Whales As A Unit Of Measure For Launch Vehicles
Keith’s note: I guess ULA has adopted a humpback whale as a standard unit of measure with which to compare launch vehicles. In so doing Tory Bruno is now mocking – my mockery – of his original infographic with whales – except his original used trucks and tanks – and likely had its inspiration in part from Elon Musk’s space Tesla. This is kind of like featuring Space Shuttle Enterprise in the opening of “Star Trek Enterprise” when in fact Space Shuttle Enterprise was named after the original USS Enterprise in a TV show. Or something like that – with time travel.
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I sea what he did there.
I can see the point … portraying large volumes or dimension in terms of something we recognise as large. To try and get the point across to mgmt (sigh) we had to express the load on a pressure floor in terms of “elephants” (which naturally, for people familiar with the “shallow” sketch, brought into the discussion … indian or african ?).
Sad things are that most people have no clue, for comparison to every day life, how much any kind of whale weighs, just that they are big animals. And this unit of measure may go extinct.
I was going to point out that the Harvard Bridge in Boston is 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus an ear (one Smoot being the height of Dr. Smoot, 5’7″, when he was a fraternity pledge at MIT…) In fact, I just did point that out. But…
You make a good point about the whale. It doesn’t convey much to most people. The shuttle craft from Star Trek conveyed more to me, and I don’t think it’s (entirely) because I’m a geek. How often have you seen an image of a whale next to something familiar, with both the whale and the thing (or person) completely in view? I believe I’ve seen that a few times in news stories about beached whales. More often, the whale is in the water and not fully visible. The same is probably true of anything you might use as a scale bar. How many times have you seen, on television or in a movie, a person standing next to a Star Trek shuttle craft? Probably more often than you’ve seen someone standing (or swimming) next to a whale, even if you aren’t a science fiction fan.
I do think we all deserve “fair” comparisons for payload size, preferably an independent view. Isakowitz AIAA guide used to be the standard.
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/bo… Having been at NASA everyone has there own spin on this of course. Really it is requirements driven and the price you are willing to pay for it. The best thing is that there is competition in the market and eventually the markets will chose their provider based on the best financial model (which includes reliability/insurance) that meets the requirements.
Still excited to see the competition in the small launcher market as well. If you can get costs down to a reasonable price point, space becomes a viable option over terrestrial and it could be a real tipping point.
They all just like Star Trek IV: The One with the Whales.
In the dune books, they took a worm offworld. The planet 9 aliens (falcon 9?) are getting ready to take our whales. Planet 9 may be a huge ocean planet. Their singing resonates with the van Allen belts and they are critical infrastructure to moderate a protective planetary shield system. We didn’t save the whales so the nibirulings are gonna take them. Now time to go watch stargate: wormhole xxtreme!
Oo, oo, oo! Someone make a meme that compares the capacity of BFR vs SLS vs New Glenn using Dune worms!
[. Paraphrasing ]
Q: (Speaking to Cmdr Data while Watching Geordi organize something in engineering): “Just what does he think he’s doing?”
Data. “Geordi thinks he is in command. That is because he is”.
Similarly MR. Bruno is doing his job: running and promoting ULA.
It’s not just the whales, it’s the water.
Somebody had to post it.
Filling the fairing would be somewhat north of 300 000 lb. Wow, we don’t need SLS!
Interestingly, FH is the only one on the chart that could actually lift a Humpback. Or two medium sized whales.
Delta IVH could lift about 2/3rds of a whale. F9 and Atlas about half of one each.
BFR should be able to carry a blue whale, fully reusable. (I mean the rocket, not the whale. The whale is definitely expended.)
And the diagram is moot since F9/FH are now using Fairing 2.0. F2.0 is slightly larger and can also be stretched if a customer needs it. What customer? Likely the USAF, which has given SpaceX $21m for vertical integration work. Can you say EELV 2?
The increase in width is trivial, you wouldn’t see it on the scale of this image. And they’ve yet to field a longer fairing. So I’m not bothered by that. Just the deliberate deception of implying that Atlas can carry more mass than FH, by using a heavy object for scale.
Thereby proving that it takes a village to raise a metaphor. 😉
One measurement folks would be able to visualize better would be a semi-trailer. The maximum weight allowed for a Class 8 tractor-trailer is 80,000. The Delta IV Heavy would be able to place about 3/4 of that mass into orbit. One of the new Amtrak locomotives weight 264,000 lbs, it would be able to put just less than a quarter of one into orbit.
BTW, adult Sperm Whales average about 104,000 lbs, so even if they are able to fit one in the faring they won’t be able to get it off the ground. So if you are planning to launch Sperm Whales into space you will need a BFR.
Things people see on a daily basis are a better comparison. The Cassini project has been using, “the spacecraft is about the size of a bus” for years, and it gives people a good feel for how big it is. At one point before launch, Juno had a project manager who was slightly shorter than average, and exactly the right height to let them say that the spacecraft was as tall as their manager. (That’s the bus of course, not the length of the solar arrays, they had another comparison for the solar arrays. I think it involved are tennis courts.)
There was a time (1950s, 1960s) when didn’t have to show things like whales and busses for visualization. Artwork showed stations and moonbases with people inside like drawings of buildings and airplanes so people can relate to how big it is and how they are positioned inside. However, these gigantic weather, communications, and recon stations employing 1000s of people in reality were replaced with a few kilograms of electronics. Just saying as there’s lots of visualization these days i.e. the ad I see on the right “Humans to Mars Summit 2018” which I say is a big distraction particularly when we still can’t put a man on the moon.