Space Thread

[Count Nerfedalot]

Only one of three Raptor engines working while it tried to land.  Needs better brakes.

[calapine]

I wrote a quick overview of what 2021 brings in space (rockets, rovers, probes)

The thread has over 30 images, so instead of copy/paste here is the link:

https://twitter.com/AuerSusan/status/1344655344992210945

[Mandella]

Time for end of/beginning of the year space lists?

I enjoyed Tim Dodd's (The Everyday Astronaut) Astro Awards this year. Some surprises in how he ordered things, but I appreciated his rationales. And for those who avoid him due to his characteristic exuberance, he was pretty quiet and mellow for this webcast.

Lots of good video clips of all the neat things that happened spacewise this year too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2f0vqgYdLc

[calapine]

Time for end of/beginning of the year space lists?

I enjoyed Tim Dodd's (The Everyday Astronaut) Astro Awards this year. Some surprises in how he ordered things, but I appreciated his rationales. And for those who avoid him due to his characteristic exuberance, he was pretty quiet and mellow for this webcast.

Lots of good video clips of all the neat things that happened spacewise this year too.

The video is interesting, but 53 minutes long, buuuut there are timestamps for each of the top 10.
Informative too. CrewDragon being #1 wasn't a suprise, but did not know, for example, that the ISS got a new airlock, made by a private company.

=====

Some outtakes from the Soyuz launch I mentioned upthread.







Source is this time-lapse video (duration 1 minute), which itself is worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=molMEKLwYaw

[calapine]

Interesting Soyuz detail:


Soyuz doesn't stand on the launchpad, but is suspended over it. Held in place by the four main support arms. Here seen during pad construction:



Below are triangular guides (yellow-black) that provide extra stability and two additional arms (black) for umbilical lines. (The platform was only present during construction).


Here with a clear view into the flame deflector:




And here with rocket attached. The system is the same for all Soyuz launchpads, but the "house" is a mobile gantry that is a Kourou speciality.
(Main reason for it is to allow vertical integration of satellites, which a lot western sats require.)




The way the primary support arms work is typically Russian fool-proof:
Once the launcher builds thrust the load on the support arms decreases, allowing them to move outwards by the force of counterweights located at their base.

Counterweighs during their installation:



Because of the characteristic opening movement this setup is called the "Tulip".


Here the mobile gantry in action (sorry for the potato quality):


As you can see, rocket is cut of at the neck. The fairing, and inside that the satellite, is missing.
They are added in the next step (vertical integration). On a Baikonur Soyuz the launcher would be rolled out in it's complete configuration.




To close, bonus fun fact:
Ariane 6 will have a similar mobile gantry, only this one is 90 meters tall (the Soyuz is 52m) and weights 8200 tons.



Hope that was interesting

[Hammond]

So today is the scheduled landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars. Starting at 11 am Pacific standard time is the start of the Landing Coverage with the landing windows around 1 PM. Much like the Curiosity landing they are going with the bonkers sky crane landing with a added twist of much worse terrain. Should be fun.


Nasa's site (the animation is bonkers)

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Youtube live feed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w23gC0WhXdI&ab_channel=SPACE%28Official%29

[01101010]

Welp, so much for doing anything work related for the next half an hour.

edit: thankfully uneventful and successful. Pretty intense in the lead up... way more than I thought.

[calapine]

Good image that shows Terrain Relative Navigation system did a good job:

[calapine]

Here is a zoomed out version. (Note the two upper craters just being small dots in this image)

[Mandella]

Wow. Watching the Monday press conference right now. Look at those landing videos! Cameras everywhere on Perseverance!

Here's to the start of years and years of science and exploration from this rover!

 

[pxib]

Here's a great link to just the three minutes of videos.

Amazing.

[Trippy]

NASA's link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4czjS9h4Fpg

[Hammond]

Love the video!

They also released audio from the lander.

[Mandella]

So a super cool announcement video from "When we say we're going to do something, we do it" Rocket Lab.

Plus apparently when they say they are not going to do something, they do that too, with a side of hat.

 

Gotta love the Peter Beck mic drop at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqxJw5ISdk

[Trippy]

I was waiting for a THIS. IS. SPARTA! in the first part of that video.

[Trippy]

SpaceX Starship SN10 test flight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODY6JWzS8WU
https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/index.html

It looks pretty cool coming down "sideways". Then after the successful landing and they cut the stream it blew up. Oops.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/03/spacex-lands-starship-sn10-rocket-after-a-high-altitude-flight-test.html

[MahrinSkel]

At some point it would be nice if they stopped with the rapid unscheduled disassembling, but at least it was definitely landed before it blew up.

--Dave

[Sir T]

That went down in the report as "A 100% successful test of the landing system." 

[Sir T]

https://www.twitch.tv/nasa

Am watching a spacewalk right now and they are attaching a module to the ISS. So they are screwing bolts in with a spanner. IN SPACE!!!!!!

Actually pretty cool.

[Mandella]

https://www.twitch.tv/nasa

Am watching a spacewalk right now and they are attaching a module to the ISS. So they are screwing bolts in with a spanner. IN SPACE!!!!!!

Actually pretty cool.

Second glove tear in a row though. Got to admire the (heavily trained in) calm of both Glover and Rubins. But there is a team on the ground right now probably working the weekend to change the design and/or procedure a bit I bet.

[Morat20]

https://www.twitch.tv/nasa

Am watching a spacewalk right now and they are attaching a module to the ISS. So they are screwing bolts in with a spanner. IN SPACE!!!!!!

Actually pretty cool.

IIRC, something as simply as tightening a bolt in space is a PITA.

You either use a special tool, or make sure you're anchored properly otherwise you just turn yourself around.

My favorite "problems that were a surprise" fact was when NASA went to upgrade the laptops used on the Shuttle back in the 90s. They kept burning out. Turns out the model they were trying out didn't have enough active cooling. Worked just fine on the ground, but the second *heat no longer rose* (because zero g), they burned out. Cooling wasn't sufficient, so heat built up around the processor and cooked them.

So much of basic design just takes *gravity* as a given.

[Mandella]

A Dragon named Resilience returning to Earth, as seen from the ISS.







Photo credit Thomas Pesquet
--just one of lots of great pics he's already posted.

[Khaldun]

A genuinely amazing image.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Oh wow, that is an amazing photo. 

[Sir T]

On the same lines, Part of a Chinese rocket is going to burn up in the Earths atmosphere soon, but parts of it will hit the surface at some point. Social media has been having fainting spells about it but an astrophysisist said it would be the equivalent of a small plane crash scattered over 100 miles, and will likely hit the ocean in any case.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chinese-rocket-land/

On April 29, China launched the main module of its first permanent space station (the module is called the Tianhe) using a 100-foot-tall Long March 5B rocket. Here’s how The Associated Press covered the event:

    Minutes after the launch, the fairing opened to expose the Tianhe atop the core stage of the rocket, with the characters for “China Manned Space” emblazoned on its exterior. Soon after, it separated from the rocket, which will orbit for about a week before falling to Earth, and minutes after that, opened its solar arrays to provide a steady energy source.

In other words, as part of China’s space program, the Long March 5B rocket temporarily entered orbit in late April and its core was indeed falling back to Earth with its gravitational pull. Instead of following a predetermined path, however, the portion of the space vehicle was traveling in an “uncontrolled” manner — without an exact landing spot or course in mind.

“Huge rocket looks set for uncontrolled reentry following Chinese space station launch,” tweeted Andrew Jones, a journalist for SpaceNews.

Furthermore, the Aerospace Corporation, a U.S. research and development center, performed its own analysis of the object’s orbit and predicted that it would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere on May 10, plus or minus roughly two days.

However, exactly where that will happen — or how much of the rocket would disintegrate while descending to Earth — remains unknown.

SpaceNews, a credible source of news about the global space industry, reported on April 30 (one day after the rocket’s launch from the Wenchang Launch Center on the island of Hainan) that while much of the object will burn up, some debris could remain in tact and rain anywhere between the northern latitude lines of New York, Madrid and Beijing and southern locations of Chile and Wellington, New Zealand.

“Where and when the new Long March 5B stage will land is impossible to predict. The decay of its orbit will increase as atmospheric drag brings it down into more denser,” the article by Jones read. “The most likely event will see any debris surviving the intense heat of reentry falling into the oceans or uninhabited areas, but the risk remains of damage to people or property.”

[Sky]

I'm old enough to remember people thinking Skylab was going to kill a lot of people when it fell.

[Khaldun]

It actually could have caused some damage and fatalities--it broke up much lower than NASA expected and adjustments intended to increase the chances of it crashing mostly over ocean didn't fully work. They got lucky that it hit an area of Australia with very low population densities.

[slog]

When I think back to Skylab, I'm amazed at how little progress we have made since then.  I used to watch SPACE 1999 when I was a kid and imagined by the time I was this old we would  have people living in space full time.

[SurfD]

When I think back to Skylab, I'm amazed at how little progress we have made since then.  I used to watch SPACE 1999 when I was a kid and imagined by the time I was this old we would  have people living in space full time.

Likely has something to do with profit.

There's really no profit in "space living" right now.

I guarantee you though, if someone discovers a billion tonnes of rare metals on the moon or something, you will have space condos sprouting like weeds in lunar craters so fast it will snap your head clean off trying to keep up.

[pxib]

Space is cramped, miserable, deadly, and expensive. Your bones and muscles atrophy without gravity, you get irradiated without the Van Allen belts, there's no food, no water, no breathable air. Even if we suddenly did find out there was a huge surplus of rare metals on the moon we'd have to figure out how to get all the mining and refining equipment there and get all the metal back... for cheaper than just finding more of the stuff here on earth. And if you succeed, there's a good chance you flood the market for whatever few purposes that particular mineral has and the price goes down.

Don't hold your breath.

Literally, if you're stuck in a vacuum it's very important you exhale vigorously.

There will likely never be profit in space living. There are significantly nicer completely uninhabited places here on earth already. Don't expect tourists to want to spend more than a week trapped in a space hotel, and don't expect good word of mouth once they realize what a shitty visit all that money got them.

[MahrinSkel]

A lot of those problems become very tractable if you capture a small asteroid, preferably an amalgamate of C and M types, or one of each. A 30 meter asteroid is more building material and organics than a thousand Starship Heavy launches, and it's downhill all the way.

--Dave

Edit: Point is, there are quite a few things we know we could make in space that would be useful and valuable on Earth. But at a cost of thousands of dollars per pound just to get the raw materials into orbit, none of them are worth it. Starship brings the costs down by an order of magnitude, and some of them might become minimally viable. But if your materials cost drops by another order of magnitude, and your overhead does the same because you're getting your CHON organics on site, then all manner of things are possible.

Mars is fucking hopeless. There is no possibility that anything we find there will be worth the costs of hauling it back, nor that a self sustaining colony could exist. The moon's worse.

[Sir T]

The moon's future is a strip mine, probably with robots, and a rubbish dump. There's nothing there worth preserving.

[MahrinSkel]

The moon's future is a strip mine, probably with robots, and a rubbish dump. There's nothing there worth preserving.

The only thing that has been suggested as worth going to the moon for is He3...which is based on scifi pseudoscience that it might be easier to reach viable fusion power with that as a fuel, that we won't achieve fusion power without it, and that the power output will be so immense it will be worth the expense and difficulty of sifting millions of tons of lunar regolith to extract a few pounds of a gas that is damned hard to separate from the *other* trapped hydrogen and helium.

Other than, you've got high levels of titanium and aluminum, which are nice since you don't find much in asteroids...but your best case scenarios for refining and launching them off the moon are more expensive than buying them on earth and spending a few hundred per pound on Starship.

And if you've got great honking chunks of nickel-iron in orbit already, you don't really need that much titanium or aluminum. Every part of an asteroid would be useful, as mass shielding again radiation if nothing else.

--Dave

[Trippy]

It's much much easier to launch things into the rest of the solar system and beyond from the Moon. So if we can figure out a way to create rocket fuel on the Moon with few dependencies on supplies being sent up from Earth that would make making trips to Mars and other places a lot easier.

[MahrinSkel]

It's much much easier to launch things into the rest of the solar system and beyond from the Moon. So if we can figure out a way to create rocket fuel on the Moon with few dependencies on supplies being sent up from Earth that would make making trips to Mars and other places a lot easier.

You know where it's even easier to launch things away from Earth's gravity well? Orbit. You know where you don't find much carbon or nitrogen? The moon. Carbon and nitrogen in the Apollo samples was in the range of 100-230ppm. You're going to need a lot of power and go through a lot of rock.

What are you going to use for an energy source? Solar? For 2 weeks at a time, your refinery does nothing. But in orbit, once you're a ways from Earth, you have 24/7 sunlight.

Your energy cost of bring anything up from the surface of the moon is only 1/10 of getting it off Earth, but if you can't source it locally, your cost of materials is launching it from Earth, then landing it.

Gravity wells are poison to the economics of space exploitation. You want to stay out of them if you can.

--Dave