Spaceflight Before 1951 | Hacker News Reader

Spaceflight Before 1951

en.wikipedia.org

63 pointsruaraidh31 comments

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...

Does it really count if it is vaporized before leaving the atmosphere?

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...

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

A full up Saturn V with LEM and the works looks a lot more complex and capable than a 60% improvement on a V2.

But the additional complexity is mostly designing a suite of vehicles, not general rocketry advances.

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.

V2 does NOT go into orbit.

Yet another reason why the comment I'm replying to was incorrect, thanks.

No, it’s actually the opposite. Re read. If you compare an actually LEO capable vehicle and a moon lander of the same payload, you’ll see that the difference is not that big.

Saturn had a massive payload, hence the gap in difficulty.

But my point anyway was that Saturn V is not 1000x larger than a soyouz, despite the moon being 1000x further away. Distance is not what counts in space.

The delta-v from Earth Surface to the bottom of the ocean is 0, so by your logic, going there is trivial.

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

It’s a measure of the energy needed to move from one orbit to another.

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.

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.

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.

27 years; that's what the whole linked article on wikipedia is about.

> Exploration of space began in earnest in 1947

22, 27...either way it's incredible.

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/)

There is a link to some generic viagra salespitch [1] in that first article, I wonder how it got there - a subtle hack or a strange form of advertising?

The control connections between cabin and hull would uncouple automatically on separation and the communication system would be switched from the four-dipole arrays arranged in blisters near the stem of the hull to arrays situated under the floor of the cabin. --->>>This moment can be described as the action of sildenafil.<<<--- Cabin attitude and rate of spin would be controlled by hydrogen peroxide jets.

[1] I assume it to be a salespitch by the URL, not having followed the link I can not be sure

Reminds me of this stingy classic by Tom Lehrer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio

There’s this guy too (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagâri_Hasan_Çelebi) who allegedly made a manned rocket flight in 1633 in front of the Ottoman sultan.

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.

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.

This was one of Yuri's original designs, https://cdn.discordapp.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!

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)

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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