SpaceX and other space news updates

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TexAgs91
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ABATTBQ11 said:


Think Interstellar. Cooper experiences time dilation on Miller's planet, and time passes differently for him than Romilly in orbit because of the difference in gravity. While that was not technically correct because the difference was too extreme, it is a real phenomenon, and someone in this black hole or its gravity would be experiencing time very differently relative to us outside it. While we see the black hole as being 13 billion years old, it may have only experienced a couple hundred million years of time in its own frame of reference. The question is how it got so big in that little time.
Well without involving general relativity, that is the case. Because of its distance, we're seeing the 13 billion year old black hole as it was when it was no more than a couple hundred million years old.

But yes, factoring in general relativity, if you're on the event horizon of this black hole, looking out at the rest of the universe, it's already ended since time stops at the event horizon, although you don't view it that way.
No, I don't care what CNN or MSNBC said this time
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Leonard H. Stringfield
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Sea Speed said:

The universe is an absolute mind**** and if I think about it too much I start become a nihilist and I dont like that.
There is a plethora of mind-blowing stuff on the horizon.
"Roswell, 1947, there was a uap (ufo) that crashed, in fact there were 2 uaps, 1 crashed and one flew away and the other one did not and was recovered by the US GOVERNMENT."
- Lue Elizondo-former director of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program-August 20, 2024

Are A&M's core values..optional? Who has the POWER to determine that? Are certain departments exempt? Why?

Farsight Institute, Atlanta, GA

NASAg03
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Really interesting article posted late last week from Eric Berger. Swamp's gonna swamp.
Quote:

With this plan, Griffin is essentially returning NASA to the Constellation Program that Griffin helped create in 2005 and 2006. The spacecraft (Orion) is the same, and the rocket (SLS Block II instead of Ares V) is similar. The proposed lunar lander looks somewhat like the Altair lunar lander. He is trying to put the band back together, relying on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to get astronauts back to the Moon in a quick and efficient manner.

The problem with Griffin's plan is that it failed miserably 15 years ago. The independent Augustine Commission, which reviewed NASA's human spaceflight plans in 2009, found that "[t]he US human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practices of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources." And that is probably putting it politely.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/former-nasa-administrator-hates-artemis-wants-to-party-like-its-2008
Mike Shaw - Class of '03
nortex97
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Turrible.
TexAgs91
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NASAg03 said:

Really interesting article posted late last week from Eric Berger. Swamp's gonna swamp.
Quote:

With this plan, Griffin is essentially returning NASA to the Constellation Program that Griffin helped create in 2005 and 2006. The spacecraft (Orion) is the same, and the rocket (SLS Block II instead of Ares V) is similar. The proposed lunar lander looks somewhat like the Altair lunar lander. He is trying to put the band back together, relying on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to get astronauts back to the Moon in a quick and efficient manner.

The problem with Griffin's plan is that it failed miserably 15 years ago. The independent Augustine Commission, which reviewed NASA's human spaceflight plans in 2009, found that "[t]he US human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practices of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources." And that is probably putting it politely.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/former-nasa-administrator-hates-artemis-wants-to-party-like-its-2008
Griffin's plan didn't fail miserably. The Bush admin and congress failed to support it, causing it to be delayed and go over budget. It was a good plan at the time, but that was 1-2 generations of rocket technology ago. Now Starship is the obvious choice.

Griffin tossed a few coins to some commercial startups on the off chance they might be successful. Congrats. SpaceX was wildly successful.
No, I don't care what CNN or MSNBC said this time
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will25u
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Tumbled 90 degrees or so... Womp Womp... Neat photo though.

Sea Speed
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Must have been a pretty bad solar wind storm.
Kansas Kid
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Sea Speed said:

Must have been a pretty bad solar wind storm.

It was a malfunctioning rocket that caused it to have horizontal velocity above design.
will25u
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Sea Speed
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Kansas Kid said:

Sea Speed said:

Must have been a pretty bad solar wind storm.

It was a malfunctioning rocket that caused it to have horizontal velocity above design.


Got one.
Mathguy64
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Kansas Kid said:

Sea Speed said:

Must have been a pretty bad solar wind storm.

It was a malfunctioning rocket that caused it to have horizontal velocity above design.


I looks to have landed on a fairly decent incline. I'm sure that didn't help.
TexAgs91
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No, I don't care what CNN or MSNBC said this time
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Kansas Kid
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Mathguy64 said:

Kansas Kid said:

Sea Speed said:

Must have been a pretty bad solar wind storm.

It was a malfunctioning rocket that caused it to have horizontal velocity above design.


I looks to have landed on a fairly decent incline. I'm sure that didn't help.

Agreed.

A decent summary of the outcome and main cause of the failure.
It seems one of the two big thrusters on Slim (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) stopped working during the descent.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68091389.amp

ABATTBQ11
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Looks like the Ingenuity helicopter has a damaged blade from potentially a crash landing. Considering the engineering challenges and expected life, it was wildly successful.
Kansas Kid
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ABATTBQ11 said:

Looks like the Ingenuity helicopter has a damaged blade from potentially a crash landing. Considering the engineering challenges and expected life, it was wildly successful.

It cost $80mm to build and an estimated $5mm to fly. It flew for about. 2 hours total. $42.5mm per flight hour. Makes those G5s look cheap to fly.

It was impressive what it accomplished.
Leonard H. Stringfield
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I suspect there is much "uneasiness" within NASA these days.
"Roswell, 1947, there was a uap (ufo) that crashed, in fact there were 2 uaps, 1 crashed and one flew away and the other one did not and was recovered by the US GOVERNMENT."
- Lue Elizondo-former director of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program-August 20, 2024

Are A&M's core values..optional? Who has the POWER to determine that? Are certain departments exempt? Why?

Farsight Institute, Atlanta, GA

Mathguy64
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Ingenuity was a massive success for a proof of concept.

They were hoping for 5 flights and got 72 over a 3 year period. The hardware had to deal with Martian winters.

This stuff, the rovers, the unmanned spacecraft is all what NASA and JPL does best.

They land VW sized rovers on Mars with a pocket helicopter. No one else can manage to land on the moon right now.
jkag89
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Leonard H. Stringfield said:

I suspect there is much "uneasiness" within NASA these days.
Why? And in what way?
Kansas Kid
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Hey, the Japanese landed on Mars. They just landed upside down
Decay
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It's still hard to believe they flew on Mars. The air is so thin there. It's at the limits of physics to fly anything aeronautically there.
bmks270
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Mathguy64 said:

Ingenuity was a massive success for a proof of concept.

They were hoping for 5 flights and got 72 over a 3 year period. The hardware had to deal with Martian winters.

This stuff, the rovers, the unmanned spacecraft is all what NASA and JPL does best.

They land VW sized rovers on Mars with a pocket helicopter. No one else can manage to land on the moon right now.


Why is their moon mission such a mess? Contractors? NASA also takes little risks. But their R&D work over their history is quite impressive. Paved the way for the current private space market that's opened up now.
Mathguy64
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bmks270 said:

Mathguy64 said:

Ingenuity was a massive success for a proof of concept.

They were hoping for 5 flights and got 72 over a 3 year period. The hardware had to deal with Martian winters.

This stuff, the rovers, the unmanned spacecraft is all what NASA and JPL does best.

They land VW sized rovers on Mars with a pocket helicopter. No one else can manage to land on the moon right now.


Why is their moon mission such a mess? Contractors? NASA also takes little risks. But their R&D work over their history is quite impressive. Paved the way for the current private space market that's opened up now.
I don't have the answer as to why but it's a definite dichotomy.

The unmanned stuff is definitely miles away from the manned stuff. And they do take risks there. Just think of the Mars rovers. They tried the car bag balloon system and it worked. They swapped over to the skyhook system and it worked. The Dawn/Ceres mission with new propulsion tech worked so well they kept moving to a third site. Osiris-REX worked so well they sent the unit to another object after the sample drop off. Hell, Voyagers are still returning signals.

Is this because of NASA? Is it really JPL? Is it because it's unmanned and not a bloated contracter mess? It's an order of magnitude simpler and that helps. And they have decades of successes to grow off of.
Kansas Kid
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Mathguy64 said:

bmks270 said:

Mathguy64 said:

Ingenuity was a massive success for a proof of concept.

They were hoping for 5 flights and got 72 over a 3 year period. The hardware had to deal with Martian winters.

This stuff, the rovers, the unmanned spacecraft is all what NASA and JPL does best.

They land VW sized rovers on Mars with a pocket helicopter. No one else can manage to land on the moon right now.


Why is their moon mission such a mess? Contractors? NASA also takes little risks. But their R&D work over their history is quite impressive. Paved the way for the current private space market that's opened up now.
I don't have the answer as to why but it's a definite dichotomy.

The unmanned stuff is definitely miles away from the manned stuff. And they do take risks there. Just think of the Mars rovers. They tried the car bag balloon system and it worked. They swapped over to the skyhook system and it worked. The Dawn/Ceres mission with new propulsion tech worked so well they kept moving to a third site. Osiris-REX worked so well they sent the unit to another object after the sample drop off. Hell, Voyagers are still returning signals.

Is this because of NASA? Is it really JPL? Is it because it's unmanned and not a bloated contracter mess? It's an order of magnitude simpler and that helps. And they have decades of successes to grow off of.

Those are great successes but they have had spectacular failures in unmanned as well. I especially liked the Climate orbiter failure because they confused metric and imperial units. Eventually, this country will get smart and go all metric like essentially the rest of the world but probably not in my lifetime.
TexAgs91
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Kansas Kid said:

Mathguy64 said:

bmks270 said:

Mathguy64 said:

Ingenuity was a massive success for a proof of concept.

They were hoping for 5 flights and got 72 over a 3 year period. The hardware had to deal with Martian winters.

This stuff, the rovers, the unmanned spacecraft is all what NASA and JPL does best.

They land VW sized rovers on Mars with a pocket helicopter. No one else can manage to land on the moon right now.


Why is their moon mission such a mess? Contractors? NASA also takes little risks. But their R&D work over their history is quite impressive. Paved the way for the current private space market that's opened up now.
I don't have the answer as to why but it's a definite dichotomy.

The unmanned stuff is definitely miles away from the manned stuff. And they do take risks there. Just think of the Mars rovers. They tried the car bag balloon system and it worked. They swapped over to the skyhook system and it worked. The Dawn/Ceres mission with new propulsion tech worked so well they kept moving to a third site. Osiris-REX worked so well they sent the unit to another object after the sample drop off. Hell, Voyagers are still returning signals.

Is this because of NASA? Is it really JPL? Is it because it's unmanned and not a bloated contracter mess? It's an order of magnitude simpler and that helps. And they have decades of successes to grow off of.

Those are great successes but they have had spectacular failures in unmanned as well. I especially liked the Climate orbiter failure because they confused metric and imperial units. Eventually, this country will get smart and go all metric like essentially the rest of the world but probably not in my lifetime.
I remember there was a run of bad luck in the 90s with multiple space probes including the Climate orbiter. That's when "Better, Faster, Cheaper" became the mantra. Those 3 words apparently spawned numerous successes since then.
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nortex97
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TexAgs91 said:

NASAg03 said:

Really interesting article posted late last week from Eric Berger. Swamp's gonna swamp.
Quote:

With this plan, Griffin is essentially returning NASA to the Constellation Program that Griffin helped create in 2005 and 2006. The spacecraft (Orion) is the same, and the rocket (SLS Block II instead of Ares V) is similar. The proposed lunar lander looks somewhat like the Altair lunar lander. He is trying to put the band back together, relying on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to get astronauts back to the Moon in a quick and efficient manner.

The problem with Griffin's plan is that it failed miserably 15 years ago. The independent Augustine Commission, which reviewed NASA's human spaceflight plans in 2009, found that "[t]he US human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practices of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources." And that is probably putting it politely.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/former-nasa-administrator-hates-artemis-wants-to-party-like-its-2008
Griffin's plan didn't fail miserably. The Bush admin and congress failed to support it, causing it to be delayed and go over budget. It was a good plan at the time, but that was 1-2 generations of rocket technology ago. Now Starship is the obvious choice.

Griffin tossed a few coins to some commercial startups on the off chance they might be successful. Congrats. SpaceX was wildly successful.


Skip to around 8:20. Griffin does seem to have some animus toward commercial launches/partnership.

I agree with him (and Berger and Elon) about how pathetic Griffin's hand waiving 'plan' really would be:

Quote:

There are some huge fictions in Griffin's plan. One is that there would be two SLS Block II rockets ready to launch in 2029. Recall that it took 12 years and $30 billion to develop the Block I version of the rocket. The earliest NASA expects an interim version, Block 1B, to be ready is 2028. But magically, NASA will have two builds of the more advanced Block II rocket (with more powerful side-mounted boosters) ready by 2029.

Then there is the lunar lander. It has not been designed. It is not funded. And if it were built through the cost-plus acquisition strategy outlined by Griffin, it undoubtedly would cost $10 to $20 billion and take a decade based on past performance. A reasonable estimate of Griffin's plan, based on contractor performance with Orion (in development since 2005) and the SLS rocket, is that if NASA's budget roughly doubled, humans might land on the Moon by the late 2030s.
Quote:

Commercial space sucks, Griffin says

One of the ironies of the career of Mike Griffin is that, at the direction of the George W. Bush administration, he helped launch the commercial space revolution. Griffin created the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS, program in 2006; it funded the development of cargo spacecraft by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences. It is no exaggeration to say that this program and its successor in 2008 to fund cargo supply missions to the International Space Station saved SpaceX. Without them, the company founded by Elon Musk would probably not exist today.

But even before he left NASA in early 2009, Griffin was already turning on the commercial space industry. He did not support NASA's funding of companies because he did not believe they were putting enough "skin in the game" as a part of their fixed-price contracts. Griffin ended up opposing the creation of the "commercial crew" program that ultimately led to the Crew Dragon vehicle that broke NASA's dependence on Russia for rides to the International Space Station.

"The plan to use commercial capabilities certainly departed from what I saw as the correct path," Griffin said in 2013. "In our view, activating a crew provision would come only after substantialeven enormousprogress had been made on cargo. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk. We set the COTS agreements up initially to allow for money to be invested in crew development. But in our plan, we certainly weren't going to invest in crew development until cargo capability had been amply demonstrated."
Sort of like some of our, ahem, politicians up on the hill/White House, he sounds like an old man that really can't think through what perhaps he used to be able to. From the comments (many good ones):

Quote:

Quote:

Griffin's comments might not be the most out of touch thing I've heard in the last four years, but they are close.

I can only wonder what his real angle is. Because his statements and proposals make no sense.

edit: clarity

He's the guy who axed the CEV project and decided to go with "Shuttle-derived" launcher and capsule.

He's also the guy who said it was impossible to build a manned vehicle that weighed less than 20 tons.

O'Keefe had a fairly good plan. Have a fixed budget and build to that budget. Concurrently building a new launch vehicle and a new manned capsule had too many variables. So, his idea was to build a manned capsule that would work on existing launchers, then build a new launcher to match the launch vehicle. Then, continuously iterate new pieces after the current design was proven.

Griffin came in an axed the project as "the vehicle was not abortable in all phases of the launch profile", then pushed the Constellation project using the Ares rockets.. which were SRB's and were not abortable in all phases of the launch profile and were not throttleable in any phase of the launch profile.

He's always been a hack for Lockheed-Martin.
I think what could be best admitted by O'Keefe's plan is that it accommodated both a budget, and the political reality of the SLS (Senate Launch System) into something that could actually get done, roughly on time, while also encouraging/partnering to expand commercial capabilities as has already proven true. In orbit fuel transfers are going to be critical moving forward, too, and shouldn't be cast aside for some sort of silly politics related to somehow hoping to build two Artemis II vehicles at the same time in 2028, or any other SLS-related reason.
will25u
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ABATTBQ11
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nortex97 said:

In orbit fuel transfers are going to be critical moving forward, too, and shouldn't be cast aside for some sort of silly politics related to somehow hoping to build two Artemis II vehicles at the same time in 2028, or any other SLS-related reason.


Honestly, I'm a little surprised Elon hasn't built some small models and launched them on a Falcon 9 to test in orbit fuel transfers. Just go from one tank to another on different disposable satellites.
Dufflepud
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ABATTBQ11 said:




Honestly, I'm a little surprised Elon hasn't built some small models and launched them on a Falcon 9 to test in orbit fuel transfers. Just go from one tank to another on different disposable satellites.
Or just repurpose Megamaid.

nortex97
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ABATTBQ11 said:

nortex97 said:

In orbit fuel transfers are going to be critical moving forward, too, and shouldn't be cast aside for some sort of silly politics related to somehow hoping to build two Artemis II vehicles at the same time in 2028, or any other SLS-related reason.


Honestly, I'm a little surprised Elon hasn't built some small models and launched them on a Falcon 9 to test in orbit fuel transfers. Just go from one tank to another on different disposable satellites.


I am guessing most of the challenge will be precise control of the huge starships to dock without needing thrusters like others use.

Gotta get to orbit I guess.
NASAg03
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will25u said:


I saw that last night driving home from Greely CO to my apt in Arvada!!!! What was that?

Can't find any details on it, but it was huge.
Mike Shaw - Class of '03
TexAgs91
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NASAg03 said:

will25u said:


I saw that last night driving home from Greely CO to my apt in Arvada!!!! What was that?

Can't find any details on it, but it was huge.
Looks like that meteor seen at Starbase came from the west. So probably not the same meteor. Same meteor shower though, but didn't see any info about a meteor shower now.
Ag_of_08
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AG
I actually watched one come down last night north of us, somewhere between Evadale and Buna if I had to guess. It was definitely in that neighborhood
Kansas Kid
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I found the source of the meteors.
Leonard H. Stringfield
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They might be seen as obsolete at some point.
"Roswell, 1947, there was a uap (ufo) that crashed, in fact there were 2 uaps, 1 crashed and one flew away and the other one did not and was recovered by the US GOVERNMENT."
- Lue Elizondo-former director of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program-August 20, 2024

Are A&M's core values..optional? Who has the POWER to determine that? Are certain departments exempt? Why?

Farsight Institute, Atlanta, GA

ABATTBQ11
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AG
Dufflepud said:

ABATTBQ11 said:




Honestly, I'm a little surprised Elon hasn't built some small models and launched them on a Falcon 9 to test in orbit fuel transfers. Just go from one tank to another on different disposable satellites.
Or just repurpose Megamaid.




Marvel already did that.
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