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Super-Earths in Need for Extremly Big Rockets (2018)
- daft_pink 3y agoImagine non-super earth's alien civilizations are probably writing up articles about how planets like ours are hard to escape. You dealt the hand you're given.
- ftxbro 3y ago> You dealt the hand you're given.
- daltont 3y agoRead a sci-fi book recently with that being a central plot point. Reasonably advanced species unable to escape the gravity of its home world. There is also a dearth of fissile material in the solar system that prevent a "nuclear option". Book was written as a bit of homage to "The Mote in God's Eye" with wanting to leave to planet being seen as a "Crazy Eddie" idea. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59554147-cold-eyes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59554147-cold-eyes
- Retric 3y agoIt’s clearly more difficult, but authors are a few individuals briefly thinking about a problem not entire civilization attacking the problem across generations. My first thought is balloons work based on relative densities so they can still reach very low density air on a high gravity world. That doesn’t help much with rockets, but firing a gun or using something like spin launch is much easier if you can start from very low atmospheric pressure. No idea what actual engineers could come up with.
- neolefty 3y agoMostly it's moar stages. Each stage of a kerolox engine can get you about 5 km/s, and LEO is about 8 km/s, so two stages works pretty well. Velocity for LSEO (low super-earth orbit) might be 11 km/s, so you'd need a third stage, and each stage would be 3-5 times the size of whatever it's launching.
- Retric 3y agoIt’s not that simple a falcon 9 upper stage on a 5g super earth would collapse from its own weight during takeoff. It’s a double hit as your lower stages are also losing ~5g’s of acceleration due to gravity. So if you want to add 3g the entire rocket needs to be able to withstand an effective 8g, and you need a rocket engine + fuel to provide 8g’s worth of force. On top of this the time between each stage becomes extremely costly.
- jqpabc123 3y agoBottom line: Chemical rockets are never going to take us any place interesting in the universe.
- mkaic 3y agoI would argue that the moon, Venus, Mars, Titan, Enceladus, and others are quite interesting :P But I see what you're saying. Excluding our own solar system, yes, chemical rockets are super limited :)
- jqpabc123 3y agoEven within our own solar system, anywhere beyond the moon is likely to end up as a one way, dead end trip.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoWhy is it so important to get back? That implies people need to go there, I think? Why? And would it really not be possible to get to Enceladus and back (w/o people)? The gravity there is so much less than the moon. Or is it just the distance to and from Enceladus, and possibly nothing for a slingshot?
- mcbutterbunz 3y agoI can look at pictures of Machu Picchu on Google Maps but the experience of being there is so much better (from what I hear). That's why we want to send people. Presumably those people want to survive and come back too.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago> I can look at pictures of Machu Picchu on Google Maps but the experience of being there is so much better (from what I hear). Right, but you can't even look at pictures of these other planets because we haven't gone at all. And if your choice was between spending $4T to go to Macchu Picchu yourself, or look at pictures on Google Maps for free - you would almost certainly not spend $4T "for the experience". The reality is - Nasa estimates it would cost $4B for another manned moon mission. India just sent a lunar probe to the moon for about 1/100th that price. Even if we could send someone to Saturn - the price would be more prohibitive than the chemistry. If it costs 100-1000 times more to send humans than robots - it's probably not worth it.
- cat_plus_plus 3y agoI would assume that such planets have a very large surface area, larger than Earth and Mars combined? In this case, super-Earthlings have plenty of exploring to do, just in a different way from us. It can still be challenging and time consuming, for example air travel may not be practical, or may require balloons floating in denser atmosphere rather than jet engines. By the time we explored Mars and they explored their entire surface, or prospects for going further may not be so different. Either we have developed technology to travel much further, or we have to accept that that's all the planetary surface we are going to see and we better take good care of it.
- dylan604 3y agoMaybe? But as they say, necessity is the mother of all invention.
- tahoeskibum 3y agoI'm curious how much harder it would be on these planets to launch 1) Sputnik like satellite 2) Hubble Space telescope
- perihelions 3y agoThere's a lot of loopholes you could plausibly escape through. For one: you could use hybrid atmosphere-breathing engines to get most of the way to low orbit. (Using ambient atmosphere as a reaction mass circumvents the rocket equation). From low orbit, you can switch to electric thrusters with Isp much higher than the engines considered here: it's no longer necessary to have a thrust/weight ratio greater than unity. A hydrogen planet would be particularly easy, since the light molecules would maximize Isp for a (non-combustion) thermal engine. A nuclear scramjet on a Hycaean world would have some truly impressive performance.
- sjducb 3y agoYea. Some kind of nuclear scramjet would be the way to get off a big planet with a dense atmosphere. To explain for all of the non engineers: On earth scramjets work because airflow enters the front of the engine and the shape of the inlet compresses the gas, fuel is added and burnt, then the exhaust gasses go out the back really fast. With a nuclear scramjet the fission reaction heats up the middle of the scramjet so air comes in, is compressed then heated so it expands and goes out the back really fast. That would move you very quickly and efficiently through the dense atmosphere, using almost no fuel, and you do not have to carry much reaction mass. Then once in space you feed compressed hydrogen into the front of the engine heat it up and send it out the back really fast, just like the nuclear rocket motors that nasa is developing right now.
- Antipode 3y agoA hybrid engine like SABRE might also be viable? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)
- neolefty 3y agoOr a jet stage followed by rocket stages.
- captainmuon 3y agoPerhaps "slow" ascent would be a option, i.e. not reaching escape velocity but just steadily ascending until you are far enough away that gravity is lower. I know here on earth it is far more inefficient, which is why you always go for "ballistic" trajectories where you gain enough velocity that inertia carries you on. Maybe there is something you could "ratchet" against? Thrust a bit upward and have something prevent you from falling back down. Maybe the denser atmosphere would provide an option. You could deploy large sails as intermediate launch pads in the atmosphere for example.
- sdenton4 3y agoI once had a fun week playing Kerbal Space Program building solar-powered quadcopter launch platforms... Basically a quadcopter which is mostly a big platform with a rocket payload in the middle. The quadcopter slowly ascends to the highest feasible altitude, bypassing all of the worst of the air resistance, and greatly reducing the delta v needed to get into orbit as a result. This was mainly helping with the atmospheric drag problem, though; you would presumably need a lot of atmosphere to get far enough from the planet to help with the increased need for horizontal speed with a super massive planet. Oh hey I found an old screenshot: https://imgur.io/zq8iyV0?r https://imgur.io/zq8iyV0?r
- M_bara 3y agoNot a rocket scientist or even a physicist.. but if i remember right, the bulk of your energy in a rocket is expended on your horizontal speed not the height gain. I came across this when I was looking up if it made sense to launch a rocket from an equatorial mountain like Kilimanjaro (6000m asl)
- marcosdumay 3y agoKeep in mind that KSP happens in "easy mode" where all of the atmospheric drag, gravity pulling, and orbital speed are smaller, but they are smaller by completely non-proportional amounts. Last time I looked, there was a mod that made Kerbin like Earth. I suggest you try it.
- mapmap 3y ago
- 1970-01-01 3y agoHere's the wiki page for ways around it. Of course, it's all hypothetical and theoretical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch
- whoisthemachine 3y agoSpin launches have become less theoretical. https://www.spinlaunch.com/ https://www.spinlaunch.com/
- messe 3y ago> We find that chemical rockets still allow for escape velocities on Super-Earths up to 10x Earth mass. Much heavier rocky worlds, if they exist, will require using up most of the planet as chemical fuel for the (one) launch, a rather risky undertaking. From the abstract. I love papers with a sense of humor.
- uneekname 3y ago> It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in astrophysics From what I can tell, this was published in August of that year, though with the silliness toned down significantly [0] [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/90E8835704DB1C3449B38867D848AB74/S1473550418000198a.pdf/spaceflight-from-super-earths-is-difficult.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
- pmontra 3y ago> water (H2O) cannot become radioactive itself This was interesting. I researched it a little and found this on https://www.quora.com/Why-is-water-the-only-thing-on-Earth-that-cannot-become-radioactive https://www.quora.com/Why-is-water-the-only-thing-on-Earth-t... When hit by neutrons "hydrogen, move to another stable state and only become unstable when that particular atom gets hit twice" "Oxygen takes three absorptions to become radioactive" and underwater neutrons "activated mainly the sodium in the sea salt."
- autokad 3y agoI thought because gravity gets smaller by squared distance, large planets would not have crushing gravity on the surface because you are far away from the center of mass. Is that true? If so, how large would a super earth have to be to have an equivalent earth gravity on its surface?
- shkkmo 3y agoIt's because volume increases by cubed distance. For a larger planet to have the same surface gravity as ours, it would have to be less dense.
- autokad 3y agogood points. I think the less dense part is pretty 'easy' though, earth is a bit dense for its size. (probably a result of the collision that created the moon).
- shkkmo 3y agoIt is completely reasonable to have a planet that is more massive than earth with the same or lower gravity due to differences in density. However, the density variation of rocky planets is pretty small so as they get larger you will see higher surface gravities.
- autokad 3y agoA super earth 2x the diameter of Earth but with the density of Mars would have the same surface gravity as Earth (according to my back of the envelope calculations).
- friend_and_foe 3y agoThe density of an object at hydrostatic equilibrium is a function of its gravity, which is a function of it's mass, assuming rocky and similar composition in aggregate. The likelihood that a planet would be 2x the diameter of earth and less dense is extremely low.
- autokad 3y agoi completely disagree. Mercury is extremely dense and small, Venus is almost exactly the same size as Earth and is in fact ... less dense than Earth. There are many many things that leads to a planets density, and they call fall into a very wide range. A planet 2x the size of Earth with mars density seems very reasonable to happen - even if unlikely. Kepler-22b is very close for example
- dyno12345 3y agojust think of the countless civilizations of blind space whales living in subsurface oceans for whom merely getting to the surface of their planet is as difficult as it is for us to get to space
- friend_and_foe 3y agoWe think it's hard launching a can full of air with some people inside is hard, try launching a can full of water.
- dredmorbius 3y agoOne option that doesn't seem to be mentioned is the used of beamed energy such as laser (visible or infra-red spectrum) which provide energy directly to a rocket. This might be used in a secondary process (e.g., ion or plasma generators) or directly (heating atmosphere and/or fuel) to generate thrust. The advantage is that the power source is on the ground, and need not be lofted, which removes part of the rocket-equation limit. It's still required to source or carry reaction mass, and I'd suggest that at least a fair portion of that be obtained within the atmosphere. I don't know what a launch trajectory would look like, though I suspect something which went relatively slowly vertical (to minimise low-elevation drag), then began a hybrid lifting-ballistic flight at the highest possible levels of the atmosphere, powered by a planet-ringing set of laser stations, and acquiring reaction mass from the atmosphere itself, might be within the realm of reason? It also strikes me that a world with sufficient mass would tend to retain hydrogen gas itself (though that would still likely react with oxygen to form water vapour), but at higher elevations there might be a significant differential fraction of H2 to other atmospheric components. Root mean squared velocity of H2 at 27 C (300 K) is about 7,000 kph (~4,300 mph).[1] That's already less than Earth's escape velocity, so the problem is the molecules which have higher velocity that "boil off" into space.[2] I don't have the chops to compute this. But a laser-pumped mesospheric hydrogen ramjet rocket might be able to take advantage of highly-energised (heated or ionised) hydrogen to gain escape velocity on even a significantly larger Super-Earth. ________________________________ Notes: 1. <https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/General_Chemistry/ChemPRIME_(Moore_et_al.)/09%3A_Gases/9.15%3A_Kinetic_Theory_of_Gases-_Molecular_Speeds https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/General_Chemistry/Ch...> 2. Earth has lost roughly 25% of its primordial hydrogen (and water) by this mechanism. <https://sciencenordic.com/chemistry-climate-denmark/the-earth-has-lost-a-quarter-of-its-water/1462713 https://sciencenordic.com/chemistry-climate-denmark/the-eart...>
- emmelaich 3y agoExtremly?!