Space News thread

[Luigi]

What they really need to do is fly through and sample the newly discovered water plumes that erupt there.

I am sure they will try to do that. But they need luck because they don't know when one will happen.

They are working on a lander too.

Yup, the lander is the way.

The spray from the plumes that falls back to the surface is a way to get samples of what's inside, without having to drill through 20km of rock hard ice.

[Takeovers]

Yup, the lander is the way.

The NASA budget request by President Trump does not include the Europa lander. But that does not mean a lot. One Senator involved in this has it as a pet project. Likely he will ensure it is again in the final approved budget.

[Takeovers]

SES 10 telecom satellite fueled and readied for launch on reused rocket



SpaceX has by now landed a number of their rockets after launch and done thorough tests on them. One stage, the one that has been exposed to the harshest conditions during landing, has been fired 8 times for a full mission duration. They are now confident enough to use another landed stage to relaunch it and lift the SES 10 satellite to GTO, a mission that will push it to its limits and then attempt to land it again.


The booster for this flight after landing from the first mission.




https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/03/1...reused-rocket/

Launch preparations for the SES 10 communications satellite, the first spacecraft to ride a reused Falcon 9 booster to space, are on track for a late March blastoff from Florida, officials said.
The satellite, designed to broadcast video and television services across Latin America, was delivered to Cape Canaveral in January from its factory at Airbus Defense and Space in Toulouse, France.
Since its arrival in Florida, SES 10 has been prepped for liftoff inside a SpaceX clean room a few miles from launch pad 39A, where the mission will blast off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. Filling of the spacecraft with its supply of hydrazine fuel and nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer was completed Thursday, soon after SpaceX’s last flight took off from pad 39A.
Officials said the SES 10 satellite was scheduled to be enclosed this weekend inside the two halves of the Falcon 9’s nose cone, a composite fairing measuring 43 feet (13.1 meters) tall and 17 feet (5.2 meters) wide. The fairing protects the SES 10 spacecraft during final launch processing and the initial few minutes of flight through the dense lower atmosphere, then is shed once the rocket reaches space.
The rocket is also ready for final preflight tests after its delivery to Florida from SpaceX’s test site in McGregor, Texas. The 15-story booster was cleaned, refurbished and test-fired at the Texas test facility after landing on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean following a space station cargo ship launch on April 8, 2016.
SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said March 8 that the booster took around four months to refurbish after its first flight last April. SpaceX hopes to reduce that turnaround time to two months soon, and eventually to less than a day.
The SES 10 flight will be the first of six previously-flown Falcon rocket boosters SpaceX intends to re-fly this year, Shotwell said.
Two of the boosters reportedly might launch later this year on the first demo flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, which uses three Falcon rocket cores firing in unison to propel heavy payloads into orbit.
SES, a Luxembourg-based international telecom satellite operator, announced its agreement with SpaceX in August 2016 to send the SES 10 satellite to orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket with a reused first stage. The second stage and fairing are manufactured new.

[Takeovers]

This is going to change spaceflight forever.

The competition, from the US, Europe, Russia and China is still in denial. They have gone from "this will never work", to "the customers won't trust used boosters and will not fly on them", to now "this may work but is not economical and SpaceX will be losing money on the attempt".

[BaitongBoy]

Cheers...Why would they say that SpaceX "will be losing money on the attempt?"...

Is it more expensive?...

[Takeovers]

Why would they say that SpaceX "will be losing money on the attempt?"

They still claim loss for the whole project. Actually with all the thorough testing and careful evaluation SpaceX are likely to lose money on this flight.

But others are claiming that landing and refurbishment will have cost in excess of building a new stage, complete nonsense with the SpaceX approach. See it as whistling in the dark.

In the past it was always assumed that a vehicle needs to be very complex and expensive to be reusable, see the SpaceShuttle. In order to be cost efficient it needs to do many flights before it recoups the initial investment. In contrast to that the SpaceX Falcon family of rockets are already cheaper than the competition when they are thrown away after each launch. So they can save money with even 1 reflight. That would not be true if the competitions evaluates their own rockets. They just close their eyes to the facts and hope it goes away if they only stick their head in the sand long enough.

There is still a chance they turn out right. SpaceX had 2 launch failures, completely normal for a new system but the competition has had their failures a decade or more in the past and claim SpaceX is just unreliable. Two more failures in the near future can still destroy them.

[BaitongBoy]

Thanks for that...I figured it was something along those lines...

[Takeovers]

Not so good news about the Curiosity rover. The wheels continue to deteriorate.



At the two locations circled with a red ring the ribs of one wheel have broken. The breaks were not present when checked in january. Holes have been there for a long time but these ribs are a more serious failure. Operations are not at risk yet but they will drive even more carefully. We need to recognize that Curiosity is past its initially planned life span.

Beyond its life span but it has not yet reached its primary goal, the foot of Mount Sharp. That is in itself not a bad sign. They just have found so many highly interesting locations along the way that exploring them has slowed down progress. There is still an excellent chance they get to that destination.

[Luigi]

^ What is it about that location that makes it its primary goal TO?

[Takeovers]

What is it about that location that makes it its primary goal TO?

I think it is exposed strata of geologic history.

[Luigi]

Ahh, cheers.

[Takeovers]

Some news on SpaceX to reuse a booster for their next orbital flight. They did fire the engines successfully on the pad today for a few seconds and are ready to fly on thursday, march 30.

https://zippy.gfycat.com/HoarseFriendlyArcticwolf.webm

Link to a short replay. Nothing on YouTube yet.

Besides this being historic for reflight of a previously flown booster, this indicates they are speeding up their launch cadence. That is very important. They have a huge backlog of customer contracts with payloads waiting to fly. And the backlog becomes longer as more contracts are coming in.

While ULA may fly 10 times this year SpaceX will barely keep up with incoming new contracts when they fly 20 times.

[Takeovers]

Here a video of the landing of this stage after flying a Dragon on CRS-8 mission to the ISS for resupply.

[Takeovers]

The excitement is building up. Today the fate of SpaceX may be decided as well as the future of spaceflight.

If it fails SpaceX will take a long time to recover and all their plans will be probably delayed. If it succeeds the path to human spaceflight is open. Cost will drop. This reflight is only the first step. Many more steps will need to follow to make spaceflight more affordable so people can go to the planets.

Fortunately there is another player in the game. Blue Origin with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is also trying to do reusable spaceflight. BO is working much slower than SpaceX but they have the backing of Jeff Bezos with almost unlimited funds. SpaceX in contrast had to earn money to keep investing and researching from very early on.

But today is today and SpaceX is going to relaunch a launched and landed first stage on another commercial spaceflight. I could not be more excited.

Here a photo of the rocket in the hangar. If you open it to full size and look closely you can see it is still slightly dirty from the first flight. They cleaned it but did not repaint.



There are 2 more rockets in the hangar. The one in front is probably the next to fly. What the one in the back is, we don't know. It has no engines.

In case you want to see it live, here the hosted webcast that will show the launch in 6 hours if everything goes well and the landing too. This rocket is going to land again on the ASDS about 8 minutes after launch. Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship as Elon Musk likes to call them. The name is "Of course I still love you"



This is the rocket on the pad.

[Luigi]

Cool. So this is going to be the first time ever that a reusable rocket has been reused.

[Takeovers]

Cool. So this is going to be the first time ever that a reusable rocket has been reused.

Yes, unless you count the SpaceShuttle too. But that was reusable only with huge cost to get it flight ready again. It was reusable but it gave reuse a bad name. Countless times it was argued reuse is not cost efficient, just look at the Space Shuttle.

SpaceX tries to prove this wrong today.

[Takeovers]

Don't jinx it.

The customer of the SpaceX flight today, SES, has put this video online.

Maybe they should have waited a few hours. It is still on the pad.

[Takeovers]

The customers early report of success was justified.

Successful launch. The first stage landed back on the drone ship for the second time.

Two burns of the second stage and successful deployment of the satellite.

Success all around and reuse of the expensive first stage validated.

[David48atTD]

.


The amount of space junk in orbit around Earth is always increasing.
Whenever there is a collision between a big bit and a little bit, you get another couple of hundred little bits.

Spacecraft have actually been destroyed by collisions with space junk.
And the International Space Station has had plenty of close calls. It's had to move its 400-tonne bulk out of the way more than a dozen times before incoming space junk could destroy it.



At other times the threat of the space junk wasn't realised until it was too late to move the Space Station. The crew had to put on their space suits and take shelter in the Soyuz re-entry space craft, ready to abandon ship and make an emergency landing on Earth.

Cleaning up all that junk is essential for our future space operations. And it's not going to be easy. At the moment, there seem to be three major approaches to getting space junk out of orbit.


Burn it up

Several European proposals deal with the big bits of space junk in a big way — using the space equivalent of a tug boat.

The space tug is sent into orbit. It gets near to, and then somehow grabs hold of, a large lump of space junk.
The tug then sends that junk into a downward trajectory, so it burns up in the atmosphere.

Teams in Japan and Australia have proposed a slightly different approach. It involves creating drag to slow down the orbiting space junk, so it could burn up in the atmosphere.
You're probably familiar with aerodynamic drag. It's what cars and planes have to fight against as they push through the air.

There's not a lot of atmosphere to create aerodynamic drag hundreds of kilometres above Earth. But Earth's magnetic field can be used to create a different kind of drag: electrodynamic drag.
The idea is to have a conducting string or tether that's hundreds of metres long trailing behind the space junk.

As this tether moves through the Earth's magnetic field, it would create electrodynamic drag. And that drag would slow down the space junk, again leading to it burning up in the atmosphere.




Getting those conducting tethers onto big chunks of space junk is another challenge.

One proposal is that all new spacecraft should have a tether built into them.
At the end of their life, they would reel out the tether, and burn up in the atmosphere.

A space tug could be used to attach tethers to existing pieces of medium-to-large space junk, causing them to slow and burn up too.

And finally, an American proposal takes a different approach to tackling the smaller space junk.
Instead of the slow-it-down-and-burn-it-up tactic for big junk, it involves a solid shield that would mop up tiny space junk by actual physical contact.
The shield would be huge — the size of the football field. And it would work like a giant windscreen mopping up insects on a warm summer night.


The tragedy of the commons

The problem of space junk is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons.
This is an economic concept involving a shared common resource.
The users, instead of acting for the common long term good of their society, instead, each selfishly act entirely in their own self-interest. And the tragic result is that the commons get degraded, so that future generations miss out.
In this case, millions of pieces of space junk, moving at hypersonic speed, could seriously interfere with working in space.

Overall, space technology generates some $160 billion each year.
This includes military surveillance, climate and weather data, international phone calls and television broadcasts.
But there is no commercial incentive to keep these useful orbits around the earth clean, because the costs are not assigned to the polluters.
Credit

Listen to the podcast
.

[Takeovers]

Space Junk is a real problem and if not dealt with it can potentialy threaten spaceflight. We are not near that point yet fortunately but with increasing use of space we will get there unless it is taken much more seriously.

I am not a great fan of any method of cleaning up the small debris. The existing debris is mostly below 600km of altitude and will clear itself in a reasonable timeframe. The way to go is avoid adding to it. At least all new satellites should have mandatory methods of deorbiting, for low orbits. Or going to dedicated graveyard orbits, for geostationary com sats. All regulations to that effect are only recommendations, not mandatory. In 2015 I have seen numbers that way less than half of the decomissioned com sats, that provide TV and internet services, have adhered to the recommendatons. Most were left dead in their orbits. The involved service providers are literally destroying their livelihoods. The reason is they use the satellites beyond their initially planned service lifes until they drop dead in place.

There is a new situation coming up. There are a number of proposals for a new generation of sats, mostly for internet at altitudes of around 1000km and up. At that altitude dead sats will stay in orbit for hundreds if not thousands of years. With satellite constellation sizes in the thousands these orbits will become unusable soon unless the providers act responsibly and deorbit at the end of service life. SpaceX alone proposed a fleet of over 4000 satellites in that range and One Web company have recently upgraded their proposed fleet to more than 2000. There are others too.

SpaceX at least promised a reasonable handling of the problem. Their planned life time is only 5-7 years and their satellites will carry redundant deorbiting systems to make sure not to clog their orbits.

[Takeovers]

The SES-10 first stage is back at Canaveral Harbour after its second successful commercial flight.





If you want super high resolution to look at details of the rocket, here is a panorama where you can zoom in to see every bolt and soot mark. The grid fins look toasted but otherwise in great shape.

Extremely high-res panorama

[Norton]

Like this thread. Fasinating. Keep the goid stuff coming.

[Luigi]

Those legs look a lot bigger when there's some bloke standing next to them. Unless he's a very small man.


How many times do they reckon these rockets can be reused?

[Takeovers]

How many times do they reckon these rockets can be reused?

In the post landing press conference Elon Musk mentioned 10 times without any serious work on them. But a more thorough overhaul after each 10 flights, maybe a total of 100 flights.

But that is after a large number of small improvements for robustness and easier refurbishment coming some time this year and some think he is too optimistic. the present cores will be retired after a few flights, maybe 2 or 3. That's mainly because they are more work and they don't want to fly several versions parallel.

I am not sure personally. Elon always is on the optimistic side. But many still argue that economic reuse may not happen. It would turn out to be too work intensive, just like the Shuttle. Nonsense of course, even when the 10/100 number is too optimistic.

Elon Musk announced that they will refly 6 cores this year. Among them the side cores of the Falcon Heavy that is expected to do its first flight some time this year. Many thought Elon is totally crazy, flying used cores on the maiden voyage of a new vehicle. But many people think, he is crazy no matter what he does.



A render of Falcon Heavy on LC-39A, the Apollo 11 and SpaceShuttle pad. Historic pad now reworked for SpaceX Falcon.

As recently announced also the pad where he wants to launch the Mars vehicle from. Of course just another of his crazy ideas.

[Takeovers]

Just a repetition of the story how Elon Musk came to found SpaceX.

He had just made 180 million $ from selling PayPal. He considered what to do with it to promote spaceflight, especially to Mars. His first thought was that people just need an inspiration and decided he wanted to fly a small greenhouse to Mars. So he contacted officials in Russa and said he wants to buy two ICBMs to send a greenhouse to Mars. Of course they thought in Russia he is just one of those crazy rich guys from America and raised the price higher and higher until he stopped negotiating and flew home. On the flight he used his laptop to do some calculations and declared to his friends he thinks he can build those rockets himself and do it cheaper. Guess what, they thought he is crazy and tried to talk him out of it. But he went on to found SpaceX.

I am sure, some people in Russia now regret that they have not sold him the rockets at a reasonable price. That would have cost him the money he used instead to found SpaceX and may now push Russia slowly out of the launch business.