SpaceX does it again

Another Falcon9 successfully landed on a moving barge this morning.

In order to make the economics work, these birds do a ballistic reentry, essentially falling out of the sky and making a corrective landing burn at the last possible minute. Since this Falcon was delivering a Japanese communications satellite to high orbit, the lifter fell a lot further than the last one did, ending up going twice as fast and requiring a 12-G final burn before touching down softly on the recovery vessel Of Course I Still Love You.

Congratulations to Elon Musk and the SpaceX team, who are among the many people who don’t read this blog.

SpaceX lands at sea

A little late with the news, but anyway the SpaceX’s Falcon-9 has successfully landed on the drone barge “Of Course I Still Love You”. The landing deck is 170 by 300 feet long, and the Falcon’s legs stand 60 feet apart. As you can see by the whitecaps, the sea was very rough with high altitude crosswinds of 50 mph and low altitude winds of 25 mph.

For true space geeks, the beautifully produced full 18 minute video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZXu_rYF51M

Orbital ATK Cygnus 6 space truck

The unmanned Cygnus cargo mission OA-6 went up Saturday on a Russian/American Atlas V, successfully delivering a new 3d printer to the International Space station. The ISS crew snagged the Cygnus today with their robotic arm.

Interesting side note on this mission, before Cygnus 6 plunges to its fiery reentry doom it’s going to test artificial gecko feet and be used for a fire-in-space experiment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JkQ12JluJ0

Sintel means “ember” or “coal”

The Blender Foundation released Sintel on September 30th, 2010.



The film and all its animation data, characters and textures have been released under the Creative Commons Attribution License. This has not stopped Sony from issuing DCMA takedowns.

VTOL Rocket Roundup

The Experimental Delta Clipper (DC-X) of the 1990s was canceled before it ever made it into space.

The Rotary Rocket Company’s incredibly innovative Roton was designed to land with helicopter blades instead of a parachute or a landing rocket. After the collapse of the small telecommunications satellite market in 1999 the company went out of business without ever building their unique spinning aerospike main engine; without a clear mission, investors were unwilling to fund the various exotic technologies that the company was successfully pioneering.

In 2013 SpaceX’s series of “grasshopper tests” picked up where the DC-X left off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwS4YOTbbw

But SpaceX’s plan to land their Falcon 9 lifter on a seagoing barge has not yet succeeded.

And bringing us up to date, Blue Origin landed the New Shepard on the 23rd. I love the final replay of the landing sequence!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pillaOxGCo

Einstein via teenager

https://youtu.be/CYv5GsXEf1o

NASA Ames

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. — William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum

The photoessay This Used to Be the Future reminded me of a childhood spent reading yellowed 1940s science fiction.

1958 General Motors Firebird III

Virgin Galactic Feather

A simple and entertaining explanation of the rentry mechanism of Space Ship Two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n8q41DWhQk

Happy Birthday Hubble ST

The Hubble Space Telescope is 25 years old today. Congratulations, Dennis!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5MwOCgzQ6M

Ow, CARP!

Apparently invasive Asian silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) get stirred up by the sound of the motorboat accompanying the rowers.

It’s too bad the person recording the scene is so prone to thoughtless profanity, as that will limit the appeal of this video.

MMS Separation

See http://mms.gsfc.nasa.gov/ for mission updates!

Bladerunner model builds on imgur

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XKCD Philae coverage as a flipbook

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Harpoon it, Philae!

Artist concept of Rosetta's Philae lander touching down

Edit 2014-11-14: From this blog post, a somewhat speculative plot of the bouncy landing, showing how close Philae might have come to tumbling off Churyumov-Gerasimenko and into space.

The Philae probe bouncing on landing

It’s believed that Philae bounced twice – the first bounce took about two hours, and the second one 7 minutes. As expected, the comet’s lack of mass and consequent lack of gravity has been a big challenge. At this point, it’s believed that the lander may be lying on its side, making a harpooning attempt out of the question. The drilling maneuver currently being carried out may push the lander upright, or out of the little sunlight it’s been getting, or even entirely off the comet, but there’s no way to tell just yet….

Antares explosion videos

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Busy weekend at ISS

Elon Musk’s Dragon spacecraft left the International Space Station Saturday after delivering 5000 lb of cargo, and in the wee hours of this morning a Russian Progress unmanned cargo lifter undocked with a full load of garbage, freeing up some parking spaces (video replay on NASA TV at noon today). The Progress will stay nearby for a while to assist with some engineering experiments, and is eventually destined to burn up on reentry on Oct 19th.

Around 2:00pm EDT there will be a course adjustment to dodge some incoming debris left over the 2003 launch of a Cosmos communications satellite.

An Orbital Sciences Cygnus, named in honor of Deke Slayton, is scheduled to launch on an Antares from Wallops tonight. This will be the first Antares launch to use a Castor 30XL upper stage; the payload will include the Planetary Resources Arkyd-3 test satellite and nearly 3 tons of supplies. Coverage starts at 4:00pm EDT on NASA TV, launch at 5:45.

Fireworks from a drone

Thanks to Bhil for the link.

Still half dead

Bhil says I should stay away from “probiotic seafood” in the future.

I lost so much fluid yesterday, so quickly, that I started drinking warm sugar water with chamomile just to keep hydrated enough to stay out of the hospital. I was working alone, which was in some ways convenient, since I didn’t have to worry about offending cow-orkers with my fever, sweats, vomiting and diarrhea, but also a little scary, since there was nobody to pick me up if I completely collapsed.

Managed to stomach a little oatmeal at breakfast, and I’ve been sipping at chocolate milk all day, but I probably shouldn’t have attempted that cheeseburger at lunchtime. I’m regretting it. Not ready for anything flavorful yet.

Flying back out tonight. I plan to recline my seat despite the kerfuffle.

Adding the final element to the migraine experience

I’ve always said, when discussing my infrequent migraines with physicians, “well, at least I don’t have any nausea.” I get all the other symptoms – pain, confusion, light and sound sensitivity, polychromatic visual aberrations, etc. – to a pretty extreme degree. But at least I’m not actively throwing up at the same time, right?

As I staggered off the plane in Boston’s Logan Airport, my six-hour migraine finally ebbing, it seemed like a good idea to have a nice fisherman’s platter and let the medication wear off before picking up the rental car.

The scrod was delicious, but the shrimp were tough and the oysters seemed a little off. Oysters vary quite a bit regionally (I’m used to the big, sweet oysters of Tappahannock) so I ate several of them anyway.

Thanks for the food poisoning, Legal Seafood.

High Voltage Cable Inspector Guy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tzga6qAaBA

Redstone Rockets

I enjoy reading John Bullard’s History of the Redstone Missile System, although most people are likely to find it pretty dry. I found it linked from Jim Ryan’s marvelously informative site, which is a memoir of his Army experiences manning the Army’s Redstone missiles from 1958 to 1962. It’s a wonderful site to visit if you’re a hardcore rocket buff or cold war historian, although perhaps not much fun for those who couldn’t keep themselves awake in history class.

I think sites like Jim’s are the best thing about the World Wide Web. Computer professionals didn’t need the WWWeb to communicate with each other and organizations didn’t need the Web to move data – those needs were already met by the Internet itself, underlying the Web. But the Web lets people like Jim reach out to the whole world, not just computer gurus, with information that would never otherwise be available to many of the people most interested in it.