On January 10 2018 06:06 LegalLord wrote: The Chinese news agency links the story that cites that it isn't possible. Where is the claim being made by China or some Chinese representative that it's fake, because it's not in the twit up there?
I mean I saw plenty of internet hobbyists say it's like that, but no one should take that seriously. Nowhere in the article does it say that the Chinese government called it fake, it's just cited as a scenario considered.
That's why I said replace. But I guess you skipped that part. :/
On January 10 2018 06:06 LegalLord wrote: The Chinese news agency links the story that cites that it isn't possible. Where is the claim being made by China or some Chinese representative that it's fake, because it's not in the twit up there?
I mean I saw plenty of internet hobbyists say it's like that, but no one should take that seriously. Nowhere in the article does it say that the Chinese government called it fake, it's just cited as a scenario considered.
That's why I said replace. But I guess you skipped that part. :/
Ok, so you don't actually see China saying it, so the statement
On January 10 2018 04:55 lestye wrote: China says Zuma failure is fake news.
is not something you agree with?
On January 10 2018 05:48 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote: (replace China with Rumors)
I didn't miss that part, it's just that if you don't say that China said it then that changes everything. One is a government with real tracking hardware, the other is internet conspiratards.
Which you said is also one of the rumors being touted, correct? I'm not interested enough to follow that rabbit hole, to get to the bottom of it, to be honest.
But I will agree, that upon reading the article, rereading the tweet, that no, that is not something I agree.
Yeah, that's a rumor - but not one of the substantiated ones. Just the kind of things I've been reading on the message boards. But it's also something you can dismiss out of hand because that kind of farce just isn't really viable. Now if China says that it didn't actually go down... well that would be huge news. They actually have the means by which to track it so it would be significantly different from just baseless speculation.
The current story that seems the most credible, and is the one being leaked, is this: the craft never separated from the second stage, and burned up on reentry when the stage deorbited. Northrop made the payload adapter but it's not clear precisely what happened so it's not clear who's at fault. Both companies are blaming the other.
i got my first real professional employment working in a co-op job in 1st year university in 2006. i worked for an IT consulting firm and spent a lot of time in the IT department of a giant Nursing Org....
this is when Bush announced the USA was returning to the moon. at the time i said "this ain't happening they ain't gonna go to the moon". zero agreed with me and a few laughed. everyone, both inside and outside the IT dept., thought the moon return was gonna happen.,
i was back at the same nursing org for a couple of weeks recently. now, everyone thinks the latest "return to the moon plans" are total BS and will never happen.
SLS and Deep Space Gateway are far more viable and real than Constellation. At least 70% of this "commercial boom" stuff is a hilarious and overhyped farce though.
Least surprising news of the day, buried in a very eventful few days.
WASHINGTON — SpaceX has delayed its two commercial crew test flights by four months, according to a new NASA schedule released Jan. 11, raising questions about whether it or Boeing will be able to send astronauts to the International Space Station by the end of the year as previously planned.
The updated schedule, which NASA said represents “the most recent publicly releasable dates” for the two companies, lists an uncrewed test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft in August 2018, followed by a crewed test flight in December. The previous schedule released by NASA, in October 2017, stated those flights would take place in April and August 2018, respectively.
SpaceX spokesperson Eva Behrend, in a statement to SpaceNews, did not discuss the reasons for the delay. “SpaceX continues to target 2018 for the first demonstration missions with and without crew under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program,” she said.
Behrend instead focused on the progress the company has made in the development of its Crew Dragon vehicle. “In 2017, significant progress was made towards the production, qualification and launch of Crew Dragon — one of the safest and most advanced human spaceflight systems ever built — and we are set to meet the additional milestones needed to launch our demonstration missions this year.”
In a Jan. 4 release, NASA outlined some of the milestones ahead for SpaceX before those test flights. They include “continued, rigorous qualification testing” of both the Merlin engines used on the Falcon 9 as well as the Dragon’s SuperDraco thrusters, tests of the Dragon’s parachutes, post-splashdown recovery tests, and testing of the pressure suits that will be worn by astronauts flying on the Dragon.
At the time of the release, NASA had not disclosed the latest delays, but the list of milestones suggested delays were likely. For example, NASA said that a second round of Dragon parachute system validation tests “will be completed by mid-2018,” which under the previous schedule would have been after the uncrewed test flight.
The Boeing schedule released by NASA is unchanged from the previous version, with an uncrewed test flight of its CST-100 Starliner scheduled for August 2018 and a crewed test flight in November. However, in an interview in September 2017, Chris Ferguson, director of Starliner crew and mission systems at Boeing, suggested the crewed test flight could be delayed until early 2019.
Venus is a famously difficult planet to explore — but a new NASA proposal that borrows a thing or two from steampunk science fiction could make things easier.
The proposal, part of the experimental NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, calls for a rover that is minimal on electronics. Instead, it navigates more like a clockwork construct, allowing for higher temperature resistant materials to fully explore the surface of the planet for the first time.
There have been few landers to successfully make it to Venus, and no rovers. The USSR launched several probes to the planet, but only nine survived and none for more than two hours, limiting the amount of data we could obtain from our twin planet. Venus has a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere that causes a massive greenhouse effect, leaving the surface 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 Celsius) near-uniformly across the planet. The surface of Venus is at 90 atmospheres, meaning 90 times the thickness of the air at Earth’s sea level.
This dooms any lander almost as soon as it touches down, and makes for a lot of possible errors. Instruments can and do malfunction under these extremes before the probes die entirely.
The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) would minimize the number of electronic instruments on board, running mostly as a series of gears with movements from World War I-like tank tracks. Levers and gears on board would take measurements from the surface, and it would be powered by a small wind turbine utilizing Venus’ extreme atmosphere to great benefit.
And — no joke — the team behind the concept are taking the steampunk idea so far as to suggest that morse code could be used to send data back to an orbiter that would then relay it to NASA. The orbiter would simply point at the spacecraft and gather data via radar.
Most NIAC projects are decades from being made, and are instead two-year research proposals to find out if such a concept is possible. So don’t expect a clockwork rover to launch this year, but the current study’s findings could pave the way for some extreme methods to use 19th century technology to forge ahead in the 21st century on our solar system’s most hellish planet.
An Indian-built PSLV rocket successfully deployed 31 satellites from seven countries into orbit Friday, a big step in the burgeoning global space industry.
Among them was Planetary Resources' Arkyd-6 satellite, which has the ambitious mission of learning how to prospect asteroids for mining. Arkyd-6 will test 17 new technologies, with one of its most important being a new mid-wave infrared imaging sensor (or MWIR) designed to detect water resources.
"If all of the experimental systems operate successfully, Planetary Resources intends to use the Arkyd-6 satellite to capture MWIR images of targets on Earth's surface," the company's chief engineer Chris Voorhees said in a statement.
Water is critical to the future of spaceflight, and especially to human colonizing other planets. Beyond being necessary for life, water is one of the most efficient propellants. The results of the Arkyd-6 mission will teach Planetary Resources what it needs to know before launching exploratory crafts to asteroids near the Earth – which CEO Chris Lewicki has said the company plans to do by 2020.
"This is the first post-global enterprise," Lewicki told CNBC last year.
The PSLV-C40 launch carried India's 100th satellite, a surveillance craft named Cartosat 2, and was the longest flight duration for the rocket vehicle at over 2 hours. This was the first PSLV mission since a failure in August resulted in the payload falling short of orbit.
Other secondary payloads on board included 19 satellites contracted and managed by Spaceflight Industries — notably the ICEYE-X1 satellite and several cubesats for both Planet and Spire. ICEYE's inaugural craft is the first commercial satellite for Finland, with next-generation technology known as synthetic aperture radar (or SAR) on board designed to provide almost real-time imagery regardless of atmospheric conditions.
"We use observation data to help our customers navigate through the world as it is, not as it was," CEO Rafal Modrzewski told CNBC in December.
EPT
