Space - The Final Frontier

Here is one view of how commercial rocketry may change the world.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/7535648

"The Space Age has finally come and it promises savings for American taxpayers, new high-quality jobs and economic opportunities we can't predict yet. A sustainable, market driven economy is emerging from the stagnant cocoon of traditional governmental contracting. California-based SpaceX has been granted certification by the U.S. Air Force for launching military payloads, which will bolster the Hawthorne firm's already robust manifest of commercial and NASA launch contracts. This certification breaks a long-standing monopoly held by Boeing and Lockheed's rocket company conglomerate United Launch Alliance (ULA).
The loss of this military monopoly combined with pressure from SpaceX's efficient manufacturing processes and innovative work on rocket reusability has pressured the formerly moribund incumbent to rapidly adapt to the new competitive landscape."
 
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What a disappointment for those guys. Not to mention the folks on the ISS who lost their shipment.
 
No a good week for Elon Musk. First, looks like Chevy will beat him to the punch of making an affordable EV car that goes up to 200 mile on a charge, then the SpaceX explosion.

First you don't succeed, try try again.
 
So Elon's has been tweeting/working for 19 hours straight and obviously so has the engineering team.

Elon Musk ‏@elonmusk 3h (1 AM PDT)3 hours ago
Cause still unknown after several thousand engineering-hours of review. Now parsing data with a hex editor to recover final milliseconds​


This was on a Sunday,and his birthday no less.

What did Thomas Edison say.
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration
 
clifp said:
So Elon's has been tweeting/working for 19 hours straight and obviously so has the engineering team.

Elon Musk ‏@elonmusk 3h (1 AM PDT)3 hours ago
Cause still unknown after several thousand engineering-hours of review. Now parsing data with a hex editor to recover final milliseconds​
Click to expand...

Par for the course during a anomaly/mishap in the industry. I've seen people work a regular day and then get called back in on the way home and are up for the next 16 hours working problems. 24 hour work days, while very rare, do happen.
 
clifp said:
So Elon's has been tweeting/working for 19 hours straight and obviously so has the engineering team.

Elon Musk ‏@elonmusk 3h (1 AM PDT)3 hours ago
Cause still unknown after several thousand engineering-hours of review. Now parsing data with a hex editor to recover final milliseconds​


This was on a Sunday,and his birthday no less. ....
Click to expand...

Well, there's an awful lot on the line, so they need to find out. At this point, Musk is more driven by wanting success than wanting money (or personal time), so there you go.

Although, at some point, it won't make much difference if they figure it out today, or next week. So pretty soon, he should let the team get some sleep so they can be in top mental form to come back and find the problem. Being sleep deprived, they might miss something, and it could take even longer!


What did Thomas Edison say.
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration
Click to expand...

Yes, but if you've read much about Edison, he was a trial-and-error guy, so it took a lot of work. Tesla (Nikola, not the car company) was the high-level thinker, and could skip a lot of trial and error because he mostly understood what would not work. AC versus DC being a prime example.

-ERD50
 
Falcon has had 18 successful launches. Rockets are complex high energy machines that are very unforgiving of errors. ULA' s record of 40+ successful launches certainly looks impressive at this point. But, at some point they will have a failure also. It's a matter of when not if.
 
alistair said:
Par for the course during a anomaly/mishap in the industry. I've seen people work a regular day and then get called back in on the way home and are up for the next 16 hours working problems. 24 hour work days, while very rare, do happen.
Click to expand...

Yep.

heh heh heh - :cool:
 
Ed_The_Gypsy said:
Unk: Contracting = no unpaid OT.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Early Retirement Forum mobile app
Click to expand...

He knows. Just glad it isn't him anymore! I too have fond memories of all day and all nighters, can't say I miss them.
 
Pics being taken as we type.

They won't be transmitted back to earth for a while, I think starting very late tonight.
 
JoeWras said:
Pics being taken as we type.

They won't be transmitted back to earth for a while, I think starting very late tonight.
Click to expand...

The download might take a while... from wiki:

Communication with the spacecraft is via X band. The craft had a communication rate of 38 kbit/s at Jupiter; at Pluto's distance, a rate of approximately 1 kbit/s is expected. Besides the low bandwidth, Pluto's distance also causes a latency of about 4.5 hours (one-way).
Click to expand...

The engineering approach on this spacecraft, like Voyager I & II before it is just amazing. They had to go for high reliability in a harsh environment, so much of it is really very simple.

They can't rely on solar power so far from the Sun. So these are nuclear powered, but it is not a nuclear reactor, it is a very simple power source (conceptually simple that is, the implementation is quite demanding).

Basically, they use a chunk of nuclear material at the center, it is just naturally decaying and giving off heat. It is surrounded by thermo-couples, same concept as the thermo-couple in an standing pilot gas furnace - just two dissimilar metals that produce an electrical current when heated.

It is very inefficient, and doesn't provide much power, but no moving parts - very reliable. The craft only needs ~ 200 watts. It gets the job done.

The thermo-couples do degrade slowly (and maybe the heat from the material lessens over this time period?), so the output power does decline over the years. In the Voyagers, they had to keep shutting down systems to keep it alive after it had gone past its expected life.

-ERD50
 
16 months was mentioned as the time it would take to receive all the data New Horizons is designed to acquire. I assume that is also data acquired after today's close flyby.

The data transmittal rate makes your old 56K modem look like a speedster.
 
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