https://naukatehnika.com/pervyij-orbitalnyij-polet-starship-mozhet-sostoyatsya-v-marte.html
in March #Ракетостроение and astronautics Marcia Dunn Yesterday at 16:07 303 0 On Thursday, Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX, said that the first orbital flight of the future starship - the most powerful rocket ever built in the world - could take place in a month or two. Not without problems, but by the end of this year, Starship will be launched into Earth's orbit, Musk is sure. Musk unveiled his first major Starship update in more than two years, standing next to a 119-meter rocket at SpaceX's Spaceport in Texas. He admitted that "Actually, it's hard to believe that this is real." NASA plans to use Musk's reusable starship to land astronauts on the moon as early as 2025. Meanwhile, the founder of SpaceX has repeatedly voiced his dream - to create a whole fleet of starships to colonize Mars. SpaceX's first orbiter, the SN20, is mounted on its massive Super Heavy 4 accelerator at Starbase's facility near Boca Chica in South Texas on Feb. 10, 2022. In the meantime, the first Starship launches will solve a more mundane task - to deliver Musk's Internet satellites, called Starlinks, into orbit. As Elon Musk put it: "There will probably be a few bumps on the road, but we plan to smooth it out through satellite missions and test launches of the ship before taking people on board." The Super Heavy launch vehicle with the first stage of SpaceX has not yet launched. But a futuristic bullet-shaped steel starship located on top of a hill and serving as an upper stage was able to successfully launch and land on its own last May after a series of explosions. The rocket rose to a height of more than 10 kilometers. SpaceX is awaiting approval from the Federal Aviation Administration before proceeding with the next phase of the Starship program: going into orbit. Musk said he expects approval in March and that the rocket should be ready to fly by then. That means the launch will take place in the next couple of months, he added. Musk said Starship launches could be moved to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida if the FAA doesn't give permission. But that would delay the first orbital launch by more than six months, he said. In addition to Cape Canaveral in Florida and the southern tip of Texas near Boca Chick, Musk said, starships could eventually be launched from floating ocean platforms anywhere in the world. He envisions spacecraft being launched three times a day, using rapid reuse and the ability to replenish fuel at orbiting space refueling stations for more distant missions, such as a mission to Mars. According to him, the first refueling test may take place by the end of next year. Musk estimates that launching Starship could cost less than $10 million, maybe even just a few million dollars, which would lower the price of space launches. He called it an "insanely low" and "ridiculously good" price by current space standards. Starship already has one private customer: a Japanese entrepreneur who bought a flight around the moon and plans to take a dozen artists with him. Musk has hinted that there are other stakeholders in space travel on a starship ready to buy tickets.
https://naukatehnika.com/doletet-do-marsa-za-45-dnej-pomozhet-lazer.html
To fly to Mars in 45 days will help the laser #Ракетостроение and astronautics Roman Barsky Yesterday at 19:13 254 0 The main problem of the colonization of Mars, which will have to be solved in the near future, is the question - how quickly to deliver people to the Red Planet? A group of researchers began to search for solutions to this problem and put forward an extraordinary idea, they propose to use the laser installed on Earth to send ships to Mars in just 45 days. Note that at the moment the flight from our planet to Mars takes at least 115 days. A team of scientists from McGill University (Canada) proposes to use a laser array installed on Earth to power the orbiting spacecraft. Research into the viability of such a concept was conducted on behalf of NASA. Phys.org writes about it. A huge laser located on Earth will heat hydrogen plasma in a chamber behind the spacecraft, creating thrust and delivering it to Mars, whose atmosphere will use aerobraking. Thus, in the future, it would be possible to send payloads to colonists or even transport people. It is assumed that such a project will involve an array of ground-based lasers of unprecedented size (diameter 10 m) and power (100 MW), which will be made possible thanks to current developments in photonic laser technology. The heating chamber and its associated regenerative cooling and fuel management systems are key design elements that are particularly emphasized in the new study. Astrodynamics and the extreme aerocapsulation maneuver required to reach Mars are also analyzed in detail. The ability to withstand much larger laser fluxes allows for a combination of high thrust and high specific impulse, making this approach advantageous compared to a laser-electric motor and meeting a parameter limit similar to gas-core nuclear thermal rockets, the researchers said. The cargo, previously launched into Earth orbit, will be equipped with a reflector that directs a laser beam from the Earth into a heating chamber containing hydrogen plasma. When the core of the plasma is heated to 40,000 degrees Kelvin, the gas around the core reaches 10,000 K and, breaking out of the nozzle, creates enough thrust to push the ship. Such tremors will occur at intervals of 58 minutes. This will allow the ship to accelerate to 17 km / s. To the lunar orbit at this speed can be reached in just eight hours, and on approach to Mars in a month and a half, the speed will still be 16 km / s. To bring the cargo to the 150-km orbit of Mars is a more difficult task, since the proposed ship does not have a chemical engine like rockets (otherwise it is not possible to take the required amount of cargo). And until the inhabitants of Mars build a similar laser system for catching parcels from Earth, the only way is a risky aerodynamic capture maneuver. In this case, during the descent, the device will experience a load of 8 g, and the heat from friction will be higher than traditional protective materials are able to withstand. It remains to be hoped for those that are in the development phase. The advantages of the proposed laser-thermal system include an extremely favorable ratio of mass to energy - in the range of 0.001-0.01 kg / kW, better than that of advanced atomic propulsion systems due to the fact that the energy source remains on Earth, and the transmitted flow is processed by an inflatable low-mass reflector, the authors of the idea explained. The first humans will get to Mars, most likely, without the use of laser-thermal propulsion technology. Space X founder Elon Musk is "80-90% sure" that the company's super-heavy launch vehicle will be able to enter orbit as early as next year, and by 2024 it will be ready to perform an unmanned flight with cargo to Mars.
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