If you’re curious about commercial launch vehicles, there’s a decent documentary about the challenges these aerospace startups face called Wild Wild Space[0].
Just getting the thing off the ground is a huge milestone. I wish them the best in future launches.
I don't see why would you detonate the rocket if it doesn't pose danger to just fall down. Probably its also easier to collect the debris.
- Neil deGrasse Tysonhttps://youtu.be/bykfQ3J4NNc?t=2049
edit: And different camera angles here,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlAgenP2RxM
https://tv.vg.no/nyheter/se-den-historiske-rakettoppskytning...
Commercial is required to exclude launches from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, orbital is required to exclude the Miura 1 attempt, Europe is required for obvious reasons & continental is required to exclude the LauncherOne attempt, and attempt is required for obvious reasons.
Also to exclude a few hundred launches from French Guiana, which is politically part of France and the EU (but certainly not geographically in Europe).
I found it quite interesting. They are taking two very different approaches.
RocketLab is still flying electron, but they never produced much profit from it and are themselves moving to a bigger rocket.
I have sincerely no intention to trivialize this, but would we ever see rockets launched from Moon or low Earth orbit? It seems so inefficient to launch like how we do now.
Assuming you mean getting materials from the moon, such as ice, the problems is that it would take 100s of billion in investment on the moon to do that practically. Everything from mining robots, transport and launch infrastructure. Plus infrastructure in LEO to refine that stuff.
If you do the math, assuming you have something like Starship, for those 100 billion to pay for itself, you likely would require an absolute absurd amount of materials from the moon. And on earth we have all the materials, refining capabilities and so on. Far, far cheaper to just launch it from earth in its final required form.
Unless you really want to build a fleet of inter-generational spaceship to explore the outersolar system, this is unlikely going to be make sense.
If you really, really want to transport stuff from the moon to LEO (for some reason), as long as it is basically ice, then its better to use some kind of mass accelerator.
You need the rocket to get to LEO or the moon. Once you're actually in LEO your propulsion system needs relatively little thrust, but you've replaced a moderately hard problem of launching from earth with a much bigger one of assembling things in orbit using material that's already there...
Nobody lives there (within rounding error), and shipping in supplies to build rockets costs even more than launching from the ground.
Also we can do reusable launches to LEO so it's not all that inefficient.
Some examples -- skyhooks -- large counterweighted swinging things that reach down into upper atmosphere and spin you right round baby right round -- a bunch of gravity assisted momentum ideas where you get the sun or the earth or what have you to get you really going, and then use that momentum to get a little thing up and moving more quickly. Space elevators -- hang a giant heavy thing out off one end, and drop a cable made of uninvented nanoscale tech down to earth, then just, you know, climb.
And then there's orbital construction, which requires some .. construction materials. The long standing idea has been to either go out to the asteroids and build there, or bring an asteroid or two here. Both have a lot of problems, and are a long way off. I think it's most likely that human governments will opt not to have the ability to make giant tungsten rods hanging over their countries, and will, to the extent moving an asteroid were ever viable, require they be a long way away, or alternately that we just go to the asteroids and construct elsewhere.
We are like maybe a century from all this being viable, and that's if companies like SpaceX keep moving at the clip they've been moving for that century.
Less jokingly: liquid-fueled rockets aren't very practical weapons, especially ones with cryogenic fuels like liquid oxygen. I highly recommend Clark's Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants for a history of the space and missile races, as understood from the point-of-view of a propellant chemist who worked in them. There's an amazing amount of lost art and lore from the early Cold-war space era, that's no longer relevant in the modern world, except for its sheer entertainment value.
https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...
Snippet:
Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and WENA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up, when Uncle Milty warned, "Hold it- the acid valve is leaking!"
"Go ahead - fire anyway!" Paul ordered.
I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started backing gently away, like so many cats with wet feet.
Howard Streim opened his mouth to protest, but as he said later, "I saw that dog-eating grin on Doc's face and shut it again," and somebody pushed the button. There was a little flicker of yellow flame, and then a brilliant blue-white flash and an ear-splitting crack. The lid to the chamber went through the ceiling (we found it in the attic some weeks later), the viewports vanished, and some forty pounds of high-grade optical glass was reduced to a fine powder before I could blink.
I clasped both hands over my mouth and staggered out of the lab, lo collapse on the lawn and laugh myself sick, and Paul stalked out in a huff.
When I tottered weakly back into the lab some hours later I found that my gang had sawed out, carried away, and carefully lost, some four feet from the middle of the table on which the gadget had rested, so that Paul's STIDA could never, never, never be reassembled, in our lab.There were generations of hypergolic liquid fueled ICBMs. Those are typically pretty reasonably responsive (and reliable). Unfortunately the fuel is toxic as hell.
Europe does have native solid booster capability. The Vega-C has solid rocket motors for the first 3 stages for example. Very crudely looking at sizes, the 2nd and 3rd stages of a Vega-C should more or less approximate a typical ICBM.