Kryten
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KSP2 Release Notes
Posts posted by Kryten
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15 minutes ago, Dman979 said:
And it's a direct injection, too- no silly orbits for this!
It's not completely direct, there's an earth flyby in about a year to give it an extra boost.
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VSS Unity's first captive-carry flight is happening now.
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Launch window is 23:05 - 01:05 UTC, they'll launch close to the start of that if they can.
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16 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
only forty tons... Still requires an Energy-class booster. Greater than shuttle's payload.
They were initially going to use a bespoke Titan variant, Barbarian. A big vehicle for sure, but not Energiya-class. They later switched it to a dual-launch architecture with a pair of Titan IVs.
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Quick update via Blue's mailing list; the next flight is an in-flight abort test, and should take place in early October, with another livestream. The booster used will be the same one as the past few flights, and will probably be destroyed in the test. If it manages to survive, it'll be retired and put in a museum. The email also says that a 'sneak peek' of the orbital system should be included in the next one.
In other news, Blue're now planning to launch orbital systems from and test engines at CCAFS LC-11, as well as the previously announced LC-36.
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Skif-D probably doesn't tell you very much about what would be needed for orbital ABM work, given soviet laser tech of the time. The contemporary US equivalent, ZENITH STAR, was only to be about forty metric tons, and it'd probably be a good bit less with modern electronic lasers.
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1 hour ago, DerekL1963 said:
Like wumpus I find it very hard to believe that an expensive satellite wasn't covered by somebody's insurance (SpaceX, IAI, Spacecom, any banks or financiers involved, etc... etc...) at every step of the process from exiting the factory doors through end-of-life. Speculating over which insurance did or did not, will or won't pay out strikes me as just meaningless jaw flapping.
We know the satellite itself was covered by a prelaunch insurance policy purchased by ISI, but those policies don't cover launch cost. They're intended for circumstances like damage during transport, failures like we've had today being unprecedented in commercial launch. We know Spacecom are at least going to request a refund of the launch cost from SpaceX, and it's hardly likely they'll have announced this without their lawyers having a good look over it.
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10 hours ago, A Fuzzy Velociraptor said:
Isnt that literally the entire point of insurance for satellites?
Satellite insurance is insurance for the satellite, not the launch. In this case they only got a payout from their sat maritime transport insurance, so launch definitely isn't included.
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That wouldn't happen without a clause in the contract if they had got a launch, even a failed one, but they didn't. They bought a launch, and they didn't get one.
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I was recently on a 757, and I was perfectly positioned to get a facefull of debris should anything happen to the engine rotor.
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The van Allen belts aren't that bad for a few passes, particularly if you miss the denser patches like the SAA. Most of the overall exposure for Apollo was cosmic radiation after passage through the belts.
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2 hours ago, B787_300 said:
ack not entirely true. SpaceX said it was the strut and that is it. NASA (who has most of the data from SpaceX) said it was probably the strut but they cant be 100% sure. I would tend to agree with SpaceX on this one and say it was the strut overs NASA's well it seemed like the strut but could have been a couple of other things.
Orbital were certain they'd found the root cause in the OCO-1 failure, over NASA's objections. Didn't exactly work out well for them.
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What happened today was that a vehicle containing over five hundred tons of liquid oxygen and kerosene, hundreds of kilos of hypergolic propellants, significant amounts of outright pyrophoric material, and wrapped in a thin film of flammable metal, exploded. That is not suspicious. That's the natural state of such an object. That's why space is hard.
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That's like asking why food packaging doesn't specify that the mass given is the rest mass. Nobody who works with aircraft has any reason to care about paradoxes appearing at infinite speed, simple as.
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It is built for outsize cargo on top of the fuselage, so could potentially be used for transportation of e.g. C919 fuselage.
17 minutes ago, LN400 said:I am indeed curious what uses China sees in this plane. Surely it's not for sending post cards to remote areas and a space shuttle program that demands a small fleet of 225s doesn't seem very likely.
While a shuttle isn't likely, AN-225 was also used to transport the tank sections for Energiya; a similar role for future large Chinese rockets would be feasible, in particular CZ-9.
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11 minutes ago, ImmaStegosaurus! said:
It's going to be completed now and sold to unnamed Chinese corporation.
It's not unnamed, it's AVIC, parent company of most Chinese aircraft manufacturers.
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11 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:
Regarding the first failure, material and supplier selection is their fault. Cutting corners by going for the cheaper supplier who sells non-aerospace grade parts has a cost.
Should be noted that NASA had misgivings over whether or not SpaceX had really found the root cause in that case. I suppose we'll know in a few months.
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10 minutes ago, Robotengineer said:
Is SpaceX the only launch provider that does pre-launch static fires?
Currently, yes. Most other providers have a simulated launch with tanking but without firing (a so-called wet dress rehearsal, WDR).
10 minutes ago, Robotengineer said:Why do they leave the payload on for the static fire? Vibration measurements?
It's faster. This thing was supposed to be going up in two days, not much time for rolling the stage back and doing extra integration work.
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1 minute ago, KAL 9000 said:
Just want to point out, LC-39 is reserved for history-making missions (Apollo, STS, The flagship probes, SLS, etc.)
Nope, SpaceX have the lease on LC-39A now. There's also a new LC-39C for small launchers like Electron.
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1 minute ago, CptRichardson said:
Not really, no. This was an explosion in the PAD, not the launcher. This wasn't a launch failure.
We don't know that. Stop spreading baseless rumours.
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1 minute ago, todofwar said:
Will this count against F9 though?
It won't strictly be counted in launch failure stats, but is still notable as a complete failure of a launch campaign, and is likely to be counted colloquially. Atlas-able is famous for getting 'four failures in three flights' due to a similar incident.
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We know just about nothing about what happened, this kind of baseless speculation is not in the least helpful or useful. Explosions during launch or test preparation have happened before.
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3 minutes ago, CptRichardson said:
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.
I can basically guarantee that the actual cause will be nothing like that, we're still only a few hours out.
Blue Origin Thread (merged)
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted · Edited by Kryten