Space News thread

[harrybarracuda]

Static fire test of Falcon 9 complete – targeting Wednesday, September 15 for launch of Dragon’s first all-civilian human spaceflight. The 5-hour launch window opens at 8:02 p.m. EDT

And while I was reading that I came across...

Worldwide Space Launches

Shit there's a lot going up.

That catastrophic collision can't be far off.

[Edmond]

They be ready.




SpaceX is set to launch the world's first ever all-civilian mission to orbit on Wednesday evening in Florida, weather permitting.


The crew of four civilians includes a high-school dropout for a commander, a medical officer who survived cancer as a child, an artist and college professor, and a man who won his seat through a charity donation.



Launch window opens around 7am Thai time.

[Takeovers]

Link to a YouTube live stream of Inspiration 4 launch. With a count down. Live stream begins in 26 hours. Which is I think a long time before liftoff.

SpaceX - Launches

[Takeovers]

There has been some doubt that the SpaceX Falcon Heavy would ever earn its development cost. SpaceX needs it, to get any Spaceforce contracts, but does not get many launchs. Recently there was a number of private and NASA and Spaceforce contracts. They now have a total of 10 flights, likely to increase. A development, after ULA terminated their Delta IV Heavy, which was very expensive but still got all the contracts at the time.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch contracts reach double digits after latest NASA win

[Takeovers]

Inspiration 4 launched successful. Sidenote: The booster landed successfully

The crew was waiving hands while at max acceleration close to 4 g.

Picture of the engine plume during ascent.

[Latindancer]

Sorry to be pedantic, but shouldn't it look like this ?

That's a lot of unburnt fuel at the bottom.. Their carby is running a bit rich..

[Takeovers]

That's a lot of unburnt fuel at the bottom.. Their carby is running a bit rich..

It does not take much for this effect in the high atmosphere. Though I have not seen it so clearly before.

All rocket engines run fuel rich. Stochiometric it would get too hot and destroy the engines. Some call that engine rich combustion. I think there were some trials to run stochiometric and add water to limit temperatures, but it was too complex.

About orientation. When flying towards the horizon , rockets always look to the observer at the launch site like they are going down, they are not. That argument is used by some crazy conspiracy theorists though, to argue it is all fake.

[Takeovers]

BTW, the rocket booster landed this night was successful landing 91. The landing a few days ago was landing 90, with a booster on its 10th flight. They have now 2 boosters which reached 10 flights. They intend to keep flying them after some refurbishment.

[malmomike77]

Blast off

[harrybarracuda]

Something quietly hit Jupiter the other day.

[Takeovers]

Some Inspiration 4 pictures released.

BTW that girl child Hayley Arceneaux is 29 years old.

The cupola is quite big, bigger than individual windows in the ISS cupola, though the ISS cupola in total is quite a bit bigger.

In some places there are blinds protecting the cupola from the exhaust of firing thrusters.

[Takeovers]

Inspiration 4 crew has landed a few hours ago. Watching the video right now.

[Edmond]

Amazing stuff.

Nice video shot at 30 mins in.


17,500mph down to 350mph with no breaks, from only the heatshield and atmospheric drag. Amazing science.

[Takeovers]

Something quietly hit Jupiter the other day.

It has been said, that Jupiter attracts a lot of hits, helping Earth to receve fewer, so enabling life on Earth as we know it. Frequent extinction level events would stop a technical civilization from rising.

A matter of scientific debate, not everybody agrees.

[Edmond]

Known as our big brother, watching out for us. Without Jupiter sucking up rogue asteroids, the inner solar system would be a lot more exciting.

[harrybarracuda]

More fascinating spacey stuff here.

Supercluster

[David48atTD]

Apologies if posted before ...

[Takeovers]

Apologies if posted before ...

These are mostly in the On to Mars thread. Not sure about this one, there are many different ones.

SpaceX - On to Mars

Many explosions in that phase of the test campaign. It made NASA confident enough to give SpaceX the Artemis Moon lander contract, intended to bring people back to the Moon. Including the first women to the Moon. Artemis is the sister of Apollo in greek mythology.

[Takeovers]

Another incident on the ISS by Russian equipment.

They did a test fire of thrusters on the Soyuz Spaceship that will return to Earth soon. The test fire however did not stop when it was supposed to and pushed the ISS out of its intended orientation. Not really dangerous, but the ISS and all the connections of components are aging and already stressed. Any additional stressing like this is not good.


Space Station Emergency Prompted by Russian Thruster Firing - The New York Times

By Joey RouletteOct. 15, 2021
The International Space Station was briefly tilted out of its normal position in orbit on Friday during a test firing of thrusters on one of Russia’s docked spacecraft.


The Russian space agency said in a statement on its website that the crew and station were never in any danger. But it was the second such emergency on the station since July, when an unexpected firing of thrusters on a new Russian module briefly inverted the outpost.


The incident occurred on Friday morning as the Russian astronaut Oleg Novitsky was performing a test of the engines aboard the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft, a crew module that has been docked to the station since April. The spacecraft is scheduled to return three passengers to Earth on Sunday.


When the engine test was scheduled to end, “the thruster firing unexpectedly continued,” Leah Cheshier, a NASA spokeswoman, said in an email, and the station orbital positioning control was lost at 5:13 a.m. Eastern time. Russian officials in Moscow and personnel at NASA’s astronaut headquarters in Houston sprang into action during the incident, voicing commands to their astronauts to initiate emergency protocols.


“Oleg, take it easy, the station was turned by 57 degrees, no big deal,” a Russian mission control official in Moscow was quoted as saying to the astronaut by Interfax, a Russian news agency. “We had to make sure that engines are in order, this is important.”


“Station, Houston space-to-ground two, we see the loss of attitude control warning,” NASA mission control in Houston alerted its astronauts on the station, instructing them to begin emergency procedures in the crew’s “warning book.” Flight controllers regained control of the station within 30 minutes, Ms. Cheshier said.


Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, said in a statement that the space station’s “orientation was temporarily changed” but that its normal position was “swiftly recovered” after Russian specialists in Moscow intervened. A Roscosmos spokesman declined to provide additional details of the incident.


“As you can well imagine, when things start going off the rails like that, there’s enough noise on the radar that the clarity of what actually happened is a bit of a mystery,” Timothy Creamer, a NASA flight director who was on duty at the time, told the American astronauts in communications shortly after the thruster firings stopped. He said the Russian thrusters may have stopped firing after they reached a limit, though it was unclear what kind.


“We think — and we haven’t got confirmation — we think the thrusters stopped firing because they reached their prop limit,” Mr. Creamer said, adding that “Moscow is checking into it and doing their data analysis.”


On Sunday, the same spacecraft that experienced the thruster incident is expected to bring back to Earth a Russian film crew that was flown to the station on a different Soyuz spacecraft on Oct. 5. NASA mission control, heard on a livestream of mission control audio, indicated that the thruster firing incident delayed a planned film shoot in the station’s cupola, a room with six windows facing Earth. Ms. Cheshier said the MS-18 spacecraft’s undocking with the crew inside would occur at 9:14 p.m. Saturday, as planned.


In July, Russia docked its Nauka module to the orbital base, adding a new room for science experiments on the Russian segment of the station. Hours later, Nauka’s thrusters suddenly started firing, spinning the station one and a half revolutions — about 540 degrees — before it came to a stop upside down.


Unexpected jolts to the space station, which is the size of a football field, put stress on the forest of instrumentation on its exterior. After the Nauka incident, Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director who managed the agency’s emergency response that day, said on Twitter that he had never “been so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.”


NASA and Russia have maintained a long relationship on the space station over the past two decades. But in recent years, elements of the station have showed signs of their age, including some air leaks on the Russian side.


NASA wants to continue the partnership with Russia and keep the station operating through 2030, gradually handing off American elements of the laboratory to private U.S. companies. But Russia’s space chief, Dmitri Rogozin, has suggested that Moscow could pull out of the orbital partnership in 2025, one of the latest signals that ties between the two space powers are beginning to fray.


Russia has ramped up its relationship with China’s space program. The two countries signed an agreement in March to work on lunar bases, which would rival the plans of NASA’s Artemis moon exploration program.


China launched the first elements of its own new space station this year and sent its second crew of three astronauts there on Friday for a six-month mission.

[Takeovers]

An interesting video about work of Russian Cosmonauts on a spacewalk, cutting into insulation to locate the hole in a Soyuz orbital module. The hole they later blamed on a female US astronaut they said was mentally instable.

A NASA interpreter translated Russian dialog.

Ground Control to the Cosmonaut saying something like "We know you are frustrated, but try to stay calm" while he hacked away on the insulation layer.



I think it is time for NASA to think about how to operate the ISS without the Russians. They are increasingly erratic and error prone, their equipment is breaking down.

[Takeovers]

China has launched another crew of Taikonauts to their new space station. They are building up for capability of permanently manning it but they still need to enlarge the station and have several docking ports to do that.

A video of the launch. It is very long, probably skip right to 2:53 shortly before launch.



I am not following Chinese space activities closely. So just a few remarks, what I could glean from the live coverage.

Their spacecraft has evolved a lot from early close copies of Soyuz. They have a quite spacious orbital module and a large maneuvering module which are pure chinese design. Their reentry capsule is still close to Soyuz, but larger. 3 people are not as crammed in as they are on Soyuz.

They drop the launch escape tower soon after getting out of the atmosphere, even before first stage side boosters separate. Which means they go through a quite dangerous phase of the flight without the escape tower. But at this phase of the flight probably the maneuvering module can do the function.

Interesting the steering of the first stage. They have 1 main engine that does not gimbal. They have a set of smaller engines, they call vernier engines that each gimbal in one axis. So for control they need several of them working. Commentary mentioned that they shut down the main engine first and then do precision orbit insertion with the vernier engines.

They use side boosters at lift off and keep them for quite a while. It looks similar to what ULA rockets do, Atlas V, Delta IV and the new Vulcan when it flies. But it is quite different. US uses solid boosters, which has quite severe disadvantages. Chinas side boosters are liquid fuelled, IMO a better solution.


A side remark. The english language commentary sounds like from media professionals, but resonably well informed. Better than the cringeworthy commentator at Blue Origin New Shepard launches.

[Takeovers]

I really did not follow closely enough.

They already docked at the station, opened the hatch and entered.

A short video of the docking. They said fully autonomous docking. The russian Soyuz also has autonomous docking capability but it frequently fails and the crew needs to do the docking.



Another video, a little longer and with english language commentary on entering the station.

[OhOh]

Thanks for the posts.

[Takeovers]

NASA has launched the Lucy mission. A very exciting mission to the Jupiter trojan asteroids. They are in the Lagrange points of the Sun Jupiter system. Lagrange points are stable or semi stable points relative to Jupiter and Sun which tend to attract smaller bodies flying around in the solar system. Both L4 and L5 have quite a number of asteroids. These points are 60° ahead and behind Jupiter in its orbit.

A schematic graphic of Lagrange points. Not everybody here may be familiar with this.

A short video about the mission.


The launch was successful, Lucy is on its way. However there was a glitch in deploying one of the two solar arrays. Seems it is producing power but not clear if it has fully deployed. It may be just a sensor error. Not clear if this is a photo, I don't think so. It probably is a graphic showing how the array probably looks. The right one is a fully deployed circle, the left one has a gap. I don't think it will affect the mission much if at all. They are working on it.

[Saint Willy]

I didn't realise that the Lucy mission did not include fly buys of Jupiter. That graphic makes it clear why.