Re: Small, cheap, reusable rocket launcher


"Andrew Nowicki" <andrew@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:44BCF84B.7338935F@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Joe Strout wrote:

But airships (whether filled with hydrogen or helium) are.
Big ones can have a quite impressive lift capacity, too.

The problem is how to bring the balloon or the airship
back to the earth -- you would have to release lots of
expensive hydrogen. The cost of making hydrogen is about
0.7 $/kg, but the cost of liquefying and transporting hydrogen
from the oil refinery to the user raises the cost to about
3 $/kg. Hydrogen, like chlorine, is a destroyer of the ozone
layer. If the rocket weighs 10 tons, you would spend about
$50,000 on the hydrogen alone. Helium is even more expensive.

I'd think it would be cheaper to buy kerosene and build a conventional
LOX/kerosene first stage than it would be to build and operate an airship
big enough to replace said first stage. The airship, after all, is going to
be so huge, it would need some big engines of its own just to maneuver back
to base once it's launch vehicle has been released.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)


.

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