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The Spaceflight Thread

Started by Hog, October 26, 2017, 06:07:02 AM

Gd5150

Best angle yet. One continuous shot from launch to landing.

https://youtu.be/7JcJcZWke1c

Gd5150

Serious telephoto lens on this one. Shot with a Meade 8” LX200 telescope. 2000mm f/8 focal length lens. F/6.3 reducer.  Computer controlled  tracking via Teletrak. Amazing.

https://youtu.be/z5K7HKFkZ8o

Uncle Duke

Quote from: Gd5150 on February 15, 2018, 09:14:42 PM
Best angle yet. One continuous shot from launch to landing.

https://youtu.be/7JcJcZWke1c

Anyone know the distance from the launch pad to the (water?) tower to the left of the pad?

Gd5150

Looks about 1/2 mile from 39a to the Atlantic Ocean.


albrecht

Quote from: Gd5150 on February 15, 2018, 09:21:12 PM
Serious telephoto lens on this one. Shot with a Meade 8” LX200 telescope. 2000mm f/8 focal length lens. F/6.3 reducer.  Computer controlled  tracking via Teletrak. Amazing.

https://youtu.be/z5K7HKFkZ8o
Awesome. The guy's comments at the end pretty much sum it up....

Uncle Duke

Quote from: Gd5150 on February 15, 2018, 09:39:27 PM
Looks about 1/2 mile from 39a to the Atlantic Ocean.



Seeing the tower that close (relatively) to the launch pad gives me a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach contemplating the modeling and vibrational analysis that went into its design knowing the immense power of the rocket at launch.  Terms like "spring constants" and "dampening ratios" come back to mind......

Jackstar

Quote from: Uncle Duke on February 15, 2018, 11:03:54 PM
a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach [...] immense power of the rocket at launch

A) "That's what she said."

B) What can rockets accomplish that anti-gravity cannot? Asking for a friend.

Dr. MD MD

Quote from: Jackstar on February 15, 2018, 11:29:55 PM
A) "That's what she said."

B) What can rockets accomplish that anti-gravity cannot? Asking for a friend.

You're asking someone who doesn't even think accurate memory is possible. How could he ever know of anti-gravity let alone rockets? He's just waiting for them to tell him what to think next. ;)

albrecht

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/three-years-of-sls-development-could-buy-86-falcon-heavy-launches/
"
The Falcon Heavy is an absurdly low-cost heavy lift rocket The new SpaceX rocket seriously undercuts its competitors."

Hog

The Core Stage consists of five major structural elements, the forward skirt, the liquid oxygen (LOX) tank, the intertank, the liquid hydrogen (LH2) tank, and the engine section.

New NASA graphic of the Core Stage(CS) of SLS(Space Launch System)


Just a few shots:

SLS Block-1 will look like this:



Here is the Intertank STA(Structural Test Article) just before being loaded onto the newly jumboised Pegasus barge and floated from Michoud to the Marshal Space Flight Center for structural testing.  The intertank is the portion of the core stage that connects the LOX(Liquid Oxygen) and LH2(Liquid Hydrogen) tanks together.  From Feb 22, 2018



And the ready for structural testing LOX STA(Liquid Oxygen Structural Test Article) built at Michoud Assembly Facility(MAF-where the Saturn-V was assembled and where Space Shuttle External Tanks were built) The tank has just been primered, the actual flight tanks will also be covered with Spray On Foam Insulation(SOFI)


Here is a massive LH2 tank in Cell D of the MAF. This is an actual flight tank.


Building 110 at Michoud, many tanks "In Process"


And the newly built 221 foot structural test stand (4693) where the LH2 tanks will be/have been tested.  This test stand can apply millions of pounds of pull/push force and up to 340,000 pounds of shearing forces

and another


And Test Stand 4697 which tests the LOX tanks it's 85 feet tall and can exert over 9,000,000 pounds of push/pull forces and 340,000 pound shear stresses


Here is the Core Stage Forward Skirt Section.  Lots of electronics in this section


and the electronics that occupy the inside of the Forward Skirt


Here is the Core Stage Engine Section.  This is where the 4 RS25 (Space Shuttle Main Engines) will reside.  They will produce over 2 million pounds of thrust on their own, from liftoff to MECO some 8-1/2 minutes later. 2 5 segment Solid Rocket Boosters will provide an additional 3.6 million pounds of thrust each(7.2 million pounds for the pair) for the first just over 2 minutes of flight, then they will jettison in a similar manner to the Space Shuttle stack. 
The Engine Section of the Core Stage is the critical path of the core stage and is the most complicated section. Dozens of people are working this section 24 hours a day.


Areas of exposed cork applied to the outside of the Engine Section, the cork is a cheap ablative material that is used as all this hardware is "Expendable".  The cork protects the Core Stage Engine Section from radiant and convective heat generated by the 2 Solid Rocket Boosters and the 4 RS-25s themselves.


Here is the Boat Tail Assembly.  It is the very bottom part of the Core Stages Engine Section


I cant wait for a Corse Stage to ride Pegasus to Stennis Space Center where the Core Stage will be installed into the B-1 test stand for the SLS CS-1 Green-Run hotfire with 4 flight certified engines running all at once.  The B-1/B-2 stand is the same stand where the 1st stage, the S1-C was Green-Run with all 5 F-1 engines burning at once, producing 7.6 million pounds of thrust.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YTaG91KD5s

peace
Hog

Hog

 The video, Without Limits from the contractors with a workforce of 15,000 people working on SLS..

Exploration Mission #1.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU50_9LkOic

New EM-1 flight patch released.


peace
Hog

Hog

Some closeup shots of the Falcon Heavy launch featuring the "raibirds" that spray hundreds of thousands of gallons of water onto the pad just after the rocket launches.  This is to keep aucoustic energy from reflecting off of the pad surface and up towards the launcher and its payload thus preventing damage. Space Explorations Falcon Heavy launched from Kennedy SPace Centers Launch Complex 39-A, the same pad where Apollo and STS missions launched from.

During STS-1 the first launch of teh SPace Shuttle, not enough water was deluged onto the pad resulting in damage to the Orbiter structure and its heat shield.  This was corrected for STS-2.
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And here are a couple pics of observatories detecting the Tesla moving through space.

The Tesla Roadster & Starman have been spotted at a record distance of 3.7 mln km on Feb 19 (nearly magnitude 20) near globular star cluster NGC 5694. (watch in the box for the moving dot)




A sooty booster after 2 flights


Closeup of titanium grid fin.



peace
Hog




Juan

Fake news. Everybody knows when you mix oxygen and hydrogen you get water not fire. Somebody tell Rosie.

Hog

Quote from: Juan on March 06, 2018, 04:02:29 PM
Fake news. Everybody knows when you mix oxygen and hydrogen you get water not fire. Somebody tell Rosie.
The Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy burn a mix of RP-1(high grade kerosene) and Liquid Oxygen.  The core stage of SLS does burn Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen, which does indeed make water.

peace
Hog

ItsOver

Quote from: albrecht on February 16, 2018, 12:44:58 PM
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/three-years-of-sls-development-could-buy-86-falcon-heavy-launches/
"
The Falcon Heavy is an absurdly low-cost heavy lift rocket The new SpaceX rocket seriously undercuts its competitors."
To use the usual cliche, "game-changing."  I'm glad Musk is really pushing the boundaries.

Gd5150

Quote from: ItsOver on March 12, 2018, 11:18:56 AM
To use the usual cliche, "game-changing."  I'm glad Musk is really pushing the boundaries.

A testament to how much better the private sector does things.

The private sector (who must utilize efficiency, creativity, and productivity to survive)

vs

The government (who must utilize inefficiency, cost overruns, mandatory budget increases, bloated administration, polical kickbacks, union kickbacks) to survive.

But single payer government healthcrap will be great!

Hog

Without government space, there would be no private space.  NASA does things that benefit everyone, private companies serve themselves.

peace
Hog

chefist

Quote from: Hog on March 13, 2018, 09:50:02 AM
Without government space, there would be no private space.  NASA does things that benefit everyone, private companies serve themselves.

peace
Hog

;D



Dr. MD MD

Quote from: albrecht on March 15, 2018, 10:50:17 AM
Sorta weird:
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2018/03/13/scott-kelly-astronaut-twins-different-dna/

I dropped a vid on this in random political I think. I guess Clarke/Kubrick were right. Space is the next phase of our evolution.

albrecht

Quote from: Dr. MD MD on March 15, 2018, 12:28:00 PM
I dropped a vid on this in random political I think. I guess Clarke/Kubrick were right. Space is the next phase of our evolution.
Maybe so:
"Scott’s telomeres (endcaps of chromosomes that shorten as one ages) actually became significantly longer in space,” NASA researchers"

So you not only get taller but get longer life by going to space?

Dr. MD MD

Quote from: albrecht on March 15, 2018, 01:35:38 PM
Maybe so:
"Scott’s telomeres (endcaps of chromosomes that shorten as one ages) actually became significantly longer in space,” NASA researchers"

So you not only get taller but get longer life by going to space?

Possibly. It's intriguing.

Hog

On October 10 2018 there was an emergency abort of the Russian Soyuz FG rocket that was carrying the Soyuz 10 spacecraft to orbit with Cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin Astronaut Nick Hague to the International Space Station as part of crew rotation for Expedition 57. See first pic
The crew apparently experienced 7 gs of force as the emergency separation motors ignited, 2 motors fire immediately and then a second set ignite 0.32 seconds later in order to reduce the initial G loading experienced by the crew. 

Pic #2 diagram of Soyuz core stage and 4 boosters

Apparently one of the boosters separated incorrectly and recontacted the core stage and punctured a fuel tank, this caused and explosion and the emergency system enabled which causes the Soyuz capsule to separate from the Soyuz rocket.

Pic#3 Soyuz just before launch from its launch pad

Pic#4  A picture of a Soyuz launch vehicle just after staging, you can see the 4 boosters that have been dropped and they form a shape which is referred to as "Korolev's Cross".


Pic#5  This shows the 3 parts of the Soyuz space vehicle. See picture #7 for what the Orbital Module looks like after it comes back to Earth without a parachute from an altitude of 93 kilometers.approx 57 miles.

All three of those sections meet up with the ISS, the Canadarm-2 reaches out and "grapples" the Soyuz and berths it to the ISS.  The Soyuz stays with the ISS during the entire time the crew that rode it to space is at ISS.  IOW  Usually, if you ride up on a Soyuz, you will go home on the very same Soyuz.  This is how the Soyuz system is like an emergency lifeboat in case the crew needs to shelter or evacuate from the ISS.  The Soyuz "seats" actually more of a "couch" are custom formed for each cosmo-astro-naut as the landing forces are pretty high on Soyuz.  When its time for crew to return to Earth, the Soyuz leaves the, performs its de orbit burn and Earths gravity begins to bring Soyuz to Earth.  The instrumentation/service module and orbital modules separate from the descent module, experiences all the heat from that crazy re entry ride, then once slowed down it pops its parachutes and usually lands somewhere in the Khazak desert.  Just before it touches down, at an altitude of 10-12 feet, a series of retrorockets fire and help to "soften" the hit of landing.


Currently there are 3 crew aboard ISS, they are due to come home in December.  Each Soyuz capsule is limited in its length of service docked to the ISS in space because its fuels begin to degrade after a certain amount of time.  IIRC the limit is approx. 200 days or so.

Soyuz MS-11 will be launched atop another Soyuz FG rocket in December. Russian Commander Oleg Kononenko, Canadian CSA astronaut David Saint-Jacques and American NASA astronaut Anne McClain are scheduled to launch aboard Soyuz MS-11.  No official flight has been announced yet, though my back door sources tell me that Soyuz will with humans again in December.  A Soyuz rocket has launched successfully last week for a satellite, and another Soyuz will launch next week to launch another satellite.  These rockets are Soyuz rockets which are similar to the human rated Soyuz FG, though the boosters(that failed) are common between the human rated rocket and the non human rated rocket.

Here is the real accident with some visual techniques applied
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=rROPB0QrZVY

Here is a SIMULATION of the Soyuz abort scenario for MS-10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=ocn7aLqEq-Q


Pic #6 is a pic of the failed Soyuz FG booster on the ground post flight.

Pic #7  The Soyuz Orbital Module after it return ballistically to Earth after attaining an altitude of 03kms/57miles


Within the next year both of the Commercial Crew contractors which are Boeing with their Starliner/CST-100 to be launched atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas-5 rocket and the Space X Dragon-2 capsule which is the newest version of the Space-X capsule, this one being rated to carry humans.  Drangon-2 will use a human rated Falcon-9 rocket to lift Dragon to to the ISS.  Both capsules will deliver crews to ISS, stay on station for 5-12 months and bring the crew home.  Either the Starliner or teh Dragon-2, when launched, will end the embarrassingly long amount of time that has elapsed since the USA has NOT had the capability to launch humans into space and have relied on Russians to take our crew to our own space station at the cost of US$83 million per passenger.  The last launch of humans from Earth to space occurred on July 21, 2018.  2659 days or  7 years, 3 months, 10 days have elapsed since STS-135 launched from KSC in Florida carrying 4 people to the ISS.

SLS/Orion is still plugging along, probably not going to launch Exploration Mission #1 which is a crewless first flight or Orion which will fly to the Moon and back in order to test new systems.  The driving force is the Core Stage of the SLS rocket.

Speaking of SLS, there is a RS-25 engine test today at Stennis Space Center between 2-3pm CDT Central Daylight Time.
And yes, the RS-25 engine test will be shown on NASA-TV.  I justy checked.  NASA.gov

peace
Hog

Hog

#1  An excellent pic of a nominal booster separation
#2  A booster on the ground after use
#3  The boosters just after Booster Sep and the formation known as Korolevs Cross. Sergei Korolev  was the famed Soviet rocket designer that was the mind behind many Soviet rocket designs.  He died in 1966 following surgery, and with him many believed that any hope of the Soviets beating the Americans to the Moon died with him.
#4 3 parts of the orbital part of the Soyuz space vehicle a)Orbital Module, b) Descent Module-this is the capsule that has the heat shield and life support for 3 humans, c)Instrumentation and Service Module
#5  This is the jettisoned Orbital Module after hitting the ground from an altitude of 93kms/57 miles.  It was separated from the Descent Module as part of the Abort of MS-10, then the Descent Module after free falling for a while would have popped its parachutes, then at about 10-12 feet the landing retro-rockets fire in order to "soften" the g loading of hitting the ground.  These retro-rockets are the exact ones that Sandra Bullock uses to propel herself towards the Chinese space station in the movie GRAVITY.

peace
Hog


Hog

Soyuz MS-10 will now launch on December 3, 2018, moved up almost 3 weeks from it original-late December launch.

The first crewed launch since the failed October 11th MS-10 launch had to be terminated.  Shortly after staging, where the rocket boosters now depleted are supposed to fall away allowing the core stage of the rocket continue on to orbit. One of the boosters apparently contacted the stage causing an explosion which prompted the Launch Escape System(LES) to cause the Soyuz descent capsule to be boosted a safe distance away from the failing rocket before it formed a normal parachute landing.

Soyuz-9 has now been docked to ISS since June 28 2018, its crew of 3 are now scheduled to leave ISS on December 20 2018 leaving the ISS with a crew of 3 until Soyuz 12 launches with 3 crew in April 2019.  Soyuz 9 is the capsule that set off the ISSs leak detectors with the leak being located in the Soyuz-9 capsule itself.  The leak was fixed.  The hole appeared to have been drilled purposefully, in error or otherwise, that's still being investigated.

It looks as though they have avoided de crewing the ISS for any amount of time.  The ISS has been on orbits for 7285 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes since November 20 1998 orbiting some 134,600 orbits of the Earth.
It has been crewed now for 6572 days(just under 18 years), 11 months, 28 days, 8 hours 16 minutes

The ISS is currently funded by all ISS participants to at least 2024 with the possibility of it seeing 2028.

peace
Hog



Hog

Here's a pic of the Orion Service Module for EM-1.  If this mission were crewed, this is where the crew would live and eat.  EM-1 is an uncrewed test mission however.
This was part of the European SPace Agencies effort for SLS, it will be flown out of Bremmen Germany from the Airbus facility and will arrive at KSC the next day on November 6 2018.

It will be powered by:
1 Space Shuttle Orbital Maneuvering System providing  26.6 kN
8 490 N Aerojet R-4D-11 Auxiliary Thrusters providing 3.92 kN
24 220 N Airbus Reaction Control System Engines in six pods of four

Fuel capacity   9,000 kg in four 2000 l propellant tanks, 2 mixed oxides of nitrogen (MON) and 2 monomethyl hydrazine (MMH)

Power generation   11.2 kW from 4 x 7.375 m wings each containing 3 solar panels

Consumables   240 kg of water in four tanks, 90 kg of oxygen in three tanks, 30 kg of nitrogen in one tank

peace
Hog

Hog

The European Service Module arrived at Kennedy Space Center from Bremmen Germany on an Antonov An-124 aircraft on 6 November 2018 at 11:35 EST, local time.

The service module now must be tested and intergrated with the Orion capsule before being stacked atop the first SLS rocket.

peace
Hog

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