This might be seen as the tipping point in commercial space ventures. With SpaceX running LEO operations, NASA/Roscosmos can focus on the planets next.
Now from GEO/HEO to anywhere else it's quite easy to get because you are pretty much near the escape velocity so it takes almost no delta-v to get pretty much anywhere you want in the solar system, at least as far as getting to a higher solar orbit goes as the closer you get the faster your solar orbital velocity is so using that speed to get even to the edges of the solar system takes very little energy. If we talk about say a mars shot then most of the energy in that trip goes to 2 things, getting to high earth orbit, and then slowing down for a mars capture the amount of fuel needed to do the martian orbit transfer is almost negligible.
>you don't need to scale "go fast rocket" up by that much
My napkin math says you need at least 2 orders of magnitude more fuel mass which classifies as "a lot"
Altitude is the easy part, relatively speaking. Getting the speed for LEO is the hard part. The GoFast rocket you linked to has demonstrated up to 4,200MPH. Low earth orbit requires about 17,000MPH.
That factor of ~4 requires massively larger rockets, because the rocket equation is cruel. Each incremental increase in final speed requires an exponential (actually using this word correctly, for once) increase in the amount of fuel. Fuel in return requires more hardware like tanks and engines, which means yet more fuel is required, etc.
Edit: using RP-1 as the fuel in a single stage, getting to 4,200MPH requires that 45% of your total rocket mass be fuel at launch. Getting to LEO requires 94% of the mass to be fuel.
The difference in ISP between a liquid-fueled rocket (say 450s for LH2/LO2, 350s for RP1/LO2) and solid propellant (250s) makes a huge difference to your prop fraction. To get, say 8km/s delta-v, just plug it into the rocket equation:
LH2/LO2: 6.1 initial/final mass. RP1/LO2: 10.3 solids: 26
Staging can help this a bit, but the basic fact remains. It's very difficult to get useful payload to orbit with solids.
It needs to go 4 times faster, and no, a 20% larger rocket won't cut it. 20000% larger by mass would be more like it. It also needs a 2nd stage burning liquid propellant with high specific impulse which is way, way harder to build than a dumb solid propellant rocket.
Noone (not even governments) has been able to send a single stage rocket to orbit.
Also 20000% larger by mass? want to be a bit more serious? if you scale this rocket by 35-40% you get to about the size of the first stage of the Shavit solid fuel space launcher which is a commercial space launcher.
You do understand how scaling works on 3 dimensional objects right?
The GoFast Rocket weighs 350kg. Scaling it by 35% (1.35 ^ 3) would make it weigh 861kg. The rocket you mentioned weighs between 30 and 70 _tons_.
I'm not sure you understand how anything works.
Based on my previous conversations with this guy, this seems to be a recurring pattern. I do hope that he's using these conversations to recognize and fill in the holes in his knowledge. :)
Edit: I see Shavit can also launch in a three stage configuration. My overall point remains.
Math is done with numbers, so let me give you actual numbers. You can double-check these against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_speed#Tangential_veloc....
Standing on the surface of the Earth your potential energy relative to infinity is −62.6 MJ/kg. If you were standing still 160 km up, you've added roughly 1.6 MJ/kg. (You climbed 160,000 meters against a force of 9.8 Newtons per meter.)
To then go into orbit you have to add a sideways velocity of about 7800 m/s. Apply the famous kinetic energy = 0.5mv^2 and going into orbit requires 30.4 MJ/kg of energy. That's 19x more energy than is required to get to altitude!
But it gets worse! If you're going to go into orbit, you need to think about getting down. Going up we go straight up out of the air and then add sideways velocity. Going down we let the atmosphere do most of the work of slowing us down. But in order to survive that you need a much more rugged device with a heavy heat shield. You're now both doing more work per mass lifted AND you're lifting more mass!
But we're not done with the bad news. A fundamental fact about rockets is that you have to lift the fuel you use later in the launch. That means that as you're increasing the final velocity you're getting an ever-decreasing ratio of energy expended to useful kinetic energy for your payload.
Put it all together and actual rocket scientists have told me that it is about 100x easier to get to orbital altitude than it is to actually get into orbit.
That said, LEO is the half-way point. Getting into LEO takes about as much energy as it does to launch from LEO entirely out of Earth's orbit.
It takes a 8 km/s horizontal velocity just to stay in orbit. That is in addition to the 2 km/s to just get to the right altitude.
So just by speed ratios orbit is 5x the difficulty of a space hop. In reality rocket scaling is exponential (you need more fuel to carry more fuel...)
Anyway, I do think nowadays "amateurs" actually could build orbital rockets with budgets in the low millions class. Modern electronics and GPS make it a bit easier than a few decades ago.
US-government mandated
The MTCR has 34 members, basically the G20 minus China and India. Since the MTCR doesn't have any provisions for enforcement, (It's "an informal and voluntary partnership") its US equivalent is the International Traffic In Arms Regulations Act. (Category XV, Section c, if you want to read how the US statute words it. In imperial units, of course, just to make things simple.)
No amateur rocket has made orbit or even come close. The difficulty of building a vehicle to make LEO is not comparable to building one to raise altitude once in orbit. LEO to GEO is less than half the delta-v of surface to LEO. It is routinely done by satellites alone. The only reason getting to GEO is particularly hard is because you have to get to LEO first.
You are right about transfer to Mars, though.
Now, accelerating a Mir-sized craft towards Mars and decelerating it to orbit while keeping the crew alive for a year outside the Earth's benevolent magnetic field and having enough fuel to accelerate back to Earth (even assuming we'll throw out the interplanetary craft and get to Earth on a capsule) is quite an impressive engineering feat. I'm inclined to suggest that, instead of building a vehicle like that we build one or more cyclers that will orbit the Earth-Mars-Sun system periodically and astronauts would only need to reach them in order to get back and forth. This way we pack all shielding for the long-duration trip into the cyclers and astronauts only need to carry the consumables they'll use. Since reaching them would be time-critical (they won't stop), I would suggest building a similar one that could be stationed in Martian orbit to serve as a fallback plan in case a crew misses the one cycler and has to wait a couple months for the next bus home. These two spacecraft are, essentially, space stations with clever orbits we could maintain with regular resupply missions just as we do with the ISS, but we'd need beefier rockets because the delta-v is the same as a craft going to Mars (because that's what it's doing). Luckily, we'd only need to accelerate the resupply craft - living space is "free" after the first burn.
I am uncertain if these craft are more or less complicated than building and landing the Mars ascent vehicle (much worse than landing a crew capsule, for sure). This sounds very complicated to me.
You don't need to ship enough fuel to return to Earth in the same trip as a manned crew.
You can send orbital depots for return fuel and ascent\descent vehicles ahead of time in unmanned missions. This could be done multiple years in advance.
When you are launching the crew and interplanetary habitat, you only need to bring enough fuel for a one way trip.