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X-15 Rocket-plane?

5 (22.7%)

Skylon SSTO?

4 (18.2%)

The Space Shuttle?

8 (36.4%)

Saturn-V?

4 (18.2%)

Boeing X-51 Waverider?

1 (4.5%)

Total Members Voted: 22

[LeeC]

[Jimor]

Some friends of mine were on site to stream and film the Falcon Heavy.

[BenRG]

Astronauts Safe After Launch Abort

The crew of the Soyuz MS-10 mission (one Russian and one American bound for the International Space Station) are safe but somewhat bumped and scraped around the edges after their spacecraft's Soyuz-FG rocket exploded about two minutes into its flight into orbit. The crew were saved by the launch escape system on the Soyuz spacecraft, which separated the crew capsule from the malfunctioning booster as it broke up at about the moment of the separation of the first-stage wrap-around booster rockets from the Soyuz-FG.

Investigations by NASA and Roskosmos, the Russian Space Agency are underway and most information is embargoed. However, unconfirmed information says that one of the latches on the wrap-around booster failed, causing the booster to partially separate and crash into the central second stage of the rocket.

This comes after the confirmation by the Russian government that a hole in the upper crew compartment on the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft was caused by 'sabotage' by person or persons unknown at the factory, who drilled the hole and filled it with epoxy that eventually 'popped out' due to the pressure in the capsule verses the vacuum outside. Russia has had a string of very high-profile space technology failures in the past few years that were traced back to production mistakes, shoddy workmanship and cost-cutting.

[LeeC]

"Cigar-shaped interstellar object may have been an alien probe, Harvard paper claims"
I found this article on CNN this morning and I honestly do not remember this being sited in January 2018 but with a new job and a pregnant wife at the time, I wasn't looking for such stories. Looks interesting so I figured I would share.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/06/health/oumuamua-alien-probe-harvard-intl/index.html

" The theory is based on the object's "excess acceleration," or its unexpected boost in speed as it traveled through and ultimately out of our solar system in January 2018. "

I'm guessing the Vulcans didn't detect the use of warp drive from us yet and just jetted off to fuck with the Andorians again. Jeffrey Combs will not be happy.

[Akima]

Sounds more like Rama to me.

[BenRG]

SpaceX Dragon-2 DM-1 mission splashes down in Atlantic Ocean.

After a basically flawless flight, including a four-day stop-over at the ISS, the prototype of the Crewed Dragon spacecraft returned to Earth today in what looked like a flawless splash-down.

The next mission in the line will be the aerial abort test to confirm whether the capsule's ejection system can get the spacecraft clear of an exploding launch-vehicle. Then will come the DM-2 mission, which will be the first US-launched astronauts since the retirement of the Space Shuttle. SpX-DM2 is tentatively scheduled for July although NASA sources say it could be delayed as late as November depending on back-room work required.

[LeeC]

The Solar System

[BenRG]

Well, there were times when I never thought that we'd see the day, but it has finally happened.

[jwhouk]

You will go to space today.

[Jimor]

If you want to know why the video is unavailable, National Geographic has claimed the public domain *by U.S. Constitution* NASA live stream as its own and has had it taken down.

[pwhodges]

Copyright is a strange thing; but there is copyright in a recording of a non-copyright event.  Was the source of the video on YouTube a National Geographic recording of the NASA feed?

[Jimor]

Right, normally just creating something also embues a copyright whether the owner wants it or not, but the U.S. Constitution specifically puts all government created "documents" into the public domain for all to use, thus an official NASA broadcast (as opposed to the SpaceX life feed, which would be under copyright) is free and clear for anybody to use.

However, what probably happened is that National Geographic probably used some of that footage in some kind of news report on the matter, and then when they fed their own broadcast into YouTube's copyright fingerprinting system, it of course also fingerprinted the NASA footage within it, and then when the original NASA footage matches as a "copy" of NG's stuff, YT's system pulled it as a violation.

This is a VERY common fault in YouTube's system, and has caught several independent rocket launch streams who create their own original content with bits of NASA audio/visual feed when NBC/Universal did the same thing, flagging the NASA elements as violating *their* copyright of the NASA elements during the aborted first try of the launch a few days before.

The problem with YouTube in this respect is that 1) independent creators do not have access to this system for their own works, unless they go through some kind of content management company that has an agreement with YouTube to represent creators and seize ad revenue on their behalf, and 2) anybody who does NOT wish their work to be used to claim ad revenue of other uploaders also do not have access to this system to keep their works from being claimed by others.

Not only do you get massive numbers of accidental false positives like the NG/NASA one, but it gives a loophole for bad actors to find unclaimed material, use a shady content management company to upload it on their behalf and then illegitimately claim ad revenue knowing most people aren't going to bother to dispute. And if they DO dispute, guess who gets to arbitrate that dispute? The thieves who stole the material in the first place! And if they deny your claim, the NEXT step to get YouTube to act is to actually file a lawsuit in court, spending the filing and attorney's fees to then attempt to regain the funds.

When they do get caught, they just change their name and move on to other targets, never having to pay any price, and the content management company just says "oops, we didn't know they were thieves using our service!"

YouTube's system is massively broken, and as long as there's no consequences for false claims *at all*, it just gets worse and worse over time. (Why does that seem to be a recurring theme in today's world?)

[Pilchard123]

"Coooorner three!"

[Is it cold in here?]

So there was a discussion a while back of how big a structure would need to be in order to maintain human comfort while spinning to simulate gravity.

One estimate is about a kilometer for 1 g.

Several people think such a structure could be launched on a single Falcon Heavy.

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2021_Phase_I/Kilometer-Scale_Space_Structures_from_a_Single_Launch/

Even cooler, we do have experience with multi-decade deep space missions. So make an ultralight nanoprobe, accelerate it with a huge laser, I mean *really* accelerate it to 0.2c, and in twenty years it's an Alpha Centauri flyby. https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/initiative/3

[Is it cold in here?]

The conventional wisdom is that the test ban treaty put an end to Orion. Lawyers are wondering if it could be legal after all.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4057500

[Akima]

So there was a discussion a while back of how big a structure would need to be in order to maintain human comfort while spinning to simulate gravity. One estimate is about a kilometer for 1 g.

A space habitat one kilometre in diameter if circular, or long if it were some sort of "barbell" arrangement, would have to rotate at 1.34 RPM to generate a 1g centripetal acceleration. That's well within the estimated human comfort zone. Up to 2RPM is reckoned to be acceptable, however, and halving the diameter to 500m would give you 1g at 1.89 RPM, but with a less massive structure.

[sitnspin]

Mind you, that's still really big.

[Akima]

Sitnspin is a remarkably apposite handle for this discussion.

[hedgie]

Mind you, that's still really big.

But it’s still peanuts compared to space.

[sitnspin]

Mind you, that's still really big.

But it’s still peanuts compared to space.

If we're going with that rationale, a galactic cluster is tiny compared to the universe

[Cornelius]

H2G2?

500m is long, but we've already had a ship - though not space ship - nearly that long: Seawise Giant

[hedgie]

H2G2?

Aye.  I know that it has been posted here before, but here goes: "You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.”

[Is it cold in here?]

It stands for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if it's the abbreviation you were asking about.

We have of course no real data on this, but it's conceivable that humans can stay healthy at less than a full 1 g. I hope so, otherwise the Moon and Mars colonies would face a serious problem.