The thread for space cadets!

Higher stages sound a lot more complicated to recover. Dont know how high and fast stage two reach but you may deal with reentry issues and i doubt it can be landed the same way as stage one. Maybe parachutes?
 
The problem would be breaking and landing I'd imagine. The rest is guidance and we've been doing that with ICBM warheads and capsules for several decades by now.
 
Thorgalaeg said:
Higher stages sound a lot more complicated to recover. Dont know how high and fast stage two reach but you may deal with reentry issues and i doubt it can be landed the same way as stage one. Maybe parachutes?
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Stage two is going the full orbital velocity at the height of whatever payload it dropped off. For LEO, that's about 400 km and 7.8 km/s - GTO missions are much more punishing.

So yes, 2nd stages on a 2 stage rocket are much harder to recover than the first stage. The rocket equation is also working against you in more nefarious ways. A general rule of thumb is you can add about 10 lbs to the first stage and only lose 1 lb of payload. For second stages, the ratio is 1:1. So not only do you have to shed more energy to get S2 back but you have far less margin to do it with.
Michkov said:
The problem would be breaking and landing I'd imagine. The rest is guidance and we've been doing that with ICBM warheads and capsules for several decades by now.
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Yes and no. ICBM's only have to hit within their CEP* to be considered successful. Those can be up to a few kilometers in diameter (though usually less). That's not good enough to land a second stage unless you can drop it in the ocean - and dropping things in the ocean is terrible for re-use.


*It's basically the size of the bulls-eye that ICBMs are designed to land within.

_________________

Lots of news from Russia lately. Head over to SpaceNews.com for more detailed stories, I'll summarize some of them here -

1) It turns out the entire stockpile of second stage and third stage engines for the Proton are defective and must be reworked. The story has been changing continuously with these guys (which is a theme of Russian press releases related to space flight, I regretfully add). At first it was just a minor issue with one engine blamed on an accident. Then it was blamed on a single bad actor who tried to save some money by swapping out solders in a 'few' engines. Now we know that all of the ones they haven't launched already are bad which very likely means lots of people were involved in this quality control failure. I'd even hazard to guess that a few of these made it to launch but I doubt we'll ever know that for sure.

2) On top of that, the maker and markerter of Proton rockets have decided not to develop some of their new models of Proton (the smaller 'light' variants) due to lack of demand. Protons are made domestically by a Russian company and marketed by an America-based firm. I don't know which firm is in the driver's seat on these decisions.

3) A Russian official announced they were looking into reusing some of their 'rocket components' though he did not really mention what parts of the rocket or how they would be saved for re-use.

4) They also cut their contingent of astronauts on the ISS to 2 (was 3) and had to give a bunch of free seats to Boeing (who then sold them to NASA) as the result of a lawsuit over the break up of SeaLaunch.

Basically, kind of bad news all around for Russian spaceflight in general. I still have yet to see any proposals for new exploration missions in the solar system from them either. :(
 
Hopping in here with a random question, maybe someone has a good idea or a comment: I'm looking for a gift for someone, who's into Mars 'n stuff.
Had in mind to e.g. buy the Mars Trilogy, and also stumbled upon a Curiosity Rover 3D puzzle, I came across this this website/company Uwingu , where you can buy a name on a crater on mars. While apparently the international astronomical union doesn't have anything to do with it, so the whole thing is unofficial, they have partnered with Mars One (...which is a scam, right? Or maybe not), and apparently donate the money for various space related things/research.
So I thougth this sounded like a good idea.
Any comments, or maybe a better idea :D?
 
Buying stuff like crater names, stars and so on are just a waste of money - even if they claim to donate some money to space related things. Space research is either financed by state or private companies and only in some very rare cases by fund raising....
As you are in Germany/Netherlands you might consider doing a daytrip to Darmstadt to visit ESA's ESOC (European Space Operations Centre) - There is also the ESTEC (European Space Research and Technology Center) in Schiphol but I am not sure if it can be visited. I've been to neither but spending time with a friend is always a good gift.
Juniqe and probably others have some interesting art related to the space/mars theme.
 
We have also a nice poster on the list :D.
The ESTEC is actually not in Schiphol, but in Katwijk (or Norwijk, or whatever). They have a visitor center, but haven't been there, because it's a bit annoying to reach (first need to go to Leiden, then to Katwijk, will take a half day).
BUT it might be a good idea to have a look at their website, if anything is coming up.
Thanks for the pointer :), don't know how I could forget about this.
 
I would say that buying a chance to name something in space is pretty sketch at best. If the charity or website isn't working under actual astronomical naming authorities then it has pretty much 0 chance of being accepted by anyone but you and the person selling you the naming right. Even with the blessing of a naming authority I doubt any name a random person pays for the rights to will stick. I am no expert in this by any means.

I'm not sure if Mars One is truly a scam or just run by a man with a dream that far outstretches his ability to competently pull it off. I'm leaning more toward scam though given the enormous amount of shade that group has. They've lied about everything they've done so far like the number of potential recruits that signed up, the amount and type of screenings these recruits received, the training they received, etc. Everything technically-oriented that they've published about the effort has been shredded by experts and scientists and their response to the criticism was to personally attack the critics.

It's quite sad because a lot of people have been duped into giving up money, their time and their aspirations to a company that can't actually accomplish what they claim.
 
Watching a bunch of guys slowly dying would be a secure success in TV. Specially if there are some guest celebrities.
 
they wouldn't like it there .
 
Best contender for an earth-like planet so far found. El Reg or source pdf:

the planet is well within the goldilocks zone, close enough to its sun to be warm enough for liquid water to exist on the surface and not so far that its frozen.

In addition the star it orbits is very stable. Ditmann said that many red dwarf stars are quite volatile and send out regular bursts of radiation that can strip away a planet's atmosphere and prove fatal for any life on the surface. But this planet's star is quiet and the team hasn't seen any flares while it has been observed.

The planet, though close to Earth's size, is seven times its mass. That indicates that the planet has a rocky surface and a dense iron core, which could means it could have a viable magnetosphere like Earth's that would protect it from cosmic radiation.

Finally, the planet's circular orbit around its sun is very stable. This damps down on climate extremes and would make LHS 1140 a more stable place where life could develop.

There is, however, a catch. Its sun's development means that around 40 million years ago the star was larger and the extra heat would put the planet outside of the goldilocks zone.
...
LHS 1140 is 40 light years away, so there's no way to get there and check it out using currently available transport technology.

The next step is to get more telescope time to examine the planet, using telescopes high in the mountains of Chile. Sadly next year there will only be one opportunity for a viewing, but other telescopes may be able to help to find out more.
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So this is the picture you get when you orbit the Moon. My question, why do some of the impacts have lines running away from them? Did they fracture the outer crust?
 
Melted rock splatters.
 
The white streaks are ejected matter from the impact, I'm not sure why some have it and others dont. May be age related or composition of the impactor. The big black splotches are where the young crust was punctured, forming a lava lake early in the moons life.
 
The size of the impactor, the angle and speed it struck at and the composition of the material it was made out of and hit are all factors in impact ray formation. But you're right, that's exactly what those lines are - ray systems caused by secondary impacts thrown up as ejecta from the main event. The crater Tycho on the lower left quadrant of the near side of the moon has a particularly striking ray system.

I don't think that puncturing the crust is particularly favorable to ray formation as the crater and adjacent areas would immediately begin filling with lava (which formed the black mare of the near side) which would hide ray systems if not erase them entirely.
 
Thorgalaeg said:
Watching a bunch of guys slowly dying would be a secure success in TV. Specially if there are some guest celebrities.
Click to expand...
If it got so far as sending people into space, yeah. It would also be a pretty big blow to the entire space industry on many levels. On the other hand, sometimes the public shows a striking amount of resolve and determination to press forward in the face of catastrophes so maybe it would have the opposite effect in the long run. No one can really know.

What we can know is that people have died and will continue to die in higher numbers than the general population in the pursuit of a space fairing civilization.

I regret to realize that if we are ever to leave this cradle it must be thus.
 
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