Since a number of cool things are happening in space exploration these days, we'll widen the scope of this thread a smidge. Conversation about all things space exploration are welcome, whether it be from NASA, SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, or anyone else. Chances are most of the discussion will still be about SpaceX since they love to make things public and fun, but nothing's off limits. I'll eventually get around to modifying the OP to include resources for other companies too, but in the meantime, feel free to post any cool stuff you run across.
Tim Dodd (Everyday Astronaut) - A "random dude" who got really into space (particularly SpaceX). He's a great resource for simple explanations of this stuff, as well as live hosting launches.
USLaunchReport - Lost of videos of the more mundane stuff (e.g., booster recovery operations). Not a ton of commentary.
NASASpaceFlight - Live hosting of most launches including a ton of video of Starlink operations.
Glossary
Spoiler!
Space discussions tend to get a little bogged down in jargon, so here's a list of terms you might encounter. (Others, please let me know of others that should be added.)
ASDS - Autonomous Spaceport Droneship - The "barges" that they sometimes land rockets on.
Dragon - The cone-shaped capsule that sits at the top of the rocket for ISS-bound launches that holds the cargo (or, in the future, humans).
F9 - Falcon 9, the name of the rocket itself.
FH - Falcon Heavy, the three-booster version.
GTO - Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit, a type of orbit that will eventually result in the satellite orbiting the earth as it turns so that it seems to be in the same spot from the ground (such as DirecTV or Dish satellites). These types of launches are particularly challenging because they require a lot of power to get them into the right orbit, leaving very little fuel left for landing.
HIF - Horizontal Integration Facility - the building near the launch pad where they put all of the pieces of the rocket together before rolling it out to the pad.
ISS - The International Space Station
JRTI - Just Read The Instructions, the name of the "barge" that they land on for west-coast launches.
LEO - Low Earth Orbit, a fairly low orbit shared by many satellites and ISS. These launches usually require less power to achieve the proper orbit, so the first stage can often be landed back on land rather than on a drone ship.
LZ1 - Landing Zone 1, basically a big open slab of concrete at Cape Canaveral where the first stage will attempt to land (for some launches).
NET - No Earlier Than, basically the date they're hoping to launch, but rocket launches have a tendency of getting delayed.
OCISLY - Of Course I Still Love You, the name of the "barge" that they land on for east-coast launches.
RTLS - Return to Landing Site, a mission where the first stage comes back and lands at LZ1.
Starship - SpaceX's next-generation rocket (and spacecraft) that will hopefully one day take us to Mars. Starship is the "second stage" that will carry cargo or people, but also refers to the whole system. (It's confusing, but think of it like the Space Shuttle, which was both the shuttle itself and the entire launch system.)
Super Heavy - The giant booster that will carry Starship to space.
New York (CNN Business)Issues with the toilet on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule will leave a group of four astronauts without a bathroom option during their hours-long trip back home from the International Space Station aboard the 13-foot-wide capsule this month.
Instead, the crew will have to rely on "undergarments," Steve Stich, NASA's Commercial Crew Program manager, told reporters Friday night.
SpaceX first discovered an issue with its spacecraft's toilet last month while inspecting a different Crew Dragon capsule. The company found that a tube used to funnel urine into a storage tank became unglued, and was causing a leaky mess hidden beneath the capsule's floor. It's a saga that, at this point, has affected all three spacecraft the company operates.
NASA did not say how long the four astronauts — NASA's Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide from Japan — will have to be on board their Crew Dragon capsule with an inoperable toilet. So far, only two Crew Dragon spacecraft have returned from the ISS with people on board, and the first of those trips took 19 hours, while the second only took six.
Timing will depend on a several factors, including how orbital dynamics and weather affect the return trip, but "we are working to try to always minimize that time from undock to landing and so that's what we'll do with this flight," Stich added.
A problem with Crew Dragon's toilet was first identified during SpaceX's Inspiration4 mission in September, which carried four people on the first all-tourism mission to orbit, where they spent three days.
Jared Isaacman, the commander and financier of the Inspiration4 mission, as it was called, told CNN Business last month that an alarm went off during the mission, alerting the crew to a problem with the toilet's fan. He said he and his fellow passengers had to work with SpaceX controllers on the ground to troubleshoot.
The issue did not cause any serious problems for the Inspiration4 crew, nor were there any instances of bodily fluids getting loose inside the capsule. But after the Inspiration4 crew's returned to Earth, SpaceX disassembled its spacecraft to further inspect what might have gone wrong.
"There's a storage tank where the the urine goes to be stored [and] there's a tube that came disconnected or came unglued," said William Gerstenmaier, a former associate administrator at NASA who now works as SpaceX's head of mission assurance. "That allowed urine essentially to not go into the storage tank, but essentially go into the fan system."
The situation highlights how spacecraft that have conducted all the necessary test flights, been vetted and approved, and even completed full missions can still prove to have design risks.
Fans are used on spacecraft toilets to create suction and control the flow of urine because, in the microgravity environment of space, waste can — and does — go in every possible direction.
In this particular case, the Inspiration4 crew did not notice any excreta floating around the cabin because the leakage was still relegated to sealed-off areas underneath the floor, Gerstenmaier said.
SpaceX is working to clean up and fix the issue on the Inspiration4 spacecraft, which is named Resilience. A brand new Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Endurance, that is slated to take four more astronauts to the ISS on Wednesday, will have the fix built in.
But the group of four astronauts already on board the ISS launched there in April, before the toilet woes were discovered. Their capsule, the Crew Dragon Endeavour, has remained attached to the ISS, serving as a potential lifeboat and sitting ready to take them home. And when astronauts recently inspected the capsule, they found it too had a leaky toilet and there was evidence of urine leaking into the walls. But since they're still in space, they don't have a way to immediately fix the issue.
The space station has its own bathrooms, so it won't be an issue while the astronauts are still on board the orbiting laboratory. But once they get back on board their capsule and begin their return trip — which could happen as early as this weekend, according to NASA — they'll have to rely on the stopgap undergarment option.
The spacecraft should still be relatively safe to fly, if not slightly less comfortable than before.
SpaceX ran a series of ground tests to make sure the Crew Dragon's aluminum structure could hold up to the leaked urine and that the substance hadn't become dangerously corrosive.
Basically, SpaceX researchers coated some pieces of metal in urine mixed with Oxone — the same substance used to remove ammonia from urine on board Crew Dragon — to see how it would react with the aluminum. They put it inside a chamber to mimic the vacuum of space, and they found limited corrosion, Gerstenmaier said.
"We'll double check things, we'll triple checks things, and we got a couple more samples we'll pull out of the chambers and inspect," he said last week. "But we'll be ready to go and make sure the crew is safe to return."
Well that's shitty. I'd be pissed. What a waste. Shit timing as it totally poops on their parade. [Reply]
LAUNCH UPDATE: @NASA's @SpaceX#Crew3 mission is now targeted to launch no earlier than 11:36pm ET on Saturday, Nov. 6 due to a minor medical issue involving one of its crew members.
LAUNCH UPDATE: @NASA's @SpaceX#Crew3 mission is now targeted to launch no earlier than 11:36pm ET on Saturday, Nov. 6 due to a minor medical issue involving one of its crew members.
This is exciting because it very obviously the key to real space exploration--potentially cutting transit times in half. And it is eminently doable with current fission technology.
New York (CNN Business)Issues with the toilet on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule will leave a group of four astronauts without a bathroom option during their hours-long trip back home from the International Space Station aboard the 13-foot-wide capsule this month.
Instead, the crew will have to rely on "undergarments," Steve Stich, NASA's Commercial Crew Program manager, told reporters Friday night.
SpaceX first discovered an issue with its spacecraft's toilet last month while inspecting a different Crew Dragon capsule. The company found that a tube used to funnel urine into a storage tank became unglued, and was causing a leaky mess hidden beneath the capsule's floor. It's a saga that, at this point, has affected all three spacecraft the company operates.
NASA did not say how long the four astronauts — NASA's Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide from Japan — will have to be on board their Crew Dragon capsule with an inoperable toilet. So far, only two Crew Dragon spacecraft have returned from the ISS with people on board, and the first of those trips took 19 hours, while the second only took six.
Timing will depend on a several factors, including how orbital dynamics and weather affect the return trip, but "we are working to try to always minimize that time from undock to landing and so that's what we'll do with this flight," Stich added.
A problem with Crew Dragon's toilet was first identified during SpaceX's Inspiration4 mission in September, which carried four people on the first all-tourism mission to orbit, where they spent three days.
Jared Isaacman, the commander and financier of the Inspiration4 mission, as it was called, told CNN Business last month that an alarm went off during the mission, alerting the crew to a problem with the toilet's fan. He said he and his fellow passengers had to work with SpaceX controllers on the ground to troubleshoot.
The issue did not cause any serious problems for the Inspiration4 crew, nor were there any instances of bodily fluids getting loose inside the capsule. But after the Inspiration4 crew's returned to Earth, SpaceX disassembled its spacecraft to further inspect what might have gone wrong.
"There's a storage tank where the the urine goes to be stored [and] there's a tube that came disconnected or came unglued," said William Gerstenmaier, a former associate administrator at NASA who now works as SpaceX's head of mission assurance. "That allowed urine essentially to not go into the storage tank, but essentially go into the fan system."
The situation highlights how spacecraft that have conducted all the necessary test flights, been vetted and approved, and even completed full missions can still prove to have design risks.
Fans are used on spacecraft toilets to create suction and control the flow of urine because, in the microgravity environment of space, waste can — and does — go in every possible direction.
In this particular case, the Inspiration4 crew did not notice any excreta floating around the cabin because the leakage was still relegated to sealed-off areas underneath the floor, Gerstenmaier said.
SpaceX is working to clean up and fix the issue on the Inspiration4 spacecraft, which is named Resilience. A brand new Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Endurance, that is slated to take four more astronauts to the ISS on Wednesday, will have the fix built in.
But the group of four astronauts already on board the ISS launched there in April, before the toilet woes were discovered. Their capsule, the Crew Dragon Endeavour, has remained attached to the ISS, serving as a potential lifeboat and sitting ready to take them home. And when astronauts recently inspected the capsule, they found it too had a leaky toilet and there was evidence of urine leaking into the walls. But since they're still in space, they don't have a way to immediately fix the issue.
The space station has its own bathrooms, so it won't be an issue while the astronauts are still on board the orbiting laboratory. But once they get back on board their capsule and begin their return trip — which could happen as early as this weekend, according to NASA — they'll have to rely on the stopgap undergarment option.
The spacecraft should still be relatively safe to fly, if not slightly less comfortable than before.
SpaceX ran a series of ground tests to make sure the Crew Dragon's aluminum structure could hold up to the leaked urine and that the substance hadn't become dangerously corrosive.
Basically, SpaceX researchers coated some pieces of metal in urine mixed with Oxone — the same substance used to remove ammonia from urine on board Crew Dragon — to see how it would react with the aluminum. They put it inside a chamber to mimic the vacuum of space, and they found limited corrosion, Gerstenmaier said.
"We'll double check things, we'll triple checks things, and we got a couple more samples we'll pull out of the chambers and inspect," he said last week. "But we'll be ready to go and make sure the crew is safe to return."
This is exciting because it very obviously the key to real space exploration--potentially cutting transit times in half. And it is eminently doable with current fission technology.
Originally Posted by MagicHef:
That looks awesome, but $5 million per contract tells me that they must not be very close.
On the fission side, we could have nuclear thermal rockets in space right now. It's based on common-place reactor technology. The non-proliferation treaty and general angst about launching nuclear reactors to space has not allowed it up to now. But, there have been sufficient advances to make it reasonably safe to launch a reactor at this point.
On the fusion side--there is substantial development needed. But it should be noted that the proposed technology is a great deal easier than earth-based fusion reactors. To put it really simply, the propulsion technology takes a major problem on earth-based reactors and turns it into a benefit by blasting all the excess heat and energy out the back for propulsion. [Reply]
Glad we delayed things two months for the outcome we all expected.
Breaking – Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin loses lawsuit against NASA over the HLS lunar lander contract, with Judge Hertling siding with the agency and SpaceX in ruling:https://t.co/iX7y2DlxiF
Not sure what's going on with Crew 3. Lots of shuffling going on.
The Crew-2 mission now is targeting a return to Earth no earlier than Nov. 8, with a splashdown off the coast of Florida. Crew Dragon Endeavour is scheduled to undock from the @Space_Station on Nov. 7.#Crew3 is targeted to launch no earlier than Nov. 10: https://t.co/tgoGo2KR69pic.twitter.com/F25Dc2gLZd
On a different note, it's crazy and impressive how often NASA manages to get their missions to go far beyond their planned life. The little helicopter that could just keeps on going.
The #MarsHelicopter successfully completed its 15th flight on Mars. It flew for 128.8 seconds. Preliminary localization places us within our targeted landing zone. Ingenuity opportunistically took images of science interest and they'll be processed soon. https://t.co/gTmZnzuVOopic.twitter.com/ZV3ZQprPnw
