Space - The Final Frontier

[nuke_diver]

Exciting stuff. The video was great thanks Freebird

 

[Walt34]

Exciting indeed. I'm happy to see this happen, hopefully not far to go to end reliance on paying someone else for rides to the space station. Not to mention maybe going to the moon or perhaps even Mars! Now that would be exciting to see happen.

 

[Hermit]

That was amazing. I was late for work this morning due to watching the launch. Was startled when the boosters separated and I saw all those flames. Someone at work said they think it's some kind of explosive charge that disconnects the booster rockets. Anyone know why all the flames?

They are most likely explosive bolts. I have worked on NASA programs both on ground systems and on board computer systems. Lots of fun and the launches are always exciting.

 

[imoldernu]

Brings back memories. We watched many of the Canaveral launches of Discovery, Columbia, Atlas and Endeavor... since 1990. They were about 65 miles away from our home in Leesburg, FL so it was common for the whole community to go out during the day ... or night... and watch the bright spark in the sky, and the contrails as the rockets disappeared. Lots of pride in those days. Remember well how we gathered at the main gate to watch, and applaud when the launch was successful.

 

[splitwdw]

They are most likely explosive bolts. I have worked on NASA programs both on ground systems and on board computer systems. Lots of fun and the launches are always exciting.

Thanks for the reply. I do remember hearing something about explosive bolts. Just very surprising to see the flames.

 

[freebird5825]

You're very welcome for the video links.

I had no idea that the Orion launch was scheduled.

I was watching the Weather Channel and saw the post-launch briefings. So I bipped right over to the NASA site and tried to find the live footage there in the NASA TV section. It directed me to the youtube site.

I thought this was pretty cool..."The Orion capsule launched Friday lacked seats, cockpit displays and life-support equipment for obvious reasons. Instead, bundles of toys and memorabilia were on board: bits of moon dust; the crew patch worn by Sally Ride, America’s first spacewoman; a Captain James Kirk collector’s doll owned by Star Trek actor William Shatner; and more."
Full article here NASA's Orion spacecraft back on Earth after successful test flight - The Globe and Mail

Google Orion and Star Trek "The Cage" and "Whom Gods Destroy" from the Original Series....too funny.

 

[6miths]

Nice to see America back in the heavy lift business.

 

[Chuckanut]

Nice to see America back in the heavy lift business.

If this thing launches successfully next year we will have a rocket with a bit more than 50% of the Saturn V thrust.

Falcon Heavy | SpaceX

I think the Delta IV that launched Orion has about 1/2 of the thrust of the Falcon Heavy. It also has an excellent launch record. The Delta rockets are very reliable.

 

[Chuckanut]

Here's an interesting history of the Apollo missions. As the author notes, yesterday's Orion mission was a replay of some of the things done during Apollo, but with much more powerful boosters than today's Delta IV heavy. And with less fancy technology.

NASA has a long way to go before it can hope to replicate the kind of deep-space piloted missions that it staged over a four-year period between Apollo 8 in December 1968 and Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Through a Glass, Darkly: Reflections on EFT-1 and Shadows of Apollo (Part 1) « AmericaSpace

Also of interest is the fact that Apollo 8 mission to circumnavigate the moon was a relatively late decision caused in part by the death of the three Apollo 1 astronauts on the launch pad.

 

[6miths]

Here's an interesting history of the Apollo missions. As the author notes, yesterday's Orion mission was a replay of some of the things done during Apollo, but with much more powerful boosters than today's Delta IV heavy. And with less fancy technology.


Through a Glass, Darkly: Reflections on EFT-1 and Shadows of Apollo (Part 1) « AmericaSpace

Also of interest is the fact that Apollo 8 mission to circumnavigate the moon was a relatively late decision caused in part by the death of the three Apollo 1 astronauts on the launch pad.

Great link and site. I enjoyed reading the articles. As a kid, I was totally enthralled by Apollo and can still remember Apollo 8's Christmas 1968 rendezvous with the moon. I still have all the mission patches and models of the CSM/LM and the Saturn IB and V. The achievements of that era were astounding and sometimes leave me feeling a bit saddened when reflecting on what we have done since. Hopefully, we will eventually find our way off this fragile planet and in the meantime will wake up and start taking care of it a bit better.

 

[Peter]

The achievements of that era were astounding and sometimes leave me feeling a bit saddened when reflecting on what we have done since.

+1

 

[growing_older]

Originally Posted by 6miths
The achievements of that era were astounding and sometimes leave me feeling a bit saddened when reflecting on what we have done since.

Also amazing is the timescale used. One significant milestone after another, often with mere months between major launches or upgrades. In my work, we sometimes plan months for a user interface update or a color change on a website. Shocking to consider the advances the Apollo engineers were making and how quickly they were doing it.

 

[Chuckanut]

Also amazing is the timescale used. One significant milestone after another, often with mere months between major launches or upgrades.

FYI, the next Orion launch is scheduled for 2018. The first manned launch is scheduled for the early 2020's.

In the 60's we went from never having put a human into space to the first man on the moon in a little less than nine years.

 

[clifp]

FYI, the next Orion launch is scheduled for 2018. The first manned launch is scheduled for the early 2020's.

In the 60's we went from never having put a human into space to the first man on the moon in a little less than nine years.

I guess I should preface this snarky comment and article by saying anything in space is pretty cool in my book.

So I echo Elon's gracious tweet. Congratulations to @NASA on the flawless Orion flight, as well as to program prime contractors @LockheedMartin and @Boeing!

That said I totally agree with this Guardian article.
The headline says it all

Orion: a last-ditch effort by a fading empire that will never strike back

Joe Pappalardo

The rest of the article makes good points.

If the new space race was like the movies, this week would be The Empire Strikes Back...

And of course there’s that other curse haunting Orion: It won’t carry actual people until around 2022.
And that’s if the budgets hold out. The incoming Congress may not shut down a program like Orion, but they can starve it of fuel until it enters a netherworld of delays, life-support funding and lethargy. When it flies on missions, it will be outdated. Orion is particularly vulnerable since, you know, Nasa has not set a destination for it to go. If the first manned test flight is in 2021, when will the actual mission to Mars be funded and staged? It takes a very optimistic person to think the funding and tech will be ready by 2022 – or even 2025.
The Orion launch has been be a triumph of engineering, hiccups and delays aside. But the Empire may not love the sequel. SpaceX is planning a historic launch of its own next year – the rocket is called the Falcon Heavy. Yes, Musk named his rocket after the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars, and he promises it will take twice as much payload into space as the one Nasa launched on Friday, and at one-third the cost. So far his claims about SpaceX have come true, and soon he’ll be fighting, with the lobbyists and the politicians who play favorites, for satellite contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Combine that kind of force with Elon Musk’s capsule full of actual people returning to space – under a Nasa contract to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station – and you have a private startup that can beat Nasa or any other government agency back to the moon, if it so chooses.


Return of the Jedi, indeed.

 

[M Paquette]

If we had gone with the original Project Orion, we would have had a manned mission to Mars in 1965, and the first manned mission to Saturn by 1970.

The spacecraft proposed ranged in size from a modest 6,000 tons to the Saturn mission at 8,000,000 tons.

Alas, the project was cancelled.

 

[Chuckanut]

The things that companies like SpaceX are trying to do remind me of NASA in the 60's. Can you imagine being able to actually land a used booster rocket onto a platform in the ocean? And later on land? This was the stuff of science fiction when I was a kid.

 

[clifp]

If we had gone with the original Project Orion, we would have had a manned mission to Mars in 1965, and the first manned mission to Saturn by 1970.

The spacecraft proposed ranged in size from a modest 6,000 tons to the Saturn mission at 8,000,000 tons.

Alas, the project was cancelled.

That's some really cool stuff. I've heard about the nuclear powered spaceship before, but never really seen much in the way of detail.

Obviously Dyson is a genius physicist, but brilliant scientist aren't the most practical engineers. So since you are my resident nuclear engineering expert, would it have worked?

 

[M Paquette]

That's some really cool stuff. I've heard about the nuclear powered spaceship before, but never really seen much in the way of detail.

Obviously Dyson is a genius physicist, but brilliant scientist aren't the most practical engineers. So since you are my resident nuclear engineering expert, would it have worked?

The physics are absurdly simple. There is a massive pusher plate, a humongous shock absorber, and the payload. Small atomic bombs are set off below the pusher plate. The impulse from detonation acts on the pusher plate just like the combustion in a rocket acts on the combustion chamber. The shock absorber and pusher plate mass act to smooth out the acceleration seen by the payload.

Of course, you don't want to be near the launch pad...

Some early variations ground launched using specially engineered, very 'clean' nuclear explosives. Without the requirements of weapons systems, materials could be selected to minimize induced radioactivity and fallout from the first several blasts to get clear of the atmosphere. Other variations launched from orbit, removing this problem.

Note that 'atomic blasts in spaaaace!' aren't much of a radiation hazard compared to the radiation from the 100,000,000,000 one megaton H bombs per second going off in the center of the solar system. Good thing our little planet comes with radiation shielding, huh?

 

[Lakewood90712]

FYI, the next Orion launch is scheduled for 2018. The first manned launch is scheduled for the early 2020's.

In the 60's we went from never having put a human into space to the first man on the moon in a little less than nine years.

Great to see the test went well. A little disappointed in the time frame too. But the 1960's was all about beating the Russians , not smart use of resources.

 

[clifp]

The physics are absurdly simple. There is a massive pusher plate, a humongous shock absorber, and the payload. Small atomic bombs are set off below the pusher plate. The impulse from detonation acts on the pusher plate just like the combustion in a rocket acts on the combustion chamber. The shock absorber and pusher plate mass act to smooth out the acceleration seen by the payload.

Of course, you don't want to be near the launch pad...

Some early variations ground launched using specially engineered, very 'clean' nuclear explosives. Without the requirements of weapons systems, materials could be selected to minimize induced radioactivity and fallout from the first several blasts to get clear of the atmosphere. Other variations launched from orbit, removing this problem.

Note that 'atomic blasts in spaaaace!' aren't much of a radiation hazard compared to the radiation from the 100,000,000,000 one megaton H bombs per second going off in the center of the solar system. Good thing our little planet comes with radiation shielding, huh?

Very interesting. But how do you build a pusher plate that can survive being on the close proximity of scores or hundred of small atomic bombs. If read some the documentation correctly they were looking at small A bombs have the equivalent explosive power of hundreds tons of TNT.

Our largest conventional bombs have been 10 tons and they can cause damage to bunkers, dams and other harden targets.

 

[Chuckanut]

But the 1960's was all about beating the Russians , not smart use of resources.

Good point. IMHO, the #1 reason to develop an ability to work in deeper space is to detect objects that might crash into Earth and divert them. That is a lot easier to do when they are still many millions of miles away.

 

[M Paquette]

Very interesting. But how do you build a pusher plate that can survive being on the close proximity of scores or hundred of small atomic bombs. If read some the documentation correctly they were looking at small A bombs have the equivalent explosive power of hundreds tons of TNT.

Our largest conventional bombs have been 10 tons and they can cause damage to bunkers, dams and other harden targets.

Two 'tricks' here. First, these nuclear explosives are designed for propulsion, not breaking structures apart. They'll probably use a disk-shaped reaction mass that will collimate the plasma from the blast into a 'cigar' shape to improve the overall coupling to the pusher plate. The pusher plate will be specially shaped and quite large, roughly similar to the diameter of the nuclear fireball created by the explosive, and a bit more than the radius of the fireball away from the detonation point. The concave shape of the plate will receive the force of the blast fairly evenly across it's surface. An ablative material would coat the pusher plate to take the heat damage from the plasma impact. One design proposed using a graphite-oil mixture to be strayed between detonations.

There won't be the large difference in force over a surface that contributes to stress failure, or the force from directions the structure is not designed for that brings down dams or buildings.

Much of the mass of each 'bomb' is reaction mass for the Orion, not nuclear explosive. The small 5 kT charges for the 4,000 ton Orion would have a mass of about 1.2 tons. That mass is converted to plasma by the nuclear charge, and becomes the reaction mass that strikes the pusher plate. The 8,000,000 ton 'Super Orion' would use larger charges, carrying a reaction mass of 3,000 tons that would act on a pusher plate with a diameter of 400 meters.

At the end of the project, Freeman Dyson sketched out a starship design that would carry a city of 20,000 people to Alpha Centauri over the course of many generations. I understand that this is the design the creators of the SyFy miniseries 'Ascension' went with for their generation ship.

 

[M Paquette]

Even without "Old Bang-Bang", we had some other interesting unconventional rockets available for a Mars mission.

The Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) project actually built, tested, and in 1968 certified an engine design for a manned Mars mission planned for 1978. NERVA powered 'tugs' would haul equipment from low earth orbit (LEO) to space stations and a permanent lunar base then scheduled for 1981. The NERVA would also act as an upper stage (Saturn S-N) as part of the Saturn C-5 to carry payloads of up to 170 tons to LEO.

The test rockets were run out at Jackass Flats, Nevada. The darn things would run for hours at a time, with twice the specific impulse of chemical rockets (better reaction mass efficiency, or less propellant for a given end velocity).

The NERVA enabled a Mars mission, and that was their undoing. Congress could see the end of the line with the Apollo 11 moon landing, and commitment for a Mars landing implied decades more funding for the space program at levels similar to the moon landing commitment. The nuclear rocket enabled the Mars mission, therefor killing the nuclear rocket made the Mars mission impractical, and the space program funding could be cut back.

 

[Free To Canoe]

JPL | News | How NASA Curiosity Instrument Made First Detection of Organic Matter on Mars


News on organic molecules found on Mars.


The only aromatic hydrocarbon found was chlorobenzene. Concentration levels are estimated to be in the low ppb range. It's not like the planet is choc full of em.


Interesting how they needed to explain what an organic molecule is in the first paragraph and climate conditions on Mars in the second one. NASA dummying down on us?

 

[clifp]

Elon Musk is doing Space X focused AMA on reddit right now.

Here is the link if you want to ask questions.