Space Thread

[Ghambit]

SpaceX update:
Looks like the landing leg failed on 1st stage approach to the drone ship.  The approach was supposedly on target however.  Bear in mind that the seas were pretty bad and the deck was heaving badly, making a cocked landing a likelihood.  Basically one of the legs bore too much of the load and broke.  Even if the angle was proper, if the rocket is landing during a deck upheaval, the loads would be much greater especially in a sharp sea.  It adds 10-20kts to the landing speed.

This whole drone ship thing is turning out to be a bad idea.

edit: landing leg lockout failed.  not the rough seas' fault

[Viin]

Video: https://www.instagram.com/p/BAqirNbwEc0/

[Jeff Kelly]

Out of the four failed drone ship landings on water only one was due to bad weather/rough sea. The other three failed because of equipment malfunction in the first stage.

Rough sea is less of a factor than the media wants to make out of it. The barge they use is not just simply a hunk of metal floating in the atlantic it is a modified heavy equipment haulage barge. Those things are already fitted/designed to be as stable as possible in rough seas because they are used to haul heavy equipment like drilling platforms or entire ships. The ones used by SpaceX are modified to be even more stable and robust.

If you can watch the video. The barge is barely moving despite the rough sea and the drone ship lands smack dab in the middle of it. Topples over after it had landed and the engines cut off. According to SpaceX because one of the landing leg lockouts didn't work. In that case the rocket would have also toppled over after touchdown on land. They also used an older version of the Falcon for this launch than the one for the last one. At this pace they'll stick the next landing.

[KallDrexx]

It hit 1.3 meters from the center of the barge.  The accuracy is astounding.

[Ghambit]

15-20 ft seas, unless in a period that does not effect the hull, are no joke and WILL mess up your landing.  Just before it touched down you could see the deck heaving pretty badly.  All these rigs have stabilizers, yes, but they only work to a point.  The sea takes no prisoners; personally, I'd rather risk a land-based landing than deal with those variables.

Granted, engineers will purposely fly in bad conditions to find the limitations (in this case, known icing and bad seas).  I applaud Musk for bleeding the money to do that.  But hell, in a normal flight profile you will never see them fly in that unless they're up against a deadline they can't move.

[Slayerik]

Seemed to be coming in a little hot to me....but WTF do I know.

[HaemishM]

Wait, that rocket landing was done on a MOVING SHIP that is piloted by a drone? In shitty, choppy seas?

I'd be less concerned about the fact that the legs on the thing broke and more awed that HOLY FUCK DID YOU SEE HOW ACCURATE THAT MOTHERFUCKER WAS? They could have literally landed that shit on a fucking Datsun truck bed. Looks to me like they've got their flight/landing software down and the only problems are mechanical. That ought to be trumpeted from the high heavens because that kind of shit is fixable.

[Ghambit]

Wait, that rocket landing was done on a MOVING SHIP that is piloted by a drone? In shitty, choppy seas?

I'd be less concerned about the fact that the legs on the thing broke and more awed that HOLY FUCK DID YOU SEE HOW ACCURATE THAT MOTHERFUCKER WAS? They could have literally landed that shit on a fucking Datsun truck bed. Looks to me like they've got their flight/landing software down and the only problems are mechanical. That ought to be trumpeted from the high heavens because that kind of shit is fixable.

... through icy atmosphere too

It's actually a boon that the conditions were what they were.  That's what you want when you iterate a design.  Try explaining that to a sponsor/politician though; they don't want to hear it.  They only want to see success.  That said, SpaceX has done poorly with marketing their dev. process to the media, so you can't blame the media either. 

Still though, fuck landing on a barge.  That has to be the last option unless conditions are perfect at the time of launch.

[HaemishM]

Naw, man, the barge is the best part of the whole thing. It's like the engineers are all like whipping their engineer dicks out and going "YOU LIKE THIS? HUH? YOU LIKE THIS?" And tattooed on the side are the words "Bad Engineering Mothefucker."

[Goumindong]

15-20 ft seas, unless in a period that does not effect the hull, are no joke and WILL mess up your landing.  Just before it touched down you could see the deck heaving pretty badly.  All these rigs have stabilizers, yes, but they only work to a point.  The sea takes no prisoners; personally, I'd rather risk a land-based landing than deal with those variables.

Granted, engineers will purposely fly in bad conditions to find the limitations (in this case, known icing and bad seas).  I applaud Musk for bleeding the money to do that.  But hell, in a normal flight profile you will never see them fly in that unless they're up against a deadline they can't move.

I think sea recoveries are ideal because land recoveries almost guarantee that the rocket will be in atmosphere over some populated area. A failure at sea means the rocket goes into the water. A failure on land might mean the rocket goes into a house.

[Merusk]

If it's in space and not geosync'd it's always over a house.  I understand this just does a big upsy-downsy though, right? So someplace like Canaveral should be OK to launch from because it's so isolated.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cape+Canaveral,+Florida/@28.4141449,-80.6758034,25820m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x88e0a3f2a5fb9a45:0x87ef91ee250f8fde!6m1!1e1

Is the barge just used for testing launches and times when they can't use NASA's facilities during ramp-up or is a permanent feature of the SpaceX program?

[Jeff Kelly]

Depending on orbit and inclination there are starts where the first stage can't touch down on land. The first stage uses the fuel reserves the rocket carries in case one of the motors fails (and the others have to take over and burn longer) to return back to earth.

Adding enough fuel to the stage so that it can always return to dry land under any launch condition would make it too heavy. For launches like the last one a touch down over water and hence the barge is the only option. Or you drop the launch vehicle into the ocean and lose 30 million in the process for either new rocket motors and turbo pumps or expensive refurbishing of the old ones that have been damaged by the salt water.

Making the first stage reusable by having it land is the key point to bring costs down.

[01101010]

Maybe get China to build an island somewhere in the vicinity of the launchpad to land on, win win  -except for the China owning it part.

[Ghambit]

Depending on orbit and inclination there are starts where the first stage can't touch down on land. The first stage uses the fuel reserves the rocket carries in case one of the motors fails (and the others have to take over and burn longer) to return back to earth.

Adding enough fuel to the stage so that it can always return to dry land under any launch condition would make it too heavy. For launches like the last one a touch down over water and hence the barge is the only option. Or you drop the launch vehicle into the ocean and lose 30 million in the process for either new rocket motors and turbo pumps or expensive refurbishing of the old ones that have been damaged by the salt water.

Making the first stage reusable by having it land is the key point to bring costs down.

The purpose of the last launch was to fire out of Vandenburg heading westward, which meant yes, they'd need more fuel to get back as the earth rotates away from the flight profile.  The Vandenburg site was used so they could avoid transport from the CA factory all the way cross-country.  It's really just to save time and money in shipping; there's no inherent advantage to that profile otherwise.

I guess the build site in Texas is for the Houston (theoretically) and Canaveral launch sites generally.  Who knows.  In any case, they've got a ton of flexibility.

[MahrinSkel]

So, apparently the Falcon 9 costs $200k to fuel, and can deliver a bit over 10k pounds to geosynchronous orbit (almost 14k to LEO). With the booster truly reusable, that puts costs per pound to orbit into the sub $50 range (I am assuming it's going to cost more, at least for a while, to manage the launch than to actually fly the bird).

That...changes everything for space exploration, actually puts serious space *exploitation* (mining asteroids and such) on the table. Even ion drives are feasible on sufficient scale at those prices, never mind Em or Cannae drives.

--Dave

[Ghambit]

There's a reason a lot of very smart, very wealthy people are getting into position for this upcoming space race.  It's not a fluke.  Many hundreds of millions have already been spent on the small business infrastructure alone, to support the industry.  Everyone hails the spinoff tech NASA pioneered, but the same thing is happening here in the private sector; albeit more closed-door.

Florida built a whole damned new Polytech University in the I-4 corridor largely on the back of space industry futures.

Moral is, if you're in the tech. space and want something new to do, it's not a bad time to dip your feet in.

[ajax34i]

HOLY FUCK DID YOU SEE HOW ACCURATE THAT MOTHERFUCKER WAS?

While that's amazing, didn't NASA pass Cassini through a gap in the rings of Saturn, while affected by a 1.5 hr communication delay for each flight path correction?

[Kail]

Possible evidence for a new planet beyond Neptune

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/150119-new-ninth-planet-solar-system-space/
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/feature-astronomers-say-neptune-sized-planet-lurks-unseen-solar-system

Allegedly it's supposed to be larger than Earth (about 10 times our mass) but smaller than the gas giants, on a 20,000 year orbital period, running from about 250 AU perihelion to about 1,000 AU aphelion (Pluto's aphelion is about 50 AU).  It's supposed to explain oribital anomalies for objects outside the Kuiper belt, but hasn't been directly imaged yet so could be wrong.

[HaemishM]

Space is just fucking awesome.

[Lucas]

Sitchin will have his last laugh, albeit from heaven 

[ajax34i]

Probably has, like, 197 moons.

[Ghambit]

HOLY FUCK DID YOU SEE HOW ACCURATE THAT MOTHERFUCKER WAS?

While that's amazing, didn't NASA pass Cassini through a gap in the rings of Saturn, while affected by a 1.5 hr communication delay for each flight path correction?

My comp. sci professor's wife did the telemetry sourcecode for that mission.  Aside from the project director, she had the most important job in the entire project.  I cannot even fathom the stress of that.  She apparently had to report in front of large assemblies as well; routinely.

[Bungee]

Gravitational Waves are real, direct detection by LIGO. Press conference live.

[Morat20]

If only this led to artificial gravity, FTL, or anti-gravity.

I mean it's pretty damn cool, don't get me wrong. I'm just at the point where I'm all "Can we use this to finally crack fusion? Or let astronaunts not die in the horrible, radiation filled hellhole of space? Or let us get to LEO for like 12 bucks a pound? Or play that laser-tag game from Ender's Game on Earth?"

Sadly I'll just have to be satisfied with awesome science.

[Xuri]

No closer to time travel either (source: press conference), though I'm not sure if that is a good or a bad thing.

[pxib]

"Can we use this to finally crack fusion? Or let astronaunts not die in the horrible, radiation filled hellhole of space? Or let us get to LEO for like 12 bucks a pound? Or play that laser-tag game from Ender's Game on Earth?"

Relativity was 20th century science's big bummer the way that thermodynamics was for the 19th century.

Proving that there weren't gravity waves would have been a lot more exciting because it would have shown that some part of our understanding of general relativity was wrong. Just like the Higg's Boson detection seemed to show that the Standard Model was complete rather than incomplete. Any day now somebody's going to prove the Riemann Hypothesis using conventional tools that don't expand the mathematical horizon at all.

Relativity itself was the result of a lot of experiments failing to find what they looked for. If the Luminiferous Aether were real, they would have been successes.

Keep your eyes open for negative results. That's where the game-changers are.

[Morat20]

Eh, until they unify quantum mechanics with relativity there's still a big question mark.

Humans are good at leveraging tiny loopholes into interesting crap.

Although I suspect nanoscale engineering is the next "big thing" -- that combined with biohacking is going to be the next frontier in science. We're on the edges of engineering ourselves, of growing cloned tissues and organs, of being able to replace crap that breaks inside us.

Ones we can start using things like custom viruses to play with things at the cellular level? Sky's the limit. Fuck angioplasty's and stents. How about a virus that eats that crap clogging up your arteries? Cancer? Identify the specific markers, and let loose a nasty little bugger (machine or virus? It gets pretty blurry at that size) that kills those cells -- and nothing else.

[Goreschach]

What a load of horseshit. New frontiers? What fucking planet have you been living on? The day that humans can just code up a virus is the day that humanity becomes 100% irrevocably fucked.

[Morat20]

What a load of horseshit. New frontiers? What fucking planet have you been living on? The day that humans can just code up a virus is the day that humanity becomes 100% irrevocably fucked.

Then it's just a matter of time until we're fucked.

But it still doesn't change the fact that the next revolution in science (well, honestly more in engineering) is going to be in biology. THere's a few people already walking around with lab grown organs (bladders, admittedly -- pretty simple), nano-scale engineering in general is starting to mature, and we've got at least one example of a purely lab created organism (some virus, I believe).

[Ghambit]

I've actually got quite a few professors who were integral parts of the LIGO experiment.  One of the perks of going to a leading space science school.  For the most part, the entire physics staff were somewhat involved in gravity experiments; then they were hired on at ERAU to continue that work.  Kinda cool.

Anyways, my thing with LIGO is this:  it's not a scope that uses the electromagnetic spectrum.  Let that sink in a bit.  Who needs Maxwell when you can just detect ripples in the fabric of spacetime?  And yes, it does indeed usher in a new form of astronomy.   Sure, you could cite the prior gravity experiments we've had limited (sometimes disastrous) success with... WISE and so forth.  But those instruments were "local space" or simply measuring photon displacement.  

LIGO is a telescope that peers into space without using any currently defineable wavelength.  It measures space itself.

To further this, we can now imagine MAYBE detecting other universes (if they're out there).  Theoretically, gravity is the only "force" that can permeate two completely different reference frames.  So yah, it's a big fuckin deal... even though for the time being there's not much we can do with it.

At this point, we just need more techs to get out there and build more detectors.  Miniaturize them if possible, and so forth.

[01101010]

And the smaller we get...

[Venkman]

If only this led to artificial gravity, FTL, or anti-gravity.

I mean it's pretty damn cool, don't get me wrong. I'm just at the point where I'm all "Can we use this to finally crack fusion? Or let astronaunts not die in the horrible, radiation filled hellhole of space? Or let us get to LEO for like 12 bucks a pound? Or play that laser-tag game from Ender's Game on Earth?"

I know where you're coming from. But I think it's a testament to our generation that this isn't all that impressive even to the run of the mill geeks. Too much magic-science like Flux Capacitors and Tachyon Emitters in our upbringing maybe?

• Proves a 100 year old theory even Einstein later in life wasn't sure about.
• Required the equivalent of 50 times the energy output of all stars in the universe to shake a couple of stripes of metal.
  
• Reaches us a billion years after it started at just the right time in humanity's tech tree

That this is physically possible in this universe at all speaks to an order of energy and principals we know dick-all about.

Finally having been able to answer this question unlocks an area of science that could be a pathway off this planet at a meaningful scale.

This is a very big deal.

[Soln]

Is it funny that this reminds me of the original Michelson-Morley experiment?   

It's profoundly interesting that you can describe how the LIGO experiment works in ways ("lasers") that would've been science fiction 50 years ago.  Yeah, it's a very big deal.   

[pxib]

Is it funny that this reminds me of the original Michelson-Morley experiment?

Except, like I said, Michelson-Morley was a negative result. It questioned the orthodoxy instead of confirming it.

Yes, it's amazing that we can detect a little spacetime wiggle - and that has consequences and potential for the future of astronomy - but it would have been a lot more exciting if the numbers didn't match the theory quite so well. We're running out of places to look for deeper understandings of physics.

[ajax34i]

Um, lots of "places to look" between 10e-35 m and 10e-15 m, and beyond 10e+26 m.