Fifth Avenue Forum

The SpaceX Crew-3 mission is now safely in orbit. This is the first flight of this particular Crew Dragon, which has been named Endurance.

I'm really surprised this doesn't happen more often.

Russians being stupid again.

Dumb dumb dumb

Speaking of..... this was last night and I thought it was pretty cool.



Moonrise on the right, ISS passing overhead on the left.

Great shot!

I set my alarm to watch the eclipse, and looked out and saw widely scattered clouds. Saw it through my window, was satisfied, and went back to bed

This got me good. Some of his best work imo

We have a new orbit-capable private launch company. Astra Space's Rocket 3.3 vehicle (serial LV0007) successfully Went to Space Today after launching from Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska. It carried a mass-simulator test payload for the United States Space Force’s Space Test Program to a 500 km orbit.

Astra's launcher is capable of around 150 kg to a sun-synchronous orbit, which is somewhat less than competitors like the Rocket Labs Electron. The Rocket 3.3, however, has the advantage in that all of the ground-support equipment is designed to be self-contained and to fit into standard shipping containers, so no dedicated launch pads / towers / etc. are supposed to be necessary. The "pad" Astra is using at Kodiak is just a patch of bare concrete. You could theoretically launch a Rocket 3.3 to orbit from a Walmart parking lot.

Who wants a long (90+ minutes) detailed video on the history of Soviet rocket engines from pedantic nerd Everyday Astronaut? Being a pedantic nerd myself, I sure as heck do.

If you haven't already, download the Heavens Above app. I've been waiting for a night to see the SpaceX Starlink constellation, and looks like I will get multiple opportunities tonight! With an ISS pass thrown in for good measure @tifosi77

Excellent

I use the ISS Detector app, but it also includes other orbital passes like Starlink. Mrs Tif and I go out and watch the passes regularly, it's so cool. It's borderline bananas as a concept "Let's go outside and watch man-made stuff fly by hundreds of miles overhead".

Btw we had 3 consecutive nights last week with 7+ minutes of ISS visibility. Almost horizon to horizon, visibility limit was trees and structures. Awesome.

I was reading about Voyager's study of the heliosphere (the outer reaches of our solar system). I didn't realize just how many readings both craft were passing back to Earth even in the late 2000s as they passed across the termination shock. Direction of solar wind, number of photons from the sun still hitting the craft, etc.

Geminids did not disappoint. My daughter and I went outside around 230 and each saw about 25 meteors in 30 minutes.

Great stuff

This channel is phenomenal

If you want to hear a lecture on gravity waves by a novel prize winner moderated by yours truly… check it:

That's good stuff, I'll listen to the rest of it when I'm doing spreadsheets later.

Successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope early this morning. At well over $10 billion and probably closer to $15 billion, the JWST may have been the single most expensive payload ever launched into space. The launch was aboard an Ariane 5 for several reasons. First, the launch was part of the European Space Agency's contributions to the project; the JWST is a joint project of NASA, the ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency. Second, the Ariane is the only launcher in the US/European portfolio that had a payload fairing large enough to accommodate the JWST. Not even the Falcon Heavy could have fit the JWST.

The JWST is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA's flagship orbital-science platform. Its folding mirror is more than double the size of the Hubble's mirror. Unlike the Hubble's telescope, which detects ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared light, the JWST will observe in a lower frequency range, from long-wavelength visible light through mid-infrared. This will allow it to observe high-redshift objects that are too old and too distant for Hubble to observe. The JWST will thus be able to look farther into "history" than the Hubble.

The launch went off without a hitch. Shortly after separation, the JWST unfolded its solar array. It completed its first course-correction burn about 12 hours after launch. Over the next three months, the JWST will conduct additional engine burns, extend instrument booms, deploy sunshades, extend the two mirror wings, adjust its mirrors (each of the mirror segments can be independently adjusted to exacting fineness), and activate and initialize its instruments. The JWST is headed to a tight orbit around the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point, which is a point that is always on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun where the gravitational forces from the Earth and Sun are in balance.

I am really excited about the JWST. A local trucking company in Lancaster County (I believe) actually transported the telescope across the country to be shipped to French Guiana. I cannot imagine the logistics of planning a trip like that in which you basically have to avoid most underpasses.

https://www.space.com/nasa-james-webb-s ... next-steps

The telescope is traveling to our Lagrange point in our orbit. Fun fact about Lagrange points... Each planet has two, and for some of the larger gas giants (Jupiter most notably) there are groups of asteroids/rocks that congregate in those two Lagrange points.

They are called Trojan and Greek asteroids.