The Imaginary Rocket Driving a Small-Town Spaceport (theverge.com) 45
Is the FAA licensing spaceports that are doomed to fail? From a report: The latest launch attempt out of Kodiak, Alaska's spaceport shows in vivid detail just how quickly things can go sideways. In the video, rocket maker Astra's 3.3 skids horizontally for hundreds of yards, then shoots some 20 miles upwards, listing off course. Ground crew terminates the flight, and the craft free falls back to Earth in pieces, landing in a fireball. None of Astra's six test flights from Kodiak's Pacific Spaceport Complex have made it into orbit, and five have exploded. But, as Jeff Bezos says, failure and innovation are inseparable twins.
Analysts expect the commercial space industry to be worth $1 trillion by 2040, and increasingly, small towns are angling to get in on the action. One such community is Camden County, Georgia, where a group of county commissioners is longing for their own spaceport -- and the economic growth and diversification they hope will come with it. There's one caveat: Spaceport Camden's sole proposed launch trajectory would, in an unprecedented move, cross two populated islands, as well as a federally protected marshland and wilderness, just a few miles from the toxic brownfield set to become the launch site.
To some residents, this seems like an astronomically bad idea. But failures -- even explosive ones -- don't faze Camden County: according to spaceport planners, Astra is a prime launch tenant candidate, and Alaska Aerospace Corporation, which runs Kodiak's spaceport, could become an operation partner. All they need to get this plan off the ground is an operation license from the Federal Aviation Administration. And to secure that, they aren't basing their proposal on rockets like the one that blew up in Alaska -- instead, they're using models of rockets that don't exist.
Analysts expect the commercial space industry to be worth $1 trillion by 2040, and increasingly, small towns are angling to get in on the action. One such community is Camden County, Georgia, where a group of county commissioners is longing for their own spaceport -- and the economic growth and diversification they hope will come with it. There's one caveat: Spaceport Camden's sole proposed launch trajectory would, in an unprecedented move, cross two populated islands, as well as a federally protected marshland and wilderness, just a few miles from the toxic brownfield set to become the launch site.
To some residents, this seems like an astronomically bad idea. But failures -- even explosive ones -- don't faze Camden County: according to spaceport planners, Astra is a prime launch tenant candidate, and Alaska Aerospace Corporation, which runs Kodiak's spaceport, could become an operation partner. All they need to get this plan off the ground is an operation license from the Federal Aviation Administration. And to secure that, they aren't basing their proposal on rockets like the one that blew up in Alaska -- instead, they're using models of rockets that don't exist.
The great leveller (of cities) (Score:2)
Excess optimism strikes again
Titanic
Chenrnobyl
TMI
San Onofre (at least that one didn't melt)
Harry Hawker and his navigator Kenneth MacKenzie Grieve
Concorde
Colombia
Challenger
the list is endless.
Want to get things "done"? Hire optimists
Want them done RIGHT?
Hire pessimists
Re: (Score:3)
Uh, San Onofre didn't melt down. They noticed an issue with the cooling system and shut the thing down BEFORE there was any sort of accident... You know, like they were supposed to?
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The foolish optimism was strictly economic
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I misread. I thought you meant that one reactor melted, and the other didn't. My bad.
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And I'm married to a Ph.D. English lit. I should have shown it to her first.
My grammar sort of sucks chunks.
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Why would anyone quote Jeff Bezos as to what constitutes innovation in rocketry. He has been pouring money into the rocket business for 20 years and has NEVER managed to put ANYTHING into orbit.
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They noticed an issue with the cooling system and shut the thing down BEFORE there was any sort of accident... You know, like they were supposed to?
As Fukushima has amply shown you, shutting down doesn't really help you if you have "an issue with the cooling system".
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It's a bit more complicated than that and they didn't spot the root cause until after there had been a catastrophic leak.
A radioactive leak was detected in unit 3, which was mostly contained by the containment vessel, but some did escape into the environment. That basically destroyed the unit 3 reactor, because cleaning up and fixing the leak is likely impossible and would certainly be extremely expensive. The whole reactor and containment vessel is now high level nuclear waste and they need to come up with
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It's Alaska. Blowing up rockets is probably the most entertainment they're going to get.
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You've never been chased by a bear.
And don't underestimate the excitement of a Caribou-board after a few months in the bush.
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You've never been chased by a bear.
And don't underestimate the excitement of a Caribou-board after a few months in the bush.
That actually sounds like fun...IF you don't get caught.
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That actually sounds like fun...IF you don't get caught.
Don't worry, nobody is going to follow you into the bushes when you're carrying a Caribou-board.
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Concorde wasn't actually a failure. It flew commercially for 26 years, and nothing comes close to replacing it since it was retired.
You may as well call the SR-71 and Saturn V failures, they also broke various records which haven't been surpassed as of 2021.
"Oh, we don't need to fly fast any more because of Zoom/spy satellites/climate change". Righto. Hire some pessimists. Instead of making a breakthrough in aerospace engineering, they'll take your money and write a half-assed app, then spend some time on T
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You do get more "new" stuff done, you just have to wait for the Pessimists before it is safe to use.
Good Software (Score:5, Interesting)
So which is it (Score:2)
Is it imaginary, or did it crash to Earth in a ball of fire?
Re: So which is it (Score:2)
It crashed to Earth in a fireball after attempting to compute sqrt(-1), so...both!
Re:So which is it (Score:5, Informative)
The article is badly written. The Astra rocket was not the "imaginary" rocket in question, it was simply chosen to illustrate the fact that new rocket designs have high failure rates.
In a nutshell, a county in Georgia is attempting to obtain a spaceport license from the FAA for a launch location that would not be permitted with existing technology. To make their application appear more viable, they posit the future existence of small rockets with novel capabilities that would just so happen to mitigate the specific risks at their proposed site.
They'll probably get that spaceport license, but they won't get any launch *permits* until someone actually designs and tests that new class of rockets. They've spent ten million taxpayer dollars on an idea that only makes sense if its vitally important to people *outside of Camden* that they launch from Camden County.
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I guess that's a lot of money down there?
I'm so glad I didn't read the article. The fireball was more interesting.
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I read the article because I was confused about the same point.
Ten million dollars is about what five miles of rural road costs. It's not a *lot*, but it is a lot to spend on something so speculative.
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Why the fuck would 5 miles of rural road cost $10M?
China has beaten the US already in terms of infrastructure if you just accept those kind of numbers.
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Nah, a million just isn't that much in construction. A mile is a long way and a paved road has crowned surface, shoulders, drainage ditches.
If you're old just remember that would be 750K dollars a mile in 1985.
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and the USA workers will get over $20 an hour, those 3rd world shithole workers not so much
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That's about $380 per foot of road or, assuming a two lane road with 12 foot lanes, about 24 square feet of road surface. Each square foot has about 1 foot of aggregate under it and about 6 inches of asphalt on top. So that's 12 cubic feet of asphalt and 24 cubic feet of aggregate for every foot of road. Assuming about $50 per cubic yard of aggregate and about $120 per cubic yard of asphalt, that's about $98 of materials. The other $282 would come from engineering costs, digging/cutting, compacting and grad
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They've spent ten million taxpayer dollars on an idea that only makes sense if its vitally important to people *outside of Camden* that they launch from Camden County.
I'm quite happy for them to launch from Camden. In fact I'd really, really prefer it if they launch from there.
PS: I live a long, long way away from Camden.
Of all places, they had to pick a pristine .. (Score:2)
Re: Of all places, they had to pick a pristine .. (Score:2)
Alaska is an awesome location for launching polar orbit satellites.
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In a polar orbit you have to cancel out the rotation of the earth. The closer you are to the poles the less velocity you have to spend fuel nullifying. Also it's being used as an Airforce missile range for most of its tests so...
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Cape Canaveral is more or less a wild area, too, with abundant fish and wildlife. The presence of the launch facilities, which prevent anything else from being there, helps keep it that way.
Put differently: if we weren't launching stuff from Cape Canaveral, that area probably would look no different than the rest of the Florida coastline. Kennedy Space Center is an oasis of wetlands in an otherwise unbroken stretch of coa
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Cape Kennedy space center is the closest I've come to seeing a bald eagle in the wild up close. It landed on the road right in front of the tour bus. Otherwise I've only seen them at a distance flying around or in their nests from far off.
Endorsed by those who know the business (Score:5, Interesting)
I live near the proposed spaceport and have listened carefully to the debate over the years. This is a specialized industry, and I'm well aware that I lack the experience to judge with any credibility how the costs, risks, and possible benefits stack up.
What I have noticed, though, is that the people with the greatest knowledge and experience in the space industry (mangers at Cape Canaveral, etc) are generally the people most enthusiastic about it. They talk about an acute shortage of space at the cape and the demand from emerging small operators for launch space that the cape just can't provide. And these folks aren't employed with the spaceport project, so it's not just Lyle Lanley hawking a monorail.
On the other hand, the loudest critics offer little other than a curmudgeonly NIMBYism, speculating about worst-case scenarios while suggesting that the whole thing is a scam and everyone working on the project is just in on the action. They spam the local newspaper with the same low-quality rant every month and generally make up with volume what they lack in legitimate argument.
The pandemic has highlighted the importance of weighting the judgement of experts vs. unqualified commentators, and for this particular project those with the real-world experience seem to think it's worthwhile. It's certainly no guarantee, but it's far from the boondoggle this article makes it out to be.
Re:Endorsed by those who know the business (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the whole idea of locating a spaceport as close as possible to the equator (for the going up part at least) was that you needed significantly less fuel to get to space. Alaska is rather not near the equator. Or do they have something else in mind?
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Alaska has the real rocket that went sideways. See Scott Manley's great video [youtu.be]. Alaska is good for polar orbits, as described above [slashdot.org].
Camden County, Georgia is where the spaceport with the imaginary rocket is planned, and is a lot closer to the equator.
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Alaska is a good starting point for a polar orbit. Not so much for lower inclinations.
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Alaska is a good starting point for a polar orbit. Not so much for lower inclinations.
Exactly. It all depends on the orbit you are trying to achieve. Alaska is terrible for geostationary, but great for polar.
An island in the middle of the ocean, near the equator, is the best for all orbits. However, there are other issues with that location. Supply chains are difficult, and the climate can cause problems with hardware. SpaceX abandoned the island strategy because of the corrosion [nbcnews.com] caused by the tropical climate.
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I thought the whole idea of locating a spaceport as close as possible to the equator (for the going up part at least) was that you needed significantly less fuel to get to space. Alaska is rather not near the equator. Or do they have something else in mind?
Getting to orbit requires speed. Launching from the equator in the direction that the equator is traveling means that you can use the speed of the equator's rotation to your advantage. But this means that your final orbit will be in the same direction that a spot of land on the equator moves: westward.
Sometimes we want to launch satellites in directions other than westward. One specific type of orbit, called a polar orbit because it comes near the poles, has no westward velocity component. Thus, the additio
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I thought the whole idea of locating a spaceport as close as possible to the equator
Is really only applicable to launches putting a satellite in a geostationary orbit. Otherwise it's most economical to match the launch latitude to the desired orbit.
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But isn't this what you'd expect? People heavily involved in the industry are in favor of small towns giving them large tax breaks. Meanwhile, locals aren't so sure that paying tax breaks to corporate interests is a good idea.
Yeah, no way this will ever happen (Score:2)
After reading the original article I was somewhat confused - the down of Woodbine is somewhat inland and obviously not the actual location. Poking about a bit in Google Maps satellite view I noticed a large demolished area east of town, on Union Carbide road, and that is obviously the actual proposed location. A couple of googles later confirmed that.
So let's look at this location... This would be used for eastward launches, directly over the Cumberland Island National Seashore. So yeah, that's not going to
The real criticism is not about rockets (Score:2)
The description in the article is not of an institution rationally pursuing the interests of its constituents, but a very small handful of landowners trying to quickly increase the value of otherwise low-value holdings with a cheap gimmick deal. Ten million dollars they spent on lobbying and ad campaigns for it...money that did not directly net them anything, and yet could have been directly invested in the kind of local developm
Elsewhere in the world (Score:2)
China has a launch facility in Hainan [wikipedia.org] (far south coast, near Vietnam), but also one well inland [wikipedia.org], and another in Inner Mongolia [wikipedia.org]. They also routinely drop spent stages on populated areas [slashdot.org].
So I guess what Camden County, Georgia is looking to do is be more like the Chinese and Soviets. Brilliant!