[HN Gopher] Spaceflight Before 1951
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Spaceflight Before 1951
Author : ruaraidh
Score : 61 points
Date : 2021-09-06 07:39 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| gumby wrote:
| > Beginning life as a weapon, the V-2 was pressed into peaceful
| service after the war at the United States' White Sands Missile
| Range as well as the Soviet Union's Kapustin Yar.
|
| This is a rather generous explanation. They began as weapons and
| their use was explored by the militaries of the victorious
| powers. Those research efforts were primarily to gain the
| knowledge of how to continue development of rocket weapons.
|
| In the case of the US: NACA worked on air flight only; civilian
| space research only began with the formation of NASA in 1958.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| In 1957, two months before the Sputnik 1 launch, a steel cap
| covering an underground nuclear explosion test, although
| unlikely, may have been the first object reaching greater then
| orbital, in fact escape velocity from earth:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#Missing_ste...
| david_draco wrote:
| Does it really count if it is vaporized before leaving the
| atmosphere?
| 7373737373 wrote:
| These calculations suggest that it indeed probably vaporized
| within a few meters due to the insane amount of heat:
| https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/488151/could-
| the...
| beerandt wrote:
| That meteor equation isn't the right one to use. It's based
| on assumptions that don't apply here. It has to be re-
| derived, at a minimum, if it can even be repurposed.
|
| Any dt equation like that should have some value of
| X_final-X_initial for any constants that change.
|
| For rho, he plugs in rho_initial for rho_final. And
| rho_initial in space is zero, so it likely got dropped from
| the equation when it was derived.
|
| That said, if it even survived the initial xray ablation,
| yeah, it probably burnt up before reaching space, or at
| least slowed down enough that it came back down.
| jgilias wrote:
| Reminds me of this stingy classic by Tom Lehrer:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
| davidw wrote:
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wan_Hu
| nsf39k wrote:
| There's this guy too
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagari_Hasan_Celebi) who
| allegedly made a manned rocket flight in 1633 in front of the
| Ottoman sultan.
| nsf39k wrote:
| The British Interplanetary Society proposed using a modified V-2
| called 'Megaroc' to perform a manned suborbital spaceflight
| before 1950. (https://www.bis-space.com/megaroc/)
|
| They were pretty visionary when it came to space exploration and
| even made the first serious study into potential manned lunar
| mission in 1938 using a 'step rocket'. (https://www.bis-
| space.com/the-bis-lunar-spaceship/)
| Xophmeister wrote:
| I realise this is a trite observation, but it never ceases to
| amaze me that it took just 22 years from the beginning of space
| exploration to walking on the moon.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There's a filk song about Sputnik that makes this point as its
| punchline.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-mZ9pKvCmk - "Surprise!"
| Sputnik wore out and spiraled back to Earth On re-entry
| it burned up very soon Hail and good-bye to that goose in
| the sky... And in 12 more years a man walked on the Moon!
|
| I find it far from trite, I'm continuously amazed by this as
| well.
| nautilius wrote:
| 27 years; that's what the whole linked article on wikipedia is
| about.
| Xophmeister wrote:
| > Exploration of space began in earnest in 1947
|
| 22, 27...either way it's incredible.
| crubier wrote:
| The delta-v from Earth Surface to Low Earth Orbit (beginning of
| space exploration) is 9km/s.
|
| The delta-v from Earth Surface to Moon is 15km/s.
|
| So basically once you learned to go to space, going to the Moon
| is "only" 60% harder, even thought the moon is 1000x further
| away.
| simonh wrote:
| A full up Saturn V with LEM and the works looks a lot more
| complex and capable than a 60% improvement on a V2.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| But the additional complexity is mostly designing a suite
| of vehicles, not general rocketry advances.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Incorrect. Orbital mechanics were not a part of the V2
| era programs because they were sub-orbital with
| relatively simple parabolic trajectories. Getting a
| capsule back from LEO was not something that had been
| worked out mathematically until later.
| hoseja wrote:
| V2 does NOT go into orbit.
| simonh wrote:
| Yet another reason why the comment I'm replying to was
| incorrect, thanks.
| dmd wrote:
| The delta-v from Earth Surface to the bottom of the ocean is
| 0, so by your logic, going there is trivial.
| OJFord wrote:
| Well when did you ever hear of a space agency bothering?
|
| Jokes aside, I hadn't heard the term before and from what I
| could guess/infer didn't see how it could be a measure
| between two places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v
| ustolemyname wrote:
| I'm going to nit this for several reasons:
|
| 1. Walking on the moon implied a return trip which requires
| an extra ~3km/s.
|
| 2. Under the rocket equation the fuel requirements for more
| delta v grows superlinearly, which then awkwardly makes your
| rocket bigger, which requires more fuel...
|
| 3. 22 years prior a metal can went to space. The scale of a
| manned moon mission in comparison is absolutely nuts, even
| basic things like having rocket motors that can be relit is a
| large technical challenge.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Addendum to point 3. It's not just a metal can, it's a
| metal can with some people in it. You have to keep them
| alive and useful for roughly a week, not just fling them at
| the moon.
| [deleted]
| areoform wrote:
| A few weeks ago a Russian-speaking friend in the aerospace
| industry (hey Dennis!) surprised me with photos of Yuri Gagarin
| (and other cosmonauts from Air Force Group 1) engaging with a re-
| usable lifting body aircraft,
| https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/836685279875956746/87...
|
| The vehicle was the subject of his thesis with the following
| diagrams apparently being sourced from it,
| https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/836685279875956746/87...
| The design is a fairly striking, lifting body design being
| pursued in the early 60s! (Russian source,
| http://www.buran.ru/other/Buran_Gagarin.pdf )
|
| This meant that the first human in orbit and on another heavenly
| body both worked on reusable space vehicles (Gagarin's vehicle
| and the Dyna-Soar by Neil Armstrong). That's a fairly incredible
| coincidence that begs the question; why? Why did two different
| agencies - walled off from each other at opposite ends of the
| world - converge on the same design?
|
| Apparently, as with many things from that era, the answer is the
| Nazis. More specifically, the Silbervogel, a lifting-body, sub-
| orbital, liquid-fuel-rocket-powered vehicle designed in the 1930s
| by Irene Bredt and Eugene Sanger. This is the very first _known_
| design of its kind, and it seems to have shaped much of aerospace
| history. For e.g. regeneratively cooled nozzles trace their
| history back to this design, as the Silbervogel was designed to
| operate with one due to their early experiments /tests. They also
| did substantial work in the physical and physio-chemical
| properties of liquid-fueled rockets that stands as some of the
| earliest work on the subject.
|
| Eugene Sanger has become well known in rocketry circles and has
| been credited for some of the analytical techniques used to
| estimate the performance of liquid-fueled rockets due to his
| book, Raketenjlugtechnik (Rocket Flight Technology) that he
| published in 1933 (along with additional literature later on).
| Because of this public material, the field remembers him as one
| of the origin points for these analytical techniques. But it
| turns out that might be wrong.
|
| Thanks to the records about the silbervogel and subsequent
| reports - http://www.astronautix.com/data/saenger.pdf , I've
| found that Sanger was the engineer who designed the lifting body,
| but Irene was the mathematician and physicist who modeled their
| experiments and derived the calculations we use today. This fact
| is fairly exciting to a nerd like me. It's my first contribution
| to academia/the official record! :)
|
| However, it's not that far off to say that Bredt & Sanger are
| both the progenitors of multiple sub-fields of modern aerospace
| research, _especially_ re-usable spaceplanes.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I would just take issue with your use of "lifting body". The
| photo you linked to (and DynaSoar and the U.S. Space Shuttle
| for that matter) are closer to simple winged spacecraft and not
| what I would call lifting bodies.
| areoform wrote:
| This was one of Yuri's original designs, https://cdn.discorda
| pp.com/attachments/836685279875956746/87...
|
| As you can see, it is much closer to the lifting body concept
| than the other craft. I suspect they converged on the
| Shuttle-like design because of cost and manufacturing
| constraints. But this unsupported speculation.
|
| Also his designs incorporated grid fins! In the 1960s!
| jefftk wrote:
| Re-usable spaceplanes were a technological dead end. They're
| much more expensive than even single-use rockets, let alone
| reusable rockets.
|
| More on the Buran:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
| areoform wrote:
| From a certain perspective, the Starship is a more evolved
| version of certain STS-Apollo variants -
| https://www.wired.com/2012/04/the-lut-the-shuttle-and-the-
| sa..., one proposed North American X15B design
| http://www.astronautix.com/x/x-15b.html and a few dynasoar
| configurations.
|
| Spaceplanes haven't gone away. They've just been evolved. The
| Shuttle, for all its mistakes, got a lot of things right and
| brought incredible capabilities to the table that are well
| worth re-exploring and re-imagining.
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