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Title text:
It does come at the cost of some launchpad expansions and increased fuel requirements, but that all comes out of the facility's budget.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3291/
Kerbal launch cannon go brrrr
From the "Futurama solves global warming" school of thought.
Also a Phineas and Ferb episode.
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia theme plays
The Gang Launches a Spacecraft
I thought of Futurama too, but instead how the Ships engines move the Universe around IT
It came to me in a dream, and then I forgot it in another dream.
That's a complete load!
Nothing’s a complete load! Not if you can imagine it; that’s what being a scientist is all about!
Don’t dream it, be it.
rip
I thought that was a silly joke but that's actually more or less how an alcubierre drive would work.
I was thinking of the robots all firing their exhaust upward to push earth away from the sun.
You laugh, but China made a big-budget action movie about this very concept.
True! Based on a Liu Cixin story. Never read it but loved his Three Body Problem series.
The Wandering Earth.
This reminds me there was a project about 10-15(?) years ago where they were trying to rig the F15 with an attachment to launch satellites in quick need situations. The F15A shot down a satellite in 1985, so it makes sense it could put one up there as well. Think they ended up terminating the program because it became cheaper to launch them in mass.
Aka they probably just took it out of the public eye
no they cancelled it because thats impossible lol. you can shoot a satellite with a suborbital object but thats a loooong way from the projectile being orbital. shooting a satellite that way is more analogous to laying down a spike strip for a car. almost all the velocity of the impact is coming from the satellite not the projectile.
theres a reason even the smallest orbital rockets are the size of a building, its all the propellant required to get there. theres just no way to get that into an F15, to say nothing of the limitations of an airbreathing engine. the skylon was an attempt at a single stage to orbit vehicle using an air breathing engine and it was so complicated and impractical they never even got past the engine precooler design.
You're not totally right. A jet engine can provide a large amount of the ∆V required to get into orbit, so your orbital injector could be significantly smaller than a full orbital rocket.
Yeah, a mixed-mode engine is probably not the ideal. You'd probably just use a liquid fuel rocket carrying oxidizer, like every other orbital rocket, as the payload on the jet, but you'd get to skip a large portion of the launch. Keep in mind that the rocket equation means that most of the fuel is used for the initial portion of the launch. If we can have an air breathing jet handle that then the rocket can be significantly smaller.
If you're just trying to insert a single small payload into orbit, it makes some sense. It's very limited by the capabilities of the aircraft though, obviously. A rocket can do significantly larger payloads with more versatility, so it ends up being more practical per ton of payload.
I was sad to see Reaction Engines go, they were local-ish to where I grew up.
yeah i first learned about them going through engineering school and thought it was the coolest project id ever heard of. when i learned that they started the project before i was born it was like, oh... this is never going to fly lol.
Its roots were even older too I think.
no they cancelled it because thats impossible lol. you can shoot a satellite with a suborbital object but thats a loooong way from the projectile being orbital.
Nah, it's not that long a way. You just need to adjust your goals, add an extra stage, accept a much smaller payload.
If you can get a payload to space, you could put a payload 1/4 its mass into orbit with an additional stage.
I mean, the anti-sat F-15 test was pretty wild. But is arguably less wild than other airlaunch systems like the Pegasus or spaceship one. Saying that airlaunch is impossible is silly, because it's happening.
These systems get cancelled because they're expensive and complicated and reusable rockets are cheaper and easier.
They are saying a missile that went faster than, and tracked a target at orbital speed and velocity, can't be reached.... Obviously it can, or they'd miss everytime. Yet they shot it down using a rocket deploying a payload 41 years ago. Same shit, different payload.
The end with lots of fire coming out should point towards the ground.
If it points towards space, that's a big problem, and we will not go to space this day :/
I still say we should mount rockets into a rollercoaster rail🎢 that way stage one can be spent on the ground doing a horizontal launch and then the rail would have to change the angle to be more horizontal
This was actually tested in 2001 and found to be effective method to launch a crew into space
Sweet now I have a working example to show. Also I remember seeing jimmy neutron movie in theaters
Sure, it's just 2000 kilometers long. We'll just take over the northern half of Brazil to build it
You need a bit less than 1/3 of it...
But it's supposed to be build in an ocean. Forests do not make for good logistics.
(It's also supposed to use a series of hypersonic iron pellets running inside a tube, that will explode and endanger a hundreds of km radius if something like even an air leak appears there... So yeah, the size is the least of the issues here.)
Just do it in the winter, otherwise it might get too hot...
STOP GIVING ELON IDEAS