My rocket is bigger than yours

[Skanky Burns]

I'd prefer a rocket, personally.
As a bonus, it is much much faster.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by DanS


It doesn't what?

The FPGA does not look like a Virtex II Pro. The one in the image is rather small - just compare it to the other components.

[mindseye]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
I'd prefer a rocket, personally.
As a bonus, it is much much faster.

Sure, a rocket's fast, but how practical is a very fast one-way trip vehicle?

With the crawler transporter, you don't even need to turn around. You just go to the other control cabin, and reverse gears! Try doing that with a rocket.

[DanS]

The FPGA does not look like a Virtex II Pro. The one in the image is rather small - just compare it to the other components.

Isn't the Virtex II Pro the only Xilinx Virtex FPGA with 2x embedded CPUs? I think I can make out the "Virtex" markings, at least.

[Skanky Burns]

Rockets don't need a specially prepared road to travel on. Did someone mention a ditch?

[:) Smiley]

you want something big on treads?

Garzweiler coal mining machine. 100 meters high, 240 long. This thing chews up the countryside in Germany to surface mine coal. Often entire villages are chewed up to make way for the coal mining.

[DeathByTheSword]

oh about size....the first words of my space engereering & technology uni. teacher thingy was: with rockets SIZE matters...and then he said something that made all the girls laugh but i probably cant post here...

[Az]

You're an Aeronautics Engineering student, DBTS?

[Last Conformist]

The Soyuz launcher's called Proton.

[Sir Og]

Energia is the most powerfull rocket.

Payload from Baikonur
95-100 tons to 51-degree LEO
18 tons to geostationary orbit
32 tons to the lunar transfer
28 tons to Venus and Mars

As for the X Prise. I find it amusing that american and british companies are trying to build rockets from scratch when all they should do is hire a second rate russian rocket scientist.

I recently saw a show on Discovery channel that showed some american engineers who didn't beleive that technical characteristics of russian rocket engines were possible. The energia engines were 5 times more efficient than american engines.

[Lefty Scaevola]

Originally posted by ErikM
N1s blew up, yes.
The launching pad was destroyed on the 2nd launch, yes.
Killed personnel, no.
The largest space exploration disasters would be Challenger/Columbia.

I was thining of the Nedelin disaster, which for decades, until apparently recently with some decassified soviet information, was thought here to have occured durring the development of a heavy space exploration rocket. Last time I looked it about a year and a half ago, it was still being conjectured that it was a moon rocket that was being developed rather than a humongous multi-stage liquid fueled ICBM.

"On October 24, 1960 a rocket exploded on a Soviet launchpad killing 126 people in what is known in the West as the Nedelin catastrophe. While once thought to have been space-related based (on the little information available outside the Soviet Union) it later emerged that the accident was connected with the development of a new ICBM."
"The Nedelin catastrophe or Nedelin disaster was a launchpad accident that occurred while developing a new Soviet missile, which resulted in massive loss of life.
On October 24, 1960 the second stage of the first R-16 ICBM ignited on the pad, igniting the first stage and causing the whole rocket to explode. 126 people died, including Soviet Stratigic Missile Forces Commander-in-Chief Mitrofan Nedelin and Chief Designer Boris Konoplev. The rocket's Chief Designer, Mikhail Yangel, himself only just missed being killed, having walked into a bunker to smoke a cigarette 30 seconds before the explosion. The cause of the accident was later found to be a poorly designed second-stage control system which lacked sufficient on-pad safeguards. The heavy death toll resulted from complete neglect of safety rules.

The incident was very effectively covered up during the Cold War and the story did not emerge in the West until the 1990s."

[DanS]

As for the X Prise. I find it amusing that american and british companies are trying to build rockets from scratch when all they should do is hire a second rate russian rocket scientist.

They could hire second-rate American rocket scientists too. The X Prize rules requires that the spaceship be built from scratch without government parts.

Energia is the most powerfull rocket.

Give us pics!

How many times did this booster fly and what was its success rate?

[GePap]

My link has pics of it.

[Whoha]

Originally posted by Colon


It was a software error. They probably installed Windows on it.

seriously they look awesome when they blow up, and since they don't put people on them, we don't have that dragging down our fun now do we.

[Sir Og]

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/energia.html

Several pics and a lot of stats.