What we like to do and what we dream about has been a huge inspiration for
people all over the world. This mission is dangerous. Most of my
friends think that this is crazy and equally inspiring. The goal of
Copenhagen Suborbitals is to put a human being in a space capsule, on a rocket, fly
him a hundred kilometres up in the air so that he can come back and tell us
what he has seen and experienced with his own eyes. That is the ultimate ride.
Why are you doing this? We get that question a lot... to be honest the best answer I can
come up with this why not?
We are in the Copenhagen Suborbitals workshop, on the old abandoned shipyard
in Copenhagen. What we do here is we build rockets.
We have a collection of stuff that used to be rockets, some successful some less
successful... electronics, huge diesel engines. We have at least 10 projects
going on, but the biggest one is the Nexo II rocket that we will launch this
summer. We are starting to build bigger rockets.
We are starting to build a prototype of our first manned space capsule.
Right now, we're standing outside our main workshop where there's a lot of activity going on.
Today we have what we affectionately call our 'GOAB' -- good old British front
loader that we use for basically moving everything heavy about the workshop. 80%
of rocketry is actually infrastructure, moving heavy object A from point one
to point two.. unpack again. Over here, making a lot of noise, is Sheila. She is currently
working on the prototype for the next generation space capsule. That's roughly
the size of the can where we're going to put a person inside and then launch on this 100km suborbital trajectory.
Of course, it will have windows and steering and things like that, but you can
actually decide do I want to look at the Stars, or do I want to look at the
ground while you are 100km up? This is a mock-up of our space capsule so we
can design where the controls go, matching his mock-up of the chair we fit
in here make sure everything fits and we continued the design down to
what life support should that have, where should his bottle of water be if
he should have water with him up or if we're just gonna make him drink some
water before he launches? We need to have a mock-up so that we can test everything
before we put a lot of energy into the real deal.
That is Randy, our crash-test dummy. We use him in all our launchers where it
makes sense to have that person substitute inside, which so far I think
we only managed to kill about two or three times? He has a very cool attitude
about it, as you can see he's not moving very much... it's cool with him.
The thing I'm standing right behind here is a capsule for the the first rocket
that we launched way back in 2011. It was the first make of rocket that we launched.
It flew two, three... four kilometers roughly then
unfortunately, because of a manufacturing error,
it was flying sideways, so the flight was terminated.
Here's the 2x rocket engine the that was supposed to have flown in 2014 but due to a mistake in a
weld, it failed during a static engine test. 600 litres of alcohol poured out
out of the bottom of the rocket in a few seconds, and of course you were still
feeding in liquid oxygen from the top so the alcohol burned outside the
combustion chamber in a big fireball. It looked worse than it was.
You have to go back to the drawing board and design a new rocket engine that
would actually work instead of blowing up and that's when we built the Nexo I.
It uses liquid oxygen and 75% ethanol as the fuel. We launched it on the
only day of 2016 where the weather in the Baltic was actually good enough to launch.
It was perfect weather, very warm very humid, which is also most likely why
we had a malfunction on a valve. We still decided to launch it, to be able to get
some kind of data out of it.
Unfortunately, because of this stuck valve, the rocket engine ran out of fuel.
Then it fell back down to earth. To us it was not a failure because we've got data out of it.
Whenever you're doing a test, if you don't get any data out of the test then
it's a failure. But if it blows up and you get data out of it then it's not a
failure, that's science. Of course, it delays the
process when you have a setback like a malfunctioning rocket but it just
hardens your resolve and makes you work that extra hard to make sure that it
doesn't happen again. It's quite certain that we are going to have more failures. Even
the professionals are failures. It happens. Rockets are very very complex
machines lots and lots of parts that has to be working perfectly together to
perform the required mission.
I would be lying if I told you that everything is just rainbows and unicorns
every day because it's not. The biggest problem is time and money. If you were to
compare the way we operate with NASA or ESA, some of the big government agencies
the comparison is absurd really because our total annual budget is less than 10%
on what NASA spends on coffee for their employees. It's a different kind of
project because contrary to a normal day job, everyone here works for free.
The project itself survives mainly on donations and assistance from mostly
private persons. They basically believe in the dream that it is possible to go
to space as an amateur organization. The Nexo I and the Nexo II rockets
are actually the two first rockets which are on a more well-defined roadmap on
how to get to space. So I'm standing right here with the Nexo II rocket, which
is this year's star. We have the entire engine section down here which is where
we get all the power we need to to go to space. Moving up one section, this is the
liquid oxygen tank that's half our propellants, the other propellant tank is
this one up here... the fuel tank. The contents of these two tanks, that's what
we mix ,ignite it and then it has this very interesting chemical reaction that
lets us fly. We have to force our propellants from the tanks into the
engines. You can do that with a pump but we don't have that. This is where we have
the DPR section, which is basically a high-pressure tank with additional
pressurization gas and that gas is then routed to the two different tanks as the
fluid levels drop in those tanks... so we're sort of topping up the tanks with
gas compensating for the fuel that runs out the bottom.
This rocket here basically is a flying testbed. It contains all the different
systems we're gonna have on the final Spica rocket we're gonna use to
really go to space. But we're testing all this stuff in a much smaller scale.
We don't need to go to space to check it and to see if it works
we just need to fly a full flight circle and if we can get that working on Nexo II
we're pretty certain it will also work on the Spica rocket. Building the actual
rocket is only 15 or 20 percent of the effort that is put into launching the rocket.
There's loads of work that we have had
to put in to building launch facilities, support equipment, telemetry control
systems, everything around the rocket and then as we are launching rockets from
from sea, we also have our ships that needs to be maintained. Right now we are on our
new mission control ship called Bolette Munkholm. Our entire operation
is based upon the fact that we can launch from sean, because then like it's
basically too crowded on land we need quite a large exclusion zone around our
ships to make sure that our Rockets don't hit anybody else when they're
coming down like fishermen or sail boats or stuff like that entering the area.
Once you see the thing launch your heart skips a couple of beats at least. There's
nothing quite like it seeing something you have spent at least a couple of
years building the thing off and trying to reach the sky. It's an amazing
feeling of accomplishment which I guess is also one of the reasons why why we do
what we do. My first dream when everybody asked what do you want to be when you
grow up and it was always for me... it was astronaut. The reason why I want to be an
astronaut was because I wanted to feel the physical changes of physical laws
that we have here on earth. When you have a passion it's something that is inside
of you and that makes you happy and makes you want to spend endless nights
and days for this mission. We started off two guys in a garage and
today we are still in a workshop regular people having regular day jobs and we
are able to build spaceships.
Someday the earth will no longer be here, someday mankind will no longer be here
and we have to somehow get away from this planet if we want to survive in the
very long run. Being an ever so small part of that
journey is a very fantastic feeling. Many of us instead of dreaming the dream
we now live it and I don't think we're going to stop unless the project goes
down or we succeed.