What has changed in rocket technology since Sputnik? Are we in the same spot? What went wrong? Can there be progress?

unfair compartiion, the ariplane is a commercially viable industry that gives constant benefits and profits

it directly solves huge logistical problems and unites different parts of the world where people live in and that have value and are important
Spacecraft on the other side provide no inmediate profit, at all, 0.00%, they are orders of magnitude more complex, dangerous and expensive.
When and if they become profitable it will be probably in no less than 100-200 years.
They go to places where people don't live and where it would be extremely difficult to keep people alive, also these placfes have 0% economic value.

Space programs only exists because of the following:
1)Political propaganda
2)Military application
3)Jobs program
4)and veeeeery long behind as a scientific endeavour

/thread closed
forever
forever evere ever of the evers have i asnwered your question in a totally objectivge literally undeniable way that shows that I, the knower, know all and has the full extens of all information
your question has been asnwered like 2+2=4 and thers NOTHING more to say about it,
arguing, or even not inmediately closing the thread and going to a tatoo parlor to tatoo my name (its joe by the way) as the great educator who showed you in such an epic and unprecedented manner how wrong you were, is as obscenely wrong as denying every scientist and mathematical formula at the same time

>weather predictions
that is too complex to handle without computers, if every human being was makign calculations it would still not even be close

theres a lot of things that cant be done wtihtout computers

singufag graph needed here, its reeaaaally simple op, some techonologies reach a limit of whats phyisically possible, those of us who work in the real world of real things know that things dont just exponentially increase forever, they hit their physical limit

you could argue that forks have stayed the same way for many years, well what did you expect, there is no abstract measure of progress that keep on increasing forever

there are human, objectives, way to achieve them and solutions that steadily aproach to whats phyisically posible until they hit a limit

period.
endthread

Much better flight control systems, safety, accuracy, efficiency, better fuels, etc.

By saying "what went wrong" you imply that it failed in some way. Aircraft technology has somewhat stagnated because of a lack of funding for NASA. NASA spearheaded radical aviation concepts because they used to have the government funding. In recent years, all that can be done is to make current technologies more efficient and safer, which they have done. But very recently, the government hiked NASA's funding, and they are bringing back the X-plane program to bring about more changes in civilian aviation technologies.

pilotweb.aero/news/nasa_revives_its_x_plane_programme_1_4516101

...

/thread

mind explaining?

Capitalism values profitability above technological and human progress.

The nazis got murdered, since then scientific advancement nearly stopped.

>since then scientific advancement nearly stopped.
except for the many jewish nobel prizes

eat shit hanz, you lost

>human progress.
Crossing the Atlantic in fewer hours is "human progress"?

creating advanced machines that if piloted by guys good (commun istic) andn not bad (capitalistic) could imrpove the distribution of the foods and machines that are needed for the many peopel (Who all have the right to live not only whites) to experience tha basic objective of human life which is to experience beatuy) is progress,

BaconRider, is that you?

Concorde was overkill. Jumbo jets are much more efficient thus cheaper.

> nobel prizes
literally nobody cares about the most racist and sexist circlejerk in history. worse than the oscars

shure shure little antisemite kiddy boy, tell that to einstein,

time is money ;)

>worse than the oscars
>implying the oscars are racist
Go home Kanye, yer drunk.
Black talent isn't underrepresented in the oscars.
It just seems that way because nobody (blacks included) wants to watch black people in film as much as white people in film.

>B-but Straight Outta Compton was the best movie ever!
My sister-in-law said that, and called me racist when i said it was mediocre.

>Samuel L. Jackson has never won an Oscar
>The Oscars are not racist

>>Samuel L. Jackson has never won an Oscar
>>The Oscars are not racist
1) I never said they were fair.
2) Samuel L. Jackson doesn't deserve an oscar, no matter how much he makes your pants fit tight.
He plays the exact same character in every single movie.
He has no range, no "stagecraft".

>Samuel L. Jackson
extremely mediocre actor who based his whole career upoon exageration and repeating ad nauseam one line

if you think he even deserves to be mentioned you objectively dont know about theatering

It is cos he is black. fuck u racists

If we're being objective here then the best black movie (as of now) would be boyz n the hood since it made nearly 9 times it's original budget and was later registered and persevered in the library of Congress.

>tfw still haven't watched this
am I an oreo?

>is a lot more useful than a dumb meatbag
I would agree, if we had a drill on Europa moon by now. I see some progress between Lunokhod and ExoMars, but not much.

> Compare Congreve rockets to the Saturn V.
You'd have to compare kites to planes.
I agree the comparsion in my picture was a little stretched. But still - not much progress in rocket technology since reaching the orbit. And after landing on the moon the complexity of the missions regressed. Feels bad man.

So there was 70 years of rapid airplane evolution before a plateau was reached. In rocket design the peak was Saturn V. Then NASA got stuck on inefficient shuttle. And now it's repeating Saturn.

I partially agree. But but but. This looks like the situation old world faced when reaching Americas for the first time. First expeditions weren't economically viable. You'd need government funding to get somewhere. The benefit wasn't immediate, but it was enourmous after a time.

>By saying "what went wrong" you imply that it failed in some way
The regression to Earth orbit after landing on the moon in 1969. Surely this is not good.

Amen brother. Also I find space exploration profitable to humankind but not in money making kind of way.

That being said I see the light. I find hope in Elon Musk. ALL PRAISE ELON OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR!

>I agree with the point many make that superathmospheric person transport is lagging
To answer you all, the reason is
>economy of scale

Air transport, like all the technology in this world, is made possible only by economy of scale. Concorde didn't scale up well since it had low capacity and high running costs; things that have to go at Mach>1 require fuckloads of energy, and probably can't carry a high payload.

soyuz\semyorka is the perfect rocket .
you cant really push basic chemical rocketry that far,cant make anything considerably better then H2LOX. re usability \next gen propulsion is the next big thing .
think thermal rockets powered by external lasers or gliding boosters

Do the right thing and menace to society are better

unless nasa gets 1 trillion dollars we are going to stay in the same general place.
Rockets have gotten a lot better, but nobody really has a suitable budget for massive operations like putting a man on mars

No you're not, but you should watch it one day it's fairly good movie. That is sadly still relevant even to this day.

Maby gubernment should ask people how much of their taxes they want to spend on spess and how much on military.

How could you let your country to be run by corporations?

>and expensive.
Not really
Big planes cost hundreds of millions

>In rocket design the peak was Saturn V.
Falcon 9*

>How could you let your country to be run by corporations?
the only people who hate corporations are insane on everything else. its the best of two evils

There's always progress just look at space x

>muh efficiency
It's a LEO toy. Saturn V was a big boy machine.

Lunokhod is a glorified RC car with basically no autonomy. Time lag between the earth and moon is like 1 second so this works. For mars time lag can be up to 20 minutes, just plain RC doesn't work.

Exomars will be capable of autonmously navigating across the surface of Mars. The controllers just tell it to go to point B, it builds up a map of the terrain and navigates there

Thanks to development of computers, not rocket science.

Bullshit

>What has changed in rocket technology since Sputnik?
Sequential staging confirmed and now in widespread usage
Rockets and engines in general have grown considerably in size
Large solid-fuelled rockets (and boosters) have become practical
LH2 has become practical as a fuel
Staged-combustion has been developed and works
Liquid rockets have improved in thrust-to-weight and to a lesser extent in ISP
Materials advancements have improved mass ratios somewhat
Cost. Most people value their time, but not THAT much. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me that much if the next MAJOR change in the air travel paradigm would be a step towards slower, more efficient straight-wing airframes with propfan/turboprop engines.

Flying wing designs could significantly reduce fuel usage

SpaceX will have their big boy machine sooner or later

if they get reusability right then the falcon 9 will be to rockets what a modern day boat is compared to a sailship

Rocket science is simple, aerodynamics are hard. Play some KSP.

Russian rocketry stagnated from the 80's onward because of money, and they never really recovered from the death of Korolev.

We're still plugging away, the Delta 4 Heavy is pretty impressive.

we won't get better space technology until we have the ability to manufacture in-situ. The problem with trying to make things reusable is that the initial risk is so high that taking additional risks by using a partly-beat-up unit is more risky.

?
SpaceX is demonstrating that there is no risk, that there was HUGE oppurtunities of savings just by applying modern/sane techniques, Then you just attempt landings on all your launches until you figure out reuse

>What has changed in rocket technology since Sputnik?
Too many to list. Much better electronics/ computer/control/navigation for example.

> Are we in the same spot?
It is true much focus has been on LEO satellites similar to the original Sputnik.

> What went wrong?
Apollo 13, Challenger, etc.

> Can there be progress?
Yes.
SpaceX has some recent interesting developments. NASA is working on new systems.

>Russian rocketry stagnated from the 80's onward because of money
to be fair, they always had FAR less money than the americans.
Theirs was really a space program made out of wits and intelligence.
Americans had a much more brute force aproach, bury problems in money till they got fixed, its quite astonishing that the soviets even managed to win at something with the huge disparity of resources in both sides.

>they never really recovered from the death of Korolev.
This to the max, I think it's really possible that the soviets could have won the moon race if they had followed korolev approach, which was simply to assemble the craft in orbit using a soyuz capsule progress rockets, and a new lander and command module.

Of all this only the lander and command module (Arguably the simplest components of the whole thing) were the only things that weren't ultra reliable and tested.

So i think that with that aproach they really could have gotten it down before the americans who fixated on building a very big rocket.
Which was an aproach that could only work with ridiculous amount of money, so when the soviets decided to try the same that was their doom

>What has changed in rocket technology since Sputnik?

?
You think using tech from the 50's is an improvement?

chemical rockets have some limits, spacex is working into making them as efficient as possible. They will probably be the best way to put cargo into orbit for a very long time before some really freaky sci-fi stuff gets implemented.

But on the grounds of traveling between two different orbits theres HUGE amounts of improvement possible. Mainly researching alternatives to chemica like, solar sails, nuclear power or ion thrusters.

check mate, communists.

is this from today?

We aren't anywhere near approaching the limits of chemical rockets

Are rockets reusable? Nope

Methane rockets are just being developed too, there might be better

yes, as i said, once spacex is done with em they will be as good as they can be

it will be like the fork, a perfected techonology with no room for improvement

Better materials
Better fuel
Better electronic technology
Better pilots and crew
Better understanding of aerodynamics
Better understanding of what goes wrong
Better safety measures

>Better pilots and crew
niga, since apollo pilots do jack shit, i mean really, astronauts nowadays just press a button and go

even f-15 fighters just press a buton and go you think an astronaut passenger of a much billlioners of times spacecraft much more complexer than an f-15 airplane will have ever been today caught doing manual introduction of maneuravilimetrics?

Yea, an 5-15 pilot just presses a button and goes. That's it. That's all they do.

And those much billlioners of times spacecraft pilots do the exact same thing.

>is this from today?
Sorry, today's launch was delayed due to an anomaly on an upper stage actuator. Trying again tomorrow.

>And those much billlioners of times spacecraft pilots do the exact same thing.
no,
they do much less

ass robert m goddard used to say " i dont think that pilot deserve to be called humans at all, i like to think about them aproximately as biological payload"

im glad you accepted im right

...

I loved that liquid fly back booster concept. Bit of trivia, it was going to be piloted by a human, like they put a human in the booster so he could land the thing. Russia I wish you had built it.

When doing iterative design evolution on something as expensive as a rocket it is quite a slow and incomplete process. There are thousands of things we would like to try but are limited to only a handful.

For instance suspending aluminum nano particles in RP-1 could improve the mass fraction quite substantially but we probably wont get to try it.

May be some hope for future methane engines though.

researchgate.net/publication/261874876_Combustion_of_Aluminum_Suspensions_in_Hydrocarbon_Flame_Products

Falsey false

Chemical rockets are limited by material properties of the outer shell, not by how explosive the mix is.

They could already use hydrogenized ethanol and get like three times the exhaust velocity, but it would exhonerate the rocket in like 5 milliseconds (along with the launch board and the whide wole complexity of launch?

>ass robert m goddard
I don't trust a man named ass

still doesnt changer the fact that an explosive mix in the chemicals tank fuel will explode even the most materials strong to man taken into consideration ALL of the design characteristincs

>maneuravilimetrics
>ass robert m goddard
>hydrogenized ethanol
>exhonerate the rocket
>complexity of launch
>changer
>design characteristincs

lol he's having a stroke

>Chemical rockets are limited by material properties of the outer shell
This is mostly unintelligible. What we are after is energy density. Aluminum has excellent volumetric energy density, more than twice that of RP-1, building a liquid aluminum rocket is unpractical at present ergo we would like to suspend aluminum particles in a carrier that also has reasonably good energy density, like RP-1.

Lithium has higher mass energy density than aluminum but 1/4th the volumetric energy density.

>not by how explosive the mix is.
They are certainly limited by how explosive they are, this is usually more of a concern with monopropellants. A propellant that would detonate from moderate shock would not be a good design choice.

what is the theoretical limit of the violentness of a chemical rocket reaction on earth oxygen?

>what is the theoretical limit of the violentness of a chemical rocket
Violentness? Do you mean the instability of the propellants? The enthalpy of the reaction? Something else?

>on earth oxygen
What?

Dimethylmercury and FOOF
Can get you to Mars in an hour.

Not him but what is the most explosive chemical reaction for a rocket? like the one that will produce more thrust

and what is the most energy dense, the one that will store more energy per volume

>Not him but what is the most explosive chemical reaction for a rocket? like the one that will produce more thrust
I think you need to be more specific for that to have a proper answer.
I believe Li+H2+F2 is pretty far up there in terms of energy per kg. H2+O2 is also very good.

>and what is the most energy dense, the one that will store more energy per volume
I'm not actually sure, but I'd guess it's some kind of god-awful organic bipropellant that eats concrete and poisons people on the other side of walls. Those kind of things are generally very nasty.

but none of that come even close to the capabilities of nuclear materials or antimatter to store energy in small volumes right?

wasnt the main rocket that was boosted by this supposed to be autonomous like buran eventually was ?.
i really wish there was more info\documentaries about the russian space program \ their crazy concept rockets\plans .there's some in russian but my russian is shit .

silly politics aside imagine if america outsourced all its rockets\spacecraft to russia . we'd have the kind of reusability spacex is aiming for in the 90s and by now we'd have a base\spacestation on mars .

Turns out that you don't need to change something when you design it right the first time.

You'd be surprised, but the engine of a car hasn't advanced either.

thats categorically false you dipshit

There are a lot of developments in spacecraft propulsion, but the launch vehicles are mostly the same.
There's only so much efficiency you can squeeze out of chemical rockets, so most of the advanced have been in the computers/avionics used to fly them.

The SABRE could be a pretty big deal, but it's still in development.

>There's only so much efficiency you can squeeze out of chemical rockets
Sure you say that, but we've only ever done RP-1 and LH2 rockets

I don't think Sabre will ever be a thing

There's hydrazine, and monopropellants like hydrogen peroxide, and of course solid and hybrid rockets.

Skylon may never see light, but I think SABRE will, or at least something based off of it's technology.

Steam rockets are the answer to super cheap launches from earth. All you need is a large tank of water over a good nozzle. Ground based laser heats the water to steam. Simple and safe.

does the upper stage have a heatshield? Is it ment to be able to return?

>does the upper stage have a heatshield? Is it ment to be able to return?

Look closer, would they put wings and a tail on it if they did not want it to return?

you can see the different kinds of ablator tiles on it .
but yea from my understanding energia 2 was supposed to be fully reusable for most orbits with all components landing on runways.

>water
>not hydrogen
ISHYGDDT

>What went wrong?
russian rocket industry stopped getting money.

>boosters
just use a huge ass plane

It's not just looks that matter user.
A lot of progress has been done. And a lot of progress is going on right now.