Is it possible for "citizen scientists" to launch an object into low earth orbit for a relatively cheap amount?

Because rockets are expensive to build.

Rocket engines, guidance systems and structural parts have certain minimum overhead mass. Since a rocket's delta v is in part defined by its wet mass/dry mass, and getting into orbit requires a rather substantial amount of delta v, you need quite a big rocket to get to orbit. The minimum surface-to-orbit vehicle is any run of the mill ICBM. Pic related, for example, is 34 meters tall - and it's pretty much as small as they get.

sure.

you can reach sub orbital altitude with a rocket the size of a telephone pole.

youtube.com/watch?v=QnCn4514P2I

what are you smoking user

Yes, schools do it all the time. There are several programs available to consumers. It is also pretty cheap because cargo restraints are really high. There's no Falcon Heavy shit. Its just tiny rockets.

He's actually right. The trajectory of a thrown object isn't correct for it to enter orbit.

For example, particles thrown by an asteroid impact either fall back to the planet, or get ejected entirely. Orbit requires lateral velocity that you can't get from a ballistic trajectory.

I mean, you could through it tangential to the surface of the earth, but it would havr to pass through a very significant portion of atmosphere.

>tiny
To launch even just a couple of kilograms into LEO you need a 20-odd meter rocket.

Do physically do it? Absolutely, yes. It's not that hard.

To be allowed to do it? No. The paperwork alone is going to cost tens of millions of dollars.

What if you put a small rocket on a weather balloon, then launched the rocket out of the balloons cargo once it reached extreme heights?

>The minimum surface-to-orbit vehicle is any run of the mill ICBM.
Not true. Competent analysis has been done of the practicality of small launch vehicles with the conclusion (in 2005) that there is no lower limit (although mass efficiency drops off with smaller size) and a 1 ton vehicle could easily be made to carry a 1 kg cubesat to LEO:
redyns.com/Reference/MinLaunchVehicle.pdf

A more detailed design effort (in 1994) concluded a fully-reusable 1.5 tonne SSTO could be developed to carry a 10 kg payload to LEO:
quantumg.net/mockingbird.pdf

>Rocket engines, guidance systems and structural parts have certain minimum overhead mass.
Guidance systems can fit on a computer chip. Structural parts scale down without limit, and in fact there are structural advantages to a small rocket. While some potential efficiency is lost in your rocket engine options, solid-fuel and pressure fed rockets scale down well, while piston pumps and pistonless pumps start to make sense (as opposed to turbopumps).

>a small rocket on a weather balloon
That's advantageous. There is the problem that you lose control over where the rocket starts and which way it's facing, but it has been used for sounding rockets and it helps a lot. Aerodynamics are a major obstacle for small orbital rockets.

Rockoon been there done that... You should check out the Romanian space program

10-20 meters is the tiny zone for orbital rockets.

The one in this vid is 10 meters. The second stage on this one failed to fire though. Payloads are 3kg-140kg range.

>Romanian space program
Come on man, we're talking about the real world, not Star Trek.

Sugar Shot to Space
sugar-shot.org/

>small rocket
>big ass hydrogen baloon to lift it as high as it can
>???

Not orbital. Also willfully silly. Also defunct.

Note when you go to the project status page:
sugar-shot.org/project_status.html
>Projected End Date:
>2016
>Planned Events:
>2012 DSS Phoenix-2 (tentative)

me again: My mistake, just that website hasn't been updated. They're still updating on their Facebook page.

2016 has come and gone, but as of November, they were still hoping to achieve a (suborbital) shot to space by the end of 2017.

rocketlabusa.com/launch/rideshare/

Recently read an article about these guys. 150kg into low earth orbit for ~$5m. ~$33,333 per kilogram.

Standard cubesats are between 1.33kg and 8kg. Let's go with these because what you're looking to send up is probably in this weight range - so ~$45k - ~$267k per cubesat.

A small group of 5 "citizen scientists" willing to pay about $10,000 each could put something small in LEO.

spaceflight.com/schedule-pricing/
around the same pricing as rocketlab

spaceflightinsider.com/missions/commercial/zero-2-infinity-launches-its-first-rocket-from-high-altitude-balloon/

...

Yea. You will need 5 years of testing and you will need to sell all your sheres of paypal. Then it's $50mln a pop.

Cheap? No. Possible? Yes. All you need is a chemist (fuel), a programmer (control) and a welder (assembly).

Many rocket clubs do so already, remember that launches into US airspace have to be sanctioned by the FAA.

nar.org/high-power-rocketry-info/filing-for-faa-launch-authorization/filing-for-faa-waiver/

nar.org/find-a-local-club/section-guidebook/laws-regulations/

what the

It's a clip from Get Out, the Hollywood movie about forced transsexuality.

that's brittany white, a black big tittied pornstar that only takes white dick.

liar

unless you can find a propellant with energy density a few orders of magnitude greater than conventional rocket fuel, rockets will always be huge

there are candidates:
metallic hydrogen (if it exists and is stable)
and that's it

>rockets will always be huge
Only if the payloads are also large. See: Most rockets have orbital payloads measured in tonnes, not kg, and they've mostly crept up over the years. For instance, the Project Mercury spacecraft was under 1.5 tonnes fully loaded, while Crew Dragon is going to be over 6 tonnes dry and empty.

I see no reason why an orbital launcher of negligible payload couldn't be under 100 kg. Or why a minimalistic single-person manned launcher couldn't be about the size of a U-Haul truck.

>Citizen scientists

What the fugg
:DDDDDDDDD

No and yes. Building your own launch system is totally out of the question unless you are elon fucking musk.

The way to do it as an amateur is to hitch hike. Build a tiny cubesat and get it as an additional payload on someone else's rocket.

If your cubesat is made so that it won't fuck up the rocket it's being launched from and it does something pretty cool that no one else has done with big science/engineering value, you got a pretty good chance.

Or hell, make friends with an astronaut and get them to carry a sticker or something to the ISS.

What do you suppose is the mechanism responsible for lateral velocity countering the 'pull of Gravity', known as orbit?
Or, do you believe Gravity becomes negligible solely from the initial lateral velocity, with no maintenance thrust required?
Awesome interstella get, btw

>do you believe Gravity becomes negligible solely from the initial lateral velocity, with no maintenance thrust required?
That's the principle, yes... once you get up to orbital velocity, there's no "maintenance thrust" required, unless you're low enough to suffer drag effects from the atmosphere, and to correct for tidal forces, irregularities, and third bodies.

The guy you're responding to was explaining that you can't accelerate to an orbit that doesn't pass through the thick part of the atmosphere (and thus end your orbit before you can go around a second time) entirely by accelerating from within the thick part of the atmosphere. Whatever altitude you get thrown from, that's where your perigee (low point) is going to be. You also have to at least do a circularization burn at the apogee. You can, in principle, go fast enough to escape entirely from Earth, but not reach orbit around Earth just with a cannon launch from within Earth's atmosphere.

what the fuuuuuucckkk.

I phone posted that shit earlier and didn't even notice my own fucking quints. Screencapping my shit.

• cheaper/lower-tech than big booster
• slower to ascend than big booster
Achieving low-Earth orbit (LEO) requires:
(1) altitude of 200km
(2) velocity of 7.8kps
(3) pushing through 80km of air
A well-designed hydrogen balloon will get the
rocket through half that 80km of air, and one-fifth
the altitude of a LEO, for a fraction of the cost of
an equivalent booster stage.

As I understand it, small rockets suffer more from the effects of atmospheric and gravity drag than large rockets do, on account of the square-cube law. Drag is roughly proportional to area, yet propellant and thrust tend to be proportional to volume, leading to the aforementioned performance effect.

This is part of why Pegasus, which is small by orbital rocket standards but is still fairly enormous by amateur standars (and 50 million dollars),is air-launched from stratospheric altitudes - it helps get the thickest, densest slice of atmosphere out of the way.

Now, as mentioned, you could try using a weather balloon to get a tiny amateur orbital rocket into the upper stratosphere before lighting it off. But your rocket would still need it's inertial navigation and all other systems functioning without ground support for the entire duration of ascent, which could potentially take an hour or longer. And you have little control over where that balloon drifts during that ascent too.

What if, instead, you included a ramjet sustainer into the first or second stage to drag the rocket through the soupy lower atmosphere with minimal fuel consumption? Ramjets offer several times more specific impulse than rockets do, when operating in supersonic atmospheric conditions. That way you still offset the drag penalty from using a smaller rocket, but without the challenges an air-launch introduces. And then once the ramjet starts losing thrust due to thinning atmosphere in the upper stratosphere, you can ditch the ramjet stage and accelerate conventionally from there with (very small) rocket stages.

OP here.
Lets say that I made a rocket that had a small cross section of less than 4 inches, however it had a length of ~50 feet. Would I be able to achieve the required lift if I used a balloon?. Id like to put a solar powered laser into orbit roughly 2kg, thanks.

really
you think a massive balloon is cheaper than making your rocket slightly larger

Cost of helium/latex vs cost of rocket fuel and aluminum.

>you think a massive balloon is cheaper than making your rocket slightly larger
It's not "slightly", it's more like 50%. Gaining that altitude with rocket power is a huge expense, and delta-v costs aren't linear.

The main problem with it is scaling. It works okay for small rockets, but the balloons get too big and hard to handle for big rockets, while the rocket itself gets cheaper per unit mass as you go bigger.

Launching to suborbit and actually putting an object in orbit are two completely different beasts.

>It's not "slightly", it's more like 50%.
No
At that altitude on a normal rocket flight you've also burnt a huge amount of fuel for velocity
A balloon has only given you altitude.

Don't think anyone is going to be making balloon launched orbital rockets

>At that altitude on a normal rocket flight you've also burnt a huge amount of fuel for velocity
>A balloon has only given you altitude.
Altitude is worth more than you think. Rockets lose a lot of efficiency (both thrust and specific impulse) from the high pressure at ground level. Getting into the stratosphere before lighting the engines gets you close to the efficiency of being in the vacuum. Similarly, the air resistance is very significant at low altitudes, so gaining speed quickly is penalized, yet gaining speed slowly is also penalized through gravity drag.

For instance, Merlin 1D gets 845 kN of thrust and 282 s of specific impulse at sea level, yet the vacuum-optimized version of the same engine gets 934 kN of thrust and 348 s of specific impulse (in vacuum). A high-altitude launch gets you about 10% more thrust and 20% more Isp.

Let's say you fly straight up at a slightly subsonic average speed of 1 km per 3 seconds. Going up 40 km will take 120 seconds. This will mean paying a gravity drag of about 1200 m/s. At an overall specific impulse of 300s, already the rocket equation demands that one third of your initial mass be expended propellant. And this isn't accounting for the cost of accelerating (at the lowest specific impulse, in the thickest air) or the direct cost of air resistance, this is just paying for gravity drag with your specific impulse reduced by the atmosphere and your top speed held down to avoid excessive aerodynamic effects.

This napkin math is a bit worse than the actual gravity drag. Ground-launched rockets do accelerate somewhat faster. But it illustrates how severe this type of effect can be.

People doing subsonic airlaunch aren't idiots. There are large advantages to carrying your rocket to significant altitude before lighting it.

What if we use wireless charging to eliminate the need for fuel?

Longitudinal waves would kill it for sure.

Some people were trying that. It wasn't a great idea.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Dynamics

Just noticed a typo in there: LH2 has a density of 0.07 g/cc not 0.7 g/cc. It's just a typo, though, the error doesn't propagate through the rest of the figures.

>implying anyone understands any of that nerd shit

This is the Veeky Forumsence board, if you don't understand that infographic, you don't belong on this board.

It seems like you've thought about this before and could only come up with possibilities involving throwing it into space.

A rocket that size would weigh about 200 kg. That's pretty damn heavy as far as weather balloon payloads go. The largest standard weather balloons could still lift it if you inflated them to half of their burst volume, but it'd probably only get you up about 7 km before bursting. The air is extremely thin at 40 km, and weather balloons only get there by being extremely underfilled at launch with a light payload, and expanding 300 times in volume during ascent.

>generous margins for structural mass
>spaceflight
Pick one

Well, that was the argument for spending all the money on the huge microwave power transmission system: it would dramatically increase the specific impulse, thus allowing you to put more structural mass on the vehicle, so it would be easy to make it reusable.

...which isn't a terrible idea if you also have excellent density impulse, but hydrogen is such a terrible choice.

I think they've have been much better off going with ammonia or ammonia-methanol blend propellant, and possibly using thrust augmentation on lift-off (injecting NTO, LOX, H2O2, or ammonium nitrate slurry into the nozzle, to react with the hydrogen in the exhaust and give a big boost to thrust, while avoiding the normal complications of combustion due to how hot the hydrogen starts out). Ammonia's density is ten times that of hydrogen, and it's not even a cryogenic liquid, let alone a deep cryogenic one. The tank for it would be much simpler and smaller.

>a small cross section of less than 4 inches, however it had a length of ~50 feet
Why? If you're going to launch it from a high altitude, it might as well be a blobby thing. Small rockets are typically spin-stabilized, so a spherical or stubby-cylindrical solid motor is a good way to go.

Look at this, for example:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_(rocket_stage)
Star-37Y, a 1.15 tonne stage, could very nearly go to orbit if you put it in space first. It can achieve over 7.7 km/s of delta-V (though that's without a payload).

You won't lift anything to 40 km height with a latex balloon filled with helium.

True. 20 km is more typical.

Following the very same reasoning, it would be impossible to have satellites in orbit around Earth.

no, satellites perform a secondary burn when they're outside the atmosphere to circularize the orbit.

get rekt.

Following his argument, satellites would need to perform constant burns.

>Following the very same reasoning,
>Following his argument
He didn't offer reasoning or an argument, he simply made an accurate statement of fact about what a catapult/cannon launch can do.

It is retarded to say that there is no inbetween, when in fact there is, since the orbit doesn't have to be 100% circular. It may be impractical, but he didn't seem to be talking about practice, but about theory. He is only right if he assumed some stupid shit like firing it vertically upwards.

Don't jump in if you don't understand a subject.

With a single-impulse launch, you can either launch to escape velocity, or you can launch to an elliptical orbit that comes back to the same altitude you started from. So if you start from inside the atmosphere, the orbit is bringing you back into the atmosphere, where you will shortly not be in orbit anymore.

If you want an elliptical orbit with a higher perigee than the altitude you started from, you need a perigee-raising burn, and that can't be done at the perigee (normally, you'd do it at the apogee).

it should be cheaper to book a Dnepr launch these days, since Russia put all Ukrainian rockets (Dnepr, Rokot, Zenit) on hold.

This Japanese SS-520 is probably the smallest design that can achieve orbit. It was intended as a one-off, but they are going to try again later this year since the first launch failed.

Indonesia had a similar design, with a couple boosters added to the first stage, but they ran out of funding.

It would take millions of dollars to pull off such a launch program, most of it for testing.