Single-track’s space, rockets and astronauts thread

After the recent Artemis Orion mission and it’s thread I’ve been watching lots of YouTube and reading articles on all the space and rocketry goings on. There’s loads currently! It helps that my 2 yo is currently space and rocket obsessed and we can watch all the launches together but he does lack the ability for in-depth discussion of the final details. In fact his discussion is largely ‘ 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1….woooooshhh!’. His counting is good for a 2yo 🤣

Is there interest in a general space chat thread? I’m currently super excited by Artemis although with, I think, a year until launch 2 there is not much news there. However Chief twit’s space X is also very exciting! Just announced 11 march for starship orbital launch! The 31 raptor engine test for the booster was quite a sight. Starship plus booster should make SLS look daft!
Also interesting times with the ISS, and a second leaky Soyuz. Dragon to the rescue I guess.
I’ve been watching a lot of Matt Lowne YouTube, he seems to do great, easy to follow summaries of the weekly activity. I was even fascinated by one of his Kerbal Space Program videos.

So what has the rest of you excited?

After a mention elsewhere I’ve been reading “Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants” by John D Clark.
Brilliant.

So what has the rest of you excited?

My son is in his second year of an Aerospace Engineering degree, so I can’t wait to see what he gets involved with, further down the line.

Good for him! I hope he does well. 👍

Thanks. So far so good.

We were fortunate enough to witness a Space X launch a few years back, at KSC, which inspired him.

We saw SpaceX at KSC too (night). Daughter doing GCSEs with an eye on aeronautical engineering. Me, I loved the Webb thread we had on here last year including ‘second-hand’ reports directly from the front line!!!!

I suspect like many who end up posting on here, I own most of the Lego NASA stuff…

I’m lucky to have moved jobs and am now working for one of the home grown space firms. Absolutely fascinating and I often have to pinch myself when sat in meetings 😁

Artemis leaves me cold TBH, but Starship is just bonkers and will be extremely watchable over the next 12 months or so.

Swavis, cool! MEng here but the career has been project management largely. good too know there are homegrown space companies at work though!

Starship appears to have got FAA clearance for a launch from March onwards (I’d reckon late April/May with no major issues) so a very exciting year ahead. A successful Starship launch means that the manned mission to the moon is likely within 5 years and the manned mission to Mars might even be feasible with the next decade.

Really interesting manned launches later this year: The First Axiom space (ie fully private) mission to the ISS and the Polaris Dawn mission featuring the first commercial spacewalk for a privately funded manned space mission. Axiom are planning to add privately-funded modules (to be rented out to businesses/governments) to the ISS with a view to building a new space station later in the decade.

Scott Manly’s YouTube channel is well worth a look, always interesting weekly-ish space news roundups, very knowledgable even if I still don’t understand anything that mentions Kerbal Space programme.
Another good channel is Everyday Astronaut which is bonkers cool/nerdy insights into historical and current Rocket engineering. His series. of interviews with Elon Musk are very good indeed with great insights into Starship and the Boca Chica launch site and absolutely none of the Twitter etc. stupidity. The guy that does that channel is going on the Dear Moon mission too which adds to his generally high level of nerdy engineering cool

I’m a machinist and actually worked for a supplier to my current firm before applying for the job, thankfully they liked my work 🤣
Hopefully we’ll get to see a vertical launch from UK soil soon.

My son is in his second year of an Aerospace Engineering degree, so I can’t wait to see what he gets involved with, further down the line.

If he’s anything like me he’ll end up as an IT drone building apps for banks 😀

I’m not complaining – I love programming, and to get a decent wage for something I do in my free time anyway… But it’s a long way from the Aeronautics & Astronautics degree I did, even if my final year project was all about programming. In Fortran. But good for him, it’s a great degree and a fascinating subject.

Has anyone here been to a rocket launch? Obvs not in the control room (although IIRC someone’s sister (maybe?) was involved in one), but from a nearby road/viewpoint? That’s definitely something on my bucket list!

Stoke doing some interesting stuff, I like the guys take on rapid development in the recent everyday astronaut interview.

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I took 11 march from this.. . It’s a guess really

Scott Manley, thanks I’ve added him to the list.
Kerbal is a game, but by the look it’s an incredibly detailed rocket/astro physics/exploration sim. I watched Matt Lowne do a ksp exploration in order to work out what it was as he kept mentioning it, and I couldn’t believe how interesting it was to watch him play a game for 20 minutes!

As a child of ’73 I’m almost as old as possible without having lived when men walked on the moon, so I’m excited by all this moon and beyond stuff. Artemis seems to be about moon as a base to go onwards and mining the solar system seems to be a key driver, as far as I can deduce from lots of the science they are testing like the legrange points and water propellant.

On a smaller scale there’s this:

and a second leaky Soyuz. Dragon to the rescue I guess.

Well, I’m sure the Russians will manage perfectly well on their own, after all they’re pretty hot on their rocketry…

Has anyone here been to a rocket launch?

Went to French Guiana twice for 2 months for 2 launch campaigns, but both ended up with a launch delay, so was working back in mainland Europe for those 2 actual launches.
Did watch one of the last Ariane 4 launches while I was there though.
Didn’t manage to get to Plesetsk for the current mission.
Did have a mooch around the Soyuz rocket factory on a previous trip though.

Not that much in terms of rocket science (he does plenty of that in other videos) but think this is the best audio I’ve heard from a launch. Needs headphones though, and you can skip until he’s on top of the assembly building

and for a fascinating interview of some classic tech:

I get the distinct feeling the mega-rich are looking at options of leaving the planet 😆

On a smaller scale there’s this:

Spinlaunch is quite funky but the forces involved in spinning it up to launch speed must be bonkers – I wonder how that limits what satellites can actually be launched?

It’s been done before on here, but this is a cracking piece of TV (yes, I know it’s just about timing the piece to camera, but don’t detract from its magic)!

Obvs not in the control room

I have been in control rooms during launches (I was on the live feed during the philae lander touchdown), as an IT support bod. You have to remember for european space agency launches, the main control room is not at the launch site.

Dyna, musk has stated his aim with space X is to get to Mars, and I kind of feel like you, he’s planning a one way trip!

My son is in his second year of an Aerospace Engineering degree, so I can’t wait to see what he gets involved with, further down the line.

If he’s anything like me he’ll end up as an IT drone building apps for banks

Conversely, my brother in law is now working for Northrop Grumman and was heavily involved with the James Webb project, as was his wife, who was one of the project leads for the sun-shield element (as I have discussed on STW in the past -we are all rather proud of them). So you are right to be excited about what may be. TBF, my brother in law had to move to LA to get a real opportunity, and then had to give up entirely his UK citizenship in order to progress (official secrets act limitations meant he could not hold dual-nationality).

Stoke doing some interesting stuff

Trying to develop a small, reusable second stage must be fairly disheartening when SpaceX are so advanced – especially if you don’t have a first stage yet!!

The kids are already in charge! Note 2 of those 3 on the sofa are wearing the moniker ‘senior’ 😮

This a cracker too if you haven’t seen it

https://pluto.tv/en/on-demand/movies/in-the-shadow-of-the-moon-2007-1-1-ptv1/details?utm_medium=deeplink&utm_source=justwatch

Spin launch is…. Surely bonkers. Maybe the virgin, use a plane to get to 30-40 000 feet had merit for small stuff but aspin launch? 😳

Spinlaunch isn’t going to work tbh but they’re probably going to do some interesting things along the way. And when we get our shit together and build that mass driver up an equatorial mountain probably some stuff they’ve demo’d will come in useful! Or, lobbing things out of moon gravity.

I like reading about the old stuff – Beyond is an absolute belter, maybe one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Spinlaunch isn’t going to work

They just need to develop a stronger playground bully to spin the launcher fast enough.

I’m seeing a few bits about Artemis now and it seems the heat shield performance wasn’t as expected. Apparently it lost chunks of material. That’s got to be a worry for any potential astronaut. There is lots of time to find a solution but is there opportunity to test it? The next Artemis mission is hoped to have crew.

Seems SLS left behind a bit of damage to the launch pad too. Space X have been beefing up their pad or ‘stage zero’ , it’ll be interesting to see how they get on when starship goes to orbit. On that note, no date news yet. Visible starship activity has been quieter for the last few weeks.

In other news, japan tried to launch a rocket but had to blow it up as it failed. Reminded me just how hard space launches are!

If I understand the artemis thing correctly, the heat shield still performed more than well enough and none of what they’ve seen presents any danger itself- basically, charred bits that were supposed to stay on, fell off, but they’d already done their job and didn’t hurt the performance at all or present a risk.

But, just the fact that it didn’t perform as modelled is a worry for them because it undermines the model as a whole, so even a no-risk deviation raises some concerns about the possibility of other deviations. So now they’ve got to figure out why it deviated and basically update the model so that it exactly fits the reality, and then see if there’s any other concerns. Which basically would leave the question, is there other stuff like this that we just haven’t see yet.

It seems a bit like the Starship rocket test- the number of failed rockets was within the safety margin, but at the same time any sort of failure is a concern because the same thing could happen more, and equally any failure kind of goes to the overall trustworthiness of the vehicle, because while it’s OK that rockets failed, they shouldn’t have.

That could be oversimple though.

You mean 2 failed raptors? I believe the 31 remaining would be sufficient for orbit but yes I’m sure the engineers want to understand why 2 failed and execute a fix. It was only a very short test after all, 2 down in what, about 3 seconds, is a little concerning. I’m not sure musk really expects it to get to orbit first go, space X make stuff so fast they seem much happier to learn from failures than NASA.

I think I first saw this vid linked here, but can’t see it in this thread, soz if I missed it. But a great video on how to land a space shuttle – funny, interesting, zips through way quicker than you think! 🙂

Yeah I think I saw the vid on here but worth reposting!

What do people think of space X trying to catch a returning starship on the pad with the ‘chop sticks’ or arms? It must be harder than landing on legs on a flat pad.

After checking all the links on here last night I watched this again (I can’t get over how much it looks like a movie rather than a documentary. All that 70mm film is stunning).

This is the catch.

I guess it means the star ship doesn’t need it’s own legs and that saves cost, and weight. Or course less weight means a bigger payload. Impressive to see it. I wish we had a better sense of scale, I have to try and comprehend that booster is huge.