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Everyday Astronaut isn't the only site. Websites and news organizations tend to be sloppy when dealing with space or any technical news. Our local 24 hour news channel, which usually knows better, noted how the second Starship landed in the ocean north of Hawaii
raydude wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 11:31 am I now have my own asteroid. Had to choose between announcing it here or in the "How is your career going" thread, since this was a result of my work.
This was announced at the Asteroid, Comets, and Meteorites conference last June but I just found out today.
Suborbital was suboptimal?jztemple2 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 1:00 pmNot to be picky, but my understanding of orbit is that it is a "regular, repeating path that one object in space takes around another one". So Starship didn't achieve orbit, but was on a suborbital trajectory. Still, better than the last launch.Kraken wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 9:56 am Great show so far. Starship is in orbit and going through its test program. That's the largest single payload ever placed in orbit (according to the Everyday Astronaut, whose channel I landed on) by quite a large margin. There isn't much to see for the next 15-20 minutes.
If I go outside and throw a ball in the air, it's in a suborbital trajectory
Musk has said he was more confident this flight will be successful compared with the 2023 attempts. A success would potentially give the company crucial data that could allow Starship to move on to more difficult test flights.
“I don’t want to jinx it, but I think the probability of reaching orbit is good — 80%,” he said during a recent talk posted to social media. “Certainly the third flight is a much better rocket than flights one or two.”
And you'd believe Elon Musk over me?????Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 2:28 pm CNN
Musk has said he was more confident this flight will be successful compared with the 2023 attempts. A success would potentially give the company crucial data that could allow Starship to move on to more difficult test flights.
“I don’t want to jinx it, but I think the probability of reaching orbit is good — 80%,” he said during a recent talk posted to social media. “Certainly the third flight is a much better rocket than flights one or two.”
I knew it was supposed to be suborbital but the TV dude made me second-guess myself. Still, they could have attained orbit had that been on the menu, so close enough.jztemple2 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 1:37 pmEveryday Astronaut isn't the only site. Websites and news organizations tend to be sloppy when dealing with space or any technical news. Our local 24 hour news channel, which usually knows better, noted how the second Starship landed in the ocean north of Hawaii
The process for SpaceX to formally plan and get approved a Starship orbital mission will be interesting. For today's flight, Integrated Flight Test 3 (IFT-3), there was a planned splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean (I can't find that image
) which was hundreds of miles long to accommodate variations in the trajectory given Starship by the Super Heavy Booster.
jztemple2 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 11:55 pm
Here is the video from Spacelflight Now, starting at the acquisition of the reentry video feed. I can't seem to get the imbed to work correctly, so just click the link to send you to a YouTube page
So I tracked down that interview to see if maybe the question was phrased such that Elon got tripped up, but I agree with jz - looks like Elon confused orbital altitude with orbit. In any case, I agree that, barring the mishap, Starship hit all its goals. It was a suborbital flight, yes, but that was the plan.jztemple2 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 3:18 pmAnd you'd believe Elon Musk over me?????Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 2:28 pm CNN
Musk has said he was more confident this flight will be successful compared with the 2023 attempts. A success would potentially give the company crucial data that could allow Starship to move on to more difficult test flights.
“I don’t want to jinx it, but I think the probability of reaching orbit is good — 80%,” he said during a recent talk posted to social media. “Certainly the third flight is a much better rocket than flights one or two.”
Seriously though, there was never any intent to achieve a stable orbit. I'm thinking he's confusing orbit with orbital altitude. The intent was always for Starship to drop into the Indian ocean along a planned corridor. They were planning a relight of the Raptor engines in space, but not with the intent of circularizing the orbit.
Aging Voyager 1 sends back surprising response after ‘poke’ from EarthKraken wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2023 12:49 am Voyager 1 is speaking gibberish.
It's mind-boggling that they will probably be able to fix it 46 years and 15B miles after it left Earth. I hope V'ger gets one light-day away before falling silent.In order to come up with a solution for the space probe, NASA engineers are looking through original documents that were written decades ago. “As a result, it takes time for the team to understand how a new command will affect the spacecraft’s operations in order to avoid unintended consequences,” the space agency wrote.
The spacecraft is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands from Earth to reach Voyager 1 and vice versa. That means the mission team has to wait 45 hours to find out whether the command they sent out was effective.
The team sent a command, called a “poke,” to Voyager 1 on March 1 to get the flight data system to run different software sequences in case some type of glitch was causing the issue.
On March 3, the team noticed that activity from one part of the flight data system stood out from the rest of the garbled data. While the signal wasn’t in the format the Voyager team is used to when the flight data system is functioning as expected, an engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Network was able to decode it.
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The decoded signal included a readout of the entire flight data system’s memory, according to an update NASA shared.
“The (flight data system) memory includes its code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status,” according to a NASA blog post. “It also contains science or engineering data for downlink. The team will compare this readout to the one that came down before the issue arose and look for discrepancies in the code and the variables to potentially find the source of the ongoing issue.”
They did miss one important planned milestone, restarting a Raptor while in zero-G. This is crucial because they cannot plan an orbital flight until they can demonstrate that they can reliably fire a Raptor while on orbit so as to achieve a planned reentry.raydude wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2024 10:04 am So I tracked down that interview to see if maybe the question was phrased such that Elon got tripped up, but I agree with jz - looks like Elon confused orbital altitude with orbit. In any case, I agree that, barring the mishap, Starship hit all its goals. It was a suborbital flight, yes, but that was the plan.
Because of a relentless focus on costs and cheap building materials, such as stainless steel, SpaceX can likely build and launch a fully expendable version of Starship for about $100 million. Most of that money is in the booster, with its 33 engines. So once Super Heavy becomes reusable, you can probably cut manufacturing costs down to about $30 million per launch.
This means that, within a year or so, SpaceX will have a rocket that costs about $30 million and lifts 100 to 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.
Bluntly, this is absurd.
For fun, we could compare that to some existing rockets. NASA's Space Launch System, for example, can lift up to 95 tons to low-Earth orbit. That's nearly as much as Starship. But it costs $2.2 billion per launch, plus additional ground systems fees. So it's almost a factor of 100 times more expensive for less throw weight. Also, the SLS rocket can fly once per year at most.
Then there's the European Space Agency's Vega rocket. Its costs are roughly on par with a Starship that has a reusable first stage. For $37 million, with Vega, you get about 1.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. Again, that's a factor of 100 times less payload than Starship.
Perhaps you're beginning to understand the revolution that's underway with the Starship vehicle?
But it's not just the cost or the payload. It's the cadence. SpaceX has four more Starships, essentially, ready to go. We have already seen SpaceX's proficiency with the Falcon 9 rocket. Does anyone doubt we'll see double-digit Starship launches in 2025 and many dozens per year during the second half of this decade? Access to space used to be a rare commodity. What happens to our species and its commerce in space when access is not rare or expensive?
This is the future into which we got a glimpse this week.
No doubt Starship is a game changer. But to that last question, space is still a hash environment to work in. Companies that make instruments or spacecraft for the first time find out real quick what can or cannot work in space. Or to put it another way - SpaceX can get you there. It's up to you to make your shit work once it's there.Zaxxon wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2024 4:15 pm Yes, Berger is a SpaceX cheerleader, but still: After Thursday’s flight, Starship is already the most revolutionary rocket ever built.
Essentially, even though the top-line goals of Starship: rapid reusability, landing on other celestial bodies, etc are likely years away, we're already at a crazy point.
Because of a relentless focus on costs and cheap building materials, such as stainless steel, SpaceX can likely build and launch a fully expendable version of Starship for about $100 million. Most of that money is in the booster, with its 33 engines. So once Super Heavy becomes reusable, you can probably cut manufacturing costs down to about $30 million per launch.
This means that, within a year or so, SpaceX will have a rocket that costs about $30 million and lifts 100 to 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.
Bluntly, this is absurd.
For fun, we could compare that to some existing rockets. NASA's Space Launch System, for example, can lift up to 95 tons to low-Earth orbit. That's nearly as much as Starship. But it costs $2.2 billion per launch, plus additional ground systems fees. So it's almost a factor of 100 times more expensive for less throw weight. Also, the SLS rocket can fly once per year at most.
Then there's the European Space Agency's Vega rocket. Its costs are roughly on par with a Starship that has a reusable first stage. For $37 million, with Vega, you get about 1.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. Again, that's a factor of 100 times less payload than Starship.
Perhaps you're beginning to understand the revolution that's underway with the Starship vehicle?
But it's not just the cost or the payload. It's the cadence. SpaceX has four more Starships, essentially, ready to go. We have already seen SpaceX's proficiency with the Falcon 9 rocket. Does anyone doubt we'll see double-digit Starship launches in 2025 and many dozens per year during the second half of this decade? Access to space used to be a rare commodity. What happens to our species and its commerce in space when access is not rare or expensive?
This is the future into which we got a glimpse this week.
Me for one. Falcon 9 is a pretty conventional rocket aside from the reusable first stage and look how many years it took to get the recovery of the first stage working right. For the Super Heavy Booster, it's going to be significantly trickier. As for Starship, a safe and recoverable landing is going to be even harder.Does anyone doubt we'll see double-digit Starship launches in 2025 and many dozens per year during the second half of this decade?
Never fear! The Space Force is here to buy some launches! Seriously though I did not envision the Pentagon looking at Starship as a possible asset but it makes sense I suppose.jztemple2 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2024 7:01 pm I think that there's some wishful thinking in Berger's article. Costs are probably going to be better than SLS and Vega for bucks per pound to LEO, but the question becomes, will there be that much of need for all that capacity? Consider how much of SpaceX's traffic is due to Starlink, without that the cost per flight would be higher because there are overhead costs whether you are flying that day or not. Starship is going to have significantly greater overhead costs even if you just consider the manpower needed to maintain a launch facility of that size, not to mention the engine refurb facilities, etc.
I think that the definition of "operational" is rather in the eye of the user. For NASA, operational means fulfilling all the requirements of the HLS, but if you just are looking to chuck a bunch of satellites into orbit, you don't really care if you recover the Starship or the booster and certainly it doesn't have to be man-rated.However, the advantage the U.S. will get with Starship “won’t last forever,” and it will take years to build satellites specifically designed to take advantage of the rocket’s payload capacity, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“At this rate, they will have Starship operational this year. We need payloads to go on that, if we're actually going to take advantage of it during this window of opportunity when it's a capability only we have. If you want those payloads available next year, you needed to start building them five years ago,” Harrison said.
I was there!On March 24, 1979, space shuttle Columbia arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for the very first time. Following Presidential direction to build the space shuttle in 1972, Congress quickly approved and funded the program later that year. Construction of the first orbital vehicle, later named Columbia, began in 1975. Four years later, Columbia completed its first transcontinental flight, arriving at KSC to begin preparations for its first mission. The first shuttle flight in April 1981 ushered in an era of reusable space transportation.
In NASA’s latest budget request to Congress earlier this month, Chandra comes up short. The telescope—and its science—are degraded, NASA officials say; given the current climate of stopgap budget deals and correspondingly tighter purse strings, the agency has chosen to hasten the telescope’s end, freeing up the most of the $68 million per year currently spent on it over the course of the next five years.
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But the decision is too hasty, say some astronomers, who have banded together to launch a “Save Chandra” campaign to prolong the telescope’s life. The justification given to retire the telescope is flawed, they say – the telescope is not in as bad a shape as NASA suggests. “Are there issues with the spacecraft? Yes,” says Patrick Slane, director of the Chandra X-ray Center in Massachusetts, which runs the telescope. “Do they necessitate this action? No.” More importantly, ending the telescope would leave a considerable x-ray blind spot in U.S. (and global) astronomy, with no telescope currently in service or active development that could replicate or expand upon Chandra’s capabilities.
A mysterious object that came crashing through a house in Florida is possibly debris from the International Space Station (ISS).
The cylindrical tube was a few inches long and weighed nearly 2 pounds (0.9 kilograms). It crashed through the roof and both floors of Alejandro Otero's home in Naples, Florida, at 2:34 p.m. local time on March 8, startling his son.
The origins of the object have yet to be determined, but Otero thinks it's likely one of nine drained batteries discarded from the ISS. Earlier the same day, a large cargo pallet carrying the batteries and belonging to the Japanese space agency JAXA re-entered Earth's atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico. Jettisoned from the space station in 2021, the debris was expected to burn up in the atmosphere; at least one piece may have survived reentry.
