The Space Thread - Launches, Events, Live Streams, Governments, Corporations, drama in Spaaaaaaaaaaaace

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plgfarts said:
That's wild how it whips around like that a few seconds before landing and doesn't break apart (until it falls over and explodes).

Missed watching it live, thanks for the upload.
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It really is an impressive machine. As much as I like SLS and New Glenn, this certainly has the potential to be the most impressive engineering vehicle ever built. Already is in many ways. Get the bugs out and this really should be a game changer.
 
someone should tell them if you mash the RECOVER VEHICLE button and hit confirm quickly enough before it completely falls over you get full credit
 
The most interesting thing to me is SpaceX clearly has a lower risk tolerance then NASA. "Oh, an engine on both stages failed to fire? Eh. Its fine." On the one hand, this is good for unmanned missions where the goal is to put satellite's into orbit and wat not. But they are going to have to tighten things up for crewed missions.

Still, this is quite the accomplishment. The payload for this mission was 44,000 Kilograms.

For context, the Artemis 2 Payload was 27,000 Kilograms, and that was up until now, the heaviest launch stack ever sent up. The SLS system is also not reusable, unlike this system (allegedly). If SpaceX can work out the gremlins in this system this thing is a real beast that could very well fulfill the promise of a new frontier. For example, Starship could do everything Artemis 2 did, and have thousands of metric tons left over to put other things the 4 person crew could use on a hypothetical lunar mission. Like say, transporting an excavator. Transporting deployable habitat modules. Transporting months worth of food and water.

The key thing demonstrated though is the system got the payload into space and was able to deploy it. Which is an unqualified success, despite the seethe on reddit. Also important to keep in mind, a system capable of landing doesn't just mean landing on earth. It can land on other places too.

*edit*

Anyway, the next few months are going to be pretty boring as far as rocket launches go. Flight 13 of Starship is scheduled for "sometime" in June. But what they intend to do with it hasn't been announced yet. After that we are pretty much done for the year beyond the regular schedule of Falcon 9 and Dragon launches. NASA ain't doing shit and neither is Blue Origin. The Falcon Heavy will be launching a space telescope in August which could be cool, but after Flight 13 the next big event will be Boeing trying a redo of Starliner. "Maybe" in December.
 
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mindlessobserver said:
The most interesting thing to me is SpaceX clearly has a lower risk tolerance then NASA. "Oh, an engine on both stages failed to fire? Eh. Its fine." On the one hand, this is good for unmanned missions where the goal is to put satellite's into orbit and wat not. But they are going to have to tighten things up for crewed missions.
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I said this before but that's normal for engine clusters. Let alone 33 fucking engines. The engine-out tolerance is that tight design you want--if you can't fly with a couple flameouts you can maybe scrub on the pad if it's a booster and it fails to ramp up at launch, but being able to go up with a few out is a really good thing to have once you're off the ground and definitely on your second stage.

Think about the probability of even a 99% reliable engine failing if you're doing it 33 times. And new rocket engines have never been 99% reliable.

Apparently it can keep going with up to a third of them out depending on the stage of ascent, which I'm pretty sure is better fault tolerance than NASA historically. The current SLS can handle one (of 4). But it has co-burning solids like a little bitch so it's not directly comparable.

Since it clearly has oomph to spare I wouldn't be surprised if they're running shit near the red line for testing purposes and would scale things down a little with monkeys on board. Like how they were pulling heat tiles off for this test to see if it'd explode on reentry or not with a couple missing. They don't release those missions specs publicly though as far as I know, unfortunately.
 
Michael_Jordan_Peterson said:
This shit is so fucking cool. I'm sure landing on the moon felt epic but if they make it to mars with starship it will be so fucking cool. The level of video/teaser/trailer production from spacex feels better than most movies.
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This is what annoys me about NASA sometimes, like for all the faults of SpaceX [and for all of the 'PR disasters' that have resulted in Redditoids having a massive, blind hateboner for Elon Musk] they do production and PR right in terms of getting footage, and NASA - meanwhile, has like... the shittiest possible cameras on Earth mounted to the outside of their modules. Sure, the crew has great camera equipment, but the external camera feeds all suck dick. Plus we all remember the signal cut outs and shit when Artemis II launched, right? Flipping to different views that didn't really make sense during that phase of the flight? It had pretty strong 'there was an attempt' energy, but I'd like to see the next Artemis mission have 'production values' like that. I mean for fuck's sake, SpaceX has almost 4K feeds on basic bitch fucking test flights that really aren't expected to do anything 'milestoney' at all. Meanwhile, if NASA sticks with their current production style when Artemis IV [ideally] lands on the Moon, we still might have shitty feeds at least until the crew steps out on the surface with the good camera equipment.

I will say though, both SpaceX and NASA have fantastic ground photographers, some of the still shots of Artemis II lifting off were fucking kino, hell I'm still using one of them as my desktop background right now and a lot of the images that were shot by the actual astronauts were incredible, but the exterior cameras always look like shit on NASA spacecraft. I'm hype for Artemis IV and hype as fuck for SpaceX to put something on Mars, be it manned or unmanned. I really want to see fucking footprints in the Martian dust before I croak, man. Mars is, aside from the Moon, pretty much the only planet we can feasibly send a manned mission down to the surface on. I'm also hype for anything going to Titan or Europa, because I legitimately do think they'll find microbial life on one or perhaps both.

I would also be pretty fucking hyped over an [obviously unmanned] lander mission to Venus because God damnit I want to see the surface of that bitch in 4K. We have like a total of three pictures of her surface, all from the Soviets and not in great quality [although for the time and all things considered, they were decent images] and she's woefully unexplored. It's an incredibly harsh environment, but the Soviets managed to do it in the 70s, I think with advances in materials science we could certainly put a lander on Venus, perhaps one that could last a week or two there, although I'm not holding my breath. A rover would be extremely cool but I have no idea how you would do that considering surface conditions. For whatever reason, Venus has always been my favorite planet, I guess because of just how harsh conditions are there and the fact that [aside from scans that penetrate cloud layers] the surface is shrouded and hidden by clouds, these give Venus a sort of 'mystique'.

Mercury would be cool as fuck too but you have the huge problem that in order to even get close to Mercury, let alone establish an orbit, you have a burn a massive amount of delta-V to slow the spacecraft down due to the Sun's immense gravitational field and the inertia of even getting in Mercury's general 'neighborhood', and if you actually want to establish a low orbit or even land, that's more delta-V on top of that. I still haven't managed to get shit close to Mercury in KSP, and in my modded save [KSRSS], Mercury isn't even at its real world scale and I'm not sure if the Sun in KSRSS is exactly the same as it is in reality, either. I'm not sure I could land anything on it without cheating or using those weird 'near-future' engines at the end of the tech tree. I'd be interested to know if anyone's managed it with regular engines/etc.

I also remember when New Horizons beamed back some fucking incredible images of Pluto and it seemed like most of the public just... didn't give a shit, for some reason. Hell, I remember being giddy when I'd read that the probe had reached its closest approach to Pluto because I knew, sooner or later, there'd be some pictures of the surface coming in. I'd talk to people about it and they'd basically go: "ah, okay, well that's... cool, I guess"

Seriously, look at these:

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It also got images of Charon, and this weird looking thing, called Arrokoth:
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Seriously, it looks like it should have a fucking face on it lmao. Imagine if the fucking probe got out there and this weird looking chunk of rock turned around and it had a face, or it turned out to be a giant carved statue or some shit. I don't know why but even just as it is, it sort of creeps me out to look at it. Really everything that's out there after Pluto sort of creeps me out in a weird way, just thinking of these gigantic things that have been floating around out there all this time. Another thing I remember regarding space that creeped me out were these videos on YouTube that purported to be 'sound' captured by some instrument on a probe, obviously it wasn't literally sound as sound cannot pass/be heard in a vacuum, but it was some sort of frequency/electromagnetic signal detected by a sensitive instrument which was then translated into sound and shifted down within the range of human hearing, making it 'the sound of [planet]" and some of them were fucking terrifying.


Saturn sounds like the fucking wailing of damned, tormented souls. Seriously, that big gaseous son of a bitch sounds haunted.

Edit: shit, didn't realize I uploaded the same pic twice, one in color and one in greyscale, my bad, added a new one and possibly the best one.
 
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Green Man said:
I also remember when New Horizons beamed back some fucking incredible images of Pluto and it seemed like most of the public just... didn't give a shit, for some reason. Hell, I remember being giddy when I'd read that the probe had reached its closest approach to Pluto because I knew, sooner or later, there'd be some pictures of the surface coming in. I'd talk to people about it and they'd basically go: "ah, okay, well that's... cool, I guess
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New Horizons remains my favorite NASA mission. even more then the Apollo missions. Apollo got men to the moon, but they didnt see anything we could not see from our backyard with binoculars. New Horizons though? It went out into the void and showed us something that was a borderline myth and unseen.

You are right though, it is a bummer how uninterested most people seem to be in this stuff. Which is why I really like SpaceX's corporate PR department. And why I like how their manned mission suits are designed to look cool, as well as be functional. Optics matter, and NASA is a government agency at heart. They just dont understand the need to spend a little extra money to make the space suit look cool AND be functional.
 
Green Man said:
I would also be pretty fucking hyped over an [obviously unmanned] lander mission to Venus because God damnit I want to see the surface of that bitch in 4K. We have like a total of three pictures of her surface, all from the Soviets and not in great quality [although for the time and all things considered, they were decent images] and she's woefully unexplored. It's an incredibly harsh environment, but the Soviets managed to do it in the 70s, I think with advances in materials science we could certainly put a lander on Venus, perhaps one that could last a week or two there, although I'm not holding my breath. A rover would be extremely cool but I have no idea how you would do that considering surface conditions. For whatever reason, Venus has always been my favorite planet, I guess because of just how harsh conditions are there and the fact that [aside from scans that penetrate cloud layers] the surface is shrouded and hidden by clouds, these give Venus a sort of 'mystique'.
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I've been thinking about that recently too. It'd be hella fun to work on Venus tech in a big-ass pressure tank or something. Trouble is you'd be inventing parallel technologies with literally no other utility that probably wouldn't even work on Earth. The difficulty isn't the materials so much as the basic principles of our electronics and shit.
I'm sure you could make electric motors that work that hot but we don't have much experience with it. But we are way better with magnets in general. Computing? Probably if we wanted to invent new chunky transistors and stuff and basically start over at a 1970s level. Cameras? I have no fucking idea. The Russians didn't even really use a camera, it was a mechanical scan with a single photodiode or something. I'm sure we could do that way better if it's still the best we can come up with though (wouldn't be any good for a rover, though).
Anyway, it's exciting. It's just like a whole civ-level tech tree to redo just for some space porn and nobody's gonna fund that.

Green Man said:
Mercury would be cool as fuck too but you have the huge problem that in order to even get close to Mercury, let alone establish an orbit, you have a burn a massive amount of delta-V to slow the spacecraft down due to the Sun's immense gravitational field and the inertia of even getting in Mercury's general 'neighborhood', and if you actually want to establish a low orbit or even land, that's more delta-V on top of that. I still haven't managed to get shit close to Mercury in KSP, and in my modded save [KSRSS], Mercury isn't even at its real world scale and I'm not sure if the Sun in KSRSS is exactly the same as it is in reality, either. I'm not sure I could land anything on it without cheating or using those weird 'near-future' engines at the end of the tech tree. I'd be interested to know if anyone's managed it with regular engines/etc.
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Yeah I've never even tried but I've put some giant swastika solar arrays around Moho's orbit and that was a pain in the ass with mid-game stuff. Getting there isn't much worse than Venus but Mercury's limp-ass gravity doesn't help. It's not the sun's gravity so much as the fact that you're effectively lowering your orbit from Earth's high velocity to Mercury's low and slow orbit with basically no assistance. I think that might actually be worse with KSRSS due to the relative difference thanks to not being rescaled? IIRC it's something like 13k dV one-way at stock scale, half that IRL.

I'm thinking of taking a Mercury program in my current RP-1 file after I free up some slots by finishing my moon landing (I'm just figuring out how to do the lander without any Apollo shit right now and the Russian capsules are fucking heavy if you're like me and can't be assed doing a rendezvous to avoid bringing the heat shield) so I will get back to you on this.
 
It's worth saying that V3 SHB and Star Ship (including R3's) are basically a clean sheet design. I'm not shocked that we had 2 ending outs. Doesn't Raptor 3 a new bootstrap start up sequence? I'd guess that'll be the why the R3's is why the RVAC and sea level failed to start up.
 
This is good progress.
Soon, we(whites) will get away from browns, either by traveling the stars ourselves, or by shooting the subhumans into space.
LETS FUCKING GO!
 
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