoil anything:


Next Post: Dogs (and cat) of space

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Confidence is high. I repeat, confidence is high.

Image
Date : 1954-06-13 Amidst news that the Soviets may be developing an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), their so-called "R7" project , we have been tasked with producing a rocket capable of reaching from Western Europe to Moscow. The objective is simple in its audacity: Increase our rocket's capabilities from 600km downrange to over 3,000km, creating an Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) before the two superpowers. We have a range of new technological innovations on our side: We have developed a newer, lighter, aluminium alloy for our rockets. We have improved our existing main rocket engines (on par with the Russian RD-102). We have improved our avionics to the point we can control our rocket launches. We have also developed a new upper stage rocket engine similar to the US AJ10-27 engines, which use nitric acid/aniline and are the latest generation of the SR-1 engines we flew right back in 1951. Historical Aside: The Russian RD-102 was never actually d
Read more

Not every rocket's a winner

Image
My initial concept for the SR-2b was to adding staging to the rocket design to be able to get more distance out of it and perform sub-orbital re-entry tests: This design certainly fit the bill in some respects. On a good day it could achieve a height of 250km, double what we'd managed previously. Having similar fuel tanks and engines reduces the tooling cost significantly. It also had no issues around recovery of the payload vehicle (a biological sample)... when it worked. Despite these plus points, I ran in to a major issue with the design. Notice how severely tilted the wing fins are; this was the level of spin stabilisation required to achieve the needed level of spin to keep it going straight. Precession is a natural consequence that comes with spin stabilisation . If the spinning of the rocket is too strong, a large degree of precession occurs. Precession is best demonstrated with a spinning-top example: Source: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/top.html As our leve
Read more

The big one: Getting to orbit

Image
The time has come to build our first orbit-capable rocket and design a payload for it. Woden Main Stage At the core of our new design is a new engine, similar to the RD-107 rocket engine used as the main engine on the Soviet's R-7 rocket . It can achieve a specific impulse (ISP, which roughly equates to efficiency) of 255 in atmosphere and offers a whopping 820 kN of thrust, far in excess of anything our space program has worked with before. Despite this, it's conceptually pretty similar to the V-2 rocket engine, only swapping out the ethanol for the more efficient kerosene . Woden Engines We are currently constructing a new launch pad capable of shifting 60 tonnes (three times our previous mass). Easily growing to match our new facilities, our new rocket core weighs a whopping 58 tonnes by itself. We have full avionic control and can control it using the built-in vernier engines . This design is intended to be modular, growing to meet the needs of our orbital programme mov
Read more