A Delta IV Heavy heads for space at last while New Horizons' fumes OK for 'future missions' An expendable Delta IV Heavy finally took off at the weekend while reusability darlings SpaceX and Blue Origin both continued to suffer slippages. Meanwhile, New Horizons still has plenty of gas in the tank. Delta IV Heavy (finally) gets off the ground United Launch Alliance (ULA) was celebrating on 19 January, having finally …
All first launch dates slip by quite a bit. This is just PR not keeping up with rocket reality1 :)
Rocketstar are building an aerospike engine, a concept that is decades behind conventional rocket motors in maturity & requires a lot of development work before it becomes reliable enough for paying customers. Blue Origin are going from a reusable technology demo (Shepard) to Falcon Heavy competitor (Glenn) which is a big step. Best of luck to them both
Space-X has taken the nearest thing to a risk free path, build a bog standard rocket2 for LEO insertions (Falcon-1), then make a bigger rocket capable of useful Geosynchronous insertions (Falcon-9), then make it reusable (the really hard bit!) to slash costs, then make it (much) bigger (Falcon-Heavy). What is astounding about Space-X is that it has managed all of these steps in only 18 years from start-up and is now fairly close to providing a bus timetable equivalent for launch dates.
1 Lookup Virgin Galactic for world leading slippage.
2 Not simple, a well known engineering model used since the 50's. (Atlas development is comparable)
Doesn't going for a heavy vehicle mean ordinary launches will be more expensive. While there aren't all that many heavy launches happening nowadays. Though I accept that big cuts in prices might create some extra demand.
Or is the plan to beat Musk to the punch and launch a bigger capsule that can open up and swallow everybody else's, then return them to one's extinct volcano of choice?
The US military regularly fly some really big lumps into orbit on the Atlas-V & Delta Heavy, there's a steady market for reliable heavy lift.
The launch economics depend on how much you (and others) are wanting to lift & where to. if a Falcon-9 can carry only your payload to Geo-sync (max 8,200kg) then you'll pay for the whole flight, If ride sharing a Falcon-Heavy (max 26,700kg) with 2-3 other similar payloads comes in cheaper then that's what you'll use.
The rocket had remained stubbornly attached to the Earth after a number of failed attempts, including a particularly memorable last-second abort, which left the boosters looking a tad singed.
Although the scorching in the picture shown was due to a pre launch fireball, which is aparently a quirk of the engine design.
Thinks of aerospikes as inverted bells, the spike is one wall of the bell and atmospheric pressure provides the other wall, this means that as the rocket's altitude increases and the atmosphere thins the shape of the 'bell' changes allowing for maximum efficiency at all altitudes.
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