Space In General

[wfooshee]

I went to a park called (of all things) Rocket Launch View Point.

About 12.5 miles almost due south of 39A, unimpeded view. Free access, and free parking right across the street. There were about 100, maybe 150 people there. We were able to follow the rocket all the way to staging, and we was the boostback burn separating the booster from the second stage. The second stage was a diminishing bright point for about 5 minutes after the launch. About the time we lost it, the re-entry burn occurred, easily visible in the cloudless sky at night. Just a few moments later we followed the landing burn down to the surface. We were far enough that we got the sonic booms and the landing burn noise just as we saw the shutdown. I took video of the landing but it's horrible, pretty much as expected. It kept losing and reacquiring focus, and it would not hold the exposure setting I gave it, so it kept blooming overbright. That was disappointing, but nothing else about the event was.

 

[EngieDiesel]

Well well, look who finally came home. Exactly 50 years to the day that Apollo 17 touched down on the moon, no less.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Mars copter still going.

 

[CodeRedR51]

 

[EngieDiesel]

Considering that Soyuz is supposed to be the cosmonauts' ride home in a few months, the fact that it's leaking coolant is... um, less than ideal for them.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Considering that Soyuz is supposed to be the cosmonauts' ride home in a few months, the fact that it's leaking coolant is... um, less than ideal for them.

They might get a replacement.

 

[EngieDiesel]

They might get a replacement.

I reckon NASA is already arranging for some kind of a backup as well, just in case Vladimir can't be bothered. Of course, he probably wouldn't want the reputational black eye that will occur if Russian spacemen have to hitch a ride home on an American shuttle...

 

[CodeRedR51]

Starship 24 with a single engine static fire just a short while ago.



And Booster 9 is on its way to the launch site for cryo testing. Live streams:




Edit: this is cool.

 

[CodeRedR51]

 

[EngieDiesel]

China has been staring directly at the sun... okay, its orbital solar observatory probe has. The equipment on board will help in studying the formation of coronal mass ejections and the sun's magnetic field.

 

[CodeRedR51]

SpaceX Starlink launch just a short time ago. This is the 15th(!) launch for this booster, and the 3rd launch in 34 hours.

Not long ago they said this couldn't be done, and now we have a booster that has flown 15 times...

 

[Famine]

Not long ago they said this couldn't be done

Who did?

We've landed rockets before - quite famously every Apollo lander descended to the Moon using descent motors - and it's not a new idea in any way. The issues with returning rockets to Earth and landing them are, and remain, the fact they're less efficient and have lower payloads due to having to carry the fuel used to slow them as extra weight on the way up. Nobody at SpaceX denies this, because they're not stupid.

The discussion was always whether it should be done (not could) on that basis; you'd need to use more rockets for the same payloads, burn more fuel, and spend more to repair, refurbish, and prepare the booster for its next launch. It hadn't been done - on this planet - because nobody wanted or needed to do it; either stuff went up and stayed there so the rocket was scaled to the payload, or we sent humans up with it and we got them back in a big glider that doesn't glide.

Nobody that I'm aware of said it couldn't be done (except people retroactively saying "they said it couldn't be done", which appears in the media a lot), they just thought there wasn't any particular advantage to doing so.


What SpaceX has done is show that the break-even point, compared to sending big boosters up and letting them fall into the sea and never recovered or reused, is around three-ish launches rather than around ten-ish that was the prevailing opinion back in 2011. That is the achievement.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Rocket Lab's first launch from Virginia is later this today. So if you are on the east coast, keep an eye on the sky. For everyone else:

 

[CodeRedR51]

 

[EngieDiesel]

Sad as it is, InSight lasted way, way past its projected mission lifetime and sent back almost 6,700 pictures and tons of other data, so it was definitely a job well done.

Still, first thing we need to do when we put boots on Mars is find this little guy and give it a good once-over with a can of compressed air.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Is that a lightsaber? 😄

 

[EngieDiesel]

Is that a lightsaber? 😄

Oh goody! They found my Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modula-TOR! Now I can finally blow up the Earth!

 

[EngieDiesel]

The countries launching missions to the Moon and beyond in 2023

In 2023 several countries will launch missions to the Moon and beyond.

www.bbc.com

It's gonna be pretty busy around the moon for the next few years.

 

[EngieDiesel]

To the surprise of probably no one, NASA is asking around to arrange a backup ride for the ISS crew scheduled to come back in March. Presuming they can overcome the multitude of operational issues that arise from doing so, of course.

On the plus side, they did get to do that spacewalk that was postponed by the leaky Soyuz and installed a new solar array.

 

[EngieDiesel]

The long-defunct weather satellite that first detected the hole in the ozone layer back in the '80s gave South Korea a bit of a scare when it came back down yesterday, triggering a nationwide mobile phone alert. No damage reported, thankfully. Said satellite had been in orbit almost 40 years, though it quit working back in 2005.

And speaking of the ozone layer, it's gradually reversing the damage caused to it. If things stay the way they are the hole over Antarctica will be closed up by 2066, though hopefully we'll keep moving forwards on further reducing pollution and maybe speeding that up a little more.

 

[EngieDiesel]

So Virgin Orbit didn't quite live up to the second part of their name Monday, after the attempted 747-based launch of a rocket stuffed full of satellites suffered a malfunction at some point before actually achieving orbit. No detailed report of official cause has been announced yet, though preliminary findings say that the problem occurred during the firing of the second stage engine after it exited the atmosphere.

Regardless of the cause, the effect is that a lot of expensive satellites are now gone and VO is probably going to be under heavy scrutiny for a while, especially on the financial end of things.

Apparently Branson spent a large chunk of time on their livestream rambling about when Virgin Records signed the Rolling Stones. No, I'm not sure how that's relevant, either

 

[UKMikey]

So Virgin Orbit didn't quite live up to the second part of their name Monday, after the attempted 747-based launch of a rocket stuffed full of satellites suffered a malfunction at some point before actually achieving orbit. No detailed report of official cause has been announced yet, though preliminary findings say that the problem occurred during the firing of the second stage engine after it exited the atmosphere.

Regardless of the cause, the effect is that a lot of expensive satellites are now gone and VO is probably going to be under heavy scrutiny for a while, especially on the financial end of things.

Apparently Branson spent a large chunk of time on their livestream rambling about when Virgin Records signed the Rolling Stones. No, I'm not sure how that's relevant, either

I think he's discovering that you can't always get what you want.

 

[Famine]

I'm very surprised that the World's Worst Criminal could even take the time to run that from his prison cell, serving time for all his sexual perversions.

 

[Ak1504]

 

[ProjectWHaT]

 

[Ak1504]

 

[Touring Mars]

Pandora's Cluster

Astronomers estimate 50,000 sources of near-infrared light are represented in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Their light has travelled through varying distances to reach the telescope’s detectors, representing the vastness of space in a single image. A foreground star in our own galaxy, to the right of the image center, displays Webb’s distinctive diffraction spikes. Bright white sources surrounded by a hazy glow are the galaxies of Pandora’s Cluster, a conglomeration of already-massive clusters of galaxies coming together to form a megacluster. The concentration of mass is so great that the fabric of spacetime is warped by gravity, creating an effect that makes the region of special interest to astronomers: a natural, super-magnifying glass called a “gravitational lens” that they can use to see very distant sources of light beyond the cluster that would otherwise be undetectable, even to Webb.

Link: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/107/01GQQF4KP3GNVB12G6R0V8KSGM

Full res image (186 MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GQQF9WVPFVMCVHRZY54N2TAR.png

⭐Check out the zoomable full-res image here: Zoomable full-res image: https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images/zoomable-pandoras-cluster

 

[sirjim73]

View attachment 1231555

Pandora's Cluster



Link: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/107/01GQQF4KP3GNVB12G6R0V8KSGM

Full res image (186 MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GQQF9WVPFVMCVHRZY54N2TAR.png

⭐Check out the zoomable full-res image here: Zoomable full-res image: https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images/zoomable-pandoras-cluster

Now, there's a box you don't wanna open!

 

[Sprite]

View attachment 1231555

Pandora's Cluster



Link: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/107/01GQQF4KP3GNVB12G6R0V8KSGM

Full res image (186 MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GQQF9WVPFVMCVHRZY54N2TAR.png

⭐Check out the zoomable full-res image here: Zoomable full-res image: https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images/zoomable-pandoras-cluster

Just insane and beautiful and… awesome. I wonder how many civilisations of all states of development are in that shot.

 

[wfooshee]

Why none!!!! Don't you know that we are the only civilization in the entire Universe?!?!
But more seriously, that's a question I ask just looking at the sky from my back yard!