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  • #16
    Canadian company’s tech key to first ever rendezvous with a comet

    Canadian company’s tech key to first ever rendezvous with a comet



    MONTREAL — A little-known Canadian company is playing a big role in the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, the first in history to rendezvous with a comet.

    The agency is hoping to drop a lander, the size of a small fridge, on the comet’s surface in the coming days — a feat that has never been tried before.

    The mission is being carried out with help from Saskatoon’s SED Systems, which built three ground stations the space agency uses to communicate with the Rosetta spacecraft.

    The orbiter is currently circling Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which was named after its astronomer discoverers.

    Helping understand the origin and evolution of the solar system is the mission’s prime objective.

    “SED has been involved since the delivery of the first antenna back in 2001,” Denis Sirois, the firm’s business manager, said in a recent interview.

    The first tracking station was built in New Norcia, which is near Perth in Western Australia. The two others followed, in Cebreros, Spain, in 2006 and in Malargue, Argentina, in 2013.

    The total cost of the three stations and their 35-metre antennas was between $80-million and $100-million.

    Company officials and scientists are now eagerly awaiting this coming Wednesday, which is about three months after the 2900-kilogram spacecraft first arrived at the odd-shaped Comet 67P/C-G.

    The plan is for the orbiter to release the 100-kilogram lander.

    The Philae lander, named for an island in the Nile, will then attempt to latch on to the icy space body using harpoons fired into the surface.

    The shape of the comet, which has a ‘head’ and a ‘body’ separated by a narrow neck, has been likened to that of a rubber duck.

    Even though it’s a relatively small object of about four kilometres in diameter, the comet is moving at speeds up to 135,000 km-h.

    Sirois pointed out that since the Rosetta orbiter was launched in March 2004, communications have had to be planned “days and weeks” in advance.

    “The furthest away that the spacecraft had been was somewhere in the neighbourhood of a billion kilometres,” he said from his office in Saskatchewan.

    “So the time it takes for the signal to leave the spacecraft and arrive on Earth is somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes.”

    Sirois says when the Philae lander touches down, its signals should take about 30 minutes to arrive back on Earth.

    ESAThe comet

    And that in itself poses an interesting scientific challenge.

    “It’s a little bit like Wayne Gretzky used to say: ‘You don’t pass the puck where the player is, you’ve got to pass it where he is going to be,”‘ Sirois said.

    AFP/Getty ImagesAriane V carrying the three-tonne probe Rosetta blasting off from Kourou, French Guiana on March 2, 2004.
    “It’s the same with sending commands up to this thing because in that 30-minute timeframe — between sending the command on Earth and its arriving at the spacecraft — the spacecraft has moved considerably.”

    The SED’s three ground stations are under the control of the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany.

    Sirois said it wasn’t easy for the Saskatchewan company, with 250 employees, to win the contract to build the first one in 2001.

    “The competition was fierce, there was an Italian consortium (and) other European bidders who wanted in on these stations as well and, of course, they had some of the capabilities to do it,” he said.

    But he said a co-operative effort involving his company and the Canadian Space Agency paid off. Canada also takes part in some European Space Agency programs.

    “Because we were quite unknown, it was even more difficult to convince them (ESA) that we had the capabilities to do it,” Sirois said.

    “But, based on our heritage and our experience, that allowed us to get to the table.”

    SED has had a history of building ground stations, but mostly in the telecommunications sector.

    “After the first contract, we had basically passed the test with ESA and they were now confident in our capabilities,” Sirois said.

    SED still had to compete to get the contracts for the two other stations, but it had an advantage over its competitors after it built the first one.

    The ESA mission is named after the Rosetta Stone, a slab of volcanic basalt found near the Egyptian town of Rashid (Rosetta) in 1799. The slab, with three languages, provided historians with the key to an ancient civilization.

    Comment


    • #17
      Re: Canadian company’s tech key to first ever rendezvous with a comet

      The Philae has landed. Awesome achievement and congratulations to the ESA. Sad that one of the good things we've achieved in quite a while had to happen outside the boundary of Earth.

      European Space Agency’s Spacecraft Lands on Comet’s Surface


      By KENNETH CHANG



      An image taken by the Philae lander as it descended toward the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

      The Philae has landed.

      The European Space Agency’s ambitious attempt to place a spacecraft on the surface of a comet succeeded when a signal arrived at the mission control center at Darmstadt, Germany, just after 5 p.m . local time (11 a.m. Eastern time).

      Cheers erupted.

      “We’re there and Philae is talking to us,” said Stephan Ulamec, the manager for the lander. “We are on the comet.”
      The lander, Philae, and its 10 instruments have now begun 64 hours of scientific operations before its batteries drain. Solar panels will then recharge the batteries, allowing intermittent operations over the coming months, about one hour every two days.

      The landing culminated a long day as the Rosetta maneuvered to the correct position to let Philae go — moments of celebration interspersed with long, quiet stretches of waiting.

      The operation proceeded despite a few small glitches and one potential showstopper problem: an apparent failure of a thruster that was to fire right after touchdown to press the lander against the comet’s surface. A pin was supposed to break a wax seal on the gas tank, but repeated attempts did not appear to succeed.
      PLAY VIDEO|0:37

      Scientists Celebrate Spacecraft Landing

      Scientists at the European Space Agency react after their Philae lander arrived at its destination on Wednesday for the first extended examination of a comet.

      Without the thruster, the washing machine-size Philae would have to rely on ice screws on its landing legs and a couple of harpoons to keep it attached to the comet. The thruster, which was to shoot a stream of cold nitrogen gas, was intended to counteract not just the possibility of Philae bouncing off the surface but also the upward kick from the firing of the harpoons.

      Mission managers decided to proceed, because there was no way to repair it, and there was no benefit to waiting.

      Philae detached on schedule, for a seven-hour descent to the surface. There was some worrying a couple of hours later when the lander was about 10 minutes late in re-establishing communications with the Rosetta orbiter.
      After that, scientists received photos — a blurry image of Rosetta’s solar array taken by Philae about 50 seconds after separation and then a sharper image by Rosetta of the descending Philae.



      “We see the lander going down on the right track,” said Andrea Accomazzo, the flight director.

      Then there was more waiting, with amusing updates via the Twitter accounts of Rosetta and Philae.


      “Finally! I’m stretching my legs after more than 10 years. Landing gear deployed!” was a tweet from Philae.

      The web comic XKCD also provided real-time updates with a comic that updated throughout the landing operation, even mentioning the problem with the nitrogen thruster. In the comic, Rosetta told Philae that mission control was worried about the thruster, and the lander responded, “"I really hope harpoons work on a comet.”

      Comment


      • #18
        Re: Canadian company’s tech key to first ever rendezvous with a comet

        Great shots, great accomplishment!

        Comment


        • #19
          Re: Canadian company’s tech key to first ever rendezvous with a comet

          Wow. Just... wow! This makes me ridiculously happy. They threw a dart at a tiny moving target millions of miles away and hit the bull's eye :-)

          Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

          Comment


          • #20
            Re: Canadian company’s tech key to first ever rendezvous with a comet

            Philae’s CIVA instrument captured this image of its landing site

            a once-in-your-lifetime shot . . .

            The European Space Agency’s Philae lander has sent back the first ever image from the surface of a comet.

            The picture shows the cracked, bumpy surface in monochrome, with one of Philae’s three legs in the bottom left of the frame. It is not yet clear whether the leg in the image is actually touching the surface. What is certain is that Philae is not level, and may be wedged into a pit.

            “We’re either looking into a ditch or we are against a wall,” said ESA Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor.

            Comets are often described as “dirty snowballs”, irregular blocks of ice covered with dust and rocks, but no human craft has ever reached the surface of one before.

            Scientists re-established communications with Philae on Thursday after an anxious overnight wait while its mothership Rosetta, which relays the signals to Earth, dipped below the comet’s horizon.

            Magnetic field data from Philae’s ROMAP instrument analysed overnight revealed three ‘landings’. The first was almost exactly on the expected arrival time of 15:33 GMT. But the anchoring harpoons did not fire and Philae rebounded.

            In the weak gravity of the comet it took about 2 hours for the lander to return to the surface. It touched down for a second time at 17:26 GMT, then bounced again before finally coming to rest at 17:33.

            Esa scientists described the lander as “stable” on Thursday morning despite concerns following the touchdown on Wednesday afternoon. It emerged that a harpoon which was meant to tether it to the surface of the 2.5 mile-wide comet had failed to deploy.

            The first image from the surface is in fact a mosaic of two images taken by the lander’s CIVA (the Comet Infrared and Visible Analyser) camera. It shows one of Philae’s landing legs and the craggy surface. ESA had been expecting a view of the horizon so the scientists believe the craft is not on a flat surface.
            “We are definitely not in the open,” said Fred Jansen, ESA Rosetta mission manager.

            This presents a danger to the mission which has an initial battery life of about 60 hours. After that it must switch to rechargeable batteries and rely on solar illumination to keep it powered so if it is stuck in a trench it may not be able to receive sunlight.

            Discussions are already taking place about whether deploying the lander’s drills and other moveable parts could move it into a better position.

            Four other pictures from CIVA have been downlinked. These will be released at 13:00 GMT on Thursday. They will form the first 360° panorama of the surface.



            from 4.8 miles out

            Comment


            • #21
              Re: Canadian company’s tech key to first ever rendezvous with a comet


              How Esa scientists believe Philae has landed on the comet – on its side.

              The robotic lander that touched down on a comet on Wednesday came to rest on its side in the shadow of a cliff, according to the first data beamed home from the probe.
              Pictures from cameras on board the European Space Agency’s Philae lander show the machine with one foot in the sky and lodged against a high cliff face that is blocking sunlight to its solar panels.

              The precarious resting place means mission controllers are faced with some tough decisions over whether to try and nudge the spacecraft into a sunnier spot. If successful, that would allow Philae to fully recharge its batteries and do more science on the comet, but any sudden move could risk toppling the lander over, or worse, knock it off the comet completely.

              The washing machine-sized lander was released by its Rosetta mother ship at 0835am GMT on Wednesday morning and touched down at a perfect spot on the comet’s surface. But when anchoring harpoons failed to fire, the probe bounced back off into space. So weak is the gravitational pull of the comet that Philae soared 1km into the sky and did not come down again until two hours later. “We made quite a leap,” said Stephan Ulamec, the Philae lander manager.

              In the time it took the probe to land for the second time, the comet had rotated, bringing more treacherous terrain underneath. The spacecraft bounced a second time and finally came to a standstill on its side at what may be the rim of an enormous crater. Technically, the agency pulled off not only the first landing on a comet in history, but the second and third too.

              “We bounced twice and stopped in a place we’ve not entirely located,” said Jean-Pierre Bibring, Philae’s lead scientist. Teams of scientists are now trying to work out where the probe is. What mission controllers do know is that they are not where they hoped to be. “We are exactly below a cliff, so we are in a shadow permanently,” Bibring added.

              Comment


              • #22
                Re: Canadian company’s tech key to first ever rendezvous with a comet



                The NASA Orion space capsule launched atop a Delta IV rocket on Friday,
                If the new space race was like the movies, this week would be The Empires Strikes Back.

                On Friday, after a weather delay, Nasa launched a very cool space capsule, in what at first blush looked like another Apollo mission. It rose on a massive rocket spewing superheated exhaust like some creature from a Peter Jackson movie. All went well just now – and given the expertise of engineers performing what was essentially an update of a 1970s Apollo mission, that much was expected: a four-seat capsule called Orion will detach any minute now, and soar around the Earth twice, then descend into the atmosphere and finally splash down under some parachutes. There are no people onboard.

                Orion is a long-shot demonstration mission that is aimed at no celestial body, nor the moon, Mars or even an asteroid. The United States government’s attempt is aimed at space startups that are trying to muscle their way into the spaceflight industry – and budge NASA out for good.

                In one corner is what’s now commonly called “private space”. It’s an odd coalition of billionaires, businessmen and engineers who want to build, launch and operate their own manned space vehicles. The proposed uses of these spacecraft range from profound (asteroid mining by Planetary Resources) to the banal (daredevil trips to sub-orbit for the wealthy, courtesy of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic).

                These startups are, as startups are wont to do, upsetting the status quo, so they earn the Star Wars mantle of Rebels. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the most successful of these companies – in fact, it is also making a capsule to carry people to and from space.

                The Empire sits in the other corner. It’s a sprawling axis cobbled together over many years of hard battles for funding, for launches, for spaceflight in general. Until very recently, these were the true heroes who carried American spaceflight, of America as superpower. The Empire, of course, is Nasa, a once noble but now creaky agency that has devolved from moonshots to renting rides from the Russians, all in the span of Buzz Aldren’s adulthood.

                The space-industrial complex serves as a kind of palace guard for Nasa. Talented, experienced and corporately shrewd, this group is headed by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and its love child, the United Launch Alliance. They launch the rockets tipped with the government’s defense and scientific satellites. Supporting these players are a bipartisan brigade of Congressmen, unified almost solely by their political willingness to use the space agency as a make-work program and a repository for pork.

                Members of the US House and Senate don’t dream wistfully of space exploration or epic human achievement, of clinging on to an asteroid or visiting Mars. Politicians love whatever makes more jobs and gets them re-elected. What makes it even better for them is that they can steer federal cash to their districts and chalk it up to love of science and patriotic zeal.

                Take that, Putin: We can launch our own manned spacecraft again! Who cares if they don’t go anywhere?

                Friday’s Orion launch was a galvanizing moment for the traditional, government-led spacecraft movement in the United States. This Bush-era program was decried as wasteful and directionless spending – a “rocket to nowhere” – and cancelled four years ago. But the Empire rallied and revived Orion and the massive proposed rocket that’s supposed to propel it to deep space. After all, the Death Star wasn’t built in a day; it was devised by some very talented engineers. And from their point of view, it’s a shame anyone would blow it up.

                But there are some people out there who say Orion is too big not to fail. Earlier this year, the US Government Accountability Office took Nasa to the woodpile for fuzzy math, and offered its own accounting of how much it costs to develop Orion and its rocket through its first two flight in 2017 and 2021: $20bn, with a full $9bn spent on Orion.

                And of course there’s that other curse haunting Orion: It won’t carry actual people until around 2022.

                And that’s if the budgets hold out. The incoming Congress may not shut down a program like Orion, but they can starve it of fuel until it enters a netherworld of delays, life-support funding and lethargy. When it flies on missions, it will be outdated. Orion is particularly vulnerable since, you know, Nasa has not set a destination for it to go. If the first manned test flight is in 2021, when will the actual mission to Mars be funded and staged? It takes a very optimistic person to think the funding and tech will be ready by 2022 – or even 2025.

                The Orion launch has been be a triumph of engineering, hiccups and delays aside. But the Empire may not love the sequel. SpaceX is planning a historic launch of its own next year – the rocket is called the Falcon Heavy. Yes, Musk named his rocket after the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars, and he promises it will take twice as much payload into space as the one Nasa launched on Friday, and at one-third the cost. So far his claims about SpaceX have come true, and soon he’ll be fighting, with the lobbyists and the politicians who play favorites, for satellite contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

                Combine that kind of force with Elon Musk’s capsule full of actual people returning to space – under a Nasa contract to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station – and you have a private startup that can beat Nasa or any other government agency back to the moon, if it so chooses.
                Return of the Jedi, indeed.


                Comment


                • #23
                  Re-Entry With a Twist

                  In rocketry, what goes up, usually comes down.

                  In pieces.

                  The cost of getting to orbit is exorbitant, because the rocket, with its multimillion-dollar engines, ends up as trash in the ocean after one launching.

                  Elon Musk, the chief executive of the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, likens the waste to throwing away a 747 jet after a single transcontinental flight.

                  “Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level,” Mr. Musk said in October during a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
                  On Tuesday, his company hopes to upend the economics of space travel.

                  At 6:20 a.m. Eastern time, one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets is scheduled to lift off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on what is otherwise a routine unmanned cargo run to the International Space Station.

                  But this time, the company will attempt to land the first stage of the rocket intact on a barge floating in the Atlantic Ocean. After the booster falls away and the second stage continues pushing the payload to orbit, its engines will reignite to turn it around and guide it to a spot about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Fla.



                  The landing platform, which is 300 by 170 feet, is floating in the Atlantic Ocean, about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Fla. CreditSpaceX
                  SpaceX has attempted similar maneuvers on three earlier Falcon 9 flights, and on the second and third attempts, the rocket slowed to a hover before splashing into the water.

                  “We’ve been able to soft-land the rocket booster in the ocean twice so far,” Mr. Musk said. “Unfortunately, it sort of sat there for several seconds, then tipped over and exploded. It’s quite difficult to reuse at that point.”

                  The first rocket stage, Mr. Musk noted, is as tall as a 14-story building. “When a 14-story building falls over, it’s quite a belly flop,” he said. “What we need to do is to be able to land on a floating platform.”

                  So SpaceX built a floating platform, 300 feet long and 170 feet wide, for the rocket stage to land on.

                  A new addition to the rocket is a set of “grid fins” that will fold out after separation to help steer the rocket toward the platform.

                  No people will be aboard the barge during the landing attempt.

                  If SpaceX’s gamble succeeds, the company plans to reuse the rocket stage on a later flight.

                  Mr. Musk put the chances of success at 50 percent or less. But, he added, over the dozen or so flights scheduled for this year, “I think it’s quite likely, 80 to 90 percent likely, that one of those flights will be able to land and refly.”

                  Eventually, SpaceX would like to land the first stage back at the launch site. A longer-term goal is to recover and reuse the second stage as well, and Mr. Musk has predicted that a fully reusable rocket could cut launch costs to a hundredth of what they are now.

                  This NASA cargo mission, SpaceX’s fifth, is carrying more than 5,000 pounds of supplies and equipment, including an IMAX movie camera, a laboratory habitat for studying fruit flies, and an instrument to measure the distribution of clouds as well as particles of dust, smoke and air pollution.

                  After four weeks docked to the space station, the SpaceX cargo capsule will carry experiments, trash and other items back to Earth.

                  This flight is also attracting scrutiny because the Orbital Sciences Corporation, the other company that NASA has hired to ferry cargo to the space station, suffered a catastrophic failure in October when its Antares rocket fell back to the ground moments after liftoff.

                  Among the items destroyed in the explosion were 18 student experiments, part of a program run by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education.

                  Some of the students had traveled to the Orbital’s launching site in eastern Virginia and left crestfallen.

                  But Jeff Goldstein, the director of the center, and NanoRacks, the company that made arrangements for the experiments on the space station, were already working to juggle the manifests on future cargo flights.

                  Three weeks later, 17 of the 18 student teams had recreated their experiments and shipped them to Houston for NASA to add them to the SpaceX payload, then scheduled for launching on Dec. 19.

                  “It was nuts,” Dr. Goldstein said. “NASA moved heaven and earth for this.”

                  The 18th team, Dr. Goldstein said, decided to modify its experiment, requiring a new safety review.

                  The launching was subsequently postponed after a test firing of the Falcon 9’s nine engines was cut short. After a later successful test firing, the launch date was set for Jan. 6.




                  On Tuesday, SpaceX hopes to upend the economics of space travel by launching a Falcon 9 rocket and landing the rocket's 14-story-tall first stage on a barge. CreditSpaceX

                  Comment


                  • #24
                    Re: Re-Entry With a Twist

                    Sounds like a whole lot of moving parts(costs) and a fairly expensive engine recovery gamble.

                    One question I would ask is why other recovery options were not considered(or more likely discounted)?

                    I've visited an outfit in Florida that is capable of placing cargo via GPS robotically controlled parachute VERY precisely as long as it's within their performance "window".

                    Maybe the weight of a parachute recovery system that would put the engine right on the barge deck(or better, some remote uninhabited desert with a decent road) is too heavy impacting on payload.

                    Comment


                    • #25
                      Re: Re-Entry With a Twist

                      Originally posted by lakedaemonian View Post
                      Sounds like a whole lot of moving parts(costs) and a fairly expensive engine recovery gamble.

                      One question I would ask is why other recovery options were not considered(or more likely discounted)?

                      I've visited an outfit in Florida that is capable of placing cargo via GPS robotically controlled parachute VERY precisely as long as it's within their performance "window".

                      Maybe the weight of a parachute recovery system that would put the engine right on the barge deck(or better, some remote uninhabited desert with a decent road) is too heavy impacting on payload.
                      SpaceX has scrubbed Tuesday’s launch of its Dragon spacecraft from Cape Canaveral in Florida to resupply the International Space Station. In a first, the private space company was hoping to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket by landing it on a platform in the Atlantic.

                      The launch was called off by the flight team, but the misbehaving actuator would have triggered an automatic abort had they not intervened. The problem was with a thrust vector control actuator in the second stage of the rocket. The first stage, which SpaceX hoped to land on their ocean platform, was ready for launch.

                      There won’t be a press briefing on the scrubbed launch, but we’ll be back on Friday when we hope the mission will go ahead as planned. Join us then for more insights into how hard it really is to do rocket science.

                      Comment


                      • #26
                        Re: Re-Entry With a Twist

                        Originally posted by lakedaemonian View Post
                        Sounds like a whole lot of moving parts(costs) and a fairly expensive engine recovery gamble.

                        One question I would ask is why other recovery options were not considered(or more likely discounted)?

                        I've visited an outfit in Florida that is capable of placing cargo via GPS robotically controlled parachute VERY precisely as long as it's within their performance "window".

                        Maybe the weight of a parachute recovery system that would put the engine right on the barge deck(or better, some remote uninhabited desert with a decent road) is too heavy impacting on payload.
                        In general the first stage would end up pretty far downrange after it did its job. The goal is to get it back to the launch site and I don't think a parachute could travel that far.

                        The rocket propulsion landing also gets SpaceX closer to their Mars goals. The atmosphere on Mars is not thick enough to use parachutes for large items. Thus NASA's use of bouncing balls and skycranes.

                        Comment


                        • #27
                          Re: Re-Entry With a Twist

                          Originally posted by don View Post
                          SpaceX has scrubbed Tuesday’s launch of its Dragon spacecraft from Cape Canaveral in Florida to resupply the International Space Station. In a first, the private space company was hoping to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket by landing it on a platform in the Atlantic.

                          The launch was called off by the flight team, but the misbehaving actuator would have triggered an automatic abort had they not intervened. The problem was with a thrust vector control actuator in the second stage of the rocket. The first stage, which SpaceX hoped to land on their ocean platform, was ready for launch.

                          There won’t be a press briefing on the scrubbed launch, but we’ll be back on Friday when we hope the mission will go ahead as planned. Join us then for more insights into how hard it really is to do rocket science.
                          It's getting clearer and clearer that scrubbing US human spaceflight capability and attempting to rely on Russia for human travel and private space companies for cargo was a big Obama administration blunder, as private spaceflight accidents abound and relations with Russia sour. I'd rather the government keep the tax dollars and do the job right itself the first time than to have them give the same tax dollars over in a check to a scammy billionaire who cuts corners and profits off the public dime. It's all too early and too subsidized for private space industry to make any sense. If it did, Lockheed and Boeing would have been there a while ago. Heavy industry isn't like tech companies.

                          Comment


                          • #28
                            Re: Re-Entry With a Twist

                            Originally posted by dcarrigg View Post
                            It's getting clearer and clearer that scrubbing US human spaceflight capability and attempting to rely on Russia for human travel and private space companies for cargo was a big Obama administration blunder, as private spaceflight accidents abound and relations with Russia sour. I'd rather the government keep the tax dollars and do the job right itself the first time than to have them give the same tax dollars over in a check to a scammy billionaire who cuts corners and profits off the public dime. It's all too early and too subsidized for private space industry to make any sense. If it did, Lockheed and Boeing would have been there a while ago. Heavy industry isn't like tech companies.
                            I would agree to a certain extent.

                            The US has had some luck with some building programs coming in under time and budget(not all programs are catrastrophes).

                            I always wondered why the US is unable to say "We are putting out tenders for A, B, and C weight range payloads in quantity D, over E years, to reach X, Y, and Z orbits on a fixed price per pound/kilogram contract including payload insurance up to XXX amount".

                            Comment


                            • #29
                              Re: Re-Entry With a Twist

                              In general the first stage would end up pretty far downrange after it did its job. The goal is to get it back to the launch site and I don't think a parachute could travel that far.
                              Ya gotta love the optimism/hype in X marks the spot:



                              The landing platform, which is 300 by 170 feet, is floating in the Atlantic Ocean, about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Fla

                              Comment


                              • #30
                                Re: Re-Entry With a Twist

                                Originally posted by don View Post
                                Ya gotta love the optimism/hype in X marks the spot ...
                                Well - they almost did it ...

                                SpaceX launches station supply ship; booster landing unsuccessful

                                A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully boosted a space station cargo ship into orbit Saturday, but an unprecedented attempt to land the rocket's first stage on a barge stationed off the coast of Florida was not successful, ending with an apparent crash landing that prompted company founder Elon Musk to tweet: "close, but no cigar."

                                Recovering, refurbishing and relaunching rocket stages that otherwise would be thrown away is a major element in Musk's ambitious push to reduce the cost of spaceflight by operating a rocket company much like a commercial airline, re-flying boosters rather than building them from scratch for each flight.

                                In a series of tweets, Musk confirmed the first stage made it from the edge of space back down to the "autonomous spaceport drone ship" but said its velocity was apparently too high and the booster "landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho."

                                He said the landing barge came through in good shape, but "some of the support equipment on the deck will need to be replaced." He added a few moments later: "Didn't get good landing/impact video. Pitch dark and foggy. Will piece it together from telemetry and ... actual pieces."

                                This was the company's third attempt to guide a Falcon 9 first stage booster through a controlled vertical descent back into the atmosphere following two successful ocean splashdowns. But Saturday's test marked the first attempt to actually land a booster, using a modified barge with a deck measuring 170 feet by 300 feet, as a platform.

                                The mission got underway at 4:47 a.m. EST (GMT-5) when the Falcon 9's nine Merlin 1D first stage engines thundered to life at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The 208-foot-tall rocket quickly climbed away from launch complex 40, arcing away to the northeast as it took off directly into the plane of the space station's orbit.

                                The launch originally was planned for December, but the flight was delayed three weeks because of problems encountered during an engine test firing and temperature constraints related to the space station's orbit. A launch try Tuesday was scrubbed less than 90 seconds before liftoff because of unusual readings from one of two second-stage engine steering actuators. The actuator was replaced, clearing the way for launch Saturday.
                                SpaceX flight controllers at the company's plant in Hawthorne, Calif., monitor the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral early Saturday. Company founder Elon Musk, wearing a dark shirt, can be seen at the center of the front row.
                                This time around, the countdown made it to zero without incident, and the climb out of the dense lower atmosphere appeared to go smoothly. Two minutes and 37 seconds after liftoff, the first stage engines shut down and the stage fell away, followed seconds later by ignition of a single Merlin engine powering the booster's second stage. The cargo ship was released into the planned preliminary orbit about 10 minutes after launch, kicking off a two-day flight to the International Space Station.

                                The first stage normally would have tumbled back into the lower atmosphere, breaking apart due to high temperatures and aerodynamic stresses, with surviving components crashing back into the Atlantic Ocean.

                                But this time around, the booster's flight computer was programmed to carry out three engine firings to adjust its trajectory and reduce its velocity, slowing the booster from about 2,900 mph to about 560 mph and then to a much more sedate 4.5 mph, deploying four landing legs shortly before touchdown.

                                The stage featured four deployable fins mounted around the upper end of the booster that could be repositioned in flight to help control the rocket's lift and orientation. The use of the fins, along with steering by the first stage engines, "will allow for precision landing -- first on the autonomous spaceport drone ship, and eventually on land," the company said in a blog post last month.

                                The company said "stabilizing the Falcon 9 first stage for re-entry is like trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm."

                                Going into the mission, Musk downplayed expectations, predicting just a 50 percent chance of success. It was not immediately known why the booster apparently landed with an higher-than-expected descent velocity. But after assessing the results of Saturday's attempt, SpaceX engineers are expected to try again on subsequent flights with the long-range goal of flying boosters back to the launch site for refurbishment and reuse.

                                "If commercial spaceflight is ever going to be anything like a 'normal' industry, fast turnaround and (relatively) low costs are imperative," Joan Johnson-Freese, professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, told CBS News in an email exchange last month.

                                "Airplanes land ready to use again -- not requiring months of hanger time between flights," she said. "The analogy with recoverable rocket boosters isn't perfect, but it's close."
                                Flying into orbital dawn, the Dragon cargo ship's two solar arrays unfolded a few moments after reaching orbit, setting the stage for a two-day rendezvous with the International Space Station.
                                While the landing attempt marked a significant step toward what Musk calls "rapid reusability," the primary goal of the flight was putting the Dragon capsule on course for a rendezvous with the space station early Monday.The launch marked the company's fifth operational resupply mission under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA calling for 12 space station cargo missions to deliver some 20 tons of equipment and supplies.

                                It was the first U.S. station supply flight since an Orbital Sciences Antares booster exploded seconds after liftoff Oct. 28. A Cygnus cargo ship making the company's third flight under a separate $1.9 billion contract was destroyed in the mishap.

                                Orbital's Antares rocket is now grounded pending a switch to different engines, leaving SpaceX as the only provider of U.S.-based resupply services. The Russians also launch supplies using unmanned Progress cargo ships, and larger Japanese HTV supply ships fly once every year or so.

                                But with Orbital out of action in the near term, the SpaceX flights are critical for sustaining the station's six-person crews. Space station Program Manager Mike Suffredini said a SpaceX failure in the months ahead, depending on its severity and the steps needed to recover, could force NASA to reduce the station's crew from six to three or, in a worst-case scenario, to briefly abandon the laboratory.

                                But he said the station always has enough supplies on board for four to six months of normal operation and that even with a second U.S. resupply failure, NASA and its partners would have months to decide on a course of action.
                                "In all cases, we have plenty of time to decide what to do next, figure out what we're really dealing with and then figure out how we want to react to it," he said.

                                The Dragon capsule that launched Saturday is loaded with more than 4,000 pounds of cargo in the ship's pressurized hold, along with a 1,000-pound atmospheric research instrument mounted in an unpressurized trunk section accessible by the lab's robot arm.

                                The Cloud Aerosol Transport System, or CATS, instrument will be extracted from the trunk later this month by the station's robot arm and mounted on a platform attached to the Japanese Kibo lab module.

                                Cargo packed into the Dragon capsule's pressurized compartment includes food, clothing and personal items for the station's crew, research equipment and spare parts along with high-priority items intended to replace cargo lost in the Antares launch failure in October, including a variety of student experiments.

                                Among the science gear is a fruit fly lab for studies of the immune system, a flatworm regeneration experiment to learn more about how the organisms replace damaged cells and an investigation to learn how proteins clump together in fibrous plaques like those believed to play a role in Alzheimer's disease.

                                If all goes well, the Dragon will catch up with the station early Monday, approaching from behind and below, pulling up to within about 30 feet and standing by while Expedition 42 commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, operating the lab's robot arm, locks onto a grapple fixture.

                                Ground controllers then will take over arm operations, moving the Dragon capsule into position for berthing at the Earth-facing port of the forward Harmony module. Wilmore, assisted by European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, will operate the common berthing mechanism, driving home motorized bolts to lock the spacecraft in place.

                                The Dragon is expected to remain attached to the station for about a month. After reloading the spacecraft with some 3,600 pounds of experiment samples, no-longer-needed gear and trash, the astronauts will release the capsule for a Feb. 10 splashdown in the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego.
                                Personally I like the old McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper (aka DC-X) approach better … but it's very possible they'll get this right.

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