The Boeing Space Freighter, conceptual heavy lift reusable rocket

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CrypticCowboy4509@reddit

“So hear me out… we take a space shuttle, and shove it up the ass of another space shuttle…”

But seriously I had no idea how massive the Saturn V was compared to a full launch ready shuttle setup holy cow

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Shaun_Jones@reddit

The Saturn V on the launch pad was basically a thirty story building filled with kerosene, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen.

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rodface@reddit

And this thing would've been the height of a Shuttle stack placed atop the Saturn V.

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Standing 526 feet tall, this absolute unit was envisioned by Boeing in the early 70s to construct a city-sized orbital power station to beam energy back to earth via microwaves. The vehicle itself consisted of a reusable orbiter with a 420-ton (nice) payload capacity sent into orbit by a reusable flyback booster, very much like the original concepts for the space shuttle. The Space Freighter never went beyond the drawing board due to a lack of inexpensive development technology.

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Abandondero@reddit

The orbital solar power station seems like the nuttiest part.

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jpowell180@reddit

Not really, it’s a technologically viable concept, but you need to really reduce the costs of getting things to orbit to make this economically viable.

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syringistic@reddit

I think it could eventually find its niche in military applications. If you can track the microwave beam to a very specific point (lets say 1 foot by 1 foot), then you could use this to supply power to forward-deployed SOF units or Predator/Global Hawk style units so they can stay afloat indefinitely.

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GeneralBacteria@reddit

if you could focus such power to a very specific point you probably wouldn't need ground units any more.

Any problems you needed to solve decisively could be achieved with slight orbital adjustments

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No-Function3409@reddit

Yeah, i was thinking, "Wouldn't a tight beam microwave be less power supply more dead thing"

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like_a_pharaoh@reddit

Thing is, microwaves can't be high power and efficiently focused into a spot that small at the same time: the physics of aperture/antenna size and Airy disks means a space solar power satellite's beam will spread to be like, kilometers wide by the time it hits the ground.

A kilometers-wide array of rectennas would be needed to efficiently convert the beam to electricity, and you can fit that on a flat patch of land but not on a moving vehicle.

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kyrsjo@reddit

But if you make the antenna diameter of the transmitter lage enough.

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No-Function3409@reddit

Could you build it into the center of a city without side effects to comms or people then?

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like_a_pharaoh@reddit

Not unless you can be absolutely sure the satellite will always aim the beam where it should be aimed: if the microwave beam were to start drifting off target onto populated areas, it could damage electronics and hurt or possibly kill people and animals caught in it.

For safety reasons, it'd be better to stick the rectenna array somewhere pretty empty so there's no (or at least fewer) people who could be hurt if an accident happened, and you can set up a flight exclusion zone for aircraft.

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Weird_Point_4262@reddit

Anything you can build in space you can build 100 times over on earth

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jpowell180@reddit

In space it can have constant access to sunlight, though, and that’s a huge advantage.

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jordandino418@reddit

A shuttle with another shuttle up its ass

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AreWeThereYetNo@reddit

There was a time we used to dream of this. Do kids still dream this big?

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SloCalLocal@reddit

Yes.

https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship

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ouestjojo@reddit

Fascists always make the best rockets!

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Rocco89@reddit

I know I'm probably going to get a bunch of downvotes for this because apparently its trendy to just call people like Wernher von Braun fascists because others say so without ever bothering to actually look into their background yourself, but so be it.

Decades of research, including here in Germany, into the more "prominent" of the roughly 1,000 scientists who moved to work for the US on the rocket program or experimental aircraft (like the X-15, X-20, etc.) and so on, has made it pretty clear that the only truly committed fascist and Nazi among them was Kurt Heinrich Debus, later the director of Kennedy Space Center. People like Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, Eberhard Rees and Arthur Rudolph were mainly careerists and technically obsessed opportunists, willing to pay any price for the success of their projects, including using forced labor and cooperating with the Nazi regime at the expense of its victims. But aside from Debus, there’s no serious evidence that the others were convinced ideologues or fascists.

Please don't get me wrong, I still consider them bad people from a moral perspective and if I ever would've had the chance, I certainly wouldn't shake their hand. I simply can't stand it when facts get twisted.

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ouestjojo@reddit

You’re splitting hairs. Whatever his motivation he went along with it and Van Braun can hang from lamp posts with the rest of them. Play with the fascists, die with the fascists.

I can’t believe you spent this much energy to say “Von Braun may have tolerated slave labor torture, and murder but he wasn’t really a committed nazi.”

What a hill to die on.

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Rocco89@reddit

My point is that its totally counterproductive to just throw around those words without care because that's how they lose their meaning and impact which helps absolutely no one. Terms like Nazi and fascist have become so watered down these days that, as we can sadly see, it doesn’t really help anyone. About 20-30 years ago, in my youth, politicians were actually afraid of being called a Nazi, fascist, anti-democrat and so on and those who weren't were outcasts in fringe parties that's why even the hardline conservatives back then tried not to take things too far.

Nowadays those words have lost so much of their power and meaning that hardly anyone cares about being labeled like that anymore, some politicians nowadays almost wear it like a badge of honor. This in turn has made politics a lot more unrestrained and its one of the reasons why the new right is doing so well and gaining more and more traction in the West.

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ouestjojo@reddit

Oh my god your a loser. Blindly accept slave labour provided by fascists, enable fascists, help fascists make weapons, don’t be surprised if someone calls you a fascist.

Von Braun certainly wasn’t opposed to fascism.

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Rocco89@reddit

Hopeless..

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ouestjojo@reddit

I’m hopeless?

You’re the one spending a Saturday afternoon defending some who actively used slave labor and provided weapons that killed 10 of thousands of people. Who gives a shit if he was emotionally attached to Nazism or not. He was fucking close enough.

Name a single incident where Von Braun used his considerable clout and influence to try and do anything good during the war.

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MaterialGarbage9juan@reddit

I love his rockets, but, techno-jizzdispensing-autocrat might be more accurate. I think he's a opportunistic beneficiary of defense contracts, and not a death fetishist. Either way, gross.

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Stravonovic@reddit

Calling them his rockets is a stretch at best

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MaterialGarbage9juan@reddit

That's also fair, I've met a bunch of the welders and a couple engineers. He doesn't come by much after x, xai, and those misadventures. From what I've been told, he was intimately involved in the initial design process for falcon and starship, and while a harsh criticizer, he really pushed people to think bigger and prove the "why nots" and, although it's remarkably absent in his public and personal life, he pushed his engineers to throw out as many complexities as possible. It's really confusing how someone can push hard for some really great and brave ideas, while being a walking, talking "nope". Like.... Ya know, how?

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Sivalon@reddit

The duality of man.

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mvpilot172@reddit

The nazis got us to the moon after all.

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Abandondero@reddit

Nazis and wizards. And an army of sliderule-wielding US aeronautics engineers at the top of their game after WWII, who could have worked it out themselves in short order. I'm never going to believe that the USA actually needed von Braun more than von Braun needed a hanging.

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CapitanianExtinction@reddit

Not really. Only 150 tons to orbit

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Saul_Firehand@reddit

only

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Glittering-Match4071@reddit

Where did you get the third image from, just curious?

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Abandondero@reddit

Hazegrayart has, of course, animated this monster:

https://youtu.be/cVYbbWAd2WA?si=loACKPiLf0ome0a-

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rodface@reddit

and how!

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sojuz151@reddit

Now that we have seen Falcon 9 and Starship, this design seems very misguided.

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zoinkability@reddit

It seems pretty comparable to Starship to me both in terms of scale and in terms of reusability. They were trying for shuttle-style reentry, but given the tech of the day that was a lot more plausible than SpaceX style retroboosting.

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TacTurtle@reddit

At that point though, why use full gliding wings instead of just a lifting body to reduce velocity + drogue / descent chutes.

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zoinkability@reddit

Chutes and reusability aren't really very compatible. You either gotta land in water, which does a number on things, or you gotta land on land, which also does a number on anything built lightly enough to make it to orbit.

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TacTurtle@reddit

Make it a parasail so you can land into the wind and the lifting body will tend to skim on the surface. Maybe even land it on a freshwater lake to reduce corrosion concerns.

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Lampwick@reddit

Make it a parasail

This was considered and even tested back in the Gemini days but the complexity and delicate nature of the paraglider array was deemed insufficiently reliable as a primary recovery option... and that was for a simple 2 man capsule.

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zoinkability@reddit

The mind boggles at the size of parasail that would be needed for this thing.

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TacTurtle@reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/WeirdWings/s/fgoi6I5USr

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sojuz151@reddit

And X-38 was only 10 tones, Shuttle was 78t

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zoinkability@reddit

So this would have been either 20x or 42x

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TacTurtle@reddit

Don't need a bigger parasail, just a higher landing speed. The X-38 parasail was so big because it landed at less than 40mph.

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zoinkability@reddit

Right, but higher landing speeds need more weight in the craft to handle landing at that speed. There’s no free lunch here.

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TacTurtle@reddit

The point is that by removing the vast majority of the wing / tail structures or shrinking them down to control surfaces + a lifting body to control and reduce speed from hypersonic to subsonic, then using a parasail for lower landing speeds, you could reduce the total orbiter dead weight by at least 25-30%. Less dead weight = larger payloads to orbit and lower lift requirements for landing.

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TacTurtle@reddit

How much lighter would the shuttle be without full wings, tail, and landing gear?

Keep in mind, the Space Shuttle could be carried on the back of a 747 (which weighed another ~165 tons or so).

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_deltaVelocity_@reddit

That doesn’t change the issue of a football field-sized parasail being a pain in the ass to build and operate. There’s a reason it’s never been tried for anything larger than a few tons!

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zoinkability@reddit

This thing would likely need one at least an order of magnitude larger than a football field.

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sojuz151@reddit

Sure, but even with better engines, Starship has a really small payload fraction. Going with a different landing system could make this negative. Wings are a maintenance nightmare. Starship was able to land with things that would Columbine a Shuttle. Falcon 9 has demonstrated that achieving reusability of the lower stage is the most crucial aspect.

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15_Redstones@reddit

Wings were a nightmare on Shuttle largely because they were side mounted to a LH2 tank that dropped a bunch of ice on the wing's heat shield on each liftoff.

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DeficiencyOfGravitas@reddit

That's a fundamental problem with all winged spacecraft. Wings need large area to create lift. That also means they're taking monstrous stresses during reentry. And then the spacecraft needs those wings functioning to land. You're using the most fragile and unreliable part of the spacecraft as a heat shield. It's fundamentally a difficult thing to do.

Starship's method of using a heat shield only as a shield and using another means to land is always going to be better or at least easier to pull off with the current level of technology. Maybe we'll invent some kind of hyper-ceramic that can be both a wing and a shield, but that's not today or tomorrow.

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_deltaVelocity_@reddit

The issue with a propulsive landing system is it’s a goddamn nightmare for crew. I think we’ve seen enough Starship test craft backflip their way into the ground and hundreds of miles an hour to know that it’s never gonna be an option for a crewed vehicle unless you get the engines to almost jet engine-level reliability

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KeneticKups@reddit

Things that couldhave been