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Postby Freddy Rumsen » Fri Sep 28, 2018 8:08 pm

Yep

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Postby Shyster » Thu Oct 11, 2018 5:29 pm

To say this was a bad day for the Russian space agency would be a huge understatement. As most have probably seen by now, the Soyuz vehicle on the MS-10 crew launch to the ISS Did Not Go To Space Today and suffered a catastrophic failure at approximately the time of strap-on booster separation. Fortunately, the abort systems and plans all worked as expected, and the two-man crew (NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Soyuz commander and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin) are both fine after doing a 7 g ballistic reentry and landing near Jezkazgan, Kazakhstan, about 250 miles from the launch site in Baikonur. This is the first high-altitude abort of a manned Soyuz flight in over 40 years (the last was a launch to the Salyut 4 station in April 1975). The recent performance of Roscosmos has been replete with multiple Soyuz and Proton launch failures and other general screwups, such as the fact that the Soyuz currently attached to the ISS apparently had a hole drilled in it by mistake, and whoever did it just tried to patch the hole and didn't tell anyone.

Here is video of the anomaly:



How this will affect the ISS remains to be seen. The Soyuz crew vehicle is rated to stay in orbit and attached to the ISS for about 200 days. As new crew vehicles are launched, the oldest one attached to the ISS is used to for a return. Because the Soyuz is the only crew vehicle currently flying, the Soyuz currently in orbit might "time out" before the next crew is able to be launched, which means the ISS might have to be unmanned for a while. SpaceX has said that the Dragon2 is ready to fly, and they are just waiting on the paperwork before the first flight. Boeing's Starliner might be a little farther behind. Neither of them was is not expected to launch before early 2019, and those first flights were supposed to be unmanned anyway. The first crewed Dragon 2 flight is scheduled for June 2019, and the first crewed Starliner flight is scheduled for August 2019.

Here is Scott Manley doing some explaining:


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Postby Shyster » Thu Oct 11, 2018 8:22 pm

The Soyuz failure ended up being the biggest news, but there is other significant space news for today. The Air Force announced the winners of the latest round of "Launch Service Agreements," which is a program designed to provide funding to private companies for the development of launch vehicles that will provide the Air Force (and perhaps the Space Force) with the ability to put its large and complex payloads in orbit. The money is designed to pay for the development of vehicles to replace the Atlas 5 (with its politically problematic Russian engines) and the Delta IV (which is too freaking expensive). The winners of this round were:

- United Launch Alliance: $967,000,000 for the development of the Vulcan–Centaur launch system.
- Northrop Grumman: $791,601,015 for development of the Omega launch system
- Blue Origin: $500,000,000 for the development of the New Glenn launch system

ULA hasn't exactly been blazing away with the development of the Vulcan, but a nearly $1 billion check from the feds should push up the pace of development. The money to Blue Origin also indirectly helps out ULA, since the Vulcan will use Blue Origin's BE-4 engines. I believe Blue Origin asked for funding to develop the launch sites for the New Glenn in Florida and California. The win for NG should also mean that we will see the Omega actually fly, probably by 2021 or so. That rocket will use shuttle-derived solid rockets segments as its first stage, with a liquid-fueled second stage. Omega will be a far more capable vehicle that NG's Antares rocket, which has never secured any customers other than NASA and the Cygnus ISS resupply missions. Adding in SpaceX, this means that the early 2020s should see at least four US companies capable of putting significant payloads in orbit. One wonders whether there will be enough business to go around.

We know that SpaceX also put in a proposal for funding , but we don't know exactly what they asked for. The Air Force might have skipped over SpaceX because the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are pretty much fully developed, and the BFR would probably be overkill for the Air Force's needs. SpaceX did receive funding under prior rounds of this program. Aerojet also put in a bid for funding for its AR-1 engine, which was once proposed for the Vulcan, but that engine lacks a customer now that ULA has formally decided on the BE-4 for Vulcan. No money for Aerojet almost certainly means that the AR-1 engine is dead.

More here at Ars Technica:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10 ... evelopers/

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Postby Shyster » Tue Oct 16, 2018 9:15 pm

United Launch Alliance is scheduled to launch the Advanced Extremely High Frequency 4 (AEHF-4) satellite for the Air Force shortly after midnight tonight, east coast time. AHEF-4 is the fourth in the next generation of high-speed communications satellites for the US military. AHEF-4 must be a big bird, because the Atlas 5 launcher will be flying in its heaviest 551 configuration with an extended payload fairing and five strap-on solid boosters. The stream should start around 11:55 pm eastern.

https://www.ulalaunch.com/missions/atlas-v-aehf-4

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Postby Shyster » Fri Oct 19, 2018 7:55 pm

Rocket Lab has announced that in addition to their existing launch facility on the Mahia Peninsula on the North Island of New Zealand, they will also be building a new pad and vehicle-assembly facility at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. The new pad will be adjacent to and within the fenceline of Pad 0A, which is used by NGIS for the Antares launcher. The assembly facility and control room will be located in the nearby Wallops Research Park. The Rocket Lab Electron is a kerolox vehicle just like the first stage of the Antares, so RL should be able to just tap into the existing RP-1 and LOX storage tanks and systems already present at Pad 0A.

Assuming the NGIS Omega launcher completes development and goes into service, it will probably replace the Antares, so RL could end up as the primary commercial tenant for the Wallops launch site. The third launch of the Electron has been delayed for months and is currently NET November, but RL is hoping to scale up the production/launch cadence to the point where they are launching more than 100 times per year. People near Wallops could be seeing a lot of rocket launches in the future.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/10 ... er-launch/

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Postby Shyster » Mon Oct 22, 2018 4:39 pm

SpaceX's plans for the remainder of the year are coming into focus. If all goes well, there should be five more launches before the end of 2018.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/10 ... ches-2018/

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Postby relantel » Tue Oct 23, 2018 3:03 pm

loved the subtitles on the Space_X blooper reel

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Postby Shyster » Tue Oct 30, 2018 5:39 pm

NASA has announced that the Kepler space observatory has finally fun out of fuel for its reaction-control system, which means that the craft can no longer orient itself and perform its mission. Launched on a Delta II in 2009, Kepler's mission was to search for exoplanets, and over its mission it found evidence for more than 5,011 of them and confirmed 2,512. Kepler's original estimated lifespan was 3.5 years, but it lasted a little over 9.5 years, so NASA got plenty of mileage out of the mission. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched back in April on a Falcon 9 performs the same sort of searches over an even wider swath of space. RIP Kepler.

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Postby Willie Kool » Tue Oct 30, 2018 6:29 pm

Also in NASA news:
Parker Solar Probe now holds the record for closest approach to the Sun by a human-made object. The spacecraft passed the current record of 26.55 million miles from the Sun's surface on Oct. 29, 2018, at about 1:04 p.m. EDT, as calculated by the Parker Solar Probe team.

The previous record for closest solar approach was set by the German-American Helios 2 spacecraft in April 1976. As the Parker Solar Probe mission progresses, the spacecraft will repeatedly break its own records, with a final close approach of 3.83 million miles from the Sun's surface expected in 2024.

“It’s been just 78 days since Parker Solar Probe launched, and we’ve now come closer to our star than any other spacecraft in history,” said Project Manager Andy Driesman, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “It’s a proud moment for the team, though we remain focused on our first solar encounter, which begins on Oct. 31.”

Parker Solar Probe is also expected to break the record for fastest spacecraft traveling relative to the Sun on Oct. 29 at about 10:54 p.m. EDT. The current record for heliocentric speed is 153,454 miles per hour, set by Helios 2 in April 1976.

The Parker Solar Probe team periodically measures the spacecraft's precise speed and position using NASA's Deep Space Network, or DSN. The DSN sends a signal to the spacecraft, which then retransmits it back to the DSN, allowing the team to determine the spacecraft's speed and position based on the timing and characteristics of the signal. Parker Solar Probe's speed and position were calculated using DSN measurements made through Oct. 24, and the team used that information along with known orbital forces to calculate the spacecraft's speed and position from that point on.

Parker Solar Probe will begin its first solar encounter on Oct. 31, continuing to fly closer and closer to the Sun's surface until it reaches its first perihelion — the point closest to the Sun — at about 10:28 p.m. EST on Nov. 5. The spacecraft will face brutal heat and radiation conditions while providing humanity with unprecedentedly close-up observations of a star and helping us understand phenomena that have puzzled scientists for decades. These observations will add key knowledge to NASA’s efforts to understand the Sun, where changing conditions can propagate out into the solar system, affecting Earth and other worlds.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/parker-sol ... aft-to-sun

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Postby Shyster » Wed Oct 31, 2018 7:01 pm

Astronomers studying the data from the European Space Agency's Gaia star-mapping satellite have found that the current Milky Way galaxy is the result of a 10-billion-year-old merger with a smaller satellite galaxy.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07193-4

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Postby shafnutz05 » Wed Oct 31, 2018 8:39 pm

Astronomers studying the data from the European Space Agency's Gaia star-mapping satellite have found that the current Milky Way galaxy is the result of a 10-billion-year-old merger with a smaller satellite galaxy.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07193-4
This is fascinating, thank you. I knew about Omega Centauri, but wasn't aware about its possible origin. It is incredibly massive.

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Postby Shyster » Thu Nov 01, 2018 8:49 pm

Roscosmos has released its report on the Soyuz MS-10 launch failure. The incident is being blamed on a damaged sensor, which failed to open a valve on the LOX tank on the "D" strap-on booster. During booster separation, the bottom of each strap-on booster is released and swings away using the residual thrust of its engine. Once the bottom of the booster swings out, a sensor trips and opens a valve that depressurizes the booster's LOX tank and shoots that pressurized gas out of a port on the inside of the pointy top end of the booster. That blast of pressurized gas forces the booster away from the core of the Soyuz, which continues on in flight. When Sergei Korolev was designing the R-7 rocket, he wanted to avoid having to use separation motors to assist booster separation, so instead he decided to use tank pressure to effect the separation.

Because the sensor didn't open the valve, booster "D" didn't produce that blast of gas to blow it away from the core, and instead the pointy tip of the booster impacted the core and ruptured the core's LOX tank. Failure at 1:24 of the video:



The fact that the sensor was damaged on installation makes this failure similar to the 2013 Proton launch failure, where the cause was an attitude sensor installed upside-down by an idiot worker who literally hammered the sensor (which was designed to only fit in the proper orientation) into place. It certainly makes one wonder who exactly Roscosmos has assembling its vehicles.


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Postby Viva la Ben » Tue Nov 06, 2018 8:27 am

Harvard Report: Cigar-Shaped Interstellar Object May Have Been An Alien Probe
A mysterious cigar-shaped object spotted tumbling through our solar system last year may have been an alien spacecraft sent to investigate Earth, astronomers from Harvard University have suggested.
https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2018/11 ... ien-probe/

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Postby Silentom » Tue Nov 06, 2018 8:30 am

They are looking for the humpback whales.

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Postby Lemon Berry Lobster » Tue Nov 06, 2018 8:44 am

Nah, they're just funny and sending dick shaped objects.

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Postby Shyster » Wed Nov 14, 2018 10:20 pm

NGIS is in the final stages of preparation to launch the Cygnus NG-10 cargo mission to the ISS. The Cygnus vehicle will launch aboard an Antares rocket from Pad 0A of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The launch is currently scheduled for Friday, November 16, but expected bad weather could push the launch to Saturday or later. The launch window is way early o'clock. It would be 4:23 a.m. EST if the launch takes place on Friday, and the window for Saturday would be around the same time. But if anyone is up that early and the weather isn't poop, the launch could be visible for folks over a fair bit of the east coast.

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Postby Shyster » Fri Nov 16, 2018 9:52 pm

SpaceX had a good launch yesterday of the Es’Hail-2 communications satellite for the Qatar Satellite Company. The first stage executed what looked to be a near-bullseye droneship landing. The launch tied SpaceX's record for the most launches in a calendar year, and there are four more launches scheduled before the end of 2018.

Roscosmos returned to flight today for the FG version of the Soyuz with a successful launch of the Progress MS-10 resupply vehicle to the ISS. The Soyuz-FG is the version of the Soyuz used for the Progress and Soyuz cargo and crew vehicles. It's actually an outdated version of the Soyuz as compared to the newer Soyuz-2 versions. For example, the Soyuz-FG uses the old analog flight-control system that is incapable of performing roll maneuvers after liftoff. Instead of the vehicle rolling to align with its launch azimuth, the launch platform for the Soyuz-FG is physically rotated and aligned with the proper launch azimuth for the time of liftoff. The Progress will arrive at the ISS in roughly two days.

Bad weather with rain and winds forced NGIS to push back the Antares/Cygnus launch to Saturday morning. Liftoff is scheduled for a hair after 4:00 am EST, and unlike the last couple days weather is not expected to be a problem.

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Postby tifosi77 » Sat Nov 24, 2018 2:48 pm


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Postby eddy » Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:07 pm

I feel you, #Mars – and soon I’ll know your heart. With this safe landing, I’m here. I’m home.

#MarsLanding https://t.co/auhFdfiUMg

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Postby eddy » Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:13 pm

1st image
Image

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Postby tifosi77 » Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:14 pm

Now, it's off to find Kuato and activate the turbinium reactor and we'll be right as rain.

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Postby shafnutz05 » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:26 pm

1st image
Image
All that engineering and they didn't install window wipers? ;)

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Postby Lemon Berry Lobster » Mon Nov 26, 2018 9:54 pm


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Postby Kaiser » Mon Nov 26, 2018 11:24 pm

Just dig the hole, toaster.

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Postby Shyster » Mon Dec 03, 2018 12:58 pm

Should be a busy couple days for the launch industry. Kicking off the launches was this morning's successful launch of the Soyuz MS-11 crew mission to the ISS.



The SpaceX SSO-A multi-satellite mission is scheduled to lift off during a window opening at 1:30 pm EST / 10:30 pm PST. This mission is carrying 64 satellites for 34 customers from 17 different countries and the European Space Agency. This will also mark the first time a SpaceX booster has flown for a third time. Core 1046's two prior launches were from LC-39A at Kennedy (the Bangabandhu 1 comsat) and LC-40 at CCAFS (the Telkom 4 comsat), so this will also be the first core to launch from all three of SpaceX's active launch sites.



Tomorrow, SpaceX is scheduled to launch the CRS-16 cargo mission to the ISS. The launch is scheduled for 1:38 pm EST from LC-40 at CCAFS. The weather for tomorrow is forecast to be roughly a 60% chance of "go," so there could be a delay to Wednesday, which is forecast at a 90% chance of "go."

Also tomorrow, Arianespace is scheduled to conduct a dual launch of the Indian GSAT-11 comstat and the Korean GEO-KOMPSAT-2A meteorological satellite aboard an Ariane 5 from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana. The launch window is 3:37 to 4:53 p.m. EST.

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