Don’t know if this belongs here, or if you’ve already seen it, but …
Some british geezer has spent several years enhancing the huge amount
of pictures of the apollo missions from the NASA archives…
Clever stuff.
Unfortunately, you’d have to buy his book to see them all, but many are available
to see for free.
That image of Jim McDivitt is an amazing shot which looked like a dud originally. And I saw in one report an image of Alan Shepard’s golf ball - which hardly left the tee box.
The Guardian has a few more:
Bezo’s Blue Origin had a launch failure today:
and now:
According to Blue Origin email, that was the ninth launch of that booster. I believe that’s only the fourth rocket they’ve launched. Guess they’re going to have to make a new one.
My guess is that there’s some part in the rocket that can’t stand the stress of so many launches. Figuring out what it is may be difficult.
The third, technically. They have built four rockets, as you said. The first was destroyed in a test flight. The second was retired. The fourth is still operational. It was the third that was just destroyed.
It’ll be interesting to find out the root cause here. I’m not so sure it’s related to reusability, but it’s certainly not impossible. It definitely appeared to be an engine problem of some kind, but that’s only the proximate cause. The root cause could be something as simple as a loose bolt left in the propellant tank due to poor maintenance procedures. Or something more complicated like hydrogen embrittlement of the turbine blades.
SpaceX boosters have flown up to 14 times now in far more aggressive conditions than New Shepard, so there isn’t anything inherently limiting about vertical takeoff and landing. Musk says they still aren’t seeing any natural limits to booster lifetime (they initially guessed they’d get 10 uses before major refurbishment, and are already doing better than that).
Story related to me today: One of my colleagues, and his grad student, made their way down to TX to see this launch, as it carried one of their experiments onboard the capsule. The launch was delayed a few days, long enough so they had to return to Purdue. Then it launched…and didn’t make it to space. At least the payload wasn’t destroyed. Wow, how frustrating for them.
Minor sourcing nitpick: the Orlando Sentinel article is paywalled.
Back on subject: nice Flight Termination System demonstration.
It looked like you’d do well to avoid an injury in that flight termination system but maybe they’re all like that out of necessity. Better than exploding with the booster I suppose.
Yeah, it needs to accelerate not only faster than the rocket that it is on, but faster than the fireball that rocket may be quickly turning into.
The Ars Technica article addresses this:
Since the acceleration is in line with the trajectory of the spacecraft from launch, I doubt the additional force would cause anything more than discomfort.
I couldn’t see exactly that this abort system was rated, but they are typically well north of 10 g’s. 14 is a number I often see bandied about.
Now, that’s not life threatening, but I’d say it’s a bit more than mere “discomfort.”
Maybe more heart attack inducing. No countdown then instant 14g without warning.
It varies. The Crew Dragon is more in the range of 6 gees.
Most LASes use solid fueled rockets. There’s not much cost to a fast burn, and some advantage to getting away as quickly as possible, so they tend to tune them for a high acceleration. Liquid fueled systems (like the SuperDracos on Crew Dragon) have a lower thrust/weight ratio, so they end up optimizing for a lower acceleration. I believe the Boeing Starliner is also in the ballpark of 6 gees for its launch abort.
Liquid-fueled rockets like Falcon 9 tend to have gentle failure modes, so the lower acceleration isn’t a big deal. Solids can eject flaming chunks of propellant over considerable distance. You really want to get away fast if your rocket has solid boosters.
I didn’t notice this. What I do is use the Ublock Origin addon to Firefox and have the default of inline scripts shut off. This blocks a paywall script from opening up. If a newspaper is really serious about maintaining a paywall they can require a user to logon to their account–and they didn’t in this case.
As to LAS G-forces, I’ll also point out that the human body is most resistant to Gs in the front-to-back direction. Which is why capsules are laid out the way they are, with the crews supine to the axis of both ordinary and emergency acceleration.
Moderator Note
Considering that we are owned by a media company, please refrain from posting how-to information for how to get around newspaper paywalls, even if it is simple.
Reminder that DART (Double Asteroid Redirect Test) happens later today (Mon, Sep 26)
NASA TV coverage starts 6 PM EST, with a livestream starting half an hour later:
Brian
Nice one, I’ll be watching in bed from my timezone!
<5 minutes from impact! You can really see both asteroids now (not just as dots).
Impact! Some nice final images:
