Carnival of Space 312

The Carnival of Space 312 is up at Links Through Space

Chandra’s 14th Anniversary: Looking Back And Looking Ahead

Nextbigfuture – Spacex has successfully completed mission duration tests firings of its upgraded Merlin 1D rockets in a octogonal configuration. This will increase the launch capacity to LEO of a Spacex Falcon 9.1.1 to 14.5 tons

Nextbigfuture – An unmanned Russian cargo ship has docked at the International Space Station to deliver nearly 3 tons of supplies.

Nextbigfuture – Hyperv Technologies has a $250,000 kickstarter to make a 5 meter slingatron. It will be a modular next stage in the development of a radical new launch technology. It would launch high-g payloads at very low cost.

The technical objectives for this Slingatron Kickstarter development project are to meet or exceed the following performance goals.

1) We will design, construct, and test a Slingatron with a diameter of about 5 meters and capable of accelerating one pound payloads to 1 km/sec. We will need to achieve 40-60 cycles per second gyration frequency to accomplish this. We will only work with ¼ lb payloads during the basic Kickstarter project and for the demo event, but we will design and build the Slingatron so that later we can safely test launch one pound payloads. During these laboratory and demo tests, the payload will be captured in a tank.

2) We will design the 5-meter Slingatron as the core module of an expandable system to which additional modules can be added later to extend the performance to 2 km/sec or higher. This allows the investment in hardware provided by this Kickstarter project to leverage the construction of higher performance machines without having to start from scratch.

The 5 meter diameter Kickstarter Slingatron will demonstrate launch of up to 1 lb test payloads at 1 km/sec. This is a fully modular approach, which can be further expanded to much larger systems.

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