China completes first launch of Long March 8 rocketThe new colonial movement: China today successfully launched for the first time its new Long March 8 rocket, designed at some point to mimic the Falcon 9 by vertically landing its first stage and reusing it. (Note: link fixed!)
On this launch the rocket had no such recovery capability.
The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
34 China
25 SpaceX
15 Russia
6 ULA
6 Rocket Lab
The U.S. still leads China 40 to 34 in the national rankings.
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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
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
The new colonial movement: China today successfully launched for the first time its new Long March 8 rocket, designed at some point to mimic the Falcon 9 by vertically landing its first stage and reusing it. (Note: link fixed!)
On this launch the rocket had no such recovery capability.
The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
34 China
25 SpaceX
15 Russia
6 ULA
6 Rocket Lab
The U.S. still leads China 40 to 34 in the national rankings.
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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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
What is interesting is that the reusable mode seems to be, launch with the center core (2 engines) and 4 strapons (1 engine each) and then land as a cluster of 5 cores, since now one engine has sufficient throttle/thrust control to actually land.
That is going to be interesting to debug and see! But it means single core, and three core models may not be recoverable, only the 5 core version. Eventually. One day. in the future.
Errata- the link under “today successfully launched” has a spike in it in the very first character.
So I wonder, recovering the booster in the coming years and decades will seem like a natural thing to do. The anomaly being the rush in the 50s and 60s to get anything up before the other side did as much, so accept the cost of disposable use-once rockets. And maybe the control systems were not up to the task, but I imagine they could have worked out something – they got them off the pads forgoshsakes.
David Telford: Thank you! Link fixed.