Title text:
It does come at the cost of some launchpad expansions and increased fuel requirements, but that all comes out of the facility’s budget.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3291/
This reminds me there was a project about 10-15(?) years ago where they were trying to rig the F15 with an attachment to launch satellites in quick need situations. The F15A shot down a satellite in 1985, so it makes sense it could put one up there as well. Think they ended up terminating the program because it became cheaper to launch them in mass.
Aka they probably just took it out of the public eye
no they cancelled it because thats impossible lol. you can shoot a satellite with a suborbital object but thats a loooong way from the projectile being orbital. shooting a satellite that way is more analogous to laying down a spike strip for a car. almost all the velocity of the impact is coming from the satellite not the projectile.
theres a reason even the smallest orbital rockets are the size of a building, its all the propellant required to get there. theres just no way to get that into an F15, to say nothing of the limitations of an airbreathing engine. the skylon was an attempt at a single stage to orbit vehicle using an air breathing engine and it was so complicated and impractical they never even got past the engine precooler design.
Everything you just said was confidently false.
yeah sure believe what you want lol. the rocket equation doesnt care about your conspiracy theories.
Nah, it’s not that long a way. You just need to adjust your goals, add an extra stage, accept a much smaller payload.
If you can get a payload to space, you could put a payload 1/4 its mass into orbit with an additional stage.
I mean, the anti-sat F-15 test was pretty wild. But is arguably less wild than other airlaunch systems like the Pegasus or spaceship one. Saying that airlaunch is impossible is silly, because it’s happening.
These systems get cancelled because they’re expensive and complicated and reusable rockets are cheaper and easier.
air launch is dumb. it provides almost no benefit from a deltaV perspective while dramatically increasing the engineering cost and complexity of the launch system. just because people are working on it doesnt mean its going to be useful or practical or even work. even if it does eventually work for someone someday it wont be worth the effort or cost. theyll cancel it after a few launches or go out of business because no one can afford their overpriced copium machine.
They are saying a missile that went faster than, and tracked a target at orbital speed and velocity, can’t be reached… Obviously it can, or they’d miss everytime. Yet they shot it down using a rocket deploying a payload 41 years ago. Same shit, different payload.
thats not what i was saying at all. hitting an orbital object with a projectile is obviously possible. what im saying is that the velocity required to get a projectile in the right place at the right time is at least an order of magnitude less than the velocity required for it to be an orbital projectile.