Starship goes FOOOM again

 AARRRGH, awesomeness, Hmm..., news, rockets, science, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
May 302020
 

SpaceX is not having the best luck with their Starship prototypes. Number 4 spectacularly exploded after a successful engine test yesterday; this seems to not necessarily be a problem with the Starship itself or its engine, but with either the plumbing, the procedures or maybe even jsut a manual mistake. Scott Manley goes through the available videos.

 

 

Unrelated, SpaceX will try – weather permitting  – to launch their Crew Dragon again today at 3:22 PM eastern time. At this writing there doesn;t yet seem to be a live stream set up on YouTube.

UPDATE: here ya go…

 

 

 Posted by at 4:39 am

The Navy and the Air Force: innovators in SPS

 awesomeness, Hmm..., science, spacecraft  No Responses »
May 282020
 

Huh. Someone finally launched Solar Power Satellite equipment designed to turn sunlight into transmittable microwaves. The weird thing is it’s a Navy experiment loaded onto the latest Air Force X-37.

NRL conducts first test of solar power satellite hardware in orbit

it’s 12 inches by 12 inches. We’ll get that sucker scaled up to 12 kilometers by 12 kilometers in no time, just as soon as we devote a tenth the energy onto the effort as we’ve blown on Russiagate.

 Posted by at 1:51 am

LauncherOne to launch this weekend

 aircraft, awesomeness, news, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
May 212020
 

Huh.

Virgin Orbit to attempt 1st launch of LauncherOne rocket this weekend

The company is targeting Sunday (May 24) for its Launch Demo mission, with a backup opportunity on Monday (May 25). The four-hour window will open each day at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT), Virgin Orbit representatives announced today (May 20).

The 747 “Cosmic Girl” will be used to haul to 35,000 feet the seventy-foot-long LauncherOne rocket, lifting off from the Mojave desert. The rocket will, if it all works out, be dropped, fire its main engine and blast off into orbit.

Good luck to ’em, but it seems like Virgin Orbit has a hell of a task in competing with SpaceX. Speaking of which…

How to Watch the Upcoming NASA SpaceX Rocket Launch Live

Discovery and Science Channel will be sharing live coverage of NASA’s launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon Capsule on May 27. The launch will mark the United States’ first time sending astronauts into space in nine years.

The multi-platform “Space Launch Live: America Returns to Space” television event will be simulcast at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT

SpaceX will doubtless also live stream the launch on YouTube, and I gotta believe that NASA TV will also carry it. That said:

Chance of weather scrub on Crew Dragon astronaut launch day ‘very high,’ SpaceX officials say

 Posted by at 1:55 pm

Lotsa space news

 art, awesomeness, news, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
May 092020
 

So in the past couple days we got:

1: Tom Cruise and a film crew are going to go to the ISS to make a movie.

2: the SpaceX Starship performed its first static test fire, and *this* time there were not major failures.

3:  The Chinese launched and successfully landed a Dragon-clone space capsule.

 Posted by at 4:34 pm

Space Force: Two Views

 art, Hmm..., news, politics, rockets, science, science fiction, spacecraft, THIS is why Trump won, youtube  No Responses »
May 072020
 

The United States Space Force has released their first recruitment commercial:

It looks reasonably inspiring.

 

On the other hand, also just released is the first trailer for Netflix’s “Space Force” show, due to premiere May 29th.

It looks like it *might* be funny. It also looks like it might mock the whole concept, which is kinda like mocking the need for a Navy or an Air Force or a fire department. I suppose that *could* be funny, but it’d probably come off as insane gibberish.

 Posted by at 12:44 am

A nearby low-mass black hole?

 Hmm..., news, science, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
May 062020
 

*Some*  evidence – via micro-lensing events – of a black hole massing 20 to 50 times Earth out in the Kuiper belt or Oort cloud. Take with a chunk of salt.

A Black Hole Relic from the Big Bang –“May Exist in Our Solar System”

Given the current understanding of physics, there are currently no processes that would create a black hole much less than a couple times the mass of the sun. And there has been nowhere near the 10E68 years needed for Hawking radiation to evaporate a stellar-mass black hole down to Earth-mass. So if a planetary mass black hole is lurking out there, then it must have been created during the Big Bang. And if they’ve actually spotted one, it seems likely that the universe must be *littered* with them. Something of a hazard to navigation for starships.

And because why not, an interesting black hole calculator:

https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiation-calculator

1x Earth: radius =0.3492 inches, lifetime = 5.67661E50 years

20x Earth: radius = 6.984 inches, lifetime = 4.54128E54 years

50x Earth: radius = 17.46 inches, lifetime = 7.09576E55 years

 Posted by at 5:58 pm

SLS Cost

 AARRRGH, Crazy, rockets, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 042020
 

I believe the proper response to these numbers is akin to “Yikes.”

A single RS-25 engine – of which each SLS will expend five – costs $146 million. Ummmmmm… the SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy costs, lemme see, $90 million. You could buy 1.61 F9H’s for the cost of one SLS *engine.*  A single complete SLS launch would buy you almost 39 F9H’s.

 Posted by at 1:15 am
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