REDSTONE Redux?????

[Phil Smith]

Anyway it will cost a lot money, even if we'd had real retired redstone - image, how many tests you will do before you can put human being(s) on top of it?
PS - G-forces can be reduced (so they need to be reduced cause if make the vehicle lighter with new materials and electronics but leave the same engine performance, g-forces will be increased) by adding engine throttling system and optimize capsule descent trajectory.

 

[orbitingpluto]

Anyway it will cost a lot money, even if we'd had real retired redstone - image, how many tests you will do before you can put human being(s) on top of it?
PS - G-forces can be reduced (so they need to be reduced cause if make the vehicle lighter with new materials and electronics but leave the same engine performance, g-forces will be increased) by adding engine throttling system and optimize capsule descent trajectory.

It's a lot of money, and why spend it on a Redstone than other some other design? At this point, there no reason not to start with a clean sheet design: there's no Redstone factory we can use the tooling from, no old engines in storage to make use of, and no complete Redstones anyone will allow you to use either. All we have is old drawings, manuals, and other documents. All those papers describe the stock, as-it-was-in-Eisenhower's-day Redstone. If you start changing whole subsystems(electronics for one) you lose commonality with the stock Redstone, making those documents less applicable to 'new' Redstone. Go as far as you propose, changing engines, electrics, and structure, and you've developed something that behaves very differently from 'old' Redstone.

If you're going to throw the kinds of money to really build a suborbital rocket, Redstone doesn't make sense, at least as it was. Redesigning it to fit it's new role and make it more modern will change it to the point where it's lost most of it's links to the 'old' Redstone, and you've basically developed a new rocket.

 

[Phil Smith]

It's a lot of money, and why spend it on a Redstone than other some other design? At this point, there no reason not to start with a clean sheet design: there's no Redstone factory we can use the tooling from, no old engines in storage to make use of, and no complete Redstones anyone will allow you to use either. All we have is old drawings, manuals, and other documents. All those papers describe the stock, as-it-was-in-Eisenhower's-day Redstone. If you start changing whole subsystems(electronics for one) you lose commonality with the stock Redstone, making those documents less applicable to 'new' Redstone. Go as far as you propose, changing engines, electrics, and structure, and you've developed something that behaves very differently from 'old' Redstone.

If you're going to throw the kinds of money to really build a suborbital rocket, Redstone doesn't make sense, at least as it was. Redesigning it to fit it's new role and make it more modern will change it to the point where it's lost most of it's links to the 'old' Redstone, and you've basically developed a new rocket.

and that's my point! totally agreed. Some of my thoughts I've described in the last post at the first page

 

[Andy44]

For suborbital flights, I'd go to SpaceX and tell them what I want and see if they can't get me a Falcon/Grasshopper variant that lands on the pad after the capsule is seperated. Burns kerosene and LOX and is reusable.

Of course, the trajectory profile is important. For the Mercury program it was important to launch downrange and do a water landing, and the booster was expendable.

For a tourist operation, you don't want to be going hundreds of miles downrange; you want some kind of straight-up-and-down system that lands your customers not too far from the launch site where they parked their Bentleys. A reusable tail-landing booster can do the job.

The problem here is G-load on re-entry. For a straight up and down shot can get pretty nasty depending on what your apogee altitude is. You have to design your capsule to have some kind of high-drag setup like SpaceShip 1 and 2 with the Rutan feather.

 

[Loru]

I agree with Andy here and I'll add few cents. Those are my opinions not stated to discourage you but hopefully inspire.

I don't see a point of re-purposing 60 year old ballistic missile for civilian suborbital flights. List of problems is very long and many of them have been already written.

In my opinion you should first state your mission parameters (how much mass you want to throw on what trajectory and what are passenger's means of return).

1: Capsule or Spaceplane?.

While capsule design looks simpler at first glance it's reyling on parachutes/slow down engine to keep crew alive during the landing. That's single point of failure you cannot afford in comercial flying. Yes, you can provide backup chutes or backup engines but that'd add lot to complexity of the craft.

In my opinion better would be spaceplane of which I'll outline crucial IMO elements of such vehicle.

First advantage of spaceplane is glide capablility. You can target almost any major airport within the range and giving the fact you'll be returning from around 100km this range will be huge. Each airport has emeregency unit on standby and you don't have to go cross country to get passengers.

That may bit controversial but I think it'd need air start capable jet engine and fuel for ~20mins of flight to make another aproach. That'd add the mass but IMO it'd improve safety a lot. Engine doesn't have to be powerfull. We have some small and reliable jet engines already.

Contruction and fuselage shape that'll will allow relative safe belly landing or reliable manual gear drop ability.

I'd go with feather reentry. It's relatively simple technique and plane adjust itself in proper way without input from the pilot/flight control software assuming wings have been reconfigured for reentry. In feather design you're moving up drag elements not lift elements so fixed portion of the wing will need to bear most load in level flight.

2: Launch vehicle: rocket or plane

While airlaunch seems safer it has big dissadvantage of low initial speed. That'd require either intermediate stage for spaceplane to throw it into suborbital path or putting powerfull rocket engine inside it along with fuel for it.

With examples of SpaceX' Grasshopper I think it'd be feasible to put it on reusable LV. It doesn't have to be as efficent as orbit going rockets. Fuel/LOX is cheap so let's fill LV with more and allow engines to run below material limits.

Tomorrow or on Saturday I can do some calculations to determine what LV will be needed for various mission profiles.

 

[Urwumpe]

Still gotta test it. Even an upgrade can turn out to be a major bug if Murphy comes calling.

This is why space is so expensive :lol:

No need for component testing, if you buy properly documented COTS material. Then you just can skip to system testing and only perform random sample tests on the COTS components for controlling that the delivered product is according to the specifications.

 

[dman]

My aim was, based on designs by Copenhagen Suborbitals and one few years
back by group called Canadian Arrow to use technology similar to REDSTONE
or in case of Canadian Arrow - the V2

(can see their ads - Hitch a ride to space on Hitler's terror weapon.....)

Canadian Arrow proposal of few years ago

http://www.aerospaceguide.net/launchvehicles/canadian_arrow.html

Was trying to examine fesibility of building a REDSTONE as a suborbital booster, considering NASA had done it 50 years ago

Problem with the newer designs, while more efficent and "user friendly" have a
long and expensive development time with numerous delays

REDSTONE design had been "debugged" avoiding the delays of clean sheet of paper

Was envisioning something along lines of "kit plane" - in this case would have to fabricate the parts yourself from the plans

Am aware of the issues with G Forces on re entry

 

[orbitingpluto]

Was envisioning something along lines of "kit plane" - in this case would have to fabricate the parts yourself from the plans

While you could build a neat two seater plane in your garage, I'm flabbergasted that you think a home built Redstone might be feasible.

You'll need a professional welder and a machine shop to even begin to think about assembling a Redstone, and if your making one from scratch, you'd be pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the effort. And once you turned out one, how do you know it works without launching at least one? Testing a complete Redstone is expensive*, and you need to test- since this is the first new Redstone in decades, built using different tooling and (presumably) new electronics. Old test launch data would be extremely helpful, but they won't predict how this new run of rockets behave- you'll have to find out hard way by launching one or two.

And after all that expense, you'll still have a rip-snorting soldier's rocket that abuses passengers with high Gs. Reviving Redstone would take a level of effort of only millionaire could support on their own, and that's with an industrial team backing them- and in that kind of scenario there's enough cash to at least rig up a design that actually delivers a rocket better suited to suborbital tourism.

*Redstones are expendable- unlike testing an aircraft or reusable rocket, once that Redstone heads down range, it's gone, and the only thing left of it is a smoke trail and red in the ledger.

 

[RisingFury]

Are you sure you want people to get their hands on thousands of kilos of high explosive material?

 

[Phil Smith]

Hey everyone!
Here I got some pics of redstone tail unit and tanks interiors.
Details such as fins attach points and ring/stringers are very clear to see)))
Huge holes in bulkheads were made for installation post
Enjoy!
PS. Are there any redstone structural blueprints available in the web?

 

[dman]

REDSTONE schematics

http://heroicrelics.org/info/redstone/redstone-overview.html

Training/Firing manuals (declassified) for REDSTONE

http://myarmyredstonedays.com/page12.html

 

[Urwumpe]

Training/Firing manuals (declassified) for REDSTONE

http://myarmyredstonedays.com/page12.html

Kind of scary, if you look at the pictures of the simulated launch and know the place where they have been taken...

 

[Andy44]

Kind of scary, if you look at the pictures of the simulated launch and know the place where they have been taken...

From that page:

Warhead: Nuclear, 7,900 pounds total nose section weight.
Option of a 3.75-Megaton (MT) "High Yield" Device, or 500-Kiloton (KT) "Low Yield" Device.
Proximity or Contact.

3.75 MT is a tactical warhead? Wow. Gotta love the days of old Robert Heinlein's vision of a future battlefied.

 

[dman]

Scary thing was in August 1958 as part of HARDTACK tests used REDSTONE
to lauch 3.8 MT warheads just outside atmosphere where was detonaed

First test HARDTACK TEAK - August 1, 1958

Burst height 76.8 KM

Second test - HARDTACK ORANGE August 12, 1958

Burst height 43 km

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardtack_Teak"]Hardtack Teak - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]