Rockets, the Only Game in Town

This was an excellent article in New Scientist, comparing the advantages of rockets with air breathing engines.

I like Henry Spencer's writing, it's always clear and concise, and usually convincing.

So, if rockets have a cost/weight/simplicity advantage over air breathing engines, how does that alter our options for a launch vehicle cheap enough to open up the space frontier?

The emphasis has to be on price (and, I guess, environmental friendliness). Not safety, not reusability per se, just anything that will bring the price down of orbit access. Make it cheap enough, and the cost of satellites will come down, and risk to the payload will come down - a reverse price spiral.

A straight up and down ballistic rocket is technology we know and understand. If the stages and boosters can be recovered by parachute, all the better. Liquids are hard to work with, solids cannot be throttled, and are pretty noxious to boot. That leaves hybrids.

For manned vehicles, the capsule should be reusable. Either a parachute and dunk in the ocean (how hard would it be to refurb this capsule?) or perhaps land like a delta clipper.

So, simple is best. Should be able to start developing hybrid motors that work for simple sounding rockets for £5mil.

Anyone game?

Kepler, at last

Yes, Kepler has been launched, at last, and safely, thank goodness.

Unlike other exo-planet search tools, it will be able to watch a hundred thousand stars at once, looking for flickers in their star light that might indicate a planet passing infront of them.

This will be the first mission that will have a decent chance of detecting an Earth sized planet orbiting in a "habitable zone", a distance from a star where water could in liquid form. As such a planet would have to pass infron of the star twice before we can calculate it's orbit, we will probably have to wait a year and a half before the first confirmed sightings.

Well worth the wait, though.