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Postby Shyster » Thu Nov 09, 2017 6:31 pm

Orbital ATK is preparing to launch the OA-8 resupply mission to the ISS, which is scheduled to lift off at 7:37 a.m. EST on Saturday, November 11 from Pad 0A at Wallops Island, Virginia. This is the ninth mission of the Cygnus cargo freighter (this Cygnus is named in honor of Gene Cernan) and will carry 3350kg of cargo to the ISS. This is the second launch of the reconfigured Antares 230 rocket, which now has two new Russian-built RD-181 first-stage engines in place of the old (and demonstrably unreliable) ex-Soviet NK-33/AJ-26 engines, coupled with a Castor 30XL solid-rocket second stage.

The launch should theoretically be visible over a fair bit of the mid-Atlantic coast, but viewing may be hampered by the fact that it's an early-morning launch into the rising sun. There's a viewing map on Orbital's mission page:

https://www.orbitalatk.com/news-room/fe ... fault.aspx

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Postby Kaiser » Thu Nov 09, 2017 7:08 pm

I'm guessing binary system, with the 2nd supernova ramping up star birth in the area.

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Postby shafnutz05 » Sat Nov 11, 2017 7:50 am

My daughter and I were watching the launch countdown, and at one minute some dipsht private pilot veered into the safety zone and they had to do a full abort. What a privileged jerk.

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Postby Shyster » Sat Nov 11, 2017 6:11 pm

I just looked up the potential penalties, Federal Aircraft Regulation (FAR) 91.143 speaks specifically to "flight in the proximity of space flight operations, and it says: "When a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) is issued in accordance with this section, no person may operate any aircraft of U.S. registry, or pilot any aircraft under the authority of an airman certificate issued by the Federal Aviation Administration, within areas designated in a NOTAM for space flight operation except when authorized by ATC." Under the FAA's Compliance and Enforcement Bulletin, the violation of a secured area that is the subject of a NOTAM results in a 30-day license suspension. Which strikes me as a slap on the wrist for something that probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted employee time, LOX lost to boil-off, and other numerous expenses. Not to mention that the dimwit in the plane will force hundreds if not over a thousand people to wake up reeeally early for the second day in a row (and on a weekend no less).

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Postby robbiestoupe » Mon Nov 13, 2017 8:48 am

I just looked up the potential penalties, Federal Aircraft Regulation (FAR) 91.143 speaks specifically to "flight in the proximity of space flight operations, and it says: "When a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) is issued in accordance with this section, no person may operate any aircraft of U.S. registry, or pilot any aircraft under the authority of an airman certificate issued by the Federal Aviation Administration, within areas designated in a NOTAM for space flight operation except when authorized by ATC." Under the FAA's Compliance and Enforcement Bulletin, the violation of a secured area that is the subject of a NOTAM results in a 30-day license suspension. Which strikes me as a slap on the wrist for something that probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted employee time, LOX lost to boil-off, and other numerous expenses. Not to mention that the dimwit in the plane will force hundreds if not over a thousand people to wake up reeeally early for the second day in a row (and on a weekend no less).
There have been rocket launches cancelled/delayed due to fishermen/boats veering into the vicinity of a launch. Not sure if the Coast Guard is tasked to keep the area clear or what not, but it's happened a couple of times to my knowledge.

There was once an incident where a few college students decided to set off a homemade rocket right near Daytona Beach airport. Said students were given a slap on the wrist since the rocket's trajectory showed up on the ATC radars. They were lucky because the FAA was initially investigating this incident as a possible terrorist attack.

If you ask me, it's a plan/grow situation when you build an aeronautical university dormitory in the back yard of a major airport.

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Postby Shyster » Mon Nov 13, 2017 4:41 pm

I believe the Coast Guard is tasked with keeping the area clear. The boat thing has happened to Orbital as well. The CRS OA-3 mission in October 2014 was scrubbed on its first attempt because a sailboat was in the exclusion zone. That mission also demonstrated why we have exclusion zones, because that's the one where the Antares experienced a catastrophic RUD shortly after liftoff. I can also remember at least one SpaceX launch that was scrubbed for a boat in the exclusion zone.

It may just be a coincidence, but the problem of people being where they shouldn't be has happened more often to Orbital in recent years. I wonder if it might be the fact that launches from Wallops are much less common than launches from Florida, and perhaps people in Florida are more accustomed to checking the Notices to Mariners/Notices to Airmen.

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Postby Shyster » Mon Nov 13, 2017 7:42 pm

United Launch Alliance (ULA) is preparing to launch the JPSS-1 weather satellite into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 2W is scheduled for early tomorrow, November 14, at 01:47 Pacific time (04:47 Eastern), so only tifosi might be awake at the time (and even then he'd have to stay up late). The launch vehicle is the Delta II. This is the next-to-last launch of the Delta II rocket, which is already out of production, and the east-coast launch facilities for the Delta II have already been retired. The final launch of the Delta II will also be from Vandenburg, and it's scheduled for next year.

The Delta II traces its ancestry back to the Thor rockets of the 50s and 60s, and it's the last rocket in the US launch portfolio that is based at least in part on a legacy 1960s ICBM design. While the Delta IV and Atlas 5 rockets carry names that date back to 60s rockets, the current vehicles are new designs don't share anything other than a name with their ICBM-based predecessors. The Delta II, however, uses a first-stage design that's based on a extra-stretched Thor stage. It was a major workhorse for NASA in the 80s and 90s, and among other notable payloads the Delta II launched the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Rovers, the Dawn probe to Ceres, the MESSENGER probe to Mercury, and the Kepler exoplanet observatory.

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Postby Shyster » Wed Nov 15, 2017 7:04 pm

ULA is still trying to launch the JPSS-1 weather satellite. The first attempt early Tuesday morning was scrubbed due to a combination of an out-of-normal reading from the launcher and a red range caused by yet another idiot blundering into an exclusionary zone—this time a boat. The second attempt early this morning was scrubbed due to weather; the weather at the ground was fine but there were excessive high-altitude winds. Winds are forecast to be even higher on Thursday morning, so odds are the Delta II will probably still be on the ground this time tomorrow.

The mystery SpaceX "Zuma" mission is scheduled to lift off tomorrow, November 16, with a launch window that opens at 8:00 p.m. EST. According to the SpaceX press kit, the MECO time is 2 minutes and 16 seconds, which is the record for the earliest MECO time for the Falcon 9. Whatever Zuma is, it certainly isn't very heavy.

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Postby robbiestoupe » Thu Nov 16, 2017 9:48 am

Source of the post Whatever Zuma is
Image

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Postby Shyster » Thu Nov 16, 2017 3:36 pm

The SpaceX Zuma launch has been delayed by 24 hours to Friday. A reason for the delay was not provided.

ULA didn't even try to launch the JPSS-1 last night. The next attempt will be Saturday morning. I imagine after two early-morning scrubs, ULA also wanted to give its launch team a day or two off to rest up.

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Postby Shyster » Thu Nov 16, 2017 8:43 pm

It looks like the Zuma launch will end up delayed even longer. SpaceX released the following statement:
We have decided to stand down and take a closer look at data from recent fairing testing for another customer. Though we have preserved the range opportunity for tomorrow, we will take the time we need to complete the data review and will then confirm a new launch date.

I know SpaceX has been experimenting with various ways to recover the payload fairing (which is made out of carbon fiber and costs $6 million), so it may be the case that they have a new design they're working on. It sounds like they were running tests on another fairing for an upcoming mission, and they were seeing something they didn’t expect or didn't want to see, and they want to make sure that Zuma’s fairing doesn't have the same problem.

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Postby columbia » Wed Nov 22, 2017 4:43 pm

I guess this goes here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kittinger

My father was at Holloman AFB in 1959 and saw his chute open (but not the actual landing).

Neat.

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Postby AuthorTony » Wed Nov 22, 2017 10:20 pm

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/spe ... 05eeb4a15f
Seeking to prove that a conspiracy of astronauts fabricated the shape of the Earth, a California man intends to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a rocket he built from scrap metal.

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Postby columbia » Wed Nov 22, 2017 10:58 pm

RIP

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Postby shafnutz05 » Thu Nov 23, 2017 7:32 am

I guess this goes here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kittinger

My father was at Holloman AFB in 1959 and saw his chute open (but not the actual landing).

Neat.
It's nice to still have guys like Kittinger and Yeager around. They are a throwback to that American mythos KtK has talked about.

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Postby Shyster » Tue Nov 28, 2017 8:18 pm

An apparent launch failure early today for a Soyuz-2-1b, which was launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in eastern Russia. The Soyuz was carrying the Meteor-M weather satellite, as well as a secondary payload of eighteen small satellites. The launch was to the north such that the Souyz went over the pole and was flying south over the north Atlantic. All seemed to go well until the burn of the Fregat-M third stage, which is optional on the Soyuz. It's not clear yet what happened, but the Fregat and the satellites never made orbit. Russian news agency Interfax later sent out a tweet claiming the preliminary analysis points to “human error” in relation to the Fregat third stage, and I see some people on the space message boards positing that the Fregat wasn't in the correct orientation for at least one of its burns, which meant it actually deorbited itself and sent the payload into the Atlantic.

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Postby Shyster » Fri Dec 01, 2017 3:56 pm

Still no word from SpaceX on when the delayed "Zuma" mission will launch. SpaceX is moving forward with the CRS-13 resupply mission to the ISS, which will launch NET December 8th. The Dragon spacecraft doesn't use a payload fairing, so whatever fairing issue affected the Zuma mission cannot effect CRS-13.

The repairs to SLC-40 are finally complete, and CRS-13 will be the return-to-use mission for that pad. The static fire could be as soon as this weekend. The pad basically has all-new plumbing, so bugs could crop up. NASA has announced that it has given permission for the CRS-13 mission to use a re-used booster, which I understand will be the stage that launched the CRS-11 mission in June of this year.

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Postby robbiestoupe » Fri Dec 01, 2017 4:40 pm

Source of the post Still no word from SpaceX on when the delayed "Zuma" mission will launch.
My inside sources say sometime next year most likely.

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Postby columbia » Fri Dec 01, 2017 4:56 pm

robbie: if you feel comfortable talking about it, you work as an engineer? what kind of projects?

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Postby robbiestoupe » Fri Dec 01, 2017 5:02 pm

Yes, designing equipment for locomotives.

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Postby columbia » Fri Dec 01, 2017 5:07 pm

Yes, designing equipment for locomotives.
Vestige of Westinghouse Air Brake Company?

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Postby Willie Kool » Sat Dec 02, 2017 10:35 am

Voyager 1, NASA's farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or "puffs," lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980.

"With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years," said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Since 2014, engineers have noticed that the thrusters Voyager 1 has been using to orient the spacecraft, called "attitude control thrusters," have been degrading.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/voyage ... s-after-37

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Postby Shyster » Wed Dec 06, 2017 6:46 pm

SpaceX by all accounts had a successful static fire of the first stage for the CRS-13 mission at LC-40. If they ran into any bugs with the new pad hardware, they must have been minor. Launch is now scheduled for December 12.

robbiestoupe's inside information was absolutely correct. The Zuma mission is now NET January 4, 2018. It should also launch from LC-40. Pad 39A is now being reconfigured for the first Falcon Heavy mission, which is now scheduled for early 2018. Elon told a reporter that the test payload for that launch will be Elon's old Tesla Roadster, which will be launched into a Mars intercept. Not sure whether Elon was serious on that or not.

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Postby Viva la Ben » Tue Dec 12, 2017 7:55 pm

Big announcement on Thursday.
Google and NASA to reveal mysterious new space find

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-nasa-k ... g-planets/

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Postby Gaucho » Tue Dec 12, 2017 8:00 pm

Image

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