Space News thread

[Takeovers]

An aerial photo of the recently landed F9 at Los Angeles ports. Still amazing to me seeing a rocket just a few meters away from a public road. This one is in very good shape and likely to fly again.





Christmas decoration is still on.

[Takeovers]

Another photo from the landing.

[Takeovers]

China has announced a new rocket.

The Long March 934 is scheduled to fly in 2021.

140t to LEO, 50t to the moon.

That is almost exactly matching the NASA Saturn V, actually slightly exceeding its capacity. Far exceeding the failed Soviet N1. Certainly enough to do a mission similar to the US moon landings.



China could potentially land a man on the moon by 2022 and NASA would have nothing to match it.

China already has an ambitious moon program. Their tiny Yutu was only a precursor. Next year they plan do do a landing on the back side of the moon and shortly after that a sample return mission. They are stepping up their manned program too.

NASA is playing around with the SLS. The block 1 and block 1b of that rocket is no match to the chinese rocket after they have poured multi billions of dollar every year for a long time into it. Only the long term planned block 2 would have similar capabilities. But building it is not yet funded and if it gets funding they can build it by 2030 according to present plans.

If this is not a wakeup call for Congress nothing will get them moving.

[Takeovers]

Coseup photos of SpaceX Merlin engine and Draco maneuvering thruster. These items were on display last weekend in Hawthorne California during the Hyperloop student competition.

Many more photos for the interested here:
Dragon 2, Merlin Engine, & Draco Thrusters - Album on Imgur

The Merlin engine



Draco thruster


A 3D printed component of the Super Draco engine that will be part of the Launch Escape system firing to get Astronauts out of the way when the rocket explodes. That engine will also do powered landing of Astronauts on earth and the Red Dragon on Mars.

[Takeovers]

Today SpaceX launched another cargo Draagon spaceship with supplies for the ISS. Their first launch from the old LC-39A at Cape Canaveral. This pad has seen all Apollo moon landing launches with Saturn V. Also many including the first and last launch of the SpaceShuttle.

A short video of the first stage doing another precision landing. They have it down now it seems. The stage descending from over 100km altitude and several hundred km downrange and hitting the landing pad with an error of 1 or 2 meters.




Here a complete video of the launch up to deploying the Dragon spacecraft and the landing of the first stage. Due to the cloud cover there is some missing until aereal chase plane picks it up. But then there is fascinating coverage transmitted live from the rocket, both first and second stage and Dragon.

[crackerjack101]

Amazing.
Thanks TO.

[Takeovers]

Next big thing coming up in march, if everything goes as planned. They will relaunch a landed stage with a commercial payload. It will be a big and expensive satellite by SES, the SES-10 satellite.

SpaceX is very lucky to have a commercial customer like SES. They have helped SpaceX to establish themselves in the commercial market. They did take some risk with their first launches. Their purpose was to help a new launch provider to get prices down long term. As a big customer they were able to do some arm twisting with insurance companies too, making them accept SpaceX launches. In one case the insurers were very hesitant to cover the risk. SES told them, if you don't insure that launch we will fly without insurance, do you really want that? The insurers decided they did not want that.

[Takeovers]

I almost forgot:



The angel with the blond wavy hair was commenting the live launch video stream. She is an engineer at their Hawthorne California facility.

[Takeovers]

A Soyuz with a Progress cargo transporter is prepared for launching to the ISS. The video is well worth watching. Baikonur and the Soyuz are truly a different world. Launch is planned for Feb 22.

[snakeeyes]

NASA has discovered 7 Earth-like planets orbiting a star just 40 light-years away
This tiny star has 7 planets that potentially could be suitable for life.


The planets “e,” “f,” and “g” — marked in green are directly in the “habitable zone” of this star system. NASA

The first step in finding life outside our own planet is to find a planet like our own: small, rocky, and at just the right distance from the star that liquid water could exist on its surface.

That’s why an announcement today from NASA is so exciting: The space agency, along with partners around the world, has found seven potentially Earth-like planets orbiting a star 40 light-years away.

“It’s the first time that so many planets of this kind are found around a same star,” Michaël Gillon, the lead author of the Nature paper announcing the discovery, said in a press conference. “The seven planets … could have some liquid water and maybe life on the surface.”

Three of the planets are directly in the star’s habitable zone, meaning water can mostly likely exist on the surface of them. One of them, Gillon said, has a mass “strongly to suggest a water-rich composition.” And it’s possible that the other four could have liquid water, too, depending on the composition of their atmospheres, the astronomers said.

The exoplanets orbit a star in the constellation Aquarius called Trappist-1. And it’s a solar system very different from our own.

For one, Trappist-1 is a tiny, “ultra-cool” dwarf star. It’s cool because it’s small: just about a tenth of the mass of our sun and about one-thousandth as bright. But its low mass allows its planets to orbit it very closely and remain in the habitable zone.

The distance at which the planets orbit Trappist-1 is comparable to the distance of Jupiter to its moons. All the planets are believed to be rocky, and are all believed to be around the size of Earth, give or take 10 to 20 percent.

The star’s dimness is actually what led to the discoveries of these planets. When astronomers search for exoplanets, they typically look for a temporary dimming of a star — an indication that a planet has passed in front of it. This method makes it hard to find small, rocky worlds orbiting big, bright stars. If the planets are too small, they’ll get washed out.

Maybe the most exciting thing here is that these seven planets are very well suited for detailed atmospheric study,” Gillon said. The James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2018, will have the ability to measure the chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres. If the atmospheres contain telltale gases like ozone, oxygen, or methane, life could exist there. “We can expect that in a few years, we will know a lot more about these [seven] planets,” Amaury Triaud, another of the paper’s co-authors, said.

If this all sounds a bit familiar, it’s because astronomers announced three potentially habitable planets around Trappist-1 in May. Today’s reveal adds four more to the mix.

Right now, the astronomers are beginning to study the planets’ atmospheres with the telescopes they have. And from these observations, they feel fairly confident that the worlds are rocky. “For detailed characterization, we will need James Webb,” Triaud said.

In the meantime, we just have our imaginations to fill in the gap. This is an artist’s rendition of what the fifth planet in this bizarre solar system might look like. These planets are believed to be tidally locked to the star, each has a permanent day side and a permanent nice side. And because the planets are so close together, they’d appear in the sky like moons.

he more Earth-like exoplanets astronomers find in the galaxy, the more they update their estimates of how many Earth-like planets could be out there. “For every transiting planet found, there should be a multitude of similar planets (20–100 times more) that, seen from Earth, never pass in front of their host star,” Nature reporter Ignas Snellen explains in a feature article. And the more exoplanets there are, the more likely it is that life exists on at least one of them.

“With this discovery we’ve made a giant, accelerated leap forward in our search for habitable worlds and life on other worlds potentially,” Sara Seager, a leading exoplanet expert at MIT, said during the announcement. This one star system, she said, gives astronomers many chances to look for life, and refine their understanding of exoplanets in small-star systems.

Also promising: Tiny, cool stars like Trappist-1 are some of the most common in the galaxy. Investigating them will likely yield more exoplanet discoveries. Which will help get us closer to finding places like Earth.

As NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said, “Finding another Earth-like planet isn't a matter of if but when.“

http://www.vox.com/2017/2/22/1469803...ery-trappist-1

[Luigi]

^



With those orbital periods any aliens are going to be 1000's of years old.

[Luigi]

Takeovers will know.

With objects so close to each other and their parent star, are they all likely to be tidally locked?

And so many being so close to each other, would their gravity likely have enough of an effect to keep their cores liquid and be geologically active (like Io because of Jupiter)?

[snakeeyes]

^
Luigi have you changed your name to Patrick Moore you put out a lot of info ,



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

[BaitongBoy]

How many "missuses" does Moore have?...

[Luigi]

lol

Just an interest of mine.

Tiz a fascinating find. It will really be exciting once the James Webb Space Telescope is up and running and we can calculate their atmospheres. If E, F or G have one similar to Earth, it's going to become the focus of a lot thinking... based on How da fok can we get a probe there to see it?

We're finding a lot of exoplanets within their star's habitable zone now that we're starting to have the means. To put that all in perspective within the greater scheme of things:

[snakeeyes]

[Luigi]

This is a good pic of how the state of any water on each of them is likely to be.



Haven't had much time to read up on them, but it looks that they are likely to quite young. However, even the JWST may well be able to detect telltale signs of whether there is life there from the atmospheric readings.

[Takeovers]

Takeovers will know.

I wish.

With objects so close to each other and their parent star, are they all likely to be tidally locked?

On my own I would have thougt they are not. But I found this reddit AMA and they seem to think they are actually tidally locked. But they think an atmosphere, if present, would distribute heat well enough to make for a large habitable zone. Living there would not be fun though, I imagine. It would be a world of permanent giant storms, that make our hurricanes look like a fresh breeze.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/commen...3o&sh=1eacd414

Lots of good answers to good questions in that AMA. Like the info that these stars have a period when they are young, that is much hotter. Planets in the zone, that is now habitable, would have been baked free of water in that period. So unless these planets have migrated into this zone after that period, there would be no water for life.

James Webb space telescope will give us good info on the atmospheres of the planets, if any. Water vapor plus a lot of oxygen would indicate life. They also said, they will have more info by march.

[Luigi]

Cool, cheers T.

[bsnub]

Fascinating stuff here.

[Auroria]

And there.

[Luigi]

Musky ain't hanging about.

SpaceX to fly two tourists around the Moon next year.

Elon Musk says the lucky pair will travel "faster and further into the solar system than any before them" on the week-long flight.

SpaceX has announced plans to fly two private citizens around the Moon next year, in the first manned US mission since the 1970s.

The tourists, who have paid a "significant deposit" for the week-long trip, will travel using a spaceship being developed for NASA astronauts - as well as a heavy-lift rocket that is yet to be flown.

SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said he hopes the privately funded flight - the first ever to travel beyond the International Space Station - will happen in late 2018.

Mr Musk did not reveal who his two customers are, nor how much they paid, but the entrepreneur told reporters they are not from Hollywood.

SpaceX to fly two tourists around the Moon next year

[Luigi]

^ Actually that deserves its own thread, as it continues to develop and actually happen.

https://teakdoor.com/world-news/17368...ound-moon.html (SpaceX to fly two tourists around the Moon in 2018.)

[harrybarracuda]

Takeovers will know.

With objects so close to each other and their parent star, are they all likely to be tidally locked?

And so many being so close to each other, would their gravity likely have enough of an effect to keep their cores liquid and be geologically active (like Io because of Jupiter)?

What difference does it make, you'd be dead before you got there.

[Takeovers]

SpaceX to fly two tourists around the Moon next year.

The space fan community has been buzzing about it since the announcement. This is a lightning bolt out of the blue, nobody expected it. There was discussion that SpaceX could do it for years but nobody actually believed they would.

A quite good article on it on the NSF forum.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017...lunar-mission/

Elon Musk has carefully avoided stepping on the toes of NASA. A flight around the moon will do this big time. His offer that if NASA wants to book that flight they would be given priority over space tourists just adds insult to injury.

A very telling paragraph from the liked article:

A NASA HQ source claimed they were not informed about the announcement ahead of Elon’s comments on Monday, although he believes Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot and President Trump’s NASA “Landing Team” was briefed, which in turn – the source claimed – was why Mr. Lightfoot asked NASA to conduct a study into accelerating the schedule towards crewed missions on Orion.

Some of you may have noticed that the Trump administration has requested NASA a few days ago to check if they can advance the first manned flight of SLS/Orion launch vehicle/spacecraft so they can do a moon flyby before the end of the first 4 years of the Trump presidency. The answer of NASA will likely be that they can not do this. Their present plans are to do that flight in 2021, if everything goes smoothly. The time when NASA was flexible and agile enough to speed up plans is past. If the administration was indeed informed about Elon Musks plans this is probably the cause of their request to NASA.