Mr Squiggle's rocket always landed on its arse.

On Sat, May 13, 2017 at 12:36 PM, Mike Borgelt <
[email protected]> wrote:

> There were no enclosed wings on the Shuttle. There is plenty of Youtube
> video of shuttle launches and landings.
> It was a miserable, extremely dangerous  flying machine (this is just the
> orbiter, not the rest of the vulnerabilities built in to the system) with
> an L/D of something like 3 or 4 and a high wing loading and no go round
> capability. This resulted in quite severe re-entry heat loads and Columbia
> disintegrated at around 210,000 feet while still going Mach 12 or so. You
> want to shed energy higher up and a "fluffier" re-entry vehicle does this.
> Shuttle got the wing design it did in order to have a higher hypersonic L/D
> so it had more cross range capability on re-entry. This was to meet a USAF
> requirement for it to be able to be launched either from Cape Canaveral or
> Vandenberg and be recovered to the same place after one orbit, aka "the
> silly ass once around mission". This was meant to be a quick reaction
> reconnaisance mission but by the time the thing got built nobody believed
> in this mission anymore and anyway "quick reaction" didn't describe a
> shuttle launch. Atlantis was in processing for launch in a month when
> Columbia was launched on her last flight. I've seen a report that said they
> could have speeded up processing and would have had a window of 3 days to
> rendezvous, transfer the crew and either put Columbia into re-entry for
> disposal or park it in a higher orbit where it might have been able to be
> repaired on a later mission.
>
> Whether a vehicle has wings or not you need to burn a small amount of fuel
> to get your orbit to intersect the upper atmosphere. After that, the winged
> vehicle doesn't need to burn more fuel. A wingless rocket powered lander
> will need a small amount to cancel its terminal velocity in the lower
> atmosphere for landing . Correctly designed this should be only 100M/sec or
> so. Falcon 9 from what I could see from the last flight was less than
> 300M/sec but this booster stage wasn't originally designed for optimum
> rocket powered landing. (I think you want a conical shape for greater base
> area). Wings are pretty awful on re-entry. Very high temperatures on
> relatively small in area stagnation points. Heat shielding on a properly
> designed wingless stage will likely weigh a lot less.
>
> The upper stage of Falcon 9 was meant to re-enter and be recovered but the
> payload hit meant that idea was abandoned but in light of the success of
> the booster landings the plan has been dusted off. There is talk of
> attempting upper stage recovery on the first flight of Falcon Heavy (3
> Falcon 9 booster stages strapped together). It is planned to recover all 3
> boosters and at least one of them has flown before. See also Elon Musk ITS.
> ITS is the proposed Mars ship. Highly entertaining video of Elon Musk
> describing this at an IAU meeting in Mexico last September. SpaceX is
> actually testing the full scale carbon fiber tanks for this and the Raptor
> engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_engine_family) is in
> test and has been fired.
>
> All you ever want to know about spaceships flown and proposed at
> www.astronautix.com
>
> This is the REAL space age.
>
> Mike
>
>
>
>
>
>
> At 09:50 PM 5/12/2017, you wrote:
>
> Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
>          boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0001_01D2CB65.94F90990"
> Content-Language: en-us
>
> I agree Mark and disagree with your comments Mike.
>
> The shuttles were capable of rotating to an AoA after re-entry so that
> they could slowed sufficiently to extend enclosed wings and be turned into
> a much safer flying device that operated with much more flexibility on its
> return to Terra Firma.
>
> Noel.
>
> *From:* Aus-soaring [ mailto:[email protected]
> <[email protected]>] *On Behalf Of *Mark Newton
> *Sent:* Friday, May 12, 2017 7:18 PM
> *To:* Discussion of issues relating to Soaring in Australia.
> *Subject:* Re: [Aus-soaring] High speed glider landing
>
> Might be fine for a booster, but not so good for an orbiter, where you’d
> need to take many expensive kilograms of landing fuel all the way into
> orbit and back.
>
>
>
>   - mark
>
>
> On May 12, 2017, at 11:07 AM, Mike Borgelt < mborgelt@borgeltinstruments.
> com> wrote:
>
> About  how the Shuttle used to land except the vehicle is a lot smaller.
>
>
>
> I think wings are the most useless things on spaceships though. Just land
> it vertically on rocket thrust as SpaceX is now doing routinely.
>
>
> Mike
>
>
> At 09:54 AM 5/12/2017, you wrote:
>
> https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/05/top-secret-air-force-
> spaceplane-lands-with-sonic-boom-after-two-years-in-orbit/
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> *Borgelt Instruments* -
> *design & manufacture of quality soaring instrumentation since 1978 *
> www.borgeltinstruments.com
> tel:   07 4635 5784     overseas: int+61-7-4635 5784
> mob: 042835 5784                 :  int+61-42835 5784
> P O Box 4607, Toowoomba East, QLD 4350, Australia
>
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