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by aliljet5 hours ago |
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upvoteby chasd002 hours ago|
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Amateurs have reached the karman line, orbit is still pretty much out of reach. The people who get close to the karman line use two stage passive stabilized airframes and solid fuel motors. The airframes are basically works of art and it takes a lot of luck because of passive stabilization and Mach 3+ speeds. Many pictures of these rockets have their paint and leading fin edges burned off when they're recovered. Propellent is expensive and an attempt at > 100k feet is about $5-6k an attempt in propellent alone.

This guy is widely respected in the hobby and this flight made it to 293k feet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmv7G6Rf5WE

Check out the liquid bi-prop engines the halfcat guys have, apparently they were just certified by the HPR hobby governing organization Tripoli which means they can be insured at sponsored launches. With a liquid fueled engine you can do thrust vectoring (nozzle gymbaling) easier than solid fuel motors so active stabilization is more feasible. If you have active stabilization then all you need is thrust to weight > 1, enough fuel, and you'll eventually get to whatever altitude you want. Orbit means orbital velocity and that's just a whole other ball game.

https://www.halfcatrocketry.com/

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upvoteby lovlar3 hours ago|
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Space Concordia, a Canadian university space-oriented student group, which is sort of amateur-level given that it’s driven by students and donations, attempted to reach space not that long ago with a liquid fueled single staged rocket. Here is a video of the launch https://www.youtube.com/live/610YciEs8qg?t=4594&is=aAWo8Y7vi...
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upvoteby p-o2 hours ago|
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Thank you so much for sharing this video, it's just amazing to see a bunch of young amateurs getting so excited about things that would have been virtually inaccessible 20 years ago.
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upvoteby rigrassm4 hours ago|
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Might be worth checking out the "Copenhagen Suborbitals" group (they have a YouTube channel) and see if they're still active! It's been years but I think I recall they were trying to build something capable of getting a person into space (not sure if orbit was a goal).
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upvoteby showerst3 hours ago|
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"Space" is 100km. The moon at its closest is about 350,000km.

So the jump from the former to the latter is... significant.

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upvoteby zamadatix2 hours ago|
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Distance is usually the wrong measure in space. Something like delta-v will give you a much better scaling as once you manage to get something to orbit the rest is actually a lot closer than it would seem on the ground.

Not to say the effort somehow becomes peanuts, cheap, or easy... but the jump in delta-v needed to go from "100 km vertical ascent" to "hit the moon 350,000 km away" is more like a ~6-7x increase than a 3,500x one. If the moon were instead 700,000 km away the factor would still be ~6-7x.

Cool site for delta-v estimates https://deltavmap.github.io/

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upvoteby showerst1 hours ago|
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Wow even as a bit of a rocket nerd i'd never thought about it that way, that's pretty cool!
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upvoteby hermitcrab3 hours ago|
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And you need a serious amount of money, effort and expertise to each 100km with a rocket.
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upvoteby EvanAnderson5 hours ago|
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Amateur rocketry achieving orbit would be significant. Reaching the moon would be substantially more difficult.
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