I read somewhere that Starliner doesn't have its remote piloting ability anymore? I can't remember the source so I can't link it and I don't know how reliable it is, but it said that Boeing had a remote update ready to restore it, but NASA were concerned that it might brick the Starliner and leave that port permanently unusable, so they either nixxed it outright or wanted them to do more tests first. Given Boeings recent track record, it doesn't feel like a super unwarranted concern.
It docked autonomously. They switched over to manual during the flight but switched back as well.
It's also a requirement of the commercial crew program, it has to allow manual piloting but they want to avoid actually using the feature as much as they can.
Hevach on
0
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Super easy, they've already addressed two options - Crew 8 can take them back belted into the cargo pallet behind the seats or they can short fill crew 9 and bump the to the full expedition.
At this point the only reason Starliner is there is that the thing the engineers care about will be jettisoned on the way back. Whether it goes back empty or full at this point is secondary to the engineering data that will be lost when it does.
Eh... I'm not so sure about Starliner only sticking around because they want to do some more tests with the service module. It's been up there quite a while and they've done a fair amount of poking and prodding. There's probably more they can do, but given the massive inconvenience that Starliner is causing, I think that there's concerns about actually sticking someone on Starliner to unpark it and return.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
I thought the issue is that there’s very little confidence in the thrusters that would be used to undock Starliner and they think it could crash into the station
The autonomous docking/undocking software is fine
There is no autonomous re-entry on this specific ship though
0
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I thought the issue is that there’s very little confidence in the thrusters that would be used to undock Starliner and they think it could crash into the station
The autonomous docking/undocking software is fine
There is no autonomous re-entry on this specific ship though
Could they undock it, grab it with the canadarm, and yeet it into the atmosphere?
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I thought the issue is that there’s very little confidence in the thrusters that would be used to undock Starliner and they think it could crash into the station
The autonomous docking/undocking software is fine
There is no autonomous re-entry on this specific ship though
Could they undock it, grab it with the canadarm, and yeet it into the atmosphere?
SiliconStew on
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
I thought the issue is that there’s very little confidence in the thrusters that would be used to undock Starliner and they think it could crash into the station
The autonomous docking/undocking software is fine
There is no autonomous re-entry on this specific ship though
Could they undock it, grab it with the canadarm, and yeet it into the atmosphere?
I doubt the arm can impart that kind of delta-V.
+5
zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
I thought the issue is that there’s very little confidence in the thrusters that would be used to undock Starliner and they think it could crash into the station
The autonomous docking/undocking software is fine
There is no autonomous re-entry on this specific ship though
Could they undock it, grab it with the canadarm, and yeet it into the atmosphere?
I mean if you are going to yeet it into the atmosphere, might as well yeet it to Jupiter.
It's quite low, my guess is that because nothing can maintain a stable orbit that low due to the upper atmosphere so the risk of orbital debris impacting the station is virtually nil as anything in that zone won't stick around very long. But not so low that maintaining altitude takes too much fuel
You need to be pretty high to avoid regular boost burns and that adds a surprising amount of delta-v to get there every time. The fuel used to boost the station is orders of magnitude less than would need to be added to every launch if it were at 800 or 1200 km (or cargo reduced, which in the long run is even more expensive in additional launches).
Also, MEO is kind of the wild west. We are mostly careful with GSO and LEO is at least somewhat self cleaning on the scale of years to decades. But in the early days of spaceflight we did some dumbass shit in MEO and now stuff like several melted down Soviet nuclear reactors, kilometer wide mylar bags, and millions of conductive needles painted with radar absorbing material is just there for centuries.
There's not much benefit to MEO for most missions that wouldn't benefit even more from going even further, and for manned flight especially it's mostly downside until you get all the way to the moon. But those old missions used it because they were trying to do "permanent" things. Those balloons were supposed to be permanent passive reflectors that would eliminate the need for complex long range communications but turned out to be shit. Those needles were supposed to be a permanent radar cloak but dispersed too widely to do anything. And those nuclear reactors were going to be "forever satellites" but unfortunately they were made by the Roscosmos design bureaus that lost out to Koralev for the prestigious work and it turns out there's a reason it's the R-7 and not the UR-5.
ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer will be performing the first double gravity assist ever this month. The spacecraft will be performing a lunar flyby followed by an earth flyby, getting a little extra delta-v out of the process and allowing the setup of an Earth-Venus-Earth assist series in what would usually be a suboptimal window for it.
When I read “millions of conductive needles painted with radar absorbing material” I made the air-sucking-past-teeth gesture of unsurprised disgust. We really are capable of leaving the tiny shell of ocean and air we grew up in despite ourselves, hey?
Which project is "millions of stealth needles" referring to? Project West Ford, from 1963, launched a cloud of tiny copper wire fragments to serve as a test of an artificial ionosphere to bounce global radio transmissions off of in case a war broke out and other communication was cut off or jammed. They were not radar absorbent, necessarily quite the opposite. Most of them deorbited after 2-3 years. Apparently there are some 44 individual clumps from a separate failed dispersion attempt still orbiting and tracked today, but the miles-wide ring of them is long gone.
The international controversy over the impact of that launch also lead to including a scientific consultation provision into the 1967 Outer space treaty.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer will be performing the first double gravity assist ever this month. The spacecraft will be performing a lunar flyby followed by an earth flyby, getting a little extra delta-v out of the process and allowing the setup of an Earth-Venus-Earth assist series in what would usually be a suboptimal window for it.
Is this one of those things that's "technically" true because voyager 2s, three gravity assists don't count because of technical reasons?
Edit: according to that guardian article it's a double gravity assist because it's using the moon and earth at approximately the same time, but "double gravity assist" doesn't appear to be a word on nasa's or Wikipedia's "gravity assist" articles
It's not in the articles because it's never been done before, as it requires an incredibly specific arrangement and has much smaller tolerances than a normal earth assist.
If the moon is too far into the sunward side of its orbit, it will give a negative assist relative to earth, reducing the effectiveness of the earth assist. And if it's too far spaceward then you can't get both assists and the earth assist is far better. The moon has to be leading earth within a narrow usable angle and you need very high confidence in your tracking precision or you can easily get a net loss.
Starliner update:
Some subtle call outs to the media outlets that should know better listening to armchair astronomers and experts who aren't. Starliner can return autonomously, there's less risk of recontacting the station than with discarded cargo pallets or Cygnus craft.
Now the bad side, ground tests are not reproducing the results on the orbiter. A second round is currently in progress and will complete within the next week.
Final decision on returning it crewed or autonomously will be made within a week of that test concluding.
Apparently the inaugural flight of New Glenn includes a couple Mars probes? And is targeting a launch in the next couple months to make the current alignment window?
News to me! I knew New Glenn was getting close, but not possibly-in-a-couple-months close, and I had no idea there were actual interesting payloads targeted for its inaugural flight.
Would be neat to see Blue Origin leap from suborbital flights straight to Martian payloads in a single attempt!
New Glenn could has a potentially huge niche wide open in the market to fill. Weight wise it's in the range of Falcon Heavy, but size wise it's closer to Superheavy. It's got a huge fairing for the weight class. In a lot of ways it's closer to Arianne V than anything running now. Arianne V's big forte was that it could launch two standard GTO payloads in a single launch with rideshare leftover, while Falcon Heavy could technically lift more it barely had space for one.
It could be another game changer in space but if Blue Origin keeps plodding along like a beached manatee eventually Starship will eat their lunch.
+1
Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
The test was being carried out by German company Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) who hope to eventually launch the UK's first vertical rocket into orbit.
I have questions.
also the spirals in that fire were wild.
Phoenix-D on
+4
Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
The test was being carried out by German company Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) who hope to eventually launch the UK's first vertical rocket into orbit.
The UK's previous rocket was both a failure and launched from Australia. There's been a series of companies trying to get a domestic launch business going, since Scotland is pretty good for polar/sun synchronous launches. But they've all been smallsat rockets and the smallsat market really isn't big enough to support all the companies in it now, let alone the ones trying to break in.
Fun fact: the Woomera launch site is the inspiration for KSP's Woomerang launch site, the best stock site for polar launches. Except for some reason that's near the north pole instead.
Hevach on
+3
Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
Well at least the Germans will be launching rockets from the UK this time...
The SaxaVord Spaceport, a former RAF radar station, is co-owned by Frank and Debbie Strang.
They bought the site 15 years ago with initial plans to turn it into an eco-tourism attraction.
I also have questions
Makes sense to me, that is absolutely a place folks would want to visit and hike/camp
It’s way the fuck at the edge of the world:
And gorgeous
Sure, it probably started as green and beautiful but space port is a pretty massive divergence from eco-tourism attraction.
It is a great spot for a BNB
The thing is it’s also apparently a good spot for launching rockets and the owners changed their plans after some rocket scientists came around asking if they’d consider it
New Glenn might be having problems. Blue Origin has had a series of testing failures. The completed rocket is undamaged but the two partially built rockets in the factory were both destroyed, meaning even if the inaugural flight goes ahead a couple years of work was just ruined on the next one.
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
No injuries were reported in either incident, according to Bloomberg. One incident was said to involve the crumpling of a section of a New Glenn rocket that was destined for the second launch, in part due to worker error. The other incident reportedly involved an upper rocket portion for the third scheduled launch that failed during stress testing, resulting in an explosion.
I guess the first one can happen, but the second failing during stress testing definitely isn't good.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
They still haven't gotten a full duration test. They're very secretive about what happens at the test site and the Rocket Paparazzi doesn't have apartments rented out facing it so all we know for sure is they haven't exploded one since before that big two year gap in static fires, but I'm not quite ready to say that bottleneck is clear.
ULA is kind of in limbo. They're of course beholden to Blue Origin who are focusing on the wrong word of that graditum ferocitor motto, but more importantly Boeing and Lockheed have stopped supporting them and are looking to sell... And the current front runner to buy them is Sierra Space, which is kind of like Wal Mart selling out to a neighborhood grocer. But if it works out it could mean really good things for Dreamchaser.
Which is going to be very important going into the Axiom module launches and Orbital Destination due to the whole Starliner... Thing.
Also have we talked about Raptor 3 yet? SpaceX were showing it off a week ago and then Gwynne Shotwell got a good shot in on the ULA head.
I still cannot get over how perfect that name is for the COO of an aerospace company
+3
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
ULA is a weird beast right now. It's probably got some sort of guaranteed income from the government just to keep a launch alternative to SpaceX around, but that still depends on having a launch vehicle. Plus who the hell knows what'll happen if SpaceX actually manages to get Starship working.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
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It's also a requirement of the commercial crew program, it has to allow manual piloting but they want to avoid actually using the feature as much as they can.
Eh... I'm not so sure about Starliner only sticking around because they want to do some more tests with the service module. It's been up there quite a while and they've done a fair amount of poking and prodding. There's probably more they can do, but given the massive inconvenience that Starliner is causing, I think that there's concerns about actually sticking someone on Starliner to unpark it and return.
They just started a second round of ground/space mirror testing. The last one took three weeks, this one was started less than a week ago.
The autonomous docking/undocking software is fine
There is no autonomous re-entry on this specific ship though
Could they undock it, grab it with the canadarm, and yeet it into the atmosphere?
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I doubt the arm can impart that kind of delta-V.
https://www.heavens-above.com/IssHeight.aspx
Drag, it has to reboost periodically, iirc.
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Also, MEO is kind of the wild west. We are mostly careful with GSO and LEO is at least somewhat self cleaning on the scale of years to decades. But in the early days of spaceflight we did some dumbass shit in MEO and now stuff like several melted down Soviet nuclear reactors, kilometer wide mylar bags, and millions of conductive needles painted with radar absorbing material is just there for centuries.
There's not much benefit to MEO for most missions that wouldn't benefit even more from going even further, and for manned flight especially it's mostly downside until you get all the way to the moon. But those old missions used it because they were trying to do "permanent" things. Those balloons were supposed to be permanent passive reflectors that would eliminate the need for complex long range communications but turned out to be shit. Those needles were supposed to be a permanent radar cloak but dispersed too widely to do anything. And those nuclear reactors were going to be "forever satellites" but unfortunately they were made by the Roscosmos design bureaus that lost out to Koralev for the prestigious work and it turns out there's a reason it's the R-7 and not the UR-5.
ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer will be performing the first double gravity assist ever this month. The spacecraft will be performing a lunar flyby followed by an earth flyby, getting a little extra delta-v out of the process and allowing the setup of an Earth-Venus-Earth assist series in what would usually be a suboptimal window for it.
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The international controversy over the impact of that launch also lead to including a scientific consultation provision into the 1967 Outer space treaty.
Is this one of those things that's "technically" true because voyager 2s, three gravity assists don't count because of technical reasons?
Edit: according to that guardian article it's a double gravity assist because it's using the moon and earth at approximately the same time, but "double gravity assist" doesn't appear to be a word on nasa's or Wikipedia's "gravity assist" articles
If the moon is too far into the sunward side of its orbit, it will give a negative assist relative to earth, reducing the effectiveness of the earth assist. And if it's too far spaceward then you can't get both assists and the earth assist is far better. The moon has to be leading earth within a narrow usable angle and you need very high confidence in your tracking precision or you can easily get a net loss.
Starliner update:
Some subtle call outs to the media outlets that should know better listening to armchair astronomers and experts who aren't. Starliner can return autonomously, there's less risk of recontacting the station than with discarded cargo pallets or Cygnus craft.
Now the bad side, ground tests are not reproducing the results on the orbiter. A second round is currently in progress and will complete within the next week.
Final decision on returning it crewed or autonomously will be made within a week of that test concluding.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/rocket-lab-entered-hero-mode-to-finish-mars-probes-now-its-up-to-blue-origin/
News to me! I knew New Glenn was getting close, but not possibly-in-a-couple-months close, and I had no idea there were actual interesting payloads targeted for its inaugural flight.
Would be neat to see Blue Origin leap from suborbital flights straight to Martian payloads in a single attempt!
It could be another game changer in space but if Blue Origin keeps plodding along like a beached manatee eventually Starship will eat their lunch.
The UK is good at RUD's too. That lovely glow of kerosene.
I have questions.
also the spirals in that fire were wild.
I also have questions
Fun fact: the Woomera launch site is the inspiration for KSP's Woomerang launch site, the best stock site for polar launches. Except for some reason that's near the north pole instead.
Makes sense to me, that is absolutely a place folks would want to visit and hike/camp
It’s way the fuck at the edge of the world:
And gorgeous
Real pictures of the site are not quite as pristine.
Sure, it probably started as green and beautiful but space port is a pretty massive divergence from eco-tourism attraction.
It is a great spot for a BNB
The thing is it’s also apparently a good spot for launching rockets and the owners changed their plans after some rocket scientists came around asking if they’d consider it
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/report-blue-origin-new-glenn-test-failures/
Also have we talked about Raptor 3 yet? SpaceX were showing it off a week ago and then Gwynne Shotwell got a good shot in on the ULA head.
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I guess the first one can happen, but the second failing during stress testing definitely isn't good.
ULA is kind of in limbo. They're of course beholden to Blue Origin who are focusing on the wrong word of that graditum ferocitor motto, but more importantly Boeing and Lockheed have stopped supporting them and are looking to sell... And the current front runner to buy them is Sierra Space, which is kind of like Wal Mart selling out to a neighborhood grocer. But if it works out it could mean really good things for Dreamchaser.
Which is going to be very important going into the Axiom module launches and Orbital Destination due to the whole Starliner... Thing.
I still cannot get over how perfect that name is for the COO of an aerospace company