RCgothic
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Posts posted by RCgothic
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ok, may have spoken too soon...
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2 minutes ago, YNM said:
Again, I'm not sure how you'd refit a Starship to receive something else on top of it, given the header tanks and whatnot. What you're asking is like taking the TKS spacecraft and adding a capsule on it when it already have one. And again this is not the Starship design-related thread.
Well I mean if (and if) NASA contracts the Starship as a moon lander, then they'd already be man-rated, at least in space. OFC you can't launch it on itself from the Earth without sacrificing all the payload and the fuel, so in effect it needs the first stage, which is real early in development. That's the one I'm questioning would be man-rated by mid 2020s. But to my understanding they're aiming for man-rating.
Also, NASA might be more open for reused boosters than you might think, given that they're still considering to allow F9 reused booster for Commercial Crew. (although we haven't seen one being manifested so perhaps after two or three years...)
They wouldn't need header tanks on an expendable starship because it's not landing anywhere. They're pretty easy to leave out.
Expendable Starship has already been mooted, and for Orion it'd be even easier because no fairing is required, just a stage to spacecraft adaptor which is not difficult to make from stainless steel.
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Successful 2nd stage relight is beginning to look unlikely.
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1 hour ago, YNM said:
Well it'd be awkward if they finished their part of the mission and the main mission hasn't started...
You mean the booster ? That'd take an even longer time...
I'm not sure about that, but this isn't the thread for it.
No, I means Superheavy + an expendable Starship 2nd stage without fairings, legs, fins etc, just an adaptor to fit Orion up top.
Without refuelling Starship can't send any payload to the moon whilst lugging fins, fairing and reserve fuel for landing, but with those stripped away it's comparable to SLS at minimum. It'd be a really easy conversion - with stainless steel it's not like they'd need to hexgrid a new adaptor. And with a capsule with LAS up top and no attempt to reuse the upper stage it shouldn't be harder to crew-rate than F9.
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50 minutes ago, tater said:
It's actually in the interest of SLS to push harder to launch at this point.
As the jobs program it is, sans competition, the longer it takes the better. More money spent on the actual goal of SLS/Orion (jobs).
The trouble of course is that commercial space is going to lap SLS, and once that happens, it will become harder to justify. IMO Orion can probably survive longer than SLS as a program, since Orion can be stuck on top of NG (and possibly Vulcan, the mass is tight there with the LES).
Orion on top of an expendable Starship...?
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This was a validation test though, not a development test. It was supposed to be right first time and this programme is not hardware-rich. They can't just swap in the next engine or the next booster stage.
At worst, if this needs a redesign of the engine bay the programme may not survive.
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Major component failure definitely not good.
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In response to "how do humans train a better AI" the answer is - there's far more time available for review than there is in the moment.
Also most accidents are caused by distracted idiots. AI will always be focused on the road and will always have the same capacity of decision making.
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Launch! Very long hold down, about 8s. Lept off the pad, but small rockets always look fast.
Camera tracking is rubbish.
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1 hour ago, RealKerbal3x said:
2 static fires in one day!
And that's a wrap, detank venting.
Wrong!
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In addition to the things other about helium people have mentioned, (low density, resistance to being a liquid, inert), probably the most important thing is that helium provides exceptional pressure per kg.
The ideal gas law is PV=nRT.
R is the ideal gas constant, so at similar T and V, P depends solely on "n", the number of atoms/molecules in the volume. Because helium gas has very low atomic weight, it has a very high "n" per kg, better than any other substance except hydrogen (which due to having diatomic molecules is not as ideal a gas). This means you need less mass of helium to pressurise a tank compared with pressurising it with another gas.
High pressure per kg is such a key feature of rocket propellant pressurant.
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https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/planetary-sleuthing-finds-triple-star-world
It seems like NASA have detected a planet in a Trinary Star System!
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Apparently they're going to overlay the existing arrays, angled out at 10 Deg. Sized to go uphill rolled up in a dragon trunk, which sounds incredible to me.
This offends my sense of symmetry tbh.
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Wow, ok. Wonder how they're launching and getting installed.
Russian self-piloting extra modules you can kind of understand. Solar panels are something else entirely!
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You guys may be a little ahead of me here, but I haven't seen it spelt out explicitly - it's not SN12 in the mid-bay. It's SN15.
So looks like they're skipping 12,13,14.
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4 minutes ago, Scotius said:
Ouch. Someone pulled wrong lever too early?
Technically, satellites are built strong enough to withstand minutes of sustained acceleration and shaking. But on the other hand, they tend to have fragile bits outside - solar panels, antennas, cameras etc.
I bet there were many red ears after the incident.
It's not immediately clear where the fault lies. Yes, it was during payload integration at a SpaceX facility. But it could be a faulty customer adaptor, like Zuma. Or maybe SpaceX did do something wrong this time.
Impacts can easily have dozens of hundreds of Gs of acceleration. Hope some of the peripherals acted as crumple zones!
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The Transporter 1 ride-share mission is in trouble. In addition to the sats that don't yet have a license leading to Starlinks potentially being added to make up the payload at a very late stage, 2 DARPA sats have been inadvertently ejected from their dispensers.
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They're going for a second attempt, so it must have been an abort.
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Don't know. Could be they wanted a short one, or could be an early abort. We won't really know until they press on to flight.
In other news:
SN6 has had its mass simulator removed, paving the way for it to be mated to the lunar mockup.
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Static fire!
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Static fire alert for tomorrow:
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4 minutes ago, RealKerbal3x said:
SN8's TFR was unlimited altitude as well. It doesn't necessarily mean SN9 is going to go any higher.
Yeah, I got ahead of myself.
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To unlimited altitude! :-O
SpaceX Discussion Thread
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
Crew Starship can't go to TLI without refuelling, and there's a large obstacle to crew rating it. It's a long pole.
Capsule on top of an expendable starship is the easiest and fastest way to put crew on it, and it keeps Orion and the Artemis archeture basically as-is without starting again from scratch.