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Ultimate Steve

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Everything posted by Ultimate Steve

  1. Ultimate Steve
    I didn't expect them to all release at once!
  2. Ultimate Steve
    I did a whole bunch of math before realizing that my assumption was flawed. I basically found out that the sats may fly over at 11, but orbits are weird, coupled with the rotation of the Earth... I'm going to wait until the swarm is up on a sat tracker website like Heavens Above.
  3. Ultimate Steve
    Also minimizes redundancy, though...
  4. Ultimate Steve
    Today, Bridenstine announced that the PPE is being built by Maxar.
  5. Ultimate Steve
    They named it after me.
  6. Ultimate Steve
    Which one?
  7. Ultimate Steve
    These plans will undoubtedly change, even disregarding schedule slippage, due to the nature of things. It even said "Predecisional" at the bottom. However, I do believe they are more serious about Artemis than they have been about pretty much any lunar landing program since Apollo. I don't think the schedule will stick, but if they can get that 1.6 billion in additional funding, their chance for success grows a lot immediately. The T/V I believe is the tug vehicle. Due to Orion's IMO underpowered service module, it cannot reach low Lunar orbit with enough fuel to return. Thus, Gateway was designed to use an elliptical orbit. This means that one stage landers are pretty much out, and two stage landers would be pretty large, so they are going with a three stage system (or two stage, it depends on what system is picked). Each component launches separately on its own commercial rocket and are docked at Gateway, I think. There will be a descent stage, an ascent stage, and a tug to get the whole stack into LLO and probably also to get the ascent vehicle back to Gateway. CLPS stands for Commercial Lunar Payload Services, a series of contracts designed to take experiments on small to medium unmanned landers to the moon. The acronyms beneath this are probably all related to those experiments. NDL - Navigation Doppler LIDAR (I think it's a navigation beacon) ISRU - if you're a KSP player you should know this HPSC - High Performance Spaceflight Computing (better computers for spacecraft) CFM - Cryogenic Fluid Management TRN - Terrain Relative Navigation AA-2 - Ascent Abort 2, an abort test of the Orion capsule EM - Exploration Mission, a flight of the SLS. May be getting renamed to Artemis. CLV - Commercial Launch Vehicle PPE - Power and Propulsion Element, sort of the service module of Gateway
  8. Ultimate Steve
    So you're saying I should split each chapter into several parts?
  9. Ultimate Steve
    Interlude II - Stargazing Before The Storm
  10. Ultimate Steve
    This managed to slip through, from the SSTO article:
  11. Ultimate Steve
    Later down the line, they could save some Delta-v by not bringing the lox for the ascent, just getting it from the moon. This would make descent abort impossible, but they also don't have descent abort for Mars.
  12. Ultimate Steve
    Right, and for most of the other numbers I was overestimating, so SS should be able to do it.
  13. Ultimate Steve
    If Starship has SSTO capability, then it has the Delta-v, if refueled in LEO, to go to the Moon and back with no payload. 3 for TLI, 1 for LLO, 4 for landing and ascent, 1 for transfer, and 1 for landing, heat shielding, and boiloff. That's 10, close to the same as an SSTO. It's a useless capability, but an interesting one.
  14. Ultimate Steve
    A recent interview with Bridenstine: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18627839/nasa-administrator-jim-bridenstine-artemis-moon-program-budget-amendment Big points: EM-1, EM-2, etc. are now renamed Artemis 1, Artemis 2, etc. The naming scheme doesn't seem to officially apply to non Orion launches. I think this is great, we need more poetic mission names and not just acronyms (CRS, STS, HTV, DM, USCV, etc.). NASA wants to launch two separate redundant landers of different architectures for Artemis 3, with 2 or 3 pieces each, based on current estimates, and just 2 modules of Gateway, the utilization module and the PPE. This means that there will be potentially eleven Artemis related launches before the landing (3 SLS, 6 lander, 2 Gateway) not counting lander test flights. The 1.6 billion isn't completely secured but support for the program by politicians seems high. Part of the reason they are trying to go so quickly is that the longer it takes to land on the moon, the more likely the program is to be cancelled by politics. I don't want to be too optimistic about this, or get my hopes up, but it seems that Artemis is more likely to happen than any other recent lunar proposals. I definitely wouldn't give it a 100% chance of happening, but I think it's got a good shot. Given the scope of this project, should we create a new thread for Artemis, as it encompasses more than SLS? Or should we wait a bit and see if they continue to be serious? Or should we keep this thread and possibly rename it?
  15. Ultimate Steve
    I'd imagine that the sats don't run Windows 10, but there was a Windows 10 update late yesterday.
  16. Ultimate Steve

    Okay, you have got to hear this...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Marín_Aguilera

    First off, the authenticity of this story cannot be completely validated, but several important organizations regard it as at least partially true, including the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (who credit this guy with a flight of 360 meters). This was not well reported on as it happened in a small Spanish community.

    So this guy, Diego Marin, was an inventor in his small town, and he wanted to build a flying machine. He most likely did not know of DaVinci or any other flight pioneers, but he studied birds for a while and came up with, depending on which source you go by, a glider or an ornithopper (wing flapping flying machine). On May 15, 1793, he got a bunch of people to get his machine to the top of a nearby castle tower, and once the wind was right, he launched. Maybe partially due to the wing flapping, but most likely mostly due to the wind conditions, his machine reportedly rose ~6 meters in the air before beginning a descent (it was at least somewhat controllable by most accounts) before one of the metal parts broke and caused the thing to gently crash, having flown ~320 meters depending on the account. The machine was still in good condition, and they were going to fix it, but the village found out and destroyed it and made fun of him, breaking his will to continue, contributing to his early death four years later.

    While the story is a bit dubious, many high profile organizations say that there is some truth to it.

    This is a semi-successful manned glider test less than a decade after the first manned hot air balloon flight, and the next successful glider tests wouldn't be claimed for decades, I believe. There were a few before Lilienthal but he's the only one people really hear about.

    And if it incorporated wing flapping and wasn't just a glider, then it was an unsuccessful test of a powered heavier than air craft, probably one of the most notable and early examples seeing as it glided somewhat successfully.

  17. Ultimate Steve
    Also, you're structurally limited. If your rocket is too big/dense, it will collapse into a black hole.
  18. Ultimate Steve
  19. Ultimate Steve
    Question. What canonically causes Secunda's green color?
  20. Ultimate Steve
  21. Ultimate Steve
    No official word yet. We just have a countdown clock stopped and a tweet from someone who appears to be a local reporter. The stream still says live in 2 hours, and no @SpaceX tweet yet. So I don't want to jinx it, but maybe we still have a shot here.
  22. Ultimate Steve
    Where did you see that?
  23. Ultimate Steve
    I notice that SpaceX has a descent element study in there. I wonder is that's Starship and it didn't fit in any other category... Does the six month timeframe apply to the prototypes as well?
  24. Ultimate Steve
    It may have been misspoken.
  25. Ultimate Steve
    No, that was not the plan, and there are some major canonical differences between CW (Which I should continue sometime) and TGT. But it is an interesting proposal. WW is IC compatible, so assuming I don't get bored with this, I will be visiting the WW system at some point, probably later on, as I've already visited many of the worlds in that system. Next part requires just one more landing.
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