SkyShot - Volume 1, Issue 1: Autumn 2020

SkyShot Autumn 2020
Advancements in Aerospace
Rutvik Marathe
Rocket science: just about one of the easiest subjects in the
world. While we see launches becoming commonplace today,
this wasn’t at all the case just about 100 years ago. That’s right
- the venture of spaceflight is a very new one, requiring the
most precise and powerful technologies we have ever made. It
is far from easy; there are dozens of hurdles to overcome and
situations to account for. The most notable of these challenges
is due to Earth’s gravitational field, as lifting a rocket off the
ground and sustaining its flight needs a lot of fuel. So much so,
that roughly 80-90% of it is just fuel, preventing us from actually
carrying much into space. If that wasn’t enough, the more
fuel you carry, the more additional fuel you have to bring for
that original fuel. However, even with challenging problems
like these, society has made a lot of recent progress in launching
things into space. From companies like SpaceX, Boeing,
and Lockheed Martin, to government organizations like the
Indian and Chinese space agencies, we have been overcoming
the massive challenges that spaceflight presents by launching
every few weeks. So how did we get to this point?
Modern rocketry began to develop in the late 1800s
and early 1900s. The development of aviation led to the first
attempts to launch things off the ground, and using fuel
propulsion came soon after. At this time, all flight was limited
only to the Earth’s atmosphere. But these initial steps helped
establish how rockets function (expelling something downwards
to go up), and the process of enhancing them could
start soon. From that point, early attempts to launch things
into space were made. The first successful space launch came
during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union launched the
satellite Sputnik 1. This was huge news! A country had finally
succeeded in putting something in orbit around the Earth.
And although the R7 rocket that launched it was not very
powerful compared to modern standards, it was a monumental
development in rocketry.
Given the previously mentioned challenges, like the high
fuel requirements for rockets, meant that it wasn’t as easy as
“just making a bigger rocket” to launch heavier things. That
approach would mean that we would need gigantic rockets -
much bigger than the ones we use today - to launch people and
supplies into space. It was clear that we had to make advancements
in the way the rocket was constructed and launched,
rather than simply keep the current system, but make it larger.
Significant advancements came during the time of the space
shuttle, in the 1980s. New materials were being tested for structures
like the fuel tank, most notably an aluminum lithium alloy.
This new material reduced the rocket’s weight by about
20%, making launching and escaping Earth’s gravitational well
easier, and allowing for greater payloads for missions. Another
big advancement in this era was made in reusability. At first,
rockets were designed to be one-time-use only, as recovery was
too complicated a process to attempt early on. NASA’s Space
Shuttle was the first breakthrough in this field, as it captured
and reused the shuttle on many missions. Additionally, SpaceX
has been a pioneer in creating reusable rocket boosters, which
fly back to Earth and land on a platform in the middle of the
ocean. Such technologies make space missions much cheaper
and allow them to run quicker, as you don’t need to invest time
and energy into remaking these parts of the rocket.
Even with the current growth rate of technology, conventional
propulsion (burning fuel like we do today) doesn’t seem
like a long-term option if we want to expand past the Earth.
Such movement beyond our own planet would need a high frequency
of space missions, and therefore a lot of fuel. Not only
is this too costly for any groups to carry out, it is also not a re-
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