Shyster's thread of Spaaaace.

[shafnutz05]

After the launch and subsequent midair explosion of SpaceX's Starship rocket, Rob Nixon said particles fell from the sky on Thursday.

He was about six miles from the SpaceX launch facility, at the Port Isabel-San Benito Navigation District area in Port Isabel, Texas.

Nixon said the wet particles started falling about four to five minutes after the rocket’s launch and explosion.

How big of a concern is this? I know there is a lot of nasty sht in rocket fuel

[Shyster]

The only propellants on Starship / Super Heavy are liquid methane and LOX. There are no toxic propellants. My guess would be that the liquid was maybe remnants of the ice that formed on the outside of the ship/booster, or it was water condensing from the rocket exhaust, which would be mostly CO2 and H2O vapor.

[Shyster]

[Shyster]

[shafnutz05]

Venus has been putting on a show for months. It's pretty wild to walk outside at 930 and see it shining brightly up in the sky.

https://www.space.com/venus-night-sky-steal-show-2023

Many astronomy books often will say that Venus is usually long gone from view by around midnight, making it all that much more difficult to believe that Venus will be staying up as late as 11:45 p.m. daylight saving time during this upcoming mid-May timeframe. This will be after midnight for those living in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Des Moines and Salt Lake City.

[NAN]

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/12/health/s ... index.html

An interesting read about how astronauts prepare for sleep on space missions and what they are doing to prepare for future missions to Mars.

[Shyster]

[Shyster]

This is interesting. North Korea released launch pictures of its recent failed attempt to put an imaging satellite into orbit, and they even issued a press release. The release confirms that the launch featured a new rocket, the "Chollima-1" (the Chollima is a mythical winged horse that's a common symbol in North Korea), and it even says that the failure was due to abnormal starting of the second-stage engine. Such openness and honestly is highly unusual for North Korea.





The Chollima-1 looks to be using a first stage with a two-nozzle engine burning hypergolic propellants. In particular, there's no frost on the rocket that would indicate crypogenic propellants, and the common hypergolic propellants of nitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine burn with a pretty distinctive pinkish flame that looks just like the Chollima's exhaust. There have long been rumors that North Korea purchased technology for the RD-250 rocket engine from Ukraine, and the engine on the Chollima-1 sure looks a whole lot like an RD-250.

[Shyster]

[Shyster]

SpaceX continues to work toward the next Starship / Super Heavy test launch. In addition to the Starship static fire, the piping for the new water system at the pad has been installed, and crews have been pouring new concrete almost around the clock for the last several days. SpaceX is making over a thousand changes to the pad and the vehicles.

[Shyster]

End of an era. Wednesday was the final launch of the Ariane 5 rocket. The Ariane 5 first flew in June 1996 and flew a total of 117 missions, of which 112 were successful. The replacement Ariane 6 has been in development since 2014 but is still not yet ready, and it's first launch may not be until next year.



As an aside, Arianespace's countdown timing has always irritated me. US launchers have pretty much always set the T=0 time to be the point of liftoff. That means that if a launcher has liquid-fueled engines that take some time to start, the liquid engines start before the clock reaches zero. Solid rockets pretty much ignite instantly. The Ariane 5 however, has T=0 being the point where the liquid-fueled Vulcain main engine starts the ignition process, so the rocket doesn't ignite the solid boosters and actually lift off until something like T+8.

[Shyster]

Congrats to Chinese private company LandSpace Technology Corporation for being the first methalox-powered launch vehicle to make it to orbit. The Zhuque-2 rocket successfully make orbit on its second flight. The published specs are 6,000 kg of payload to low-Earth orbit, or 4,000 kg of payload to Sun-synchronous orbit, which makes the Zhuque-2 roughly on par with a Soyuz in terms of lift capacity and puts the Zhuque-2 into the "medium lift" category. The TQ-12 engine used on both stages of the Zhuque-2 is a gas-generator design that isn't as complicated as the engines being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin.

LandSpace is one of multiple private companies developing new launchers in China (although one may question how "private" any Chinese company can be). It's interesting that many of them appear to be focusing on medium-lift rockets, as opposed to the non-Chinese private startups that at least typically started with light-lift vehicles.

[Shyster]

Yikes. Other tweets say that the financial loss for Viasat just from the satellite alone (that is, not counting stock devaluation) is likely on the order of $450 million. They spent a bunch of extra money on a Falcon Heavy to quickly get their communications satellite to geostationary orbit, and it failed to deploy its main antenna, so it is functionally useless.

[shoeshine boy]

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/13/china/ch ... index.html

TIL that the USA is the only country to ever put humans on the moon.

[tifosi77]

[Shyster]

One of the reasons the heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket (that's the one that regularly does uncontrolled core reentries that could drop debris on major cities) was supposedly developed was for moon missions. The Chinese space agency is currently developing a super-heavy version (Long March 10) that is three Long March 5 cores strapped together like the Delta 4 Heavy and Falcon Heavy. That would be the launcher for sending manned missions to the moon. India is also working on a manned space program, although they are not nearly as far along as China. I think they are planning manned orbital missions in the next couple years.

[shafnutz05]

TIL that the USA is the only country to ever put humans on the moon.

[Shyster]

JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, had a bad day testing a second stage for the Epsilon S rocket. The Epsilon is a light-lift rocket that uses all solid-rocket motors, roughly similar to European Space Agency's Vega rocket. Just like the ESA made a new version of the Vega (the Vega-C) that will use as a first stage the same solid motors as the solid boosters on the upcoming Ariane 6, JAXA is making a new Epsilon variant (Epsilon S) that will use as a first stage the same solid motors as on its new H-III rocket. The idea is that using a common motor for both rockets will cut costs (China does an analogous thing in that the first stage of the Long March 6 rocket is based on one of the liquid-fuel boosters for the Long March 5 rocket). Unfortunately, JAXA just had a rather energetic failure of an Epsilon S second stage during a test. The anomaly was a little shy of halfway through what should have been a two-minute burn (it's toward the end of the video below).

[Shyster]

The ESA has also been having problems with the Vega, and specifically second stages. The ESA had Vega failures in 2019 and 2022 that were both caused by a second-stage failure (plus another failure in 2020 caused by crossed wires during assembly), and the ESA also just had a test-stand anomaly when doing tests on the second stage in preparation for return to flight, which will now be further delayed.

Second-stage rocket motors acting up all around the Earth.

[Shyster]

[Shyster]

The prior test of the water-deluge system was not full pressure. This one was:





If I'm understanding this system correctly, SpaceX is not using a water tower. Most launch pads have a big water tower nearby so that simple gravity can be used to force water through the deluge systems. SpaceX is apparently using a deluge system that is gas pressurized, I think by liquid nitrogen, so the water is literally blasted though the pipes by compressed gas. That's why this was a "full pressure" test.

[Shyster]

Successful launch today of the Northrop Grumman NG-19 Cygnus cargo mission to the ISS. The launch was aboard the final remaining Antares 230 rocket, which used a Ukrainian-built first stage fitted with Russian RD-181 engines. Russia has since bombed the factory in Ukraine that made those first stages. The next three Cygnus cargo missions (one more in late 2023 and two in 2024) will launch on Falcon 9 rockets. The Antares 330 rocket, with a new first stage made by Firefly Aerospace, is scheduled to debut in 2025.

The switch to the Falcon 9 will represent the third launcher for the Cygnus. After the Orb-3 launch failure in 2014, the Cygnus switched to the Atlas 5 for several launches while the Antares was modified to switch from the old Soviet-era NK-33 engines to new RD-181 engines. I don't think any orbital vehicle--manned or unmanned--has ever launched on three different rockets before.

[Ad@m]

[Shyster]

India and Russia are currently in a bit of a race to be the first to land on the Moon's south pole. The Indian Chandrayaan-3 mission launched on July 14 and is the successor to the Chandrayaan-2 mission, which crashed into the lunar surface in 2019 due to software errors. The Russian Luna 25 mission launched on August 10 and is the first Russian lunar probe since Soviet probes way back in the 1970s. Each is racing to be the first probe to land on a pole of the Moon.

Today, the Chandrayaan-3 Vikram lander, which is also carrying the Pragyan rover, successfully executed a series of braking burns to enter low lunar orbit in preparation for the final landing. Things look good.

Also today, the Luna 25 lander attempted a braking burn to enter low lunar orbit in preparation for the final landing. It doesn't sound like the burn was successful. Roscosmos has said there was an "abnormal situation" and they are working on it. Reliable sources say that communications were lost after the command to begin the burn. Semi-reliable sources say that the burn was 1.5 times was it was supposed to be, which likely took the Luna 25 lander out of orbit and turned it into the Moon's newest crater. Things look bad.

[Shyster]