Space In General

[CodeRedR51]

A few people on facebook mentioned sabotage by sniper. Sounds ridiculous to me, but it had to have started from something completely random.

 

[Thematic]

*If* it's malevolence, I'm afraid it would be only the opening. As far as attempts go that is.

 

[Dennisch]

Pluto's moon Charon is a redhead.

 

[Dotini]

A few people on facebook mentioned sabotage by sniper. Sounds ridiculous to me, but it had to have started from something completely random.

Would it be fair to say Elon Musk has a number of rivals, detractors and even enemies?

@Dennisch, that red material may have been deposited there from Pluto.

 

[Dennisch]

@Dennisch, that red material may have been deposited there from Pluto.

Yup. Chemically processed methane that escaped Pluto's atmosphere.

 

[Lain]

Orbital period.

 

[Thematic]

153 h

 

[wfooshee]

 

[Dennisch]

How southern Italy looked like this weekend.

 

[Thematic]

Tunis upper right?

 

[Denur]

Tunis upper right?

Malta

 

[LMSCorvetteGT2]

Pluto's moon Charon is a redhead.

A ugly one at that

A few people on facebook mentioned sabotage by sniper. Sounds ridiculous to me, but it had to have started from something completely random.

I mean there are people who believe Trump is poisoning Clinton literally. So yeah interwebs what are you going to do am I right?

It's engineering space/aircraft and something that isn't even full proof yet with the design as far as I'm aware, so things will and are going to go wrong. That's just how it is until you get it right, but a sniper would have to be one hell of a shot for various reasons. People watch too much TV.

 

[Dotini]

Video presents case for ignition promoted on the strongback preceding the explosion of the Falcon rocket carrying AMOS-6.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Wonder if he submitted that to SpaceX since they were asking for photos/videos.

Edit: According to SpaceX as posted today:

Three weeks ago, SpaceX experienced an anomaly at our Launch Complex 40 (LC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. This resulted in the loss of one of our Falcon 9 rockets and its payload.

The Accident Investigation Team (AIT), composed of SpaceX, the FAA, NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and industry experts, are currently scouring through approximately 3,000 channels of engineering data along with video, audio and imagery. The timeline of the event is extremely short – from first signs of an anomaly to loss of data is about 93 milliseconds or less than 1/10th of a second. The majority of debris from the incident has been recovered, photographed, labeled and catalogued, and is now in a hangar for inspection and use during the investigation.

At this stage of the investigation, preliminary review of the data and debris suggests that a large breach in the cryogenic helium system of the second stage liquid oxygen tank took place. All plausible causes are being tracked in an extensive fault tree and carefully investigated. Through the fault tree and data review process, we have exonerated any connection with last year’s CRS-7 mishap.

 

[Sanji Himura]

China's space station is out of control and is on a crash course for Earth in a natural re-entry.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...crash-tiangong-1-out-of-control-a7319916.html

 

[LMSCorvetteGT2]

Mercury has active tectonic plates, cool stuff

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/the-incredible-shrinking-mercury-is-active-after-all

 

[CodeRedR51]

Elon Musk is going to outline his plan for Mars today at 2:30pm EST.

Preview:



Edit: Live Stream:

 

[Dotini]

Elon Musk

Most rich men are happy making loud noises and stinking smoke with guns or fast cars. But Elon Musk aims for the stars.

With his terrestrial businesses in some trouble and no root cause for his latest AMOS-6 rocket explosion, Mr Musk will be Earth-bound for a time. I think he should take up ocean yacht racing and leave the planets and stars to the pros. A bit of a pechvogel he, with a reach exceeding his grasp?

 

[CodeRedR51]

Most rich men are happy making loud noises and stinking smoke with guns or fast cars. But Elon Musk aims for the stars.

With his terrestrial businesses in some trouble and no root cause for his latest AMOS-6 rocket explosion, Mr Musk will be Earth-bound for a time. I think he should take up ocean yacht racing and leave the planets and stars to the pros. A bit of a pechvogel he, with a reach exceeding his grasp?

The smartest people on this planet are not world leaders. SpaceX is young, they have a whole future to perfect what they do. How many rockets did NASA explode before going to the moon? How many people did we lose with the Space Shuttle? Space is hard, nobody is perfect, let's just be thankful there are people like Musk out there willing to do this stuff. Surely our government isn't going to fund NASA enough for them to do it, so someone has to.

Negativity will get us nowhere.

 

[Dotini]

Negativity will get us nowhere.

Negativity? How about realism? The last time NASA lost a rocket, let alone payload, in a fueling test mishap was 1960, I think. The word is NASA is not happy with the investigation of the AMOS-6 mishap. Manned flight in a Musk rocket is pretty much out of the question for years to come, I presume.

 

[CodeRedR51]

The word is NASA is not happy with the investigation of the AMOS-6 mishap.

Source.

Manned flight in a Musk rocket is pretty much out of the question for years to come, I presume.

I would go tomorrow if offered. Again, space is hard and nobody is perfect. You can't advance without failure. We all know this, especially in the automotive world. People have unfortunate accidents, we learn from them and create better ways to make them safer. Rockets are no different.

 

[Dennisch]

So, he wants them on Mars in 2023. **** YEAH. That's a whole lot sooner than I expected.

I've waited 9 years to see Pluto. I can wait another 7 years for this.

 

[CodeRedR51]

I like the fact that the video of the interplanetary transport is not just some artist's rendering, but is actually using the CAD models for the actual project. What we see is mostly what we'll get. Oh, and the photo he showed of one of the fuel tanks (or oxygen?) for the system made my jaw hit the floor.

 

[Dotini]

Source.

A group called TechX has published a very impressive and sober series of youtube videos analyzing the recent SpaceX mishap. The allegation is within one of the more recent ones.

I would go tomorrow if offered. Again, space is hard and nobody is perfect. You can't advance without failure. We all know this, especially in the automotive world. People have unfortunate accidents, we learn from them and create better ways to make them safer. Rockets are no different.

Elon Musk has promoted himself into bigtime commercial space rocketry, making promises, contracts and schedules to various government agencies which now seem distinctly in danger of going unmet. Root cause analysis of the most recent catastrophic failure is lacking. Musk's idiosyncratic ideas of cost-cutting efficiencies may, I stress may, have led himself down the garden path. He is now a big boy who wears big boy pants. He cannot be held immune from skepticism, questions and criticism as he fails to deliver results. Fueling a rocket is rocket science and engineering which NASA perfected well over five decades ago. If Musk persists in reinventing the wheel to satisfy a personal quest for glory and profit, then maybe he'd better look to less demanding industries.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Musk has immersed himself into bigtime commercial space rocketry, making promises, contracts and schedules to various government agencies which now seem distinctly in danger of going unmet.

Holding launches to investigate a mishap will do that.

Root cause analysis of the most recent catastrophic failure is lacking. Musk's idiosyncratic ideas of cost-cutting efficiencies may, I stress may, have led himself down the garden path.

I'm sure if you have an idea of that caused the accident they would be all ears. They have several agencies working on it, not just their own people. And that includes NASA.

He is now a big boy who wears big boy pants. He cannot be held immune from skepticism, questions and criticism as he fails to deliver results.

Of course not. He gets enough of that through Tesla. But until someone else steps up with such an ambitious plan and actually puts it into motion like he has, he's all we've got. As far as failing, see the last quote below but I will say that the accident last year was a supplier issue and when they discovered that it was, they changed suppliers and implemented new inspection plans. Failure inspires progress, just as I said earlier. I'm sure the same deal will happen with the recent incident.

Fueling a rocket is rocket science and engineering which NASA perfected well over five decades ago.

What if SpaceX could make it better? There's always a better way to do things. It also could have been another supplier issue, nobody knows yet. Hard to track it down when you lose data in 93 milliseconds and most physical evidence is fried to a crisp.

If Musk persists in reinventing the wheel to satisfy a personal quest for glory and profit, then maybe he'd better look to less demanding industries.

SpaceX has come a LONG way in 12 years. If you watched the live stream today, he did a presentation on their history and it was quite impressive to see that they started in 2004 with only a handful of people. Now they can send cargo to the ISS or satellites to geostationary orbit and land the first stage booster on land or on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean. In 12 whole years. That is a monumental amount of progress in short order. Seems to me the guy is getting things done.

 

[Dotini]

Holding launches to investigate a mishap will do that.


I'm sure if you have an idea of that caused the accident they would be all ears. They have several agencies working on it, not just their own people. And that includes NASA.


Of course not. He gets enough of that through Tesla. But until someone else steps up with such an ambitious plan and actually puts it into motion like he has, he's all we've got. As far as failing, see the last quote below but I will say that the accident last year was a supplier issue and when they discovered that it was, they changed suppliers and implemented new inspection plans. Failure inspires progress, just as I said earlier. I'm sure the same deal will happen with the recent incident.


What if SpaceX could make it better? There's always a better way to do things. It also could have been another supplier issue, nobody knows yet. Hard to track it down when you lose data in 93 milliseconds and most physical evidence is fried to a crisp.


SpaceX has come a LONG way in 12 years. If you watched the live stream today, he did a presentation on their history and it was quite impressive to see that they started in 2004 with only a handful of people. Now they can send cargo to the ISS or satellites to geostationary orbit and land the first stage booster on land or on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean. In 12 whole years. That is a monumental amount of progress in short order. Seems to me the guy is getting things done.

Fair enough. He is quite an entertainer in a way. Inspiring hope for an early manned Mars trip is like giving candy to a baby, enticing but not entirely wise.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Fair enough. He is quite an entertainer in a way. Inspiring hope for an early manned Mars trip is like giving candy to a baby, enticing but not entirely wise.

Eh, we'll see. With all the negative going on in the world right now. some glimmer of positive is refreshing. He's providing it.

 

[Dennisch]

Let's throw some numbers and statistics into the discussion.

Rocket launch success rate by the decade.
Source of the number crunching person.

• 1950's 43.6363636%
• 1960's 85.0731707%
• 1970's 93.54318%
• 1980's 95.9765298%
• 1990's 93.9393939%
• 2000's 94.7289157%
• 2010's 94.6808511%

Source. You can see if a launch was a success (S) or a fail (F) in the sixth row.

SpaceX is with the Falcon 9 at a 93% success rate. Not bad.

 

[Dotini]

SpaceX is with the Falcon 9 at a 93% launch success rate. Not bad.

But the Falcon 9/AMOS-6 rocket and payload loss was not even intended to be a launch. It was a fueling test. Mission failure during a fueling test is unheard of since the fifties, and is inexcusable in the extreme, especially on a rocket putatively reusable. The rocket and its fueling should be robust, not fragile. In the howlingly ironic below video he displays hubris of the highest magnitude when he depicts refueling in orbit at the exact same time he cannot seem to master basic fueling 101 on Earth! His video rockets look like the Titanic revisioned by Buck Rogers. Hubris, Chutzpah and Pride are great sins inviting disaster.

 

[Dennisch]

The rocket and its fueling should be robust, not fragile.

....

If it was fragile Spacex would have been out of business a long time ago.
They don't know anything yet. If could be a human error.

Remember how NASA deep-fried Grissom, Chaffee and White on the pad during a simulation? When you're working with highly volatile stuff, you're going to encounter a mishap sooner or later.