The thread for space cadets!

A new rocket start up recently had a 'coming out' party. This company has been operating in stealth mode for years and would not even let its employees tell people they worked there. Well now they're gearing up for their first orbital launch (after 2 failed suborbital attempts) as part of a competition that is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research and Projects Administration (DARPA). There is some grumbling because the original rules were such that competitors had to launch twice in about a month from two separate launch sites. There were also originally 3 contestants, but recently the other 2 dropped out, leaving Astra Space Corp as the only contestant. After that happened, DARPA relaxed the rules such that they'll allow Astra to fly twice from the same space port (Kodiak Alaska) but from two different pads at the site. People are wondering if this rule change would have helped the other 2 dropouts but I think they dropped out because they weren't ready and/or couldn't make the business case close.

astra-launch-879x485.jpg

https://spacenews.com/darpa-makes-last-minute-change-to-launch-competition-rules/


This article from Bloomberg is really good and it has an awesome way of embedding video loops into the story:
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-astra-rocket/
 
elsewhere on the forum , lenses to distort stellar light , to sabotage stellar navigation of ICBM , because no freaking possibility of GPS and similar to guide ICBMs . Hence Beetlejuice . Why don't you people pay attention ?

michael-keaton-beetlejuice-wallpaper-min_900x600-900x580.jpg
 
Actually you just reminded me that I wanted to post about X-Ray galactic navigation!

Yeah so scientists have been experimenting with using cosmic x-ray sources as guide stars for deep space navigation. There is a detector on the ISS right now trying this out, it's pretty cool.
 
Read an article yesterday about accident which happened on Mir space station in 1997. It was really nasty, not much better than events in "Gravity" movie. The 6-members crew (4 Russian cosmonauts, 1 German and 1 American) nearly died after fire on board started because of oxygen pellet failure. After the crew managed to extinguish fire, they had to deal with smoke and subsequent failure of cooling system, which raised the temperature inside to 40 degrees and also poisoned the air with coolant vapor. And after that was fixed, the station collided with the Progress spaceship and got a breach which was also fixed barely in time.

The crew was seriously risking their lives, two guys who did most of the work fixing the problems (Vasily Tsibliev and Alexander Lazutkin) also lost their health and never went to space again. They were grateful to American astronaut Michael Foale who came to replace Jerry Linenger on the station. By contract with NASA, Michael didn't have to help them, but decided to work together with the team and did a lot to save the station.
 
I imagine it was not a hard choice to make to pitch in to save the ship!

The Russian space program has just as much of an exemplary history of fixing up in-space disasters as NASA does, if not more. There's enough material there for several Apollo 13 type movies.

Most work days for astronauts/cosmonauts are pretty normal (putting aside being in space) but all too often they have to do heroic feats that prove their mettle.
 
hobbsyoyo said:
I imagine it was not a hard choice to make to pitch in to save the ship!
Click to expand...
It's an obvious decision in case of critical emergency, of course. But as far as I understood there were also many hours of routine work to stabilize the situation when immediate danger was gone. As it was described in the article, Russian crew essentially turned into a team of plumbers, doing nothing except constantly searching for leaks, fixing the cooling pipes, etc.

And it just occurred to me that filmmakers of Armageddon movie (1998), were probably under impression of all these news about failures on Russian space station, when they made it look like it was falling apart in the movie :)
 
To be fair, Mir really was falling apart by the end, especially once the decision was made to support the ISS.
 
I'm reading a book about the future of space exploration/exploitation that was written circa 2015. The author brought up Obama's asteroid redirect mission (ARM), which was supposed to snag a near-Earth asteroid and bring it to Lunar orbit where it would be visited by astronauts. This is the first author I've come across that really got the benefits of that plan and did not get hung up on the fact that it was not a manned landing mission. A manned landing is still probably a decade in the future at best and may not happen at all given how expensive and protracted those kinds of programs are. ARM on the other hand, was something entirely new, had serious potential for moving the needle on deep space mining technology and asteroid defense and would have been a really exciting PR feat. Can you imagine how cool and inspiring it would have been to lasso a flippin asteroid and then send astronauts out to inspect it, while it orbits the moon?

Unfortunately for ARM, it was neither a Mars or a Moon landing, and so it got no support from either camp and was continuously attacked on misguided and hyperbolic lines until Trump cancelled it. I'm sorry but sometimes space nerds can be stupid. :lol:

Asteroid_Redirect_Mission-Option_B.jpg
 
BBC said:
'Mad' Mike Hughes dies after crash-landing homemade rocket

A US daredevil pilot has been killed during an attempted launch of a homemade rocket in the Californian desert.

"Mad" Mike Hughes, 64, crash-landed his steam-powered rocket shortly after take-off near Barstow on Saturday.

A video on social media shows a rocket being fired into the sky before plummeting to the ground nearby.

Hughes was well-known for his belief that the Earth was flat. He hoped to prove his theory by going to space.

Saturday's launch was reportedly filmed as part of Homemade Astronauts, a new TV series about amateur rocket makers to be aired on the US Science Channel. The project had to be carried out on a tight budget.

With the help of his partner Waldo Stakes, Hughes was trying to reach an altitude of 5,000ft (1,525m) while riding his steam-powered rocket, according to Space.com.

In the video of the launch, a parachute can be seen trailing behind the rocket, apparently deployed too early, seconds after take-off.

In a tweet, the Science Channel said Hughes had died pursuing his dream.

San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said its officers were called to a rocket launch event at around 14:00 local time (22:00 GMT) on Saturday.

The sheriff's office said "a man was pronounced deceased after the rocket crashed in the open desert". Hughes' publicist confirmed to US media outlets that it was the pilot who had been killed.

Darren Shuster, a former representative for Hughes, told TMZ the daredevil was "one-of-a-kind".

"When God made Mike he broke the mould. The man was the real deal and lived to push the edge. He wouldn't have gone out any other way! RIP" he said.

Mad Mike and his assistants built the homemade rocket in his backyard, spending around $18,000 (£14,000).

The rocket uses steam ejected through a nozzle for propulsion.

The daredevil, who lived in Apple Valley, made headlines internationally when he announced his intention to prove his theory that the Earth was flat.

In March last year, Hughes managed an altitude of 1,870ft (570m) before deploying his parachutes and landing with a bump.

Speaking afterwards, Hughes said: "Am I glad I did it? Yeah, I guess. I'll feel it in the morning. I won't be able to get out of bed. At least I can go home and have dinner and see my cats tonight."

He set a Guinness World Record in 2002 for the longest limousine jump - over 31 metres (103 ft) in a Lincoln Town Car stretched limo.
Click to expand...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51602655
 
hobbsyoyo said:
The video is pretty sad. As soon as it took off, the parachute deployed and was ripped off.
Click to expand...
RIP.

He wanted to prove Earth was flat, however, according to his manager he didn't believed it, only said so to get more money for the project.

So, saying Earth is flat is a way to get money in USA. Here it is a way to get a ticket for a psyquiatric.
 
I think it's actually understandable that he went that route. There was no merit of any kind to his test launches, he just wanted to do them. Because they had no merit, traditional funding sources would be closed to him. He could have tried to say he needed money to prove flat earthers wrong but then we already launch astronauts into space so he wouldn't really be 'proving' anything and it probably would have been harder to raise the money. This way he got money from flatearthers and a from trolls with a few bucks they don't mind wasting for lulz.

I guess I'm glad that the 'truth' is coming out so his reputation can be examined with an accurate light cast on it. I used scare quotes b/c I don't know that what his manager said was really true. Also, what was his manager actually managing?
 
Looks like a small spacecraft performing what are called rendezvous and proximity operations - basically a 10-dollar phrase for saying 'flying around and inspecting'. These kinds of operations are usually known in advance and I would not be surprised if this was deployed from the ISS recently and it's just a case of one hand not talking to the other.
 
A vehicle built by Northrop Grumman called the Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) docked with a decommissioned Intelsat geostationary communications satellite. The MEV attached itself by inserting a grabber into the main engine nozzle on the Intelsat bird. It will now act as a propulsion unit and reposition the Intelsat back into the geostationary arc where it will resume service. There is nothing wrong with the Intelsat bird other than the fact that it ran out of fuel.

This is the first time this has ever been done and Northrop is launching a second MEV for a fully commercial mission soon. This current mission was partially paid for by government R&D money. The US has been pursuing this technology for a while and another company (Maxar/SSL) is working on their own variation that is soon to launch. Before Northrup bought out Orbital ATK, it was Orbital that was building the MEV. They used to be partnered with Maxar but they ended up stealing trade secrets through a NASA database they had access to and split off to do their own mission. They got caught for the theft and paid a fine for it but I can't help but wonder how much competitive advantage they gained.

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https://spacenews.com/northrop-grummans-mev-1-servicer-docks-with-intelsat-satellite/
 
Astronomers have found a second moon of the Earth. It's an object about the size of a car and it is caught in a temporary orbit about the Earth. They think it was caught within the last year and will only stay in its temporary orbit for a few months at best before heading back into space. It could be a spent rocket stage and that's what I think it is. One of these days, people are going to go out and snag one of the Apollo stages as it makes a pit stop back in the Earth-Moon system.
 
BBC said:
Telescopes detect 'biggest explosion since Big Bang'

Scientists have detected evidence of a colossal explosion in space - five times bigger than anything observed before.

The huge release of energy is thought to have emanated from a supermassive black hole some 390 million light years from Earth.

The eruption is said to have left a giant dent in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster.

Researchers reported their findings in The Astrophysical Journal.

"I've tried to put this explosion into human terms and it's really, really difficult," co-author Melanie Johnston-Hollitt told BBC News.

"The best I can do is tell you that if this explosion continued to occur over the 240 million years of the outburst - which it probably didn't, but anyway - it'd be like setting off 20 billion, billion megaton TNT explosions every thousandth of a second for the entire 240 million years. So that's incomprehensibly big. Huge."

Scientists had long thought there was something strange about the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which is a giant aggregation containing thousands of individual galaxies intermingled with hot gas (plasma) and dark matter.

US and European X-ray telescopes had spied a curious curved edge to it.

The speculation was that this might be the wall of a cavity that had been sculpted in its plasma by emissions from a gargantuan black hole in one of the core galaxies.

Black holes are famous for gorging on infalling matter - any gas or even stars that happen to get too close. But they can also expel prodigious amounts of material and energy in the form of radio jets that then slam through the local environment.

Scientists at first doubted the black hole explanation, however, because the cavity was so big. It implied the black hole emission would have to have been unimaginably large.

But new low-frequency telescope data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India seems to confirm the theory.

"This object was actually observed with the Chandra X-ray telescope by a previous team and they saw this bubble in the hot X-ray plasma in the centre of this galaxy cluster, and they said, 'Well, this can't be from one of these energetic outputs because it would be enormous; the scale would be unthinkable'. So, they dismissed that possibility," explained Prof Johnston-Hollitt, who directs the MWA.

"But we went back and we observed with low-frequency radio telescopes and discovered that this cavity is filled with radio plasma."

The amount of energy required to create the cavity in Ophiuchus far exceeds the previous record holder - a cluster known by the designation MS 0735+74.

"In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mount St Helens (volcano) in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain," said Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and lead author of the study.

Prof Johnston-Hollitt added: "To give it another dimension; [the cavity] is about one-and-a-half-million light-years across. So the hole that was punched in the surrounding space in the hot X-ray plasma would take light itself one-and-a-half-million years to traverse.

"It's absolutely enormous the amount of energy that we're talking about here."
Click to expand...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51669384
 
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