The Real Secrets of Rocket Design Revealed

this is the third video in a series on Ula PR looking at an article authored by Ula CEO Tony Bruno titled the secrets of Rocket design revealed we're going to be doing something a little different which is why this talk is titled the real secrets of Rocket design revealed because I don't think the picture he paints is accurate but don't worry there are plenty of visual aids in this article and we'll be looking at those as well the article starts out with this paragraph there's no single best rocket different Rockets do different things as it turns out the design of a rocket flows directly from the mission the rocket is intended to do and there are many different missions any given rocket is optimal for a specific orbit and payload its efficiency falls off as we move away from that perfect case I mostly agree with that though I would talk about markets rather than missions what I don't agree with is the assertion directly from the mission the rocket is intended to do and that efficiency is of high importance you really should go read the whole paper it's linked in the video description but since you've been spending too much time on Insta and not enough on homework I'll summarize what I think the main argument is Bruno defines what he labels as high energy missions which you can just take as a short hand for Department of Defense space force launches primarily the nssl launches that have been ula's primary market for decades optimizing for these high energy missions requires a different rocket architecture than optimizing for low earth orbit missions and that's why Vulcan is different optimized Rockets are better because they're more efficient before we dig into the paper we need to do a little work we need to understand where Rockets come from and we're going to explore this by looking at the birth of two rockets we'll start with SpaceX they great opportunity fell into their lap the shuttle was retiring and NASA needed a way to carry cargo to the International Space Station so they were funding the commercial orbital Transportation Services Program to help companies develop that capability and after that was done they would hire companies to actually carry the cargo spacex's reaction was we have to win a contract the development contract would be for hundreds of millions of dollars