Additional comment on the Cygnus launch, the tracking shot of the booster return was AMAZING! Best I can remember and I've watched nearly every SpaceX launch.
Yeah I watched that too. First how it was on its side (the "dog leg maneuver"?) gliding through the air. Then flip over. I would like to call that clip "how it looks if you ever weere about to get an orbital class rocket booster land on your head" 😂
In the space flight industry (SFI), all terminology needs to able to be a TLA (three letter abbreviation). So SSA works whereas SA clearly does not. :-)
@@death_parade 46,656 (36^3) as numbers are allowed in 3LAs/TLAs though are used fairly infrequently in the SFI. I even hear it pronounced as "three ell ayys" regularly enough.
@@death_paradeoh, you poor soul. Allow me to show you one of the acronyms that the US govt uses. Not for space, but hey. AIMS Seems innocent enough, right? No. Stands for... ATCRBS IFF Mark XII System They'll just nest it if they have to. Or as mentioned, just reuse.
As commander, Zena Cardman is one of the two pilots a Dragon carries. Afaik she's the first person to hold this position who's not an aircraft pilot. Which is fine, Dragon is so different to fly than a plane or even other spacecraft. Of course even the long-time test pilots who've piloted Dragon have done almost zero piloting due to it's autonomy.
But this is interesting, it's another milestone in moving away from needing people with intense piloting backgrounds to control a spacecraft. Dragon can make a complete flight autonomously, with the commander or pilot only monitoring the systems and maneuvers. Even manual control is simple touch buttons on a touchscreen. Excellent situational awareness and coolness under pressure are still needed in case things start to go wrong, but that doesn't always require a deep background in high-performance aircraft.
@@donjones4719The reason for selecting experienced test pilots as spacecraft pilots is, by definition, they are cool under pressure and high acceleration (or otherwise they get the title “the late”). Being able to fly aircraft has always been irrelevant.
@@allangibson8494 Being cool under pressure when it really counts is why Jared Isaacman takes his non-pilot crew members on flights in jet fighter trainers. It's a good point - but coolness under pressure can be gained otherwise. Zena's experience of 3 prior spaceflights must have qualified her.
I have to wonder if SLIM could have been righted with an appropriate attitude thruster burn. They really didn't have anything to lose if they would have tried it as the last thing before the sun set.
They may try that once the sun comes back up. If it wakes up again that is. They probably want to wring all the usability they can in this configuration before they roll the dice on that maneuver.
Would love to see more on Spire and their Lemur satellites. Is this a sign that someone is taking a financial interest in space debris and how crowded Earth orbit is getting?
Much like the military, space projects have a better chance to get funded if they have cool acronyms that are easy for government officials (or whomever) to pronounce. It's only "gravitational-wave" with a hyphen because nobody would pay billions for LIGWO. Same applies to LISA... it's easier to sell to the people with the deep pockets than LIGOSA or LISAGO, which gets even clunkier with the W in the way.
11:07 Rushmore 😂 12:38 9 layers of flying safe 13:13 LISA update 15:46 refueling standard adopted by Space Force 18:07 China exploring places where the Sun doesn’t shine
They should send politicians up on those short space flights. It changes your mindset if you can see the world from up there. Imagine them moving even 10% of the military budget over to space exploration. We'd be on the moon and on Mars before the end of the decade.
Its fascinating to watch Manley fail with Musk. He almost understood its all a scam awhile back, but he likely hasn't thought through how limited the possibilities are for humans in Space.
I caught the Cygnus launch on X/Twitter and for the few minutes I watched the quality was surprisingly good in terms of resolution/bitrate. Normally on my Gigabit connection X/Twitter has significant issues with streams and videos.
Detecting the fine details of exactly how two mutually spiraling Black Holes merge seems to be our only hope of experimentally determining the true nature of Gravity, and whether or not Gravity is quantum in nature.
The "outer portion of the propeller generating most of your lift" is a misrepresentation of propeller aerodynamics. More likely the problem will be balance, or, whether the motor is capable of spinning the props fast enough to make up for the loss of blade area.
I really would love to know more about LISA. because it really confuses me how it works. doesn't interferometers depend on extremely precise distances ? how are they going to distinguish the effect of grav waves when the distance between the satellites will never be perfectly constant ?
That's were the free floating gold cubes come into play. 14:37 They try to hold the satellite steady and measure any deviation relative to the cubes. What I don't understand is how they sync them. Any external signal will have a different runtime to one of the three satellites.
@@benjaminhanke79 exactly, you would probably be able to compensate for any deviation, but you would need to know the EXACT position of the satellites to the micrometer. I really want to learn how they plan to pull that off. there has to be some cleaver algorithm or something like it.
Basically the satellites shield the proof masses from any disturbances except for gravity. Gravitational accelerations are known well enough, so you can very accurately predict the path of the proof masses and thus the distance between them, while the satellites around them get disturbed, measure that against the proof masses in perfect free fall and compensate for that.
Surprised I never see any RU-vidrs at the orlando SpaceCom convention. It’s literally a few days of potential and future space tech. Companies with new ideas trying to make there name in space. And lots of talk about the political climate of space and how it could and should be regulated… interesting stuff
It's a shame they weren't able to right it, should maybe use ejectable rovers that could be used to right them in future? Would maybe mean more successful landings in future.
How did the Japanese craft on the moon get turned over so it get solar power, so it could take pictures, or did they not need to, after all? Also, how could it possibly be too hot on the moon for anything?
True madness with respect to Rocket Lab - on the same day that they had a successful launch to orbit and showed improved recovery of a rocket their stock price fell %17 due to an announcement that delaying a launch in 2023 had hurt quarterly profits slightly. If you ever wanted to own a bit of a space company, Rocket Lab is cheap right now - around $4 a share. It has been trading at $5 - 7 a share for the last year or so. Hoping that the Neutron program starts strong this year and that turns back into the $8 - 10 range where analysts say it should be. (To be clear, I'm just a guy who doesn't like that I no longer feel like I have a part in most space launches because SpaceX is private and NASA doesn't do their own anymore. I can own a piece of Rocket Lab and wanted to share information with people who might feel the same. That's it. Not trying to sell some get rich quick scheme or promising that their next 10 rockets won't blow up on the pad and the stock will lose all value.)
Is there a reason rockets are launched almost always on sea-level (g=9.80665 m/s^2) ? If you would launch a rocket in the Andes for example at an altitude of 4000m (g=9.794347493876 m/s^2) you would have about 0.2% less gravity and about 18% less air density.
I've seen a video on that- possibly Manley himself. I think it's just the usual cost benefit issue involved with building infrastructure in a remote area, away from safe abort corridors.
SpaceX had a proposal where they would airlaunch the falcon rockets, but then they did the math and realize they could just extend the first stage by about 5% to save lots of money
It'll cost more to drag a rocket up to the Andes than it'd cost to take the 0.2% hit. The rocket is quickly out of the densest parts of the atmosphere anyway, spending most of its fuel speeding up instead.
@@Shipwright1918 Starship is still in development and the payload hasn't even been built. I don't think you understand what's goin on very well at all.
Don't need a degree to figure out that "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" is something you really don't want your launch platform to do in the middle of trying to get to space. As I mentioned in my first post, bit on the premature side to go proposing payloads and missions for a spacecraft that hasn't even managed a successful test launch yet. Work on the not-exploding/disintegrating part, then you can start planning what to do with it afterwards.
The thrusters are very low powered, that's all they need to push the spacecraft around a bit in zero-g. Once landed, SLIM weighs too much to be moved by these small thrusters.
I don't know about that. I have seen some pretty wobbly ceiling fans spinning away, One report thinks that it landed on two legs pitching the blades into the dirt and damaging all 4 tips. Wouldn't we all be surprised if they were able to increase rotor speed and get enough for some lift to pace the rover. Never underestimate those miracle workers at JPL. We'll just have to see what they can come up with.
@@jlangevin65 well, you're right, it could be bad. Or, JPL could do what scientist do and run tests and see what they got. Categoric presumptions dont work here!
I wonder if it could be worthwhile to design blades with a weak point so that when they broke, both sides broke at the same place, remaining roughly balanced.
@@drworm5007I think the problem would be that since it broke at the weak point, it wouldn't dissipate enough energy for the rotor to stop thus it would break again beyond the weak point. But idk it could work. I think the easiest is to not crash it 😂
11:30 I was present for the LIFE full-scale burst pressure test. The energy release was so high, we had to do the testing in the evening after work hours to minimize risk to center personnel, and we were restricted by weather as well, because cloud cover can reflect the sound well out into the surrounding city. You can see me in the group shot on Marcus House's video (front row, red flannel, green hat). The group shot is not on Sierra's long video, so not sure where Marcus got it. :-)
@jamesowens7176 Fascinating. I really do wish you and all the other people involved well in progressing this project. I think that inflatables are some of the most exciting crewed space technology being developed at the moment. I had only heard about Bigelow until it closed up shop and was then delighted, after a bit of internet searching, to discover that Sierra Space is doing a great job of keeping the technology moving forward (inflatables in general, I'm not trying to imply that Sierra Space's work is derived from Bigelow's ex-NASA technology but rather a different realisation of the same general concept) I'm guessing (hoping) that pressure testing is only one of the things being tested. I think I did read somewhere (but maybe I'm wrong) someone at Sierra Space saying that it had also conducted ballistic tests on the material - firing projectiles designed to simulate various micro-meteorite impacts at test samples. Some real-life test data on that might help convince some of the naysayers. The third category of test I think would be interesting is radiation testing - an initially sub-scale test article exposed to various types of radiation with sensors inside it to be able to determine the attenuation properties of a LIFE module. I know that Sierra Space has discussed micro-meteorite and radiation protection properties of its material - in both cases expected to be better than typical thickness solid station material I think I remember hearing - but nothing makes the point better than actual test data.
@@julianfp1952 Rest assured that there will be loads of test data before these go up with a crew. The ultimate burst testing and creep-burst testing are designed to characterize the "restraint layer" - the structural part of the shell. Individual straps have been load and creep tested as well, which helped inform the design of the integrated restraint layer. There is also damage tolerance testing of the restraint straps, as well as space environment exposure testing at the ISS and on the X-37B. However, the restraint layer is kind of in the middle of the layer stack-up. The outermost layers protects the restraint layer against thermal cycling, atomic oxygen erosion, and debris strikes. The innermost layer protects the air barrier from damage from inside the vehicle (crew/cargo). The air barrier itself is multiple layers to provide redundancy. Ultimately there will be uncrewed flight articles to verify all components work together as expected before we risk crew inside. As for radiation, we have data from BEAM and from earlier Bigelow standalone flights, as well as the material testing I mentioned above. LEO radiation environment is well characterized from decades of data on the ISS. There will be multiple LIFE modules in LEO before any are sent beyond, so there will be even better data on the radiation attenuation of the system by then.
@@jamesowens7176 Thank you for the very informative reply. It’s so great to see this technology moving forwards. Once this stuff is human rated it will be a huge step up from having to live in relatively small tin cans either in space stations or for longer duration deeper space travel.
The bit about more of the lift coming from the tip of the blades is not entirely true at 9:17. While going twice as far away from the hub will generate 4 times the dynamic pressure, the geometric twist, the tapered chord, reduced camber, and the induced angle of attack near the tips do a lot to reduce the lift. A good distribution of lift will be pretty smooth and lift must go to zero at the tips of the propeller.
It's so awesome to hear you talk about LISA. I'm actually working on it as an analoge design engineer at SRON🤩 So freaking happy LISA got adopted and I still can't believe I'm working on something that will be launched in to space 😳
Well, there’s one specification for crewed docking (IDSS), and any company can build one and get it certified by their ‘local’ ISS partner agency. The Common Berthing Mechanism has also becom e something of an impromptu standard for berthing larger modules, as on Axiom and Gravitics designs, though IDSS is supposed to work for that as well. This is for unmanned probe to probe docking, picoport to IDSS’s clamp-o-tron
And the IDSS is compatible with a couple docking adapters. That is probably the best way to make a universal standard. Everyone can implement it how they prefer, but they have to adhere to the common standard. The russian APAS-95 can be converted to it (and already looks very similar) using the International Docking Adapter to turn it into the passive side, NASA has their NASA Docking System, ESA usies the International Berthing and Docking Mechanism, SpaceX has their adapter, even the chinese have a possibly compatible system.
LEMUR. Will flat earthers start shutting up? Or will they brand it as just more CGI? Will we have to launch them into space one by one to end their idiocracy?
The NG20/Cygnus launch had the best camera work ever. Nonstop camera tracking from 50km altitude down to zero. You could see how the rocket "steers and glides" itself to the pad without engine power!
I just finished my phd on the lisa mission, working on the lasers for the tests you mentioned! It's because we delivered the lasera that they have been able to finish the tests !
I too recall talk of LISA (and LIGO) at Glasgow back in the early 90s. It seems to have been a while... Let's hope they finally get it up and running sooner rather than later.
After the JW "Forever Launching In A Few Years From Now Since The 90's" ST is finally out there, generating incredible images and tons of science, apparently anything is possible!
@@KaizokuSencho even if they are reverse engineered, they still have to make the parts and make them work. Margins off error are pretty small and require the know how of making those parts. Again, those sanctions are pretty hard hitting.
Love seeing inflatables still progressing! I just saw a documentary about LIGO and it's crazy the precision that's involved. They have to measure the difference in distance equivalent to Earth -> Sun vs Earth -> Sun + a human hair (if memory serves). Will have to check out the space-based one, curious how they maintain the relative positions well enough for that level of accuracy. Fly safe! - Brought to you by Centrum Adult 😃
Until Islamic republic regime is gone I won't enjoy any kind of space progress in my country, civilian part of space program was hilarious and you actually believing it is just sad.
I'm so interested in human progression but I get this sinking feeling many of these these 'startups' are tech bros that get millions of dollars or euros from government grants and then ride off into the sunset when they're not successful. Why is that a sinking feeling? Because OUR taxes finance these ventures and it feels like more than a few are calculated to the proof of concept just to get monetized, but not really succeed. Like a hobby that lets you be rich forever.
@21:15 I'm pretty sure that as with the Falcon9, SpaceX will be StarShip's main customer as they maintain the Starlink constellation with it and attempt to colonize Mars. That's Elon's expressed purpose for the Starship.
Out of curiosity, why wouldn't a system like LISA do a tetrahedron, rather than a flat triangle? Wouldn't tetrahedron give them much better pinpointing ability in 3D?
I am assuming the day will eventually come when Starship/Super Heavy becomes almost as common as Falcon 9. I am also assuming that by the time it does, we will be seeing multiple space stations being launched. Not holding my breath, but I believe it will happen. 😊
It blows my mind that America landed men on the moon half a dozen times by the early 1970s… and Iran can’t even get an unmanned rocket to low Earth orbit until 2024…
@@AthosRacno; it’s an original web fiction where humans start getting superpowers in 1982 coincident with the arrival a mysterious golden man whose powers surpass everyone else’s. The story follows a fifteen year old girl who gains powers in horrible circumstances as she integrates into the superhuman society, fights the occasional kaiju, and eventually finds out the true purpose of the powers themselves. It’s an “it can always get worse” grim and gritty world, allegedly for the sake of “realism” according to the author.
re: New Glenn - I don't know if this is typical of simulator builds, but they deemed that one worthy of labeling it with *S/N 001* So this could be the real article, _BUT_ they intentionally did things to it to perform various tests, to confirm their manufacturing built it right.
I'd go easy on the hype with Starship commercial capabilities, since it will need a payload hatch. Which isn't the most efficient way to use available cargo space, versus a standard payload fairing.
I suspect that the payload bay will be a work in progress. They need to get the vehicle flying first. I'm expecting some kind of clamshell not terribly unlike what Rocketlab Neutron has been showing in renders, will be the ultimate version. But that is just mechanical/structural engineering. That can be dealt with once they get the flight dynamics sorted.
I remember, some years ago, when "experts" said that big rockets were useless and all kind of mission could be performed with a plethora of smaller rockets, 20 tons to LEO, and orbital building. They said it only because bigger rockets weren't available!
Starlab sounds exciting and the simplicity of a single launch making full use of Starship's payload capacity (both volume and mass) is appealing but for a follow-on version 2 this single-Starship-launch concept coupled with Sierra Space's LIFE technology once mature seems to me to be a match made in heaven (or LEO at least!). If a Starship fairing can accommodate an 8m diameter payload then I would guess that a LIFE module could probably get to something like 12 to 15 metres diameter once inflated. Also, with Musk talking about the potential of a 20 or even 30m stretch for Starship v3 even with some of that length increase going to the booster, and a lot of what increase is on the ship going to extra tankage, I would imagine at least another 5 metres of fairing length if not more. That would allow a v2 Starlab to increase the length of both inflatable hab module and the solid (non-inflatable) service module compared to the v1 lengths. Putting all of that together I can see at some point in the not too distant future (early 2030s?) it being possible to put up in a single launch a station with a pressurised volume about 25% larger than the ISS supporting maybe 8 permanent crew.
As indian its okay to fail 7 times. We indian did not succeed the moon lander the first time but we succeed after the second try. Even japan failed 2 times recently. The reason why india succeed the first or second try is because we are practical and intellgent. Maybe iran should seek advice from ISRO because of our efficiency and reliability.
About 45 years ago the USA helped out the PRC with improving the guidance of their space boosters. The help was then applied to improve the guidance of their nuclear missiles. That was an early lesson for the USA in what comes of technology transfer to China. Likewise when the USA helped India with its space program, and India stuck a nuke on top of their copy of the USA's Scout rocket. Maybe Iran, basically a Middle Ages country existing in the 21st century (unless it is perfectly ok to torture a teacher for a dress code violation), would like India's help in improving their rockets. Hopefully India doesn't provide it.
@@marcmcreynolds2827 As indians we tend to forget how much advanced and powerful our technology becomes. We indians is the leading country in space in entirety of asia, so you are right that we need to keep the tech away from lesser nations like iran.
In regard to the inflatable test, I am having an issue with how the whole test article Pops and explodes. For sure I understand that this is a test of one particular layer, amongst many others. I think the minimum test threshold was 70 psi and they got it higher before failure. In space, it probably won't be pressurized above 10 psi as opposed to Earth sea level atmospheric pressure of 14.7 psi. Again, realizing there would be multiple layers to absorb an impact, I still would feel better knowing that a failure would have been 'springing a leak (also a failure) and maintaining the structure' as opposed to a complete destruction of the test article.
9:19 imo, they should test it until it's 100% broken, it's not like it can be repaired or anything. If it can still take commands, mess around with it until it's completely dead. Never know what you might learn!
I thought the NASA vibe testing was done at JSC. I know the guy that used to run that shop before he retired. Have they decommissioned that lab? Did they move it to Glenn? Or did they duplicate it?
It seems ever more obvious that Starship ruined Spacex. Why didn't they stick with the Falcon H concept and just modify and combine it to get the performance they need?
