Go to the end. Those machines were provided by the companies discounted so she could continue her llm research. She's not saying "anyone who's anyone" has a 1024-core workstation these days.
Interesting post. I'd never thought of it that way. Not consciously anyway.
Might that make an air-launched system more reliable? Even if it's less efficient, the TCO would be lower using a winged system for the initial phases of launch.
Several air launch systems have been tried, with limited but non-zero commercial success. The altitude and speed you get from the plane is very small compared to the total work the rocket needs to do, so the benefit in terms of "the rocket can be smaller" is minimal. The main benefit in practice has been launching from ~wherever you like, since regular fixed launch sites usually have strict limits about the direction you have to fly to avoid people. But the economics of reusability are pushing rockets to get bigger, and no air launch system can fly anything nearly as big as a Falcon 9, much less a Starship + Super Heavy. Other scattered problems:
- Hanging under-wing is a totally different set of forces than standing vertically, especially for a big rocket with thin walls. You're more like a bridge than a tower, or rather like a bridge one moment and then a tower the next. You need reinforcement for that, which makes the vehicle heavier.
- Modern reusable rockets do quick "load and go" filling to keep their propellant as cold and dense as possible. You can't do that if you need to fuel on the ground and then hang off an airplane for ~an hour while it climbs.
It wouldn’t help much, sadly. Getting to orbit is about speed, not height — you need 27000 kph to get to orbit, and having an air launched platform would shave off 1k kph off it at most, perhaps 5k with some insane hypersonic engineering.
Main advantage of air launch is that you can better match your target inclination or perhaps even orbit timing - just drop the rocket at the right time in the right direction over the ocean. With a fixed launch site you always need to adjust for some difference of your point of origin versus the orbit you want to achieve.
cubesat + small rocket. Orbital mechanics require a burn at a later time in the orbit, to avoid coming back to say hello again to Mr. Trebuchet (Ignoring Earth's rotation)
It helps a bit more than you imply, though: if you can launch from a higher altitude, you have less atmosphere to plow through. That lets you use more of your propellant to speed up instead of to push air out of the way.
You've just got the problem of building a fixed wing aircraft which can carry your rocket full of explosive propellant, successfully release it pointing in the right direction and then get the hell out of the way....
That isn’t very helpful considering rocket launches only spend a few seconds in atmosphere mostly going vertically to get above the majority as quickly as possible .
There are some companies working on that and / or there have been some experiments with it, but there's two factors there; the one is of course how much weight an aircraft can carry. The other one is the altitude and / or angle; a big plane goes to about 10 kilometers (maybe more, idk), but that's a 'flat' flight, ideally you launch while angled upwards and that's a bit more involved.
But that's how a lot of the X projects were / are done.
There’s actually been commercial launch services using air launch - Virgin Orbit, which went bankrupt, and Northrop Grumman’s (acquired as part of Orbital ATK) Pegasus, which hasn’t launched since 2021 and has one launch planned in 2026.
That happens at all large organisations. I worked at a large oil company and if our contracts with a vendor represented (or would have represented) more than a certain % (i forget what) of that vendors business, they didn't get the contract. As well as having vendors more likely to stay in existence, it stops the org being "morally responsible" for keeping them afloat.
I'm no expert but that looks like an impressive feat of skill, coming blind through the clouds and picking out a relatively small patch to land on. Remember also it is late autumn there, pretty windy (according to TFA) and the wind would probably be doing weird things off the sea around those cliffs. All in all, very cool.
I have my eyes on that, looking forward to V3, maybe they manage to ship mobile support as well. That would be fantastic. For anyone that doesn't know, it's still a browser based stack.
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