I fantasize about him being abducted by aliens and made to work in their fulfillment centers as a slave.
That is all.
Category: Space
Bat Boy Billionaire to Ride Giant Space Dildo
Compensating for Something?
As you may have heard, Amazon chief and Bat Boy look-alike Jeff Bezos plans to be on the first manned manned flight of his Blue Origin booster.
I guess he thinks that having more money than God qualifies him as a test pilot.
You give an egomaniac enough money, and they think that they are Buckaroo Banzai:
Jeff Bezos has already selected a hobby for his post-CEO life: space travel.
Just two weeks after he steps down as CEO of Amazon, Bezos will climb aboard a rocket made by his space exploration company Blue Origin.
“If you see the earth from space, it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It’s one earth,” Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram on Monday morning.
“Ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of traveling to space.”
I want to go into space, but this desire is NOT strong enough for me to share a space capsule with Jeff Bezos.
I Am Not Sure How I Feel about This
Both DARPA and NASA are moving forward with plans to develop nuclear thermal rockets.
While nuclear thermal propulsion do not match the efficiencies of electric (Ion, etc.) propulsion (an ISP of about 1000 for nuclear thermal as versus up to 5000 for electric propulsion and about 300-500 for chemical rockets) they provide more efficiency than chemical rockets, and more thrust than electric propulsion.
It makes a lot of sense for satellites in various earth and lunar orbits where you need to change position rapidly.
I’m not sure how sanguine I am about the possibility of putting a few hundred pounds of enriched uranium in orbit though.
From the NASA story:
More than sixty years after the U.S. began serious studies into nuclear propulsion for space travel, NASA is taking the first steps on a new path to develop nuclear-powered engines for crewed missions to Mars by the end of the next decade.
The agency is reviewing industry responses to the first phase of a plan with the Energy Department to mature a prototype nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) reactor and engine design for use in space. The congressionally directed initiative, which is also supported by ongoing NASA/Energy Department research into advanced nuclear fuels, will ultimately lead to the building and testing of demonstrators.
Beyond this, the vision extends to the potential development of a full-scale nuclear-powered system for a crewed mission to Mars that would be launched in 2039. The new capability, which could be based on either NTP or synergistic nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) technology, would also provide power for future crewed and robotic deep-space exploration missions as well as faster, more responsive resupply flights to lunar and Martian outposts.
NEP is about having more energy available for an electric propulsion.
It is still a low thrust system, but provides much more delta V over time.
DARPA’s proposal is more about providing satellites that can move between geostationary orbits and lunar orbits quickly and flexibly to deal with treats presented by some sort of rival in space:
A nebulously named “Deterrence Layer” is on the drawing board for the National Defense Space Architecture, and that could mean the return of a functioning U.S.-operated, nuclear-powered satellite in orbit by 2025 for the first time in 60 years.
The need for the Deterrence Layer may depend on what China and Russia do next. If rival militaries establish a presence in the region of deep space between geostationary and lunar orbits, the U.S. Defense Department believes a future spacecraft—an “advanced maneuvering vehicle” (AMV)—will be needed to charge out as far as the Moon, hopefully just to remind an adversary to keep a tight leash on any nefarious plans in cislunar space.
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What is envisaged for the AMV is a propulsion system that produces a high amount of thrust compared to its weight yet is significantly more efficient than chemical propulsion.
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In the NERVA ground tests and SNAP-10A orbital tests, NASA and the military used a fission reactor fueled by highly enriched uranium, the same radioactive material used to make nuclear warheads.
For DRACO, DARPA has specified a technology shift to high-assay, low enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel. Unlike weapons-grade uranium fuel that is typically enriched to 80%, HALEU is by definition only enriched between 5% and 20%—although the exact level is not being released. HALEU in the form of uranium metal will be furnished by the government to GA-EMS for the DRACO reactor.
The choice of HALEU exploits a bureaucratic loophole created by former President Donald Trump. His presidential memorandum signed on Aug. 20 delegates approval for the launch of a spacecraft using uranium that is enriched below the 20% threshold to the head of the sponsoring agency instead of the White House. In effect, the memorandum transfers the launch authority decision for DRACO from the president to the secretary of defense, perhaps along with the risk in case anything goes wrong.
Nuclear loopholes in space. Now THERE’S a reassuring term.
I understand the advantages of such a system, but I am concerned about the potential safety risks, both for NTP and NEP propulsion.
“If You Had Any Balls, You’d Say ‘Oh, My God, What Is That Thing?’ Then Scream and Cut Your Mic.”
There is a story, I’m not sure if it is urban legend, that Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins said this when discussing what Neil Armstrong should say when he set foot on the moon.
I hope that the story is True.
Michael Collins died today. He was 90 years old.
Best take-down of Musk ever:
I want this framed pic.twitter.com/i2abP3PZ3u
— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) March 22, 2021
Marianne Williamson:1 — Elon Musk: Nothing.
Am I the Only Who Sees Fail Written All Over This?
NASA is looking at handing operations of its space station to private business in the next decade:
NASA is giving us some more insight into its plans to get humans to Mars, under the blanket mission called ‘Journey to Mars,’ and during the press conference, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Bill Hill revealed that the current hope is to hand off control of the International Space Station to a commercial owner by sometime around the mid 2020s.
“NASA’s trying to develop economic development in low-earth orbit,” Hill said, speaking on a panel of NASA staff assembled to discuss the upcoming Mars mission. “Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-earth orbit, so that research can continue in low-earth orbit.”
The timing fits with the end of The U.S. Government’s current funding of the ISS program, which was extended by President Obama’s administration from its original deorbiting date of 2016 through 2020. Operations were prolonged through 2024 to help give NASA a platform from which to run its near-Earth preparatory missions leading up to the ultimate manned mission to Mars.
If this works as well as the privatization of British rail, I would be very surprised.
A Little Rocketry Factoid
I was reading an article about how France is looking into creating a reusable rocket engine powered by Lox/CH4. (Methane)
I was wondering why they would go with Methane as a fuel, so I did some reasons.
These days, there are 4 basic options for launcher fuel, Liquid Hydrogen, Kerosene (RP-1), Hydrazine, and Methane.
Hydrazine has fallen out of favor for boosters, though it is still used in thrusters of various sorts. It has low impulse, and it’s toxic, but the fact that it can be used as a monopropellant means that it is convenient to use for orbital maneuvering, since it requires half the parts, and you don’t need to make sure that the flow of a separate fuel and oxidizer are synchronized for short the “blip” that would be needed for an orbital rendezvous or station keeping.
The commonly used propellants are LH2 and RP-1 each have distinct advantages:
- Hydrogen has the highest impulse (fuel economy).
- RP-1 is denser, and requires smaller tanks.
- RP-1 can be stored at room temperature.
Methane falls in between Hydrogen and RP-1. It’s less dense than RP-1, and more dense than LH2, and is more fuel efficient than RP-1 and less so than LH2.
Methane is also a lot easier to handle than LH2, with hydrogen condensing at -252.9°C, while liquefies at a relatively balmy -161.6°C, much closer to the boiling point of LOX. (-183°C)
Additionally, for reusable and restartable engines, Methane has the advantage that it does not coke up, so recycling the engine for another use is more straightforward than RP-1.
Additionally, if you want to go to Mars or the outer planets, it is relatively trivial to manufacture or extract Methane, while manufacturing LH2 would be extremely difficult, and manufacturing RP-1 would be nigh impossible.
So, now you know more than you want to about why a number of rocket manufacturers are looking into Methane as a propellant.
It Took Long Enough
SpaceX has finally managed to safely land a first stage on their booster:
SpaceX engineers and on-board software maneuvered the first stage of a Falcon 9 launch vehicle back to a steady, tail-down landing at Cape Canaveral Monday, 10 min. after returning the kerosene-fueled rocket to flight following an ascent explosion on a mission to the International Space Station in June.
Success in recovering the stage, after two unsuccessful attempts to land on a barge in the Atlantic, marks a major step toward the long-sought dream of reusable commercial space launchers. While Blue Origin brought its liquid-hydrogen/liquid oxygen New Shepard vehicle back from a suborbital launch to space on Nov. 23, Monday’s SpaceX recovery was the first known landing for an unmanned orbital launcher.
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, an early SpaceX backer, tweeted “Congrats @SpaceX for landing the rocket back on land!!!! Incredible!!! One giant leap!”
The landing at a surplus launch pad on Cape Canaveral AFS, Florida, came in the middle of three significant milestones for commercial spaceflight. For SpaceX, it marked a return to flight for the Falcon 9 launch vehicle that is the linchpin of the company’s business in the near term. For its customer, Orbcomm, it completed launching of a 17-spacecraft low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation of second-generation Machine-to-Machine “OG2” satellites.
Although only a secondary test objective on the Orbcomm-2 mission, landing the Falcon 9 stage at Launch Complex 13 on Cape Canaveral — a surplus Atlas launch site designed “Landing Complex 1” by SpaceX — was a major achievement for the Hawthorne, California-based company.
I am dubious as to the ultimate significance of the reusable stage.
At least some of the potential savings is eaten up by the additional fuel that needs to be carried to fly home, as are any arrangements for a landing site, with its associated blockhouse and firefighting equipment.
We’ll see.
Do’h!!!!!!!
Bummer of a birth mark, Федеральное космическое агентство Россиu
It appears that there may be a few issues with the Russian space program:
The Soyuz TMA-16M capsule with international space crew descends beneath a parachute just before landing near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan
Work at Russia’s new $ 3 billion spaceport in the Far East has ground to a halt after a critical piece of infrastructure was discovered to have been built to the wrong dimensions, and would not fit the latest version of the country’s Soyuz rocket, a news report said.
The Vostochny Cosmodrome, under construction in the Amur region, north of China, is intended to become Russia’s primary spaceport, replacing the Soviet-built Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The cutting-edge facility was meant be ready for launches of Soyuz-2 rockets in December, but an unidentified space agency of a of a told the TASS news agency of a of a late Thursday that the rocket would not fit inside the assembly building where its parts are stacked and tested before launch.
The building “has been designed for a different modification of the Soyuz rocket,” the source said, according to news website Medusa, which picked up the story from TASS.
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“Work with the rocket at the integration and testing complex now can not be conducted because the facility is not ready,” the spokesperson said in the report. “There are still imperfections in the construction.”
The problems with the testing and assembly building are the latest incident in a saga of corruption scandals, embezzlement cases, high-profile arrests, worker strikes, and construction delays at the Vostochny cosmodrome.
If there is an equivalent of The Daily Show in Russia, they are all getting drunk right now, because their script has already been written.
It’s Official, Elon Musk Is Now a Bond Villain
On Colbert last night, Elon Musk, internet tycoon turned electronic car manufacturer turned space entrepreneur wants to colonize Mars, unleashed a literal bombshell:
The billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors appeared on the second episode of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show last night (Sept. 9) to discuss his various business ventures. Colbert asked him about his plan to send people to Mars, which Musk described as a “fixer-up” of a planet. That led to this exchange:
“Eventually you can transform Mars into an Earthlike planet,” Musk said. “By warming it up.”
“With a blanket?” Colbert asked.
No, Stephen, not with a blanket. With a great number of thermonuclear bombs:
Musk has publicly supported this idea for a long time, but we’d wager it’s the first time anyone’s suggested it on a late-night talk show. The idea is that the nukes would melt the Mars’ polar ice caps and kickstart a greenhouse effect—similar to the one we’re currently experiencing on Earth—that would quickly make the planet warmer.
I will make a couple of points here:
- First, you can get the same sort of effect, sans radiation, by dispersing a few tons of carbon black on the poles. The increased albedo does the rest.
- Second, this really is Bond villain nuts. Batsh%$ insane
Nestle Launches Mission to Mars
No, Nestle is not actually flying to Mars. That’s just a snarky reference to Nestle’s sucking water out of California in orderto bottle it.
When juxtaposed with some of Nestle’s earlier behavior, the news that NASA’s discovery that there are current water flows on Mars, it is an obvious bit of humor:
Spectroscopic data from NASA
’s 10-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have confirmed years of scientific suspicion that periodic dark streaks appearing on Martian slopes are the result of liquid water flowing on the planet’s surface.
The dark features, known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), have been observed for years by the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and have appeared on dozens of sites at Mars. This imagery was later correlated with mineral mapping by another instrument, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), which determined that the dark streaks are hydrated minerals — i.e., thin patches of damp soil. The salt lowers the freezing point of the water, allowing it to persist longer in Mars’ thin, cold atmosphere.
“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science and a former space shuttle astronaut, during a Sept. 28 press conference. “Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past. Under certain circumstances, liquid water has been found on Mars.”
This is actually rather significant.
Where there is water, on Earth at least, there is life.
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the picture.
Deep Thoughts
Last night, I watched the Dr. Who episode The Waters of Mars, the episode in which astronauts are infected by evil water that they use on the crops that they are growing.
Today, on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, they were discussing the fact that the astronauts on the space station had just grown crops on the station, and had a salad made from the greens.
I found this somewhat unsettling.
Posted via mobile.
I Need Some Pictures to Understand This
Reactions Engines, the British company working on a partially air breathing cryogenic engine which would power a single stage to orbit spacecraft, Skylon, as well as a hypersonic transport, the A2.
This project has taken a major step forward with both the European Space Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have found the basic concept sound, including a heat exchanger that cools the incoming air by hundreds of degrees in a fraction of a second without choking up without being choked with frost:
It is a well-established truism in aerospace that leaps in propulsion technology almost always precede major advances in spacecraft or aircraft design.
As the clamor for affordable access to space continues to grow, there is mounting interest in the Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (Sabre) concept under development by U.K.-based Reaction Engines. This hybrid powerplant is designed to bridge the infamous power gap between air breathers and rockets, potentially enabling a vehicle to accelerate from a standing start on the runway all the way to low Earth orbit.
Such an engine could power high-speed aircraft, suborbital craft or even multi- and single-stage-to-orbit vehicles. Even more encouraging to Sabre proponents is that, while earlier attempts to harvest oxygen from the atmosphere succumbed to thermodynamic reality, the Reaction design continues to pass muster with experts in Europe and the U.S. The company’s most recent—and possibly most valuable—vote of confidence comes from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), which analyzed Sabre under a cooperative research and development agreement.
AFRL’s validation followed a detailed study of the entire concept, particularly the precooler heat exchanger technology, which allows for the practical extraction of oxygen from the air without clogging up the mechanism with frost and ice. Reaction unveiled initial details of the methanol-based frost-control system at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Hypersonics and Spaceplanes conference in Glasgow in early July.
AFRL program manager Barry Hellman says analysis “confirmed the feasibility and potential performance of the Sabre engine cycle. While development of the Sabre represents a substantial engineering challenge, the engine cycle is a very innovative approach and warrants further investigation.” As a result, Reaction Engines and AFRL plan to continue collaborating on Sabre, with potential follow-on work focusing on evaluation of various air-breathing-powered vehicle concepts and testing of specific engine components.
The AFRL study will also evaluate other potential uses for the Sabre’s heat exchanger technologies, including looking at broader defense applications. “The question to answer next is what benefit the Sabre could bring to high-speed aerospace vehicles compared to other propulsion systems,” says Hellman. “AFRL is analyzing vehicle designs based on the Sabre engine concept. We are also considering testing their heat-exchanger technology at Mach 5 flight conditions in a high-temperature wind tunnel.”
While AFRL acknowledges that Sabre’s original target—a single-stage-to-orbit space access vehicle dubbed Skylon—remains technically “very risky as a first application,” Hellman says: “Sabre may provide some unique advantages in more manageable two-stage-to-orbit configurations.”
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The precooler chills the incoming air from more than 1,000C (1832F) to -150C in less than 1/100th of a second, before passing it through a turbo-compressor and into the rocket combustion chamber, where it is burned with subcooled liquid hydrogen fuel. For higher altitude operation and the jump to orbit, the engine switches to an onboard liquid oxygen supply and runs as a conventional closed-cycle rocket engine (AW&ST Nov. 26, 2012, p. 47).
What this means in the short term is not space travel, but it does mean that they are far more likely to get government and private sector funding.
Good folks at Av Week have a description of how Reaction Engines made this work, but I cannot make heads nor tails of it:
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But after endorsement of the basic technology from the European Space Agency and, more recently, the U.S. Air Force’s Research Laboratory, the company’s synergetic air-breathing rocket engine (Sabre) concept is being taken far more seriously. Designed to power a vehicle from a standing start to Mach 5.5 in air-breathing mode, and from the edge of the atmosphere to low Earth orbit in pure rocket mode, the Sabre engine with a heat exchanger at the heart of the design is attracting widespread interest for potential application on a range of atmospheric and space vehicles.
With patents pending and negotiations with new industrial partners apparently at an advanced stage, Reaction Engines has made the surprise decision to unveil the first details of the critical technology at the core of its hybrid hypersonic propulsion system.
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“It is pretty mind-bending stuff,” says Reaction Engines technical director and chief designer, Richard Varvill. Speaking at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics International Space Planes and Hypersonics conference here, he says the system counters the frost that precipitates out of the air as it becomes saturated with increasing relative humidity during the rapid cooling process. The precipitation “looks like the white feathery frost you’d see on a cold winter’s day. Unfortunately, that frost is sufficiently mechanically strong that it can bridge the gaps between the tubes and will block the matrix solid in about 3 sec. flat if you don’t do anything about it.
“So—surprise, surprise—we use an anti-freeze, and in this case it is methanol. But we use the methanol in a rather sophisticated way, with the objective of minimizing the amount you need. Also we don’t want to spray the methanol in and leave it in the air flow because we are actually cooling down the air to the point at which the methanol would freeze itself,” he says.
To do this, Reaction Engines has “borrowed a trick from the chemical process industry,” says Varvill. “We inject the methanol at one of the coldest points, and we effectively get the mix of water and methanol to flow forward in the matrix—against the direction of the airflow.” He concedes this seems counterintuitive, but explains the system generates an effective reverse flow by catching the water-methane mix and reinjecting it further upstream. “We have multiple injection and extraction points in the matrix, but the overall effect is the mix of methanol and water is actually flowing forward in the matrix against the airflow direction.”
The reasoning, he says, is that the condensate composition at the cold end of the matrix is nearly all methanol, and as it flows forward the methanol picks up the water. “At the inlet [of the matrix] it is nearly all water, so the composition is more methanol-concentrated at the cold end than it is at the warm end,” Varvill says. “That then reduces because you have extracted most of the water at the warm end, and that reduces the absolute amount of methanol you need to throw into the pre-cooler to stop it freezing.” And because the amount of liquid water reduces so does the relative humidity. “Eventually you end up with a situation where you have extracted all the water vapor as liquid from the airflow, and that leaves you essentially with dry air below 215K. The partial pressure of the water vapor at this point is so low that you can allow it to pass through the heat exchanger and it does not freeze.”
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Reaction Engines decided to go public on the frost-control technology because of pending patent applications. “The trigger for patenting was the awareness that to execute this program we are going to have to involve other companies,” says Mark Thomas, the former chief engineer for technology and future programs at Rolls-Royce and now managing director at Reaction Engines. “You can’t keep trade secrets very long in that situation, so it is better to be protected formally and legally on the clever stuff.”
This is all going on while the engine is moving faster than mach 5, though it is slowed to subsonic speeds (the cooling allows the system to avoid the complexities of a scramjet, the shock cone in the inlet is the tell here).
I would really like to see an animation of this, because for the life of me I cannot see how they get coolant to flow forward against that sort of air flow.
It’s weird, but it is a good kind of weird.
Sorry to Harsh Your Warp Drive Buzz ………*
The reports of the EM Drive appear to be greatly exaggerated:
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Perhaps we should take a long cool drink at this point. Let’s start with the “NASA validates” part. NASA is a huge agency, with more than 18,000 employees. The testing was done by five NASA employees in a lab devoted to exploring unorthodox propulsion ideas. The team leader is a researcher named Harold “Sonny” White, himself a proponent of ideas about faster-than-light warp drives that most of his colleagues have classified as physically impossible. The lead author is one of White’s Eagleworks teammates, David A. Brady. Calling this group “NASA”—as almost every popular news story has done—is a gross oversimplification.
till, science is science: What matters are data, not motivations or semantics. Did White et al actually validate Fetta’s version of the EmDrive? The abstract of their paper, which was presented at a propulsion conference in Cleveland, is freely available online. Reading it raises a number of red flags. The methodology description makes it unclear how much of the testing took place in a vacuum—essential for measuring a subtle thrust effect. The total amount of energy consumed seems to have been far more than the amount of measured thrust, meaning there was plenty of extra energy bouncing around that could have been a source of error.
Worst of all is this statement from the paper: “Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust.” In other words, the Cannae Drive worked when it was set up correctly—but it worked just as well when it was intentionallydisabledset up incorrectly. Somehow the NASA researchers report this as a validation, rather than invalidation, of the device.
Did I say that was worst of all? I may have take that back. In the paper by White et al, they also write that the Cannae Drive “is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.” That last bit stopped me. What’s a quantum vacuum virtual plasma? I’d never heard the term, so I dropped a note to Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist whose work dives deeply into speculative realms of cosmology and quantum theory.
Carroll wrote back immediately, with a pointed message: “There is no such thing as a ‘quantum vacuum virtual plasma,’ so that should be a tip-off right there. There is a quantum vacuum, but it is nothing like a plasma. In particular, it does not have a rest frame, so there is nothing to push against, so you can’t use it for propulsion. The whole thing is just nonsense. They claim to measure an incredibly tiny effect that could very easily be just noise.” There is no theory to support the result, and there is no verified result to begin with.
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That’s part of why this space-drive story bothers me so much. Abandoning known science when it feels good to do so is a dangerous proposition. As Carroll later tweeted, “The eagerness with which folks embrace sketchy claims about impossible space drives would make astrology fans blush.” I am personally a huge space enthusiast; I would love to see a new type of propulsion that would make it easier to explore the universe. But having your heart in the right place is no excuse to walk away from normal critical thinking. It is not materially different than the approach of people who reject science when they don’t like what it says about climate change, vaccines, or genetically modified organisms.
(Emphasis Mine)
Let’s be clear here: The tests are dubious, the detected “thrust” being, “Between 30-and-50 microNewtons, where the limit of the measuring device is 10-to-15 microNewtons,” which makes the setup vulnerable to subtle errors and confirmation bias.
I am not saying that it’s true, but I am saying that we don’t have even the vaguest model to describe this phenomenon, and the scientific method requires skepticism, and this sounds like the Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion fiasco of the late 1980s.
There needs to be a lot more testing, and some theories that could actually reliably predict the results, before we should start buying Star Trek uniforms.†
*Actually, I do want to harsh your buzz. Seriously. This appears to be complete bullsh%$, or at least irresponsibly immature, and I can feel virtuous by shooting it down.
†On my part, I will not be buying a Star Trek uniform. As an engineer, I would be wearing a red shirt. I do not like those odds.
In Space, No One Can Hear You File a Workplace Complaint
Which explains why Amazon chief Jeff Bezos is getting into the rocket business:
Blue Origin, a startup space company owned by Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos, launched an experimental suborbital spaceship from Texas, the first in a series of test flights to develop commercial unmanned and passenger spaceflight services, the company said on Thursday.
The New Shepard vehicle blasted off on Wednesday from Blue Origin’s test facility near Van Horn, Texas, and rose to an altitude of 58 miles (93 km) before the capsule separated and parachuted back to Earth.
“Any astronauts on board would have had a very nice journey into space and a smooth return,” Bezos said in a statement.
The descent of the liquid hydrogen- and liquid oxygen-fueled rocket, however, was not successful.
“We lost pressure in our hydraulic system on descent,” Bezos noted. “Fortunately, we’ve already been in work for some time on an improved hydraulic system … We’ll be ready to fly again soon.”
Who cares about the landing?
After the astronauts have done their job, they are not Bezos’s concern, just like the employees in the Amazon warehouses have to wait unpaid in long lines to punch in and out.
Bad Day at the Office
The Orbital Sciences resupply mission to the International Space Station experienced what is euphemistically called “rapid disassembly” yesterday.
Thankfully, there were no casualties:
Interesting Development in Ion Drives
Iodine looks promising as a replacement for Xenon for the propellant in ion drives: (paid subscription required)
A high-efficiency radio-frequency (RF) ion microthruster in development could give engineers another approach to solar-electric propulsion (SEP) technology for deep-space exploration, particularly for the tiny CubeSat-based probes just coming into their own.
While large-scale SEP is considered necessary to preposition supplies on Mars for human explorers, work is underway at NASA and in universities on CubeSat-class missions to the Moon, Mars and other deep-space destinations as well. Of particular interest is SEP technology that uses iodine as a propellant instead of xenon.
Iodine is easier to integrate into spacecraft and costs much less than the xenon typically used today. Although they sit next to each other in the periodic table, iodine is a solid that sublimates into a useful gas at relatively low temperature, while xenon in its ambient state is a gas that must be contained in a pressure vessel.
Busek Co., a privately held 50-person space-propulsion business in Natick, Massachusetts, has just demonstrated an RF gridded-ion thruster that uses iodine as a propellant and measures only 3 cm across. With iodine, the “BIT-3” thruster demonstrated a specific impulse of 3,500 sec. and a thrust measured at more than 1.4 mN. Designed to propel advanced CubeSats from geostationary to lunar orbits, using 60 watts of power it can generate a Delta-v (velocity change) of 2.5 km/sec. (1.5 mi./sec) with 1.5 kg (3.3 lb.) of fuel in a 13-kg spacecraft, the company says.
“Iodine is a substance that is stored as a solid on a spacecraft, because it has very high density,” says Vlad Hruby, founder and president of Busek. “It also stores in small volume, in a zero-pressure tank. That means the tank can be conformal. You can stick it anywhere in the spacecraft, wherever you have space, and then you heat it up a little bit and it generates enough available pressure to feed [the propulsion system].”
Busek also has used iodine as a fuel in Hall-effect thrusters, and holds NASA small-business contracts for advanced technology development work aimed at deep-space smallsat SEP. The BIT-3 approach uses an RF coil to ionize the sublimated iodine gas, and electrically charged grids to accelerate the ions to the high velocity needed.
While the Hall thrusters are good for “Earth-centric” missions, the efficiency of the gridded-ion thruster makes it more attractive for deep-space applications.
“They have different niches, really,” says Michael Tsay, chief scientist on the BIT-3 project at Busek. “The Hall thruster has very high thrust to power, so you can get higher thrust, but with slightly lower Isp [specific impulse]. The RF ion can give you very high Isp, but you get lower thrust. So it’s mission-dependent.”
For either application, iodine has another advantage over xenon that makes it more attractive as a secondary payload. Since it doesn’t require a high-pressure tank, iodine is safer and less likely to damage a high-priced primary payload if something goes wrong.
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“It eliminates the need for a high-pressure tank, and it stores more compactly, so it takes up less volume,” says Andrew Petro, NASA program executive for the Small Spacecraft Technology Program within the STMD. “Those two features are especially important because of the small size of the small satellites we are trying to develop.”
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Iodine has advantages for small satellites, including much lower cost as industry finds new uses for xenon in fields as disparate as photography flashes and surgical anesthesia. But it may not be as scalable as xenon for the large-scale, multi-kilowatt applications NASA’s human-spaceflight engineers are pushing as a way to move habitats, cargo carriers and other large payloads toward Mars (AW&ST June 23, p. 44).
“The challenge with iodine is feeding the propellant,” says Petro. “With the xenon gas it is very simple; it’s a pressurized gas, It will come out through a valve if you open it. The iodine has to sublime into a gas and be fed, and the larger amount of it you have, the more challenging it might be to engineer a tank that will feed that propellant in a consistent and reliable way. It certainly is possible, but it will probably take some more engineering to work that out. I haven’t really seen much. I think the real attraction of the iodine is in the smaller spacecraft, because they already have the problem of limited volume. It is not as much of an issue for the bigger spacecraft.”
Iodine sublimates at 113.7° C, and being a halogen, it is rather corrosive, but I don’t see these as particularly daunting engineering issues in implementing an iodine based system.
Bad Day at the Office
Bummer
SpaceX’s latest booster just blew up shortly after launch:
An experimental reusable rocket made by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. exploded over Texas on Friday, the company announced.
The test booster, known as the F9R and a successor to the Grasshopper rocket, self-destructed several hundred feet over the company’s facility in McGregor after a problem was detected. There were no injuries.
“Three engine F9R Dev1 vehicle auto-terminated during test flight,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted. “No injuries or near injuries. Rockets are tricky.”
There is a reason that it is called “Rocket Science”, I guess.
Headline of the Day
Lust in space: Russians lose control of gecko sex satellite
Insert “Sexual Outercourse” joke here.
It’s Been 45 Years Since We Walked on the Moon
And 42½ years since we last walked on the.
Depressed yet?