It turns out I might be wrong about my prediction for a launch: “So for my money that means May or June in actuality. (heh).” Because they just ran a successful test fire of the Falcon 9 last Saturday 3.13.2010. With the success of Saturday's "hot fire" test, the Falcon 9 could lift off for the first time as early as April 12. Cool. Link to the news item: [MSNBC]
Very cool video of an Atlas 5 launch [launch details here] that leaves ripples in the clouds as it breaks the sound barrier. If you notice there is a “Sun Dog” there too that gets dispersed from the sound shock waves. Really Cool. Sonic Boom Meets Sun Dog from barbara tomlinson on Vimeo. Video from Kennedy Space Center Apollo Center February 11, 2010. Launch of Solar Dynamics Observatory on an Atlas V rocket. About 1 minute 14 seconds after liftoff the vehicle went supersonic. The shock wave obliterated a sun dog. It was really beautiful, and poetic for this mission. A sun dog or parhelion is a bright rainbow effect in the sky caused by refraction of sunlight through ice crystals.
Huge step for them and a milestone for private space endeavors. Way to go SpaceX! Elon Musk you are the MAN! SpaceX link.
PG&E just requested approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to enter into a power purchase agreement with Solaren Corp. Solaren would deploy a solar array into space to beam an anticipated 850 gigawatt hours for the first year and 1,700 gigawatt hours for the subsequent years. An actual contract from an actual Power company. Wow. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30198977/ Boerman said Solaren's plan called for four or five heavy-lift launches that would put the elements of the power-generating facility in orbit. Those elements would dock automatically in space to create the satellite system. Boerman declined to describe the elements in detail but noted that each heavy-lift launch could put 25 tons of payload into orbit.
http://spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=38 First full duration burn of all 9 engines so there’s going to be 9 engines running at 95,000 pounds each so that’s a total of 860,00 pounds for about 170 seconds. So this will be quite a test.
vertical on the pad Lots of great pictures over there. I especially like this one: 
Elon Musk (CEO and CTO) in front of the Falcon 9. I couldn’t find the actual launch date…will keep you all posted.
A Danish company, Copenhagen Suborbitals, announced plans to build yet another rocket which will take passengers to the edge of space at 100km. Currently they are testing just a rocket motor. Now, commercial space tourism is GREAT, but did they see what companies like Scaled Composites (Burt Rutan, space ship one, Virgin Galactic, those guys) and even Armadillo Aerospace have already accomplished? On the other hand, there design is soooo simple. They say they are going to use epoxy as a propellant and LOX as an oxidizer, but I don't see why you couldn't use NOx.
Looks like any idiot willing to blow them selves up could build one. 
Sounds like a mythbusters episode to me. Good luck!
After winning the Level 1 LLC, this weekend, Armadillo Aerospace's John Carmack gave an interesting interview. In the category of what's next for Armadillo, they are obviously working on the Rocket Racing League racers. They are also planning to start work on the new suborbital space tourism vehicle. This is going to allow them to do some larger run fabrication of the new rocket motors. They've also been working with NASA on a LOX / Methane rocket motor. It turns out getting combustion with methane is allot harder than they expected, which is counter intuitive because it is a gas and should combust more easily. The problem is both the LOX and methane are very very cold to start with so it turns out to be harder to get them to begin combustion. They are hoping to start work on the crewed version for commercial flights right away. "Megapixel" will essentially be a scaled up version of the mod/quad design. It will probably have 8 fixed mount motors and achieve attitude control by adjusting thrust to each motor, which will be offset slightly from each other. The crew cabin will eventually be a fully transparent sphere which holds one or two passengers and offers unobstructed 360 degree views. They are hoping to be able to try an unmanned suborbital test flight next year with existing hardware, and be able to launch manned test flights by 2010. They've also had allot of interest in trying to break the high altitude sky diving record, a so called "space jump" above 120,000 feet. They think they could actually try that next year with existing hardware, but obviously they'd need someone with "the right stuff" to attempt the jump. On the business side, they are hoping to be able to offer flights for $100,000 or less. That is 1/2 what Virgin galactic is asking, but of course the RRL / Armadillo offering is a vertical take off and powered vertical landing. Many people just won't ever be comfortable taking off and landing without wings, so obviously there is plenty of room in the market for both offerings. Things are definitely going well for Armadillo Aerospace. Carmack commented that they are now operating profitably, even without the prize money from winning the LLC, which is just gravy. He also shared some interesting views on different approaches to engineering. Armadillo has always strived to make the engineering process more like software. You try something, it fails, you learn, and make improvements. It is an iterative process that is very hands on. The NASA approach is much more cost intensive, because they spend more time on tests and simulations. Ironically, the goal of the tests and simulations are to save cost, because they idea is the hardware is so expensive you want to learn all you can by doing simulations. But, in the long run, you learn allot more, and learn more cheaply, by building test vehicles and maybe blowing them up occasionally. He says it takes an engineer to build a bridge that will just barely not fall down. The typical NASA approach is to try to engineer the best vehicle possible, but if you try to build a perfect vehicle it will never happen. That's why the Armadillo approach is so much more effective and less expensive at the same time. As a point in fact, before yesterday's launch they went at the vehicle with a hack saw, removing several pounds of extra structure they probably didn't need in the first place. Of course they didn't need to lose the weight, they had plenty of fuel to spare at the end, but the point is this is experimental science. Every flight is a test flight, and you always learn and adapt as you go. As a closing comment, he said once they have the suborbital platform essentially as a solved problem, they will be able to scale it up to deliver a payload to the 100 km mark. From there they could easily launch a LOX / methane second stage to possibly achieve orbit and deliver a sputnik like test platform into orbit.
More breaking news, it is not yet official, but Armadillo successfully completed the second 90 second test flight to win the LLC level 1. Congratulations Armadillo! What was amazing is on the second flight, the launch aborted twice, and they just restarted the count immediately. I think the first abort was an ignition failure, and the second abort was a combustion failure. Looks like they got ignition and then had a flameout. PS, you heard it here first  UPDATE: It IS official, Armadillo won the level 1 challenge! Here is the video of just the winning flight: Here is a longer video of the whole level 1 competition with Peter Diamandis:
Breaking news, at the Northrup Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson announced a private partnership between the Rocket Racing League and Armadillo Aerospace to offer commercial space flights from Spaceport America at Las Cruces, New Mexico. Test flights will begin next year. The concept vehicle will have 8 rocket motors, using the same engine developed by Armadillo for the LLC, with a full 360 degree view crew cabin (looks like either glass or polycarbonate sphere). Rocket Racing League CEO Peter Diamandis also made an appearance.
It's only a matter of time before Miller, Coors, and Bud all pick up sponsorships for the Rocket Racing League, which has now been approved by the FAA. http://www.space.com/news/081016-rocket-racing-approval.html What's interesting is the RRL also decided to use an alcohol and liquid oxygen (LOX) rocket motor developed by Doom software developer John Carmack's company, Armadillo Aerospace, instead of LOX/kerosene motors developed by XCOR. RRL CEO Granger Whitelaw indicated the XCOR motors did not meet RRL standards for "safety, reliability, reusability and performance." Armadillo Aerospace was originally a competitor for the XPrize, but more recently they have been very active developing new rocket motors and an advanced automated VTOL vehicle called Pixel. They have participated in numerous competitions and there capabilities have been improving with each new project. You've got to see this video of an RRL racer equipped with an Armadillo motor doped to produce a brilliant red exhaust plume. Some other videos: Horizontal test of Armadillo Aerospace LOX/alcohol motor Rocket racing prepares for take-off
Congratulations to Elon Musk and the whole SpaceX corporation. The design, build and launch of a private space operation is truly historic. In many ways it is much more impressive than Spaceship One's double flight to win the xprize.
With this key milestone, Falcon 1 becomes the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the Earth. - spacex.com
Way to go SpaceX!
This is it. Well not quite the proverbial "it". Maybe more like the penultimate "it". They've been getting better with each launch. The last one worked well up until separation where they miscalculated some blowback after the separation stage which kept the second stage in contact with the first, causing failure. That's fixed so now they go again. http://spacex.com/updates.php
 Former Moon Engine Burns Bright Once More
The RS-18 engine has been resurrected and re-purposed to test fuel mixtures for the new Constellation program. I will take this opportunity to drop in a classic clip of the Apollo 11 launch:
Why Mars ROCKS and living an Earth can be a real drag
Flying Cars, Jetpacks and Rocket Racers, Oh My! The Experimental Aircraft Association Annual AirVenture Show in Oshkosh Wisconsin. Which includes exactly what the title of the Popular Science video says it does. Flying cars (although we don't see it fly), jetpacks (although its actually a prop-pack not jet and it only "flies" 15 feet and under control of two guys on the ground) The Rocket Racer section sounds pretty cool and they had one up in the air screaming along on it's rocket. And the PR guy looked a little like another PR guy I know, talking about the business plan and the consumer. As a very interesting side note: The Experimental Aircraft Association's site has been partially pwned! At there very same time as one of your peaks of popularity. An article in Pop-Sci, linked via Instapundit. They just need to remove the index.html file from their server, it's not the default document so this is a rookie pwn. ...in retrospect after a bit of researching, this is in fact a fail! The hacker thought he knew what he was doing but his weak skillz are exposed. He didn't replace the default document. Only index.html (not even default.html) 
Screenshot.
Rookie.
 So this goes down as one of those "if-you-can-think-of-it, someone-has-already-made-a-website-for-it" things on the Internet.
I wanted to put together a blog entry detailing all the locations of all the space launch facilities in the world and well wouldn't you know it someone has already done so. Check out this link. It's pretty cool. Every Lat|Long listed is linked to a google map (I woulda used maps.live.com but no big deal).
 Look! In the Sky. It’s a Rocket Racer.
eh...what? It wasn't you? Oh it must of been one of the other many daredevil astronaut/test-pilot types that read the rivet. It's one of our core demographics you know...the astronaut. Racers in rocket-powered aircraft will fly four laps around a five-mile “track” at anywhere from 150 feet to 1,500 feet above the ground. The planes, designed to fly at 340 miles an hour, will start side by side, two at a time. The pilots include professional test pilots who received their training in the military and a former astronaut. This is a great idea... Red Bull Air Race already has a competition with acrobatic prop planes. I guess that isn't hairy enough. I mean 240+ miles an hour, doing flips and stuff...not enough. Add rockets. Race 'em together. 50% faster. 100% louder. 100% more dangerous...what's not to like.
 They've been too busy to update the website since August. And by busy I mean BUSY!
Report from Elon Musk. Among the many items listed, all of them impressive, is this one that caught my eye. A few months ago, NASA approved the critical design review (CDR) for the initial flight of our Dragon spacecraft on the Falcon 9 rocket booster. F9/Dragon is intended to provide crew and cargo service to the International Space Station after the Space Shuttle retires in 2010, so passing this review was no small matter. Apart from the flight itself, this was arguably the most important mark of progress in the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. SpaceX is in a unique position. A place and time in space exploration that is unlikely to come again. They have a project plan that aligns with a demand from NASA that no-one else will be able to meet. If they can stay on schedule or near schedule SpaceX could become one of the if not THE private space launch company for the U.S. Wow! Overall, the Falcon 9 program remains on track for demonstration of cargo delivery to the International Space Station by the end of 2009. Go read the whole thing.
 So interplanetary travel...cool yes?
How do we do it? Shane Ross gives a compelling speech about the use of LaGrange points as entry and exit points into orbits of planetary bodies. The Interplanetary Transport Network Essentially there are low energy paths that lead from Earth orbit to L1 or L2. There are then low energy paths that lead from L1 to the Earth-Sun LaGrange point called E1 or E2. And from there more low energy paths to the LaGrange points around other bodies in the solar system. He uses the Genesis project as an example of very low energy orbits. The Genesis project used these low energy pathways to make its way from Earth to L2 and from there to E2 where it stayed and sampled the solar winds for 2 years. It then used the reverse of those paths to make its way back to Earth again. Genesis was able to do all this travel while using "...five hundredths of 1% of the fuel that it takes to get a rocket into Earth orbit." That is remarkable. The major point of this whole speech was summed up early: Once you reach Earth's orbit you are halfway to anywhere. Here is a little lighthearted graphic from the speech defining the low energy pathways as a Metro map. 
Transit stop Professor Ross argues that the Lunar L1 location become a gateway station. It's the best location for a manned space station because: travel time is a matter of days from the Earth, launching craft and maintaining craft from that location is cheap, launching from L1 up to E1 or E2 is cheap and therefore exiting the local Earth system to head to other planets is cheap as well. It becomes the closest rest stop on the interplanetary highway. Can we get into orbit cheaply? So then the remaining hurdle is getting into Earth orbit. If we can make that cheap then the entire process of interplanetary travel becomes inexpensive. What technology are we working on right now that might lower the cost of getting payloads into orbit? Space Elevator. Does it feel like we are on the cusp of a convergence here? If we are able to tie these two sciences together, the engineering feat of a space elevator with the comprehensive knowledge of how to navigate the solar system's "currents", what will the bounds of our exploration be? Cheap Planetary Travel It would no longer require huge chemical rockets to get from Earth to Mars or Jupiter or anywhere for that matter. It would be like nudging a stick out into a stream and watching it float on down to the next stop. Only you would be able to nudge the stick back upstream as well, whenever you wanted. Download and watch the video it's compelling.
In honor of the launch of discovery today and marking the first time in history that a woman has commanded both the space shuttle and the international space station at the same time, here is a great video of a shuttle launch from the viewpoint of the cockpit. Wow. The rockin' and rollin' inside the cockpit is freaky. I also think it is interesting how you can hear it get quieter right after they pass through Max Q (maximum air pressure during launch). Great video.
 Ok so it's only for three people, but Bigelow Aerospace is committed to having their Sundancer module launched before 2010.
This is private enterprise at its best. Let's review. Paul Allen is involved with Space Ship One / Scaled composites.
Richard Branson also.
...and Northrop Grumman buys the company. Elon Musk is working hard with SpaceX on the Falcon project. Successfully launching a Falcon earlier this year. Impressive in most accounts. He has revenue coming in from scheduled launches of satellites (whether that covers his costs is unlikely). And now we have the ambitious plan of Bigelow Aerospace. This is an unprecedented influx of private industry into the space exploration realm. The design of the Bigelow modules are very innovative...they inflate once in space. As long as the interior is sufficiently safe, this is a very cool evolution. Space stations cubic interior space would no longer be limited by the carrying volume of the launch spacecraft. If it is scalable, it would make vastly bigger constructs possible in space. More info: [cosmic blog ]
 So this comes up in sci fi a lot, beginning with "2001: a space Odyssey". In that movie Dave has to jump from the pod to the emergency airlock without a helmet.
He does it and it takes some seconds, approximately 10 or so..
It happens in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy wherein Arthur and Ford are thrown off the Vogon Constructor Fleet ship and are rescue 29 seconds later by Zaphod in the Heart of Gold.
Total Recall had it where Quaid and Melina were exposed to the partial atmoshpere of Mars for awhile until the atmosphere kicked in.
It's in the new movie Sunshine too. So how long can a human actually survive in the vacuum of space?
Turns out we actually have an incident, where the astronaut survived.
At NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (now renamed Johnson
Space Center) we had a test subject accidentally exposed to a near
vacuum (less than 1 psi) in an incident involving a leaking space suit
in a vacuum chamber back in '65. He remained conscious for about 14
seconds, which is about the time it takes for O2 deprived blood to go
from the lungs to the brain. The suit probably did not reach a hard
vacuum, and we began repressurizing the chamber within 15 seconds.
The subject regained consciousness at around 15,000 feet equivalent
altitude. The subject later reported that he could feel and hear the air
leaking out, and his last conscious memory was of the water on his
tongue beginning to boil.
[linky]
 Bottom line: you have about 15 seconds until you pass out...and that will result in you...um...dying.
It's a nasty ride, you're blood boils, your skin blisters, you lungs might explode if you try to hold your breath...icky, icky.
 SpaceX has just posted its review of its latest launch. The key parts of the review is the impressive job of "Rapid response capability – launched within 70 minutes after hot launch abort". And lower in the anomalies wherein it discusses the upper stage control anomaly. It appears that was due to Liquid Oxygen sloshing in its tank.
Upper Stage Control Anomaly
An oscillation appeared in the upper stage control system approximately 90 seconds into the burn. This instability grew in pitch and yaw axes initially and after about 30 seconds also induced a noticeable roll torque. This roll torque eventually overcame the 2nd stage’s roll control thrusters and centrifuged the propellants, causing flame-out of the Kestrel engine. There is high confidence that LOX slosh was the primary contributor to this instability. This conclusion has been verified by third party industry experts that have reviewed the flight telemetry.
Falcon 1 did not use slosh baffles in the second stage tanks, as simulations done prior to flight indicated the slosh instability was a low risk. Given that in space there are no gust or buffet effects, the simulations did not take into account a perturbation, as occurred due to the hard slew maneuver after stage separation. Extensive 2nd stage slosh baffles will be included in all future flights, as is currently the case with the 1st stage.
Installing baffles will increase weight though...
Go go Elon.
How fast was the Blackbird? oh yeah...that fast.
heh: Good joke: The King of Speed.
"Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check?"
There was no hesitation, and the reply came as if was an everyday request:
"Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground."
Gimme a second heh for that one
tags: [ human | rocket | jet]
 SpaceX had a successful launch yesterday [linky] of their Falcon 1. This is an extraordinary acheivement. We are truly seeing the comercial private space launch programs take off.
All in all, this test has flight proven 95+ percent of the Falcon 1 systems, which bodes really well for our upcoming flights of Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, which uses similar hardware. We do not expect any significant delay in the upcoming flights at this point. The Dept of Defense satellite launch is currently scheduled for late Summer and the Malaysian satellite for the Fall.
 SpaceX is the less sexy, more practical private rocketship competitor to Spaceship One. These gyus are serious: Q3 2009 - 3 days - Full cargo mission profile including mate to ISS, with empty capsule , woah, docking with the ISS. Sa-weet! Space tourism here we come.
<<< Older Stuff Yo!
|
|
Total Posts: 667
This Year: 31
This Month: 0
This Week: 0
Comments: 0
Sign In
|