Spaceception

The engines lit, and the rocket didn't move. For a second I thought it was about to fail on the pad. I suppose they'll need more time to refuel the tanks? Or they could cancel for the day.

Sounds like they're back on track, but they need a new countdown. So annoying.

Hey, I might actually be able to make it for the launch! Edit, welp

I can throw my own hat into the ring! I'm currently attending a community college in Connecticut to get an A.S. in Mechanical Engineering Technology, since at the time I assumed that it would be a good way to transfer into a 4 year school for Mechanical Engineering (spoiler, it isn't), but I'm going to work with it anyway. I kind of wish I had gone into Engineering Science instead in light of that, but I only have 2 semesters left after this spring, so I want to finish. Given I can work as a technician afterwards though, I can work an engineering related job to get experience while I work on my Bachelors, plus my current degree will get me exposed to some of the basic concepts I'll encounter in univeristy. So I'm trying to see the positive in it. Next year, I'm planning to attend a state university for my ME Bachelor, and get myself qualified to apply to their 5 year Bachelors-to-Masters in ME with a concentration in Aerospace.

I don't think I'll be able to see it, if the window just opens at 1, I have a class at 1:30, and it would be rude to watch the livestream even in the background since my classmates are presenting today. Good luck to them though! Hoping for Max-Q, fingers crossed for orbit! I'll definitely be watching the replay.

Part of that is we've only seen basic renders of what the overall vehicle will look like, so I'm sure the specifics are still being hammered out. That said. 1. Depending on how much room they have, it could work like Starship where they're in the skirt, and drop down. Or they've just yet to show their designs. 2. That's a good point I think, maybe it'll have an adjustable nozzle that can extend or retract in vacuum or atmosphere. 3. All we've seen are basic renders, so I'm willing to wait and see on this one too. 4. Starship started out this way, they started adding flaps with later versions, and legs were more variable.

I'm on my phone right now, but if you guys are interested, SpaceX posted the ion engine performance on their Twitter a few hours after the initial tweets. https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1629948869239873538?t=8QxDsPU97Cq9ZnckdMWgLw&s=19 In case it doesn't embed 170 mN thrust 2500s specific impulse 50% total efficiency 4.2 kW engine power 2.1 kg mass Center mounted cathode

Overall, no, My graphics card falls well below the minimum, but I think my other specs (barely) meet the reccommended requirements. Even once KSP2 does a bunch of performance optimizations, I'm not sure if my card will be enough. AMD Ryzen 5 4600H 16 GB DDR4 GTX 1650 And I'm just about out of space on my SSD, but I plenty of HDD storage on my secondary drive. In any case, I'm not going to be able to get the game until it fully releases.

It's still standing!

Only 1 more launch to go, and SpaceX will meet their goal of 60 launches this year. There's 2 left on the manifest for 2022, according to spaceflightnow, but it'll be tight if there are any delays.

That was a great launch! It really took off. I took a few naps beforehand, and ended up missing the first few seconds getting my earbuds and opening the stream. But it was really cool to watch, and I didn't go back to bed until about the time the solar arrays were supposed to be deployed.

Might stay up for this, but it will be a late night. At least I don't have any classes tomorrow

Hydroponics? That looks interesting. Plants being grown in space for more than just experiments would be very nice to see in more future space stations.

Sounds like a full WDR is coming up then. Be a good way for them to end October with the FH launch.

I wonder how it'll take to do all of them. Will they do up to 3 at a time after this, now that the first one was fine? Or keep doing one at a time for now?

Honestly, that's kind of what I figured. That they would want to keep it around the same cost of a Falcon 9/Heavy to immediately start incentivizing customers moving to Starship instead. But below that, like a few tens of millions lower than a Falcon 9 wouldn't be good for recouping some of their costs as it moves from a developmental to an operational vehicle (if those kinds of costs are even potentially feasible for them in the near future). Did they talk about the cost of Raptor?

Congratulations! Not sure if this is something you're looking for, and it's a pretty recent startup, but it's headed by a former JPL scientist, as well as other engineers, aerospace and otherwise. It's not directly related to space related applications, but the general idea of it could be adapted for destinations like Mars, where their idea is to make carbon capture into synthetic hydrocarbons economical with solar power. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-industries-whitepaper/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/03/22/maximizing-resume-snr/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-need-a-lot-of-solar-panels/

Now waiting to see engine 1 installed on the core stage.

Very much looking forward to this. Between Grace and Webb, exoplanet science is going to go pretty far. We won't find nearly as many planets as we did with Kepler, but we will gain a lot more knowledge on the ones we already found. And, hopefully, even the first tentative signs of life.

Oh, I was thinking more along the lines of - you have a collection of smaller moons forming, and then a protoplanet in a similar orbit smacks into those, adding more material to the planet-moon system. Then you have questions like, how much was lost from colliding into the planet, or being flung out entirely? Was there a net increase? And what's the likelihood of a single large moon forming from that event (or in general with mostly the original material).

"Candidate 1" is a potential planet around Alpha Centuari A in its habitable zone, that's between the size of Neptune and Saturn. I didn't know they were looking to get time scheduled on Webb to try and confirm it until I saw this article (though I wondered if they were going to). It didn't help that they made no mention of Alpha Centuari in the information page, just "closest stellar neighbor" https://www.inverse.com/science/alpha-centauri-planets-jwst https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/program-information.html?id=1618 In terms of exomoons, it should be possible for gas giants of this size, or any, to form Mars-Earth sized moons, right? Maybe in some sort of even analogous to the hypothetical Earth-Theia collision.

That may not be the case https://www.universetoday.com/152104/good-news-red-dwarfs-blast-their-superflares-out-the-poles-sparing-their-planets-from-destruction/ There's also several observation missions scheduled on JWST searching for atmospheres on red dwarf worlds, including several dedicated to TRAPPIST. And in cycle 1 GO, there's specifically one aimed at determining how common atmospheres are around their planets. "Tell Me How I’m Supposed To Breathe With No Air: Measuring the Prevalence and Diversity of M-Dwarf Planet Atmosphere." So JWST could be poised to show how potentially 'life friendly' red dwarves really are.

Three in a half days after that?

So this is really all in the title, but what limitations and challenges are there to using methods like radial velocity to find more planets in the solar system, like planet x, or other major bodies that might be far from the sun? I know radial velocity relies on the Doppler shift of a star's light, so are we too close for it to work? Or do hypothetical Oort cloud planets have too weak of a pull to really be noticeable? Either because of their extremely long orbits or comparatively small masses. What needs to change to make it feasible, and would it be worth our time - or would it make more sense in the end to continue observing as we always have, and simply send up more telescopes to cover the sky? I was about to post this in questions that don't merit their own thread, but I figured this might.

This looks really good https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-webb-reaches-alignment-milestone-optics-working-successfully