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Postby Shyster » Fri Sep 29, 2017 6:07 pm

SpaceX announced a bunch of new stuff tonight, including plans for a shrink of the planned "BFR" Mars rocket, but much more uses for that rocket. Last year Musk mentioned that the trouble with BFR was figuring out how to pay for it. It now seems that the plan is to have the BFR replace all of SpaceX's current launch vehicles and be used for everything that SpaceX does. Rather than wade through Elon's entire presentation (and as much as I respect Elon Musk, he is not a very good public speaker), Scott Manley has a very nice breakdown of SpaceX's plans here, including their proposal to use the BFR to provide city-to-city suborbital passenger transportation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEokBZkZWxo&t=0s

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Postby Shyster » Tue Oct 03, 2017 4:29 pm

Scott Manley just put out a very nice video on the history of the R-7 rocket family, which includes the Sputnik, Luna, Vostok, Voskhod, Molniya, and Soyuz variants. More R-7s have launched than any other family of rockets—more than 1,000 launches and counting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzGsWw47sMY

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Postby Shyster » Tue Oct 10, 2017 3:35 pm

Three successful launches yesterday from around the world. First, the Chinese Space Agency launched a Long March 2D from the Jiuquan Space Center, which was carrying the VRSS-2 weather satellite for Venezuela. (Considering Venezuela's economy, I hope the Chinese got their payment up front.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RvxwgZcA3A

Second, SpaceX launched the next batch of Iridium NEXT sat-phone satellites from Vandenberg Air Force Base; the launch featured another successful recovery of the first stage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V11ohV4b2Mw

Third and finally, the Japanese Space Agency launched a HII-A rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan. It was carrying Michibiki 4, the fourth satellite in Japan's homegrown navigation constellation, which is designed to suppliment the US-based global GPS system. Tanegashima might be the most picturesque launch facility in the world. The pad is located on a rocky peninsula, surrounded by the ocean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kExAGyfjuHw

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Postby Kaiser » Wed Oct 11, 2017 7:11 pm

SES-11 first stage sticks another landing.

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Postby Shyster » Fri Oct 13, 2017 1:53 pm

Fairly rare launch earlier today. The European Space Agency's Sentinel-5P Earth-observation satellite was launched earlier today using a Russian Rokot launch vehicle. Although it sounds a whole lot like the English word, "rokot" is Russian for "rumble," not "rocket." The Rokot is a light launcher that is based on the first two stages of the retired Soviet UR-100N ICBM, topped off with a new third stage based on the optional Briz stage for the Proton. Because it was designed as a silo-launched ICBM, you can see that the Rokot launches from a tube.

https://youtu.be/NMdzZqJpHA0?t=30s

I really like the helpful arrow and label pointing to "Earth" in the launch graphics. Never would have been able to guess what that big blue and green thingy was. :lol:

It's not clear how many more Rokot launches there will be. The Angara-1.2 is slated to replace it in the Russian launch portfolio, but the Angara program has been plagued with delays and funding problems and is running many years behind schedule.

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Postby count2infinity » Fri Oct 13, 2017 2:34 pm


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Postby Lemon Berry Lobster » Thu Oct 19, 2017 4:34 pm

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2017/10/ ... naked-eye/
Want To See Uranus With The Naked Eye? Tonight Is The Night
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – All jokes aside, tonight is the night if you want to see Uranus.
The plant will reach opposition on Oct. 19, meaning it will be directly opposite the sun, bringing it closer and brighter to earth.

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Postby robbiestoupe » Thu Oct 19, 2017 4:58 pm

Interesting plant, that Uranus

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Postby shafnutz05 » Thu Oct 19, 2017 10:32 pm

Lemon Berry Lobster wrote:http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2017/10/19/uranus-visible-with-the-naked-eye/
Want To See Uranus With The Naked Eye? Tonight Is The Night

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – All jokes aside, tonight is the night if you want to see Uranus.
The plant will reach opposition on Oct. 19, meaning it will be directly opposite the sun, bringing it closer and brighter to earth.


Thank you for the heads up. This is actually one of my amateur astronomer "bucket list" items...I just am not going to be able to travel to a dark enough sky to see it this time :(

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Postby columbia » Thu Oct 19, 2017 10:37 pm

I'm really amused by the idea of diamond rain on Jupiter and Saturn. What a universe we live in.

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Postby Shyster » Thu Oct 19, 2017 11:50 pm

To go with the diamond rain, scientists a few days ago detected—for the first time ever—the gravitational waves generated by the collusion of two neutron stars. The hugely-energetic collision resulted in the formation of a massive cloud of new matter, including large amounts of heavy elements like gold and uranium. Initial estimates are that the collision generated—among all the other elements—something along the lines of 200 Earth masses of gold and 500 Earth masses of platinum.

Astronomers Strike Gravitational Gold In Colliding Neutron Stars
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ ... tron-stars

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Postby Shyster » Tue Oct 24, 2017 8:57 pm

SpaceX news:

Iridium has agreed to switch the upcoming Iridium NEXT-4 and -5 missions to reused (or as SpaceX like to call them, "flight proven") cores. One of them might be a core that launched a prior set of Iridium NEXT satellites.

NASA is considering switching the upcoming CRS-13 cargo mission to a reused core. I think they would need to amend the contract to do so, because IIRC the cargo contract between SpaceX and NASA calls for new cores for all launches.

SpaceX has added a mystery launch to the schedule for mid November. The launch is codenamed "Zuma,” and while we know the payload has been built by Northrop Grumman for the U.S. Government, no federal agency has stepped forward to claim it. Northrop is officially the entity that is paying for the launch. There is precedent for something like this; ULA launched a couple Atlas V missions in the past (codenamed PAN and CLIO) that no government entity ever officially claimed. Some of the documents leaked by Richard Snowden revealed that at least one of those satellites was a signals intelligence (SIGINT) spacecraft designed to intercept the transmissions of commercial com sats. Here's an interesting article on that program.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3095/1

Whatever Zuma is, it can't be very heavy because the permits for the launch call for the core to return to CCAFS and land at Landing Zone 1.

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Postby Kaiser » Tue Oct 24, 2017 9:43 pm

You know goodspeed, its been a long time since i said thank you to anyone, but thank you.

Image

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Postby shafnutz05 » Wed Oct 25, 2017 8:07 pm

You know goodspeed, its been a long time since i said thank you to anyone, but thank you.

Image
:thumb:

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Postby Shyster » Thu Oct 26, 2017 5:25 pm

If you are thanking me, then thanks for the thanks.

Two launches before the end of the month. First, SpaceX is scheduled to launch the Koreasat 5A communications satellite on October 30. The static fire took place today and seemed to go off successfully. That's a new core, and there should be a droneship landing. The launch is from LC-39 at Kennedy.

Second, Orbital ATK is scheduled to launch a payload of six Earth-observation satellites and CubeSat secondary payloads on October 31 aboard a Minotaur-C rocket. The launch is from Vandenberg AFB. The Minotaur-C is an upgraded, renamed version of the all-solid Orbital Sciences Taurus rocket, which has a checkered past to say the least. The last two launches for the Taurus in 2009 and 2011 both failed, in both cases due to the payload fairing not separating. The extra weight of the fairing meant that the vehicle didn't have enough delta-V to reach orbit (and the payloads would have been trapped inside the fairings anyway). Those two missions were both for NASA; the 2009 launch was the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite, and the 2011 launch was the Glory climate-change-monitoring satellite. The launch failures resulted in losses of over $700 million for NASA (not including cost of the Taurus rockets themselves). I would imagine there's going to be some severe butt-puckering during the upcoming launch, at least until successful fairing separation has been confirmed.

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Postby Shyster » Thu Oct 26, 2017 8:54 pm

Astronomers believe they have the first detection of an interstellar object passing though the Solar System.

https://www.space.com/38580-interstella ... stery.html

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Postby Silentom » Fri Oct 27, 2017 8:29 am


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Postby Shyster » Mon Oct 30, 2017 6:50 pm

SpaceX had a successful launch today for the KoreaSat-5A satellite, including a droneship landing. It looked like there was a fire at the base of the first stage upon landing, but a shot later in the broadcast showed that the fire was out, and everything seemed to look all right. That was the 16th launch of the year and the 13th successful landing (the other three Falcon 9s were flown in an expendable configuration).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O23srbO0MEw

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Postby Shyster » Tue Oct 31, 2017 5:14 pm

About 35 minutes to the Orbital Minotaur-C launch. The webcast will start at 5:17 EDT / 2:17 PDT. Here's a link:

https://www.orbitalatk.com/news-room/fe ... x?prid=283

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Postby Shyster » Tue Oct 31, 2017 5:55 pm

Oribital has had some panic-inducing losses of telemetry so far during the launch, but it seems like the vehicle is healthy and on track. Currently in a coast phase until the ignition of the fourth stage, which will circularize the orbit.

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Postby Shyster » Tue Oct 31, 2017 6:30 pm

Waiting to see whether the Orbital mission was successful. Somewhat surprisingly, Orbital did not have any capabilities in place on this launch for over-the-horizon telemetry, so no one will know whether the satellites all deployed successfully until they loop around the Earth and pass over the Alaska Satellite Facility tracking station at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (the satellites are in a north–south orbit).

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Postby Shyster » Tue Oct 31, 2017 8:27 pm

Orbital and Planet Labs have both confirmed a successful mission and ground contact with Planet Labs' six SkySat and four Dove satellites. Planet Labs operates a large constellation of over a hundred "Dove" Earth-imaging satellites, and this launch added four more. The Planet Labs "Flock" of tiny satellites, which are based on a 3U CubeSat form factor, allows for rapid Earth imaging. In addition, Planet Labs recently purchased a company called Skybox Imaging from Google; Skybox (which has since been renamed Terra Bella) offers higher-resolution Earth-imaging services. The six larger SkySat satellites in this launch are to add to the Terra Bella constellation. Planet Labs' goal is to be able to provide high-resolution satellite imagery of any place on Earth multiple times a day.

As part of the Skybox sale, Google acquired an equity stake in Planet Labs and entered into a multi-year agreement to purchase SkySat imaging data. So when you use Google Earth in the future, you may be looking at images taken by one of the sats launched today.

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Postby shafnutz05 » Wed Nov 01, 2017 8:42 am

:thumb: Thanks for sharing.

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Postby Silentom » Thu Nov 09, 2017 10:16 am


Viva la Ben
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Postby Viva la Ben » Thu Nov 09, 2017 1:51 pm

I’m sure it’s just a glitch in the simulation.

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