The Universe

[eindhovendee]

Cracking story about stars colliding but this line...

"Neutron stars are so heavy that a small teaspoon of their material weighs four billion tonnes."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61911047

[dorlomin]

Russia's new head of space is making noises about pulling out of ISS in 2024. The previous guy, Rogizin, was a total clusterfarce. Not sure about the new guy and how real this might be. 

[dorlomin]

Launch of Americans Moon rocket, SLS is planned for 29 August. It will be uncrewed and perform a lunar fly by to qualify it for crew. Though from experience first launches tend to be scrubbed a couple of times, so there will likely be a scrub. Next launch window will be 2nd September. 

Edited August 9, 2022 by dorlomin

[dorlomin]

Roll out for pre launch tests

[Blue Brazil Forever]

Saw something about Quantum Entanglement the other night

Scotland is weird enough already with and without QE and I definitely can't get my head around something faster than the speed of light!!
 

[welshbairn]

35 minutes ago, Blue Brazil Forever said:

Saw something about Quantum Entanglement the other night

Scotland is weird enough already with and without QE and I definitely can't get my head around something faster than the speed of light!!
 

Thought it was very good. After the Big Bang the Universe expanded much faster than the speed of light, once you've got your head around space/time being a holographic illusion it all makes perfect sense! If we ever manage to colonise Mars, quantum entanglement could make communication back to Earth much easier, instantaneous instead of waiting up to 45 minutes for a response.

[welshbairn]

 

[Bairnardo]

 

Well thats...... fucking terrifying

[Loonytoons]

 

The Rick Astley comment on the Twitter link...[emoji23][emoji23]

[Clown Job]

 

[welshbairn]

A slightly bitchy article about the forthcoming SLS launch and hopefully a jaunt around the moon, everything about it being single use only apart from the Orion capsule. Cost per flight is estimated at $2 billion. SpaceX's Starship which hasn't left the ground yet, but is intended to be fully reusable, has been given a price tag of $1 million  per launch, but that doesn't include the development costs including several probably blowing up in mid-air or crash landing while they fine tune it, and streamlining a production line. I'm not sure it will ever happen.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/the-sls-rocket-is-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-nasa-but-maybe-also-the-best/

[Zen Archer (Raconteur)]

 

[welshbairn]

On topic thread. It seems that as the universe expands we can still see places we could never visit even with a light speed craft and infinite time.

If you really want to dig into the hows whys and whats..

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2104/2104.01191.pdf

 

[Clown Job]

 

[welshbairn]

On 24/08/2022 at 00:12, welshbairn said:

A slightly bitchy article about the forthcoming SLS launch and hopefully a jaunt around the moon, everything about it being single use only apart from the Orion capsule. Cost per flight is estimated at $2 billion. SpaceX's Starship which hasn't left the ground yet, but is intended to be fully reusable, has been given a price tag of $1 million  per launch, but that doesn't include the development costs including several probably blowing up in mid-air or crash landing while they fine tune it, and streamlining a production line. I'm not sure it will ever happen.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/the-sls-rocket-is-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-nasa-but-maybe-also-the-best/

P.S. I was wrong about the cost per flight of Artemis (SLS+Orion), it's $4.1 Billion, discounting development costs.

Edited August 28, 2022 by welshbairn

[Zen Archer (Raconteur)]

5 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

P.S. I was wrong about the cost per flight of Artemis (SLS+Orion), it's $4.1 Billion, discounting development costs.

Is there a bus replacement service?

[welshbairn]

2 minutes ago, Zen Archer (Raconteur) said:

Is there a bus replacement service?

Given the pork barrel politics that funded it, probably.

[dorlomin]

How did we get from Shuttle to SLS?

During Apollo the US apatite for spending on space dropped, but this was partly planned (much of the spending was actually infrastructure that NASA still uses). But the realisation that building Saturn V sized rockets for single use was not sustainable so the US set about building a re-usable "spaceplane". Problem was NASAs budget had to cover the Moon landings, the new spacestation Skylab while also shrinking. So the USAF got involved and shuttle from something to carry a few crewmen into space into something to carry 20 tonnes of cargo to and from space and be able to make enormous long range glides to give it some "unique" mission profiles such as popping up and getting film out of spy satellites then coming back down before one orbit. 

This enormously complexified Shuttle but did give it USAF (and likely NRO) funding and political support. Problems with Shuttle though included every single heat tile was individual so had to be hand crafted, they were difficult to stick on so had to be rehandcrafted after ever flight and a host of other things from having a 100 tonne glider that could re-enter from orbit. 

In the end the sheer amount of human hours to refurbish it before each flight meant it became cheaper to build a simple rocket to launch 20 tonnes than refurbish a whole Shuttle. So old school rockets were cheaper and Ariane 4 arrived to bring a quasi commercial operation to satellite launches while the USAF found that digitally bringing images back to Earth was near instant and did not require yeeting a 100 tonne Shuttle on a crazy flight path to avoid flying over the USSR to get film during a war. 

Any way a host of Shuttle replacements were funding in the 80s and 90s. Almost all re-usable single stage to orbit affairs like X-33, X-30 and Delta Clipper. In the mean time to give Shuttle something to do the US built a spacestation (and lots of international politics and partners).

In 2003 Columbia broke up in re-entry. Shuttle was deemed unsavable and to be retired. 

Contractors and senators got together and designed a couple of rockets called the Constellation Program out of shuttle parts including the what the fucking f**k were you fucking thinking Ares I that used a solid rocket booster to ferry crew to the ISS. 

It was a bad bad idea and the whole Constellation program was killed by the Obama administration. Out of this cancellation funding was found for private companies to ferry cargo to ISS, this paid for SpaceX to develop its Falcon 9 then paid for them to turn it into a reusable rocket. The success of that gave NASA to green light to hire SpaceX and Boeing to build capsules for ferrying crew to ISS which SpaceX has done 6 crewed flights to iss Boeing start next year. 

Now part of the cancelled Constellation was a megarocket, Ares V. And while Obama canned it, Senate revived it and renamed it SLS Space Launch System. SLS takes the Shuttles engines and solid rocket boosters and other parts and re-plumbs them to be a single use rocket. The plan was using existing parts would be faster and cheaper. No one believed this other than the Senate and their supporters in the aerospace world. So SLS is a very complex and nowhere near and capable as it could be system. 

But its on the brink of becoming the second launch system in history that could place humans round the Moon and likely vastly safer than Apollo. It also has helped fund two other crewed launch systems to give the US redundancy in its orbital access that is unparalleled in human history, if Orion makes into orbit tomorrow the US will have 3 orbital crewed vehicle systems. And the program is paying for the development of a SpaceX rocket called Starship that is kind of insane. In theory fully reusable with a very low cost to low Earth orbit so it will launch the landing system for the Moon, Starship Human Landing System that will have a cargo mass of 100 tonnes to the Moon.

It has been a very long and political road with perhaps close to a dozen systems that never made it (Bush 42 had a whole fleet of vehicles for flying to Mars that got canned by Clinton).

I will add, politically its the norm for an administration to can the previous ones Shuttle replacement. Ergo Obama canned Constellation, but the Senate basically rebranded part of it SLS to keep it alive, then Trump came in and had about as much clue as a fish on a bicycle, his pick for NASA head was a low key right winger who quietly realised he did not have to can the program because no one was looking and instead sold it to Trump that it was his idea and it was going to land on the Moon at the end of his second term. He then went to Congress and told them it was a program to put the first woman of color on the Moon while telling others what they needed to hear. By the time Trump was replaced the program was uncancellable and Biden kept it as it was by now bipartisan having been passed from Bush to Obama to Trump onto him. 

And here we are.

Edited August 28, 2022 by dorlomin

[welshbairn]

Launch window for Artemis 1 opens today at 1333 Inverness time and lasts for 2 hours. Given that it's a hugely complex machine that hasn't been fully tried out before, though largely put together from old and thus proven technology, I won't be surprised if things don't go to plan. If it's scrubbed they'll try again sometime between Sept 2nd and 6th, mainly dependent on weather. 

 

 

Edited August 29, 2022 by welshbairn

[Melanius Mullarkey]

On 28/08/2022 at 01:33, welshbairn said:

P.S. I was wrong about the cost per flight of Artemis (SLS+Orion), it's $4.1 Billion, discounting development costs.

Bloody SNP