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What is this top secret, "Diego Garcia" type, farmer launch field you have to launch your missiles? Here in the Boulder, Colorado, area, the local, municipal officials are not at all keen on model missiles being launched from gubmint-owned land.
Awesome!
It would be kind of difficult... I'm not saying impossible, but difficult. It's a bit too far for gap staging (from the information I've read on the topic). So, you'd likely need electronics to fire the upper stage, then there's the whole recovery of the booster issue, as well as not damaging your transition so you could repeat the process. One thing that would be interesting is if the upper stage could have a piston launcher somehow incorporated into it. No matter what, a lot of careful thought would need to go into it, and I wouldn't recommend it for an original Estes kit... A clone, sure, but the original kits are a bit pricy for something so risky.Is that a two stage kit?
If not; has anybody attempted . . . successfully, to build it as a two stage rocket?
IIRC, you want to keep it under 10 inches or so... But that rear body tube is 15.313" long... That's really pushing the gap quite a bit.Is it too far for gap staging? I've read about some gaps in the double digit range inches wise.
But recovering the booster would be problematic at best.
Again, I'm not saying it can't be done, but with gap staging, I'd want to find a better way.Well, it was a nice dream while it lasted.
"I bought the kit for $30 then spent $200 making it two stage."
It takes a lot more energy to put something into orbit than it does to put something into space briefly and down again.According to this website, the real Terrier-Sandhawk has a maximum altitude of 427 km (265 miles). Can't this sounding rocket actually put a payload into orbit if it can get that high up?
So Bezos is cheating with his “barely to the Karman line” flights. I knew it! ;-).It takes a lot more energy to put something into orbit than it does to put something into space briefly and down again.
Branson isn't even reaching the Karman line.So Bezos is cheating with his “barely to the Karman line” flights. I knew it! ;-).
Branson isn't even reaching the Karman line.
Virgin OrbitThat's for sure. Still, I like the idea of the air-launched "spaceship", a la Virgin Galactic's "Spaceship 2" and the old, venerable, X-15 rocket plane.
It seems to make sense: You make a really big, high-flying, but still air-breathing aircraft. Then you launch or drop a rocket powered "spaceship" from the aircraft. Maybe the spaceship is both "scramjet" and "rocket" craft, or some sort of hybrid. Wouldn't that be the most economical, most elegant way to get into space? Here we are in 2021, 60 years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, and we are still, basically, doing this the same way: We point a large, chemically fueled rocket at the sky and then we light that roman candle. Then the rocket goes (essentially) straight up, vertically, against the gravity well of Earth, expending enormous amounts of fuel in the process. Ultimately, a fairly small payload on the top of the rocket gets into space.
I love rockets! I am a BAR model rocketeer. But as a space enthusiast, I think we (we being humanity) need a more elegant way to get into space. Space elevator? Some sort of rail run that magnetically hurls a payload into space? An air-launched spaceship? A horizontal take off craft that begins as an air-breathing jet airplane, turns into some sort of hybrid jet/rocket craft at some point, and then finally becomes a pure rocket craft that enters space?
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