The Universe

[D.A.F.C]

9 hours ago, Herman Hessian said:

if by 'ours' you mean the collective intellect of the P&B illuminati, then i'm thinking that it will be possible to utterly confound the inevitable future invasion by our potential martian overlords simply by guiding them in to a circular containment area - and telling them to stand in the corner....

 

Or turn their heating on full blast and open all their windows.

[dorlomin]

This is going to be the absolute dogs bollox. I do not think there has been an inflight abort test in the US since Apollo. 

Quote

 

NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than Jan. 11, 2020, for a critical In-Flight Abort Test of the Crew Dragon spacecraft from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, pending U.S. Air Force Eastern Range approval.

As part of the test, SpaceX will configure Crew Dragon to trigger a launch escape shortly after liftoff and demonstrate Crew Dragon’s capability to safely separate from the Falcon 9 rocket in the unlikely event of an in-flight emergency. The demonstration also will provide valuable data toward NASA certifying SpaceX’s crew transportation system for carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

The demonstration of Crew Dragon’s launch escape system is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program and is one of the final major tests for the company before NASA astronauts will fly aboard the spacecraft.

The In-Flight Abort Test follows a series of static fire engine tests of the spacecraft conducted Nov. 13 near SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. SpaceX will also conduct a static fire test of its Falcon 9 rocket ahead of the In-Flight Abort Test.

 

https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2019/12/18/spacex-in-flight-abort-test-launch-date-update-2/

 

That is during the launch phase of a rocket the human rated capsule will blow off the rocket and I assume the rocket will be destroyed in flight. 

[Newbornbairn]

Over 50 years since it was last done -

 

 

[welshbairn]

35 minutes ago, NewBornBairn said:

Over 50 years since it was last done -

 

Nasa did it a few weeks ago with their ridiculously expensive Orion system.

 

[welshbairn]

Boeing about to launch their unmanned shuttle to the Space Station. Got a weird feeling it's going to go terribly wrong.

 

[welshbairn]

[dorlomin]

 

[welshbairn]

Coverage of landing attempt starts at 11.45 our time.

 

[Forest_Fifer]

Got to love the technical explanation for this. The capsule basically asked the booster what time it was, and wrote it down wrong. So everything after that was done at the wrong time, and it fouled up all the burns and used too much fuel. Maybe the Atlas was on Florida time and the capsule was on Houston time.

[welshbairn]

2 hours ago, Forest_Fifer said:

Got to love the technical explanation for this. The capsule basically asked the booster what time it was, and wrote it down wrong. So everything after that was done at the wrong time, and it fouled up all the burns and used too much fuel. Maybe the Atlas was on Florida time and the capsule was on Houston time.

I remember they missed Mars on a mission because of part of the team using imperial measurements and the other metric. Because it's Boeing it will be called a very successful mission with one minor glitch, rather than the total failure of a delivery job costing hundreds of billions. All the safety critical stuff went ok though for a future crew, although unlike SpaceX they don't intend to carry out a mid launch high altitude escape test.

Edited December 22, 2019 by welshbairn

[Sergeant Wilson]

21 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

unlike SpaceX they don't intend to carry out a mid launch high altitude escape test.

I don't fancy it either.

[welshbairn]

4 hours ago, Forest_Fifer said:

Got to love the technical explanation for this. The capsule basically asked the booster what time it was, and wrote it down wrong. So everything after that was done at the wrong time, and it fouled up all the burns and used too much fuel. Maybe the Atlas was on Florida time and the capsule was on Houston time.

Just watched a post landing press conference, the Boeing guy said the mission elapsed clock was 11 hours out, so the space ship thought it was trying to keep position in space rather than the upper atmosphere, thus burning shed loads of fuel to stop what would be wild fluctuations in a vacuum, but normal in the actual environment. Other thing was the NASA boss saying it was a great success for American rocketry, pretty sure they bought the actual launch engines for this mission from Russia.

Edited December 22, 2019 by welshbairn

[welshbairn]

Bit of slow TV here recording the crew on the last shuttle launch. I'd be rubbish - "What was that, go for launch? Aye, whatever.".

 

[Newbornbairn]

 

[dorlomin]

Several news outlets are reporting that Betelgeuse is about to explode. (Second brightest star in Orion).

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/betelgeuse-star-night-sky-supernova-explosion-a9263626.html

Its a variable star, its light is varying. 

We currently think its been a red giant for at least 40 000 years 

Quote

The best prediction is that Betelgeuse has already spent around 40,000 years as a red supergiant,[12] having left the main sequence perhaps one million years ago.[151]

But it may have about 100 000 years in this phase. 

Quote

Given the estimated time since Betelgeuse became a red supergiant, estimates of its remaining lifetime range from a "best guess" of under 100,000 years for a non-rotating 20 M☉ model to far longer for rotating models or lower-mass stars

Quote

 while The New York Post declared Betelgeuse as "due for explosive supernova."[88] Phil Plait has again written to correct what he calls "Bad Astronomy," noting that Betelgeuse's recent behaviour "[w]hile unusual ... isn't unprecedented. Also, it probably won't go bang for a long, long time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse

It would be incredibly cool if it did, it would be brighter than the 1054 supernova that created the Crab Nebula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_Nebula

But some of the stories about it becoming a gamma ray burster are complete nonsense. It would likely be a very bright light in the sky for a few weeks, easily visible in daylight. But have minimal impact on Earth. 

[Newbornbairn]

The sun is travelling at 440,000mph 

https://9gag.com/gag/aXj4mGD

[Florentine_Pogen]

Other thing was the NASA boss saying it was a great success for American rocketry, pretty sure they bought the actual launch engines for this mission from Russia.

From Wiki:-

“The roots of the RD-180 rocket engine extend back into the Soviet Energia launch vehicle project. The RD-170, a four-chamber engine, was developed for use on the strap-on boosters for this vehicle, which ultimately was used to lift the Buran orbiter. This engine was scaled down to a two-chamber version by combining the RD-170's combustion devices with half-size turbomachinery. After successful performances in engine tests on a test stand and high-level agreements between the US government and the Russian government, the engines were imported to the US for use on the Lockheed Martin Atlas III, with first flight in 2000. The engine is also used on the United Launch Alliance Atlas V, the successor to the Atlas III.[1]

The engine has similar design features to the NK-33, which was developed by a different bureau (Kuznetzov) nearly a decade earlier.”

 

Channel 4’s Equinox did an interesting doc on engine design, how the Soviets mastered the challenges of the closed-cycle and how the NK-33 went to America.

 

 

 

[welshbairn]

Saw a thing recently that claimed that the main reason for the space race was that the Russians thought they had to build massive rockets as they thought the minimum weight of nukes was 10 times the weight they eventually managed to miniaturise to. So they had to think of something less wasteful to do with the hugely expensive and redundant rockets. Thus Sputnik and American panic.

[dorlomin]

6 hours ago, welshbairn said:

Saw a thing recently that claimed that the main reason for the space race was that the Russians thought they had to build massive rockets as they thought the minimum weight of nukes was 10 times the weight they eventually managed to miniaturise to. So they had to think of something less wasteful to do with the hugely expensive and redundant rockets. Thus Sputnik and American panic.

The R-7 was massively over engineered and that was due to them planning for a much heavier warhead than was eventually delivered, but other details of that story seem to be a bit of a stretch. 

The push for artificial satellites had been bubbling along in the post war era with a few scientists making public efforts to promote them. In the early 50s it was assumed they would need to be full sized space stations with humans doing all the work, but the improvements in electronics meant that it started to become possible for something useful to be done by an automated probe. In July 1955 the US announced it would launch a satellite for International Geophysics Year (1957). The US choose the Navy's Vanguard rocket over the Army's Redstone as some felt the latter had a few too many high profile Germans working on it. Korolev had been pushing the Soviets to use their rockets for satellites but the military were focussed on getting an ICBM as soon as possible, when the US made their announcement politicians got involved and allowed some resources to be diverted from the R-7 as an ICBM to allowing a couple to be used as orbital launchers. The propaganda success of Sputnik was a huge surprise and after that they took space a lot more seriously. 

The US was "hampered" by having multiple competing projects that could have been used such as the army's Redstone, the Air Forces Thor rocket (that through a huge number of iterations became the Delta family), and the Air Forces Atlas. All of these achieved orbital launches in the late 50s. The Soviet focus also came from the huge gulf in bomber capability. The US bomber fleet could hit the Soviet Union from bases in Europe and even from bases in the US with the B-52, while the Soviets really only had their Bears that had the range to get to the US where they would likely be chewed up over Alaska and Canada. In the US there was a degree of institutional bias against the idea that the unproven ICBMs were going to replace bombers, or that bombers were on the verge of becoming obsolete due to SAMs. 

All of these also played a big role. 

But when the US had its Sputnik shock it got its act together and focused all their civilian space ambition into one agency NASA. Where the over engineered R-7 comes into it is after the Sputnik shock they had the mass to orbit capability to follow up with the Vostok program that put a human into orbit before the Atlas derived program could do the same for the US, they were then able to iterate the R-7 into the Vokshod then Soyuz vehicles without huge redesign. But at the same time the US had the industrial and technological capability to churn out the Titan II, then the Saturn I and V's and finally the STS (shuttle) for its manned projects over the same time. 

The R-7 derived Soyuz still flies. It is how NASA currently gets crew to the ISS. The Boeing Starliner that NASA hopes will replace it in that function is launched by the Atlas V, a very much changed decedent of the Atlas rocket that sent John Glen into orbit to challenge the Soviet's apparent supremacy. 

Those two decedents of the earliest human flights into space are up against Mr Flashpants and his "watch me land this damned rocket for reuse" Falcon9\Dragon Capsule. 

[Dan Steele]

7 hours ago, NewBornBairn said:

The sun is travelling at 440,000mph 

https://9gag.com/gag/aXj4mGD

Sorry New Born Bairn, that should have been a greenie! Clumsy.