Posts by Hopalong 72 publicly visible posts • joined 13 May 2012
Considering United Airlines are rolling out Starlink to their 1000 odd airliners - yes.
SpaceX and others have tested the terminals in various aircraft and Starship.
The problem is the 'wack the mole' Starlink have to do to identify and disable the terminals which the orks are getting via third countries.
I was on a secondary site for a UK government agency I was contracting for working on an server, I had powered it off and about to open the lid to add an adaptor card when security came in to the machine room to tell me to move my car.
I was parked in a disabled spot (I am blue badge, so was entitled to park there), but that space was 'reserved' for the ops, which work out of the main site, in spite it been a disabled spot. The jobs worth of a security guard told me basically to move the car or else. As I knew that were no other spaces (car park far too small for number of employees), so I pushed the server back into the rack, powered it back on and left. There was not a operator waiting to use the spot, they where all in their little office on the main site, I checked with them when I got back to the main site.
The project manager was not to happy as it delayed the project by a couple of weeks to get another outage and I had to use the inter-site transport, so a 2 hour job turned into a all day job.
I would love the ISS to be kept, boosted to to a higher orbit, but alas, not practical for a number of reasons.
To boost the ISS from its current 400 Km orbit to a higher one requires propellant, and due to the rocket equation, a lot.
For a 100 year Orbit lifetime, 640-680 Km orbit - Dv 120-140 m/s propellant required - 19 - 23 Tonnes
For a 500 year Orbit lifetime, 770-810 Km orbit - Dv 190-210 m/s propellant required - 30 -34 tonnes
For a 5000 year Orbit lifetime, 1025-1075 Km Orbit -Dv 320-346 m/s propellant required - 52 - 56 Tonnes
Deorbit - 57 m/s - 9 Tonnes
To make it safe to leave in orbit, every source of energy has to be discharged, all pressure vessels emptied, batteries discharged, solar panels disconnected. Even then there is a high chance of breakup due to impacts etc.
Safer to bring it down in a controlled manner, the deorbit vehicle would reduce is orbit a few Km's at a time, couple of m/s here, a couple m/s there, letting the drag of the atmosphere do a lot of the work, then one final burn to put the ISS into the South Pacific.
We once had an YTS (Youth Training Scheme) lad who managed to initiate the Microcode load process on an IBM Mainframe
He was yacking on the phone and for some reason known only to himself, was gently tapping this little blue button on the console, which went 'click'.......
A couple of days latter, a button guard appeared over the button.
Dating myself badly here.
I once saw an IBM CE (Customer Engineer) fix a misbehaving IBM 3330-2 disk drive with the magic hammer.
It was spinning up to its working speed, but not becoming 'ready' after I had changed the disk pack (All of 200MB in capacity and weighted in at 10Kg), so he pulled the whole assembly out at the back of the unit on its rails and gave a solenoid a good wack with the hammer, at which point it became ready.
Back in the day (very late'80's early '90's), I was a shift leader running a small shift, max 3, often 2 (including myself) looking after a Mainframe and a number of AS400's.
Our customer helpline was advertised as 24x7 but was actually manned 8-6 and the phones switched over to us after hours, so we had to field helpline calls out of hours when we were pushed to get things like the printing done to make the taxi schedules.
So we fielded calls from our very non-IT aware customers who thought switching the screen off/on restarted the 'computer'.
This one call stood out - it was the wee hours on new years day - yes we worked 24x7x365. - had a phone call asking us to replace a window which a brick had been thrown though. The caller was a bit miffed that we did not drop everything, drive about 150 miles there and then to replace the glass when I explained that we where the computer helpline and not a facilities helpline and to contact his area manager.
It turned out that his area manager had told all his managers to call us for everything instead of calling him for non-IT (buildings etc.) problems. I think he was hoping for a night with no calls about broken windows etc. The building was in one of the rougher parts on Manchester.
Also the number of times we answered the phone to be moaned at for not returning calls when a message was left on the answerphone - there was not an answerphone, there was a message if the phone was not answered in about 30 seconds saying words to the effect "Sorry, we are busy, please ring back later, no messages will be taken".
Can the Falcon launch the JWST?
The F9, no, the FH, yes.
JWST is 6500Kg at launch and requires a C3 (characteristic energy) of -0.7Km2/s2 to get to L2.
The F9 recovering to the droneship can do 3400Kg, the FH can do 6820Kg recovering all three boosters.
So the FH can launch the JWST and recover all three boosters, but with a small margin for any under performance (e.g. loose a Merlin on the way up). I suspect if bidding today it would be an FH and expend the centre booster to give the extra margin which NASA love.
My understanding is the A5 launcher is the ESA's buy in to the project to get access to the JWST.
They tried a darkened satellite last year. I understand that although it reduced the brightness it caused a lot of thermal problems.
Keeping a satellite cool is not easy where all you have is radiation to get rid of heat, so having a large non-reflective surface facing a nice big heat source, e.g. the Earth, does not help with your thermal management.
I am sorry it did not launch last night, been waiting a long time.
But I am pleased that the presence of so many big wigs did not cloud their decision making.
The weather for the weekend does not look much better, maybe they should look to a morning launch before the summer thunderstorms have a chance to build up, but the timing is dependent of where the ISS is and if you launch when the ISS is not in the right place in relation to the launch site, Dragon will need to burn a lot of fuel making the required orbital changes to meet up with the ISS.
But they had a full wet dress rehearsal, which improves the confidence in the vehicle and procedures.
The RD-180 is actually built in Russia. The ULA has a license to build them in the US, but the bean counters must have decided it was better to leave the production of a critical bit of defence infrastructure in Russia.
I wonder if ULA are getting a bit nervous in case Vulcan is not ready before they run out of RD-180's for Altas V.
No, this was the only in-flight Abort test.
One piece of info gleamed by someone single framing through the video stream was that the Dragon must of reacted within 80ms of the lost of thrust and initiated the abort. They worked out that the time from the start of the exhaust plume starting to reduce to the time the Dragon parted company was 180ms and it takes about 100ms to pressurise the abort system tanks and activate the super draco's
Well, the Delta IV production line is being run down, and according to ULA, it takes about 3 years from order to delivery, so unless the USAF or NRO are open to giving up on a couple of their Delta IV heavies (Can't see that happening).......
This leaves only the Falcon Heavy, even then it would take two launches to put the the Orion + service module + boost stage into orbit.
Solar panels for power, the reaction wheels for fine pointing (powered by the solar panels), then the hydrazine powered RCS for things like unloading the momentum built up in the reaction wheels etc.
The reaction wheels failed over time so it had to use the RCS to do the pointing, which used more hydrazine.
So after 9 1/2 years, it had used up its 11.7 Kg of hydrazine. The camera was failing as well, so it was time for Kepler to retire with a job well done.
Short answer is yes.
Long Answer is yes, Dragon-2 has a dry mass of 6,400Kg, so adding fuel, etc you are looking at around 10,000Kg, a Falcon 9 can do about 3300Kg to the Moon. It needs a Falcon Heavy, expending the centre core.
BFS (The spaceship part of the BFR) is schedule to start Grasshopper type testing next year. Orbit? 2020-21 I think.
The diameter of the Falcon 9 was dictated by the max size which could be transported on the US roads on a daily basis.
SpaceX setup in Hawthorn as there is a pool of labour skills there which he needed and he picked up some suitable buildings at a very good price (ex. Northrop). They have never been adverse to picking up a bargain, the transporter they use to move the cores about KSC and CCAFB was originally built by NASA to move the Shuttle about, they picked it up for a song and converted it, saved a million or so.
For big pork space, look up SLS.
Had basically the same thing happen to me one night shift in the early '80s. In this case it was an 3800 (we had the fanfold paper version). There was a paper jam under the hot fuser and the cut off did not work.
It started to smoke so I quickly powered it off and switched off the power to it.
Then rang IBM for a CE.
Me, "we have a problem with our 3800 printer, serial 'what ever the serial number was'
IBM ' OK, any error codes'
Me ' No, just smoking well, I have cut the power to it'
brief pause...
IBM ' OK, CE on the way'
A couple of jobs later I working in a office building which was the headquarters for a Brewery.
We had a spat of false fire alarms, the building had a automatic alarm to the local firestation, so within about 5 minutes a couple of engines would turn up. Now if there are too many false alarms we would be charged, so the facilities manager would nip into the staff shop and grab a few trays of beer and slip them to the firemen.
The next time the alarm went off, 4 engines from two stations turned up.....
This was originally scheduled to be launched in 2016, but a problem with one of the instruments caused it to miss the 2016 window. At the time it looked like the eastern range (Basically KSC and in the Atlas's case, CCAFS) would have scheduling issues so they moved it to Vandenberg. Now the eastern range is even busier so it was kept at VFB.
The mission was originally sized for a Delta II, but they have been just about retired, last one is launched in September from VFB and the Delta II pad at CCAFS had been decommissioned, so the Atlas V 401 was selected, which is a lot more powerful vehicle, so does not need the assist of being launched to the east to send InSight to Mars. InSight is about 850Kg, the 401 can launch about 2000Kg from VFB to Mars.
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