The degree to which SpaceX has fundamentally changed the space launch industry 🚀 is truly amazing. As Ars Technica notes "this was the sixth Falcon 9 launch in less than eight days, more flights than SpaceX's main US rival, United Launch Alliance, has launched in 17 months."
After the retirement of NASA's space shuttle in 2011, the Delta IV Heavy became the most powerful operational rocket in the world, with a lift capacity of nearly 29 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. Only a handful of government-developed vehicles, including NASA's Saturn V lunar rocket and Russia's Energia vehicle, had more lift capacity, Ars Technica reports: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/the-most-metal-of-rockets-has-gone-into-the-great-mosh-pit-in-the-sky/
Russia aborts planned test launch of new heavy-lift space rocket.
AP reports: "The Angara-A5 rocket was scheduled to lift off from the Vostochny space launch facility at 0900 GMT Tuesday, but the launch was aborted two minutes before."
This recently-reported exoplanet TOI-715 b purportedly located in its local habitable zone, and sized roughly 1.5 times Earth and triple earth mass, left me to wonder…
How much the gravity there might differ, and how much (more?) energy is involved in launching spacecraft from there.
Terrestrial delta-v is most of ten kilometers per second. That’s how fast you need to be going to climb out of the gravity well.
If that exoplanet well is deep enough and it seems plenty deep, getting off that rock gets much harder.
At some point the gravity well effectively becomes a one-way trip down.
(Not that Earth and its planetary politics doesn’t have its own version of the Schwarzschild radius.)
That 0.083AU distance and that ~463.2 hour long year are both entirely disconcerting, but three earth masses just doesn’t seem all that habitable. For us.
This video is super awesome because it shows how sounds needs air. For the first few seconds a hum can be heard because th interstage is pressurised. At 10 seconds, air is vented and everything gets quiet. You can hear the springs because they pass sound through the metal to the camera. After ignition you can hear the exhaust only when it's blowing straight at the camera and producing gas that carries its sound.