CptRichardson
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Posts posted by CptRichardson
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6 hours ago, magnemoe said:
What was the event 58 years ago?
The purpose of an life fire test is to check that the engines and their system works well. They might not use launch telemetry but it would be weird if its not all running just to see that it works.
I have an feeling this is an oxygen leak, would the oxygen tube in detect an leak? Could it be an internal leak in the rocket, as they are pumping oxygen in an smaller leak would be hard to detect.
The last time a test fire exploded on the pad in the US.
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14 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:
It's desperate in the sense that they seem to now be relying on amateur footage from miles away to find the cause of the mishap, while they should have actual close-up footage and telemetry. They supposedly have data from instruments (including accelerometer data, pressure sensors, valve positions, etc...), on board the rocket and GSE, as well as their own cameras. Unless maybe that is another area where they cut corners to save money, and don't record data for tests, only for launches...
The fact that the data they have isn't helping them figure out what happened when an anomaly did occur makes you wonder what use there is to actually live-test the rocket at all.
Well, it says 'this seems to be the first time anything like this has happened, and even the most remotely similar failure in the US happened 58 years ago'. This is something at the end of the bellcurve for bellcurves, an event rare enough that everybody looking at it can't figure out what the hell happened yet.
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18 hours ago, SinBad said:
So, it dimmed twice over 700ish days. Commetary occlusions in the target system have been mentioned, but a dimming of that magnitude would mean lots of big comets.
What about a small object in our own oort cloud? Just random chance that a couple of grains of sand happened to line up with this star 700ish days apart. How big does one of our own oort objects need to be before it can occlude a star at 1500ly? And how small does it need to be before we cant see it?
As for the repeated dimming, im going to out on a limb here and site terry pratchett: a million to one odds usually means its a near certainty.
It's dimmed twice approximately 20% or so (or was it 10%?) either way, way too much for a normal natural phenomenon. More importantly, we detected uneven dipping, and these dips lasted for multiple days. Oh, and the whole '5% drop or so over the course of the kepler observations'.
Basically, to also point to Sir Pratchett, these aren't mere million to one odds, these are billions to one odds that seem to be lining up just right, and honestly we don't have anything else that's stood up.
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12 hours ago, Green Baron said:
If you mean that KIC-star ("Tabby's"), the long term dimming was identified as an artifact. At least that was my last info on it ... don't have the link present right now ... But even if it was so then why would a protoplanetary disc not be able to explain a long term dimming ?
No, the 'artifact' explanation was written off as Kepler detected an overall long-term dimming trend that slowly intensified over the course of the observations and matches up with previous observations. You are probably indeed mixing things up between Tabby's and this EPIC star.
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3 hours ago, tater said:
Yeah, my concern would be that CRS-7 and this incident were actually the same problem, and their stated cause for the former was in fact wrong.
Highly unlikely. CRS-7 was overpressure. Rupturing destroyed the structural integrity of the booster without causing a blast. This was straight-up ignition. It is fairly unlikely to almost certainly not the same problem, and will probably be 'minor seal failure followed by static event'.
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15 hours ago, Green Baron said:
Hypothesis from the linked article: a protoplanetary disc edge-on towards us.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.07291
Yet unpublished.
I can already say that it fails sanity checks, as the star is dimming more as time goes on, and there still isn't any sign of a infrared shift from orbiting material.
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1 hour ago, tater said:
Right, I'm a dupe of the conspiracy, building 7, etc. We all get exactly where you are coming from.
I have not said "You are a dupe of a conspiracy."
I have said "This basically unheard of error mode happening to a company with a proven record and who have demonstrated extremely good engineering and handling practices, and especially with their coming up major world-first milestones is highly unusual/straining SoD, and should at least be examined as a possibility due to the sheer number of factors that coming together that make it at least theoretically possible, with the hopes that it's some new form of failure mode that nobody could have anticipated."
Perhaps you should stop reading too much into it?
As for the reconstruction that is giving the current 'event at the fill valve' explaination circulating around, he took the initial frame of the blast and turned its opacity almost to zero and lined it up perfectly with a frame of the rocket from pre-detonation and it centers in on the fill valve as the center of the blast based upon the artifact rays of the blast flare in the image.
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1 minute ago, tater said:
It's not "suspicious" at all.
It's not at all unlikely that the stated cause of the previous failure was in fact wrong, it could certainly be the COPV failing.
No, it's probably not the COPV failing, but instead a static discharge around the fueling port, given some of the footage reconstruction work of people trying to figure out the initial flashpoint. Which, once more, given that the last US static-fire test failure was in 1958, is still suspicious as hell.
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5 hours ago, tater said:
Everything is their fault, it's their rocket. That's what testing is for. The "suspicious" comment is frankly absurd.
They were given defective parts that were supposedly cert'd for launch while following industry-standard practices. They didn't know that their supplier was doing a excrements job on their testing and passing on defective parts. Yes, it was absolutely the supplier's fault in that case. In this case, it's suspicious because of the bell-end of bell-end abnormality of this failure, and it's still not even clear if this is internal to their rocket or pad-side failure on the fueling equipment.
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1 minute ago, _Augustus_ said:
They really should replace that second stage with something. What if you used a Centaur or a Peacekeeper?
First one wasn't their fault, and this one is too suspicious to pin on them yet. Otherwise, the second stage has been entirely reliable.
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Just now, Robotengineer said:
Could they have over pressurized the LOX or Kerosene tanks?
You wouldn't have the tank-internal ignition.
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The only source of ignition in the second stage that I can think of is electrical. But even then... this makes no sense whatsoever, and I can't think of a failure mode that would cause this on the pad.
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7 minutes ago, codepoet said:
Bottom line is - F9 success stats now suck big time.
Not really, no. This was an explosion in the PAD, not the launcher. This wasn't a launch failure.
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Just now, Kryten said:
I can basically guarantee that the actual cause will be nothing like that, we're still only a few hours out.
Well, yeah, but there are a lot of things that still make the timing fishy as hell. SpaceX is getting ready to start the relaunch train for real with SES-10 at the end of the year, has the FH coming out and planned manned flights coming up, the communications company they were servicing for this launch is getting bought out by a chinese company from what I understand, and in general the ground systems have never-EVER been the cause of a launch explosion as far as I'm aware.
Something just doesn't seem right with this, and I can't figure out why.
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The 'hydrazine explosion on the pad, not in the rocket' story sounds fishy as hell. Not in a 'SpaceX needs handling help' way, but in a 'this almost sounds like sabotage' way.
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22 hours ago, KAL 9000 said:
For those of you that don't know, we've confirmed an exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth (other than the Sun, duh)! What's amazing is that it's super close in galactic terms, is roughly the size of Earth, and orbits IN THE FREAKING HABITABLE ZONE! What are your ideas for how we could explore it?
SpaceX's BFR lifting the assemblies for an Orion drive into deep lunar orbit, followed by LIGHTING THAT CANDLE and cruising over at factor METAL on a wave of nuclear devices.
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4 hours ago, Nibb31 said:
It's Isp that matters. Raptor is a bigger engine, so it has more thrust, which means that you need less engines. It's supposed to use liquid methane, which is less dense, which means you need more tankage. Long duration cryo storage and transfer is another unproven technology that needs to be added to the list.
You presume that they will use liquid methane beyond Earth orbit. We don't yet know what their plans are for the Mars end of the trip, but it is ridiculously silly to assume they will do something like that.
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4 hours ago, Nibb31 said:
One way to work out the minimum requirement for the BFS, you need to look for the dV requirements for each leg of the journey. Assuming it uses for the BFR and its own propellant load to get into LEO, the other minimum requirements are:
LEO to Mars intercept and LMO to Earth intercept = 4260m/s
Mars surface to LMO =3800m/s
So assuming that the BFS is refueled in LEO and LMO by another BFS, and assuming it needs a few hundred m/s for propulsive landing and manoeuvering, the BFS needs to have at least 5000 m/s of dV with a payload of 80 metric tons.
In order to support 100 tons after landing, the dry mass of the vehicle will have to be at least 40 tons, including landing gear, structure, life support, heatshield, etc... (I think that's optimistic). So when you plug this data into the rocket equation with an average Isp of 320s, you get a total mass of 591 mt. Which is about the weight of a fully loaded A380.
To get the BFS to LEO; the BFR first stage is going to need to spend 4000 m/s and land. The Falcon 9 separates at Mach 10, which is 3430m/s, so it might be possible to push the envelope a bit more, but this means that the tanks of the BFS are empty when they reach orbit with its 80 ton payload. If you want to go anywhere, you need to fill it up. We've calculated that the BFS tanks are going to need to carry nearly 600 tons of propellant, and since the BFS has a 80 ton payload, you are going to need 5 BFS tanker flights in LEO and in LMO to fill it up for the journey.
As for plugging the requirements of the BFR into the rocket equation, to get 4000m/s out of a 150-ton single stage with a 591-ton payload, you're rocket is going to weigh 2650 metric tons fully loaded. And that's without counting drag and gravity losses. Basically, that puts you in the Saturn V size category, with a BFR equivalent to the S-IC and S-II, and a BFS equivalent to the S-IVB and CSM/LM stack. The trick is in making the BFR and BFS reusable, which makes orbital refueling feasible.
Of course, to make this scheme work, SpaceX has yet to demonstrate:
- 1st stage reusability
- Powered landing from orbit
- Orbital spacecraft reusability
- Orbital refueling and propellant storage
- Fast turnaround of the above
- Long duration life support
- Mars reentry
- Mars powered landing
- Automated ISRU and ground refueling
- Mars launch
- Reentry from Mars
That really is an awful lot of technology to be developed by a single company.
Uh, you list is at least partially pretty freaking wrong.
They HAVE proven that their 1st stages are robust enough to relaunch and are currently testing their most-worn 1st stage to destruction to see how many times they can reuse one before failure. They have not outright relaunched them due to paperwork, but have demonstrated that they can still withstand the forces of launch several times after landing.
They HAVE demonstrated powered landing from orbit, also known as 'every single landed F9 ever'.
They have not demonstrated orbital craft reusability, but will be demonstrating this within approximately a year.
They have not demonstrated orbital refueling.
They have demonstrated the ability to refuel and immediately refire their landed stages after recovery, showing their ability to ramp into fast turnaround.
Long-duration life support is still being worked on by everyone, so not a particularly pressing need, and can be countered by lifting ungodly oodles of current-tech life support.
Mars reentry is theoretically proven and possible with their currently existing landing tech.
Mars powered landing is theoretically proven and possible with their currently existing landing tech.
Automated ISRU and ground refueling is still being worked on by everyone, and once more has the potential counter of 'launch some as tankers to land on Mars.
Mars Launch... yeah, that one needs some thinking.
Reentry from Mars: Current reentry gear, just oodles more of it.
And all of this discounting that they're sending the so-called 'Red Dragon' to Mars first as a testbed for Mars landing, reentry, and deep space tasks, likely pressurized and prepared as the greenhouse to Mars concept that Musk originally founded SpaceX just to do, and that at least the first BFR to Mars will be unmanned and carrying around 20 to 100 tons of probe cargo. Or that they'll almost certainly be using the BFR in Cislunar space to build the rest of the BFR infrastructure for a proper cycler ship or transport to Mars and back, and god knows how many other things that I can't even think of off the top of my head right this second.
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1 hour ago, 78stonewobble said:
Well, on the other hand red dwarves last quite a bit longer, potentially giving evolution plenty of time, even if it's slow... Assuming offcourse habitability of planet lasts long enough. Not betting on life on this particular one tho...
However... A small habitable zone, that could last for eg. 50-100 mio. years more (A far cry from over all red dwarf lifespans)... would be a decent beginners backup site. If we can get there... A big if...
Uh, try 'billions', at least theoretically.
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It shall be named by committee, only after we figure out what we're dealing with. It's our closest neighbor ever, and the only exoplanet that can be feasibly be visited within a human lifetime depending on how crazy we book it. We've got one shot to properly naming this sort of thing, we need to get it right.
Or we could call it 'Bob'. Bob works.
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3 hours ago, Nibb31 said:
How so? Most of his achievements were strongly subsidized by the US government and had a clearly defined customer base and business plan. Mars is nothing like that.
As I mentioned above, there is a lot of tech that needs to be developed and much of the tech that they do have doesn't apply. For example, most of their precision landing experience doesn't apply to Mars because those systems are based on GPS. They can't build their own GPS network on Mars (GPS sats are freaking expensive) so they will need to develop a whole new system based on optical recognition, prelanded nav beacons, or some other tech that doesn't exist yet.
As RedKraken said, their iterative development method won't work too well with launch windows every 24 months. They won't be able to afford rapid prototyping and crashing stuff to see if it works the way they usually do. Certifying a man-rated life support system and life-dependent reliable ISRU and refueling techniques is going to need many development flights before they can risk human lives on those technologies, and debugging is hard in these conditions.
You know, having a rocket with the power of the MCT would be just as useful in translunar space as interplanetary space, and the moon does make an interesting test target with which to test many of the technologies prior to going to mars...
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23 hours ago, Kryten said:
Not a chance, Hubble's angular resolution is far too low to see the planet as separate from Proxima.
Don't need to get a seperation of imagery. We've been able to glean atmospheric data from planets without doing so before thanks to spectrally analyzing the star during transits to detect the elements associated with the planet. If any part of the planet transits, we should be able to get atmospheric data with a concentrated hubble campeign, and if not then Hubble will be better able to constrain the orbital characteristics, mass, and other properties of the planet.
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6 minutes ago, Scotius said:
Hopefully we are going to hear more than: "Uh, yes - we've found something. It looks like a planet, but we're not 100% sure. We need more time for observations. Thank you."
Uh, we're going to hear that, with percentage-chance calculations of how certain they are and maybe a few of the characteristics. They need peer review before they can completely confirm it, but now that they've seen something they can swing Hubble around and glare at Proxima until the little dwarf coughs up its secrets like Jeb beating the crap out of a booster-pinata.
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http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Deals/Toray-carbon-fiber-to-carry-SpaceX-s-Mars-ambitions?page=1
SpaceX just signed a TWO BILLION dollar deal for carbon fiber supply. I have the teeniest-tiny squeak of 'oh god, it's really happening' right now.
Blue Origin Thread (merged)
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
It's only what they're saying in your head. There is no actual statement whatsoever one way or another, and saying 'they asked for any additional information that can be provided means they're helpless schmucks' is rather baseless given people have already pointed out that everyone does this if there is a chance someone has more information to provide, because more data points almost always helps to narrow down the problem quicker than trying to solve on internal data stores.