Turkish company announces plans to build commercial rocket
Capitalism in space: A Turkish company, Roketsan, has announced its plans to build a rocket capable of launching both commercial and Turkish government satellites.
A Rocketsan press release that came out right before the Turkish International Defence Industry Fair held May 9-12, 2017, revealed the company’s plan to develop an independently funded satellite launch vehicle (SLV). The SLV will be Turkey’s first domestically produced rocket and it will be capable of launching low-Earth-orbiting satellites to an altitude of 500–700 km.
The SLV development is still in the conceptual design phase, but is planned to have a liquid propulsion system and falls in line with the SLS project. The SLS project involves a three-fold plan, the first step of which is to develop an SLV for the Turkish government.
Even though the SLV development is a fully private venture by Rocketsan, it will be Turkey’s own vehicle to use for government missions. That being said, the SLS project has much bigger and ambitious goals that require two additional phases. The next steps of the project will be the establishment of both a Satellite Launch Centre and Remote Earth Stations.
There is a video animation at the link showing the launch of their imagined rocket. It is worth watching because its almost cartoon quality indicates how far they probably have to travel to make this project happen.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Capitalism in space: A Turkish company, Roketsan, has announced its plans to build a rocket capable of launching both commercial and Turkish government satellites.
A Rocketsan press release that came out right before the Turkish International Defence Industry Fair held May 9-12, 2017, revealed the company’s plan to develop an independently funded satellite launch vehicle (SLV). The SLV will be Turkey’s first domestically produced rocket and it will be capable of launching low-Earth-orbiting satellites to an altitude of 500–700 km.
The SLV development is still in the conceptual design phase, but is planned to have a liquid propulsion system and falls in line with the SLS project. The SLS project involves a three-fold plan, the first step of which is to develop an SLV for the Turkish government.
Even though the SLV development is a fully private venture by Rocketsan, it will be Turkey’s own vehicle to use for government missions. That being said, the SLS project has much bigger and ambitious goals that require two additional phases. The next steps of the project will be the establishment of both a Satellite Launch Centre and Remote Earth Stations.
There is a video animation at the link showing the launch of their imagined rocket. It is worth watching because its almost cartoon quality indicates how far they probably have to travel to make this project happen.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
This is like Mussolini in a race car in the 1920s, or Putin showing off his judo.
Erdogan has made Turkey his personal property. He fired 100,000 and jailed 40,000. Ambassadors and businessmen abroad defect and seek asylum to save themselves from Erdogan’s mass murder to come. Turkey’s big tourist industry has disappeared and sanctions would completely kill off its economy. Turkey has now, actually by democratic election, no coup here, ended its 100 years of secularism. Now it has returned into the failed state of the old Ottoman Empire, the sick man of Europe as it was called. They will never be able to launch anything to orbit.
Has anyone here ever bought anything MANUFACTURED in Turkey? Anyone? Anything?
Until recently, at least, Turkey had made considerable progress as an industrial economy owing to its low costs of production for many manufactured goods, especially subcomponents such as auto parts. Your car may well contain Turkish parts even if the “Made in…” sticker doesn’t say “Turkey.” How the increasingly despotic Erdogan regime has affected this, I haven’t looked into in detail, but it’s hard to believe the trend is positive.
There’s a bit of a deja vu effect here too. Western business magazines in the late 90’s were full of stories about how “Palestine” was about to be a legitimate state and the all-but-complete Camp David Accords would usher in a new era of Palestinian entrepreneurship and prosperity.
History records, of course, that the “Palestinian government” (i.e., Yasser Arafat) spurned the Camp David Accords and shortly thereafter launched the First Intifada. Something there seems to be in the soul of much of Islam that genuinely craves violence and barbarism.
It would be nice to suppose Turkey can avoid regressing back to its stagnant Ottoman past. Developing a home-grown spacefaring capability, however modest, could only assist in this. But I’ll confess I’m not an optimist on that score. Where this sort of happy talk PR is concerned I think we all have a right to claim honorary status as Missourians.
Dick-
Great stuff!
The US, Germany and Japan, and a few neighboring countries, invent and design everything useful to human beings. The rest of the world only assemble the parts they have designed and manufactured. I’d say that all of civilization depends on a handful of a thousand of individuals. The rest of the billions of workers are just amplifiers who would immediately become cavemen without the select one thousand innovator changers.
Turkey has had a boom in assembling components designed and manufactured in the above mentioned developed part of the world. Once they can no longer import the components, or export their assembly: kaput! And it is happening now. It has happened to ALL arabic countries. And it is not a coincidence. Turkey is becoming a wasteland fast. Their rocket ambitions at most has the ambition to imitate North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs. Erdogan is shopping for a nuke in order to burn YOU to death while you are at sleep at home. That’s what the mass murdering islamic psychopath is actually thinking about. We must nuke him before he nukes us!