BigSoccer IN SPACE!!! (The BigSoccer Space Exploration Thread)

Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh 83 years ago today.

On this day in 1977, the Space Shuttle test article Enterprise went on its first flight, with the first carry flight of the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.

The first one, N905NA, was a 747-100 bought from American Airlines. A second one, N911NA, was a 747-100SR bought from Japan Air Lines after the Challenger disaster. Both were used for the remainder of the program.

The first SCA kept its American Airlines paint job until 1983, when it was repainted white with a blue cheatline stripe.

With the retirement of the Space Shuttles, both are on display in Houston, and are used for spare parts for similar NASA research aircraft.

 

On this day 27 years ago, the Soviet Union launched the core module of the Mir space station into orbit atop a Proton rocket.




Mir would eventually be expanded with a piggyback module on the core, and four accessory modules oriented around a central all-axis docking adapter. Three spacecraft could dock with the station at a time, eventually to include the American Space Shuttle.

The first expedition to Mir, EO-1, would launch three weeks later.

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And now for a little rocketry segue.

The Proton rocket is the equivalent to America's Titan rocket: a large rocket using dirty hypergolic fuel (hydrazine, and (di)nitrogen tetroxide).



(And to top it all off, later Titan rockets used huge solid rocket boosters, too. They led the way to the ones the Space Shuttle used, and made Thiokol a killing.)

Like the Titan, which was last used in 2002, Russia is trying to replace Proton with something cleaner. But their replacement Angara rocket, which uses kerosene (RP-1) and liquid oxygen, has had delays.

Hypergolic fuel was a common shortcut because it can be stored long-term for years; it's commonly found today in ICBMs. But it is bad for space launch uses because it's highly corrosive. If a Titan rocket exploded too close to the ground, it required evacuations of the Cape. In the US, it is limited now to reaction control once on-orbit, and in much smaller-scale orbital maneuvering engines.

Liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, as cryogenics, evaporate rapidly once loaded onto the rocket. That's one reason why launch windows don't last forever. If it took more than a few hours, they had to scrub the launch and pump out the remaining cryogenics to avoid wasting too much to evaporation. RP-1 is not cryogenic, and has no imminent hazards beyond being explosively flammable, but still can't be stored in a rocket forever like hypergolics.

Atlas V, Falcon 9, Soyuz, Zenit and H-II all use RP-1 and LO2, and any solid rocket use is limited to smaller strap-on motors (see: Delta II) and upper stages. Delta IV and Ariane 5 (Europe's launcher) use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen; it's the cleanest of them (RP-1 is, after all, a fossil fuel), but LH2 is a lot more expensive than RP-1. The LO2/LH2 combo is also used in high-power upper stages for the biggest high-orbit payloads, and for interplanetary probes.

 

"Godspeed, John Glenn."

The famous first American orbital flight took place 51 years ago today.

During the flight automatic attitude control was lost for a time, requiring Glenn to take manual control, which he did successfully. There was a false heat shield deploy indicator which led to mission control ordering the retropack to remain in place during re-entry.

 

Happy 49th birthday to American astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly, the first siblings--and first pair of twins, identical or otherwise--to fly in space.

While they are twins, both retired Captains in the U.S. Navy, and both chosen in Astronaut Group 16 in 1996, their careers have gone in different directions.

Scott (left) was a test pilot. He was the first to test-fly the F-14 with a glass cockpit (monitor readouts instead of mechanical gauges).

Mark (right) was a combat pilot, and a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. He completed 39 combat missions over two deployments out of Japan.

Following their selection to NASA, Scott eventually trained for long-term operational missions aboard the International Space Station, while Mark trained to fly the Space Shuttle in support thereof.

Scott's first mission was STS-103, as pilot, which was a Hubble Space Telescope service mission. He commanded STS-118, a construction mission. He flew on the first flight of the latest model of Soyuz capsule, Soyuz TMA-01M, and was a transitional ISS crew member, acting as flight engineer for Expedition 25 before commanding Expedition 26.

Mark has flown four Shuttle missions, all ISS construction missions. He was pilot on STS-108 and STS-121, then commanded STS-131 and STS-134 (the final flight of Endeavour).

Scott is currently training for the first year-long Expedition on the ISS, which will take place in 2015-16. He will be working with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko on the long-term Expedition, along with the normal Expeditions that will come and go around them.

As for Mark, he retired from NASA following STS-134 to take care of his wife, former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. I don't think I need to explain that one.

Mark and Scott could've been the first siblings to be in space at the same time. However, delays in STS-134 (which had nothing to do with the attempt on Rep. Giffords' life; they were actually due to major delays in the mission before it, STS-133) resulted in Expedition 26 coming home before STS-134 could launch. So a missed opportunity there.

 

On this day 52 years ago, the Soviet Union selected their first group of cosmonauts for training. A total of 20 men were chosen, including Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov, Alexei Leonov and Vladimir Komarov.

On this day in 1969, Mariner 6 was launched. It would fly by Mars that July, taking 75 photos and conducting various radiographic experiments.

On this day in 1991, Iraq conducted its last Scud missile launches of the Gulf War.

 

36 years ago today, Salyut 5, the second of two successful "Almaz"-class military-dedicated Soviet space stations, ejected its photography capsule for return to Earth. It was deemed unsafe to continue missions to the station. The station's fuel had been depleted, and it wasn't refuelable.



The capsule was auctioned off by Sotheby's in December 1993, and sold to Ross Perot for about $49,000.

 

21 years ago today, the Russian Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos, was created by executive order from president Boris Yeltsin.

During the Soviet Union, there was no central "space agency". It was multi-centered, with several groups working together (or in some cases, competing against each other, which is probably part of the reason their moon project failed). For example, at one point there were five or six different versions of the Soyuz spacecraft.

Although the 1990s saw considerable budgeting issues, they would eventually get the program working like clockwork.

 

50 years ago today, the rocket that would be the direct progenitor of the modern Delta rocket, the Thrust-Augmented Thor, was launched for the first time. The launch became a failure when its Agena upper stage failed.

Some previous Thor rockets were called "Thor-Delta"; at the time, it referred to the upper stage used. Eventually, the Thor ballistic missile would become more identified as the Delta rocket, and the Castor strap-on solid rocket motors would be a defining feature of the series.

 

Rocket launch tomorrow: SpaceX is launching its second operational Dragon CRS cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station. Launch scheduled for 10:10am EST from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral, with an 80% chance of favorable weather.

This Dragon will be the first to carry unpressurized cargo in its trunk, the fairing beneath the capsule itself that its solar panels attach to. It will be removed by DEXTRE, the ISS's smaller robotic arm, while it is docked.

It will bring up a total of 1,268 lbs net cargo (1,493 lbs with packaging), and return 3,020 lbs of cargo.

BTW: I totally missed this one. On Monday, India launched a PSLV rocket from Satish Dhawan Space Center, 40 miles north of Chennai on the southeast coast in Andhra Pradesh. It carried seven satellites: three for Canada, one for Austria (their first ever), one for Denmark, one for the UK, and a French/Indian joint venture oceanography satellite.

 

Yes, NEOSsat was one of the satellites launched. All went into polar orbit.

 

66 years ago today, Wernher von Braun (who by this time had been in the U.S. for nearly 2 years) was allowed to return to occupied Germany to marry Maria von Quistrop, and bring her back to America with him. She was 16 years his junior (19 when they married; he was almost 35), but a noble from the pre-Nazi times like himself (Wernher was an actual Baron, or "freiherr" as they call it.).

On their 23rd wedding anniversary (1970), he took a job at NASA Headquarters in Washington as a Deputy Director. He had spent much of his time in the U.S. at Huntsville, first at the Redstone Arsenal, then as Director of what became Marshall Spaceflight Center. His time as a designer done, he would retire two years later, frustrated by growing public apathy for further exploration. He was convinced the Saturn rockets could lead mankind to Mars.

I think no man has done more to atone for his sins than him. He frequently characterized his interactions with the Nazi Party and SS in Germany, including the use of slave labor from concentration camps to build his V-2 rockets, as merely playing a role to save his own skin. Some of his associates among the German rocket scientists saved in Operation Paperclip (the Soviets and British each got some of their own in separate operations; von Braun specifically sought out the Americans) were eventually repatriated back to Germany, stripped of American citizenship for war crimes. The designer of the Saturn V was able to avoid that fate.

His younger brother, Magnus, used his chemistry education to become a fuel technician, escaping combat duty with the Luftwaffe, and became Wernher's assistant. Knowing English, he was the one that set their surrender to the Americans in motion, saving them from potential scorched-earth execution by the SS. He would eventually become an executive at Chrysler.

 

There was a glitch in the reaction control system. Only one of the four RCS pods activated after separation from the second stage. They have two online now, and have deployed their solar panels.

They are trying to get the other two pods up last I heard. NASA.gov says they can advance to the ISS on two thruster pods.

The launch itself was flawless.

 

SpaceX ironed out the bugs in the Dragon capsule, and all their thruster pods are online now. They were able to raise their orbit to catch the ISS.

One of the comments I have heard frequently in the wake of this issue is that being able to dynamically troubleshoot the issue on-orbit and get things right to continue on is a huge moment for SpaceX.

The original plan was to arrive today, but with the thruster issue they have decided to back it up to arrive tomorrow.

 

Dragon has been grabbed. It was taken about 30 minutes ago.



The actual capture was the first to happen on the day side of the Earth.

 

The Dragon has been opened. Among the contents: two Glacier freezers, one of which is for the ISS.

The surprise on-board for the astronauts: fresh fruit.

 

40 years ago today, NASA reorganized the Apollo spacecraft office in preparation for Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz. The manager of Apollo-Soyuz, Glenn Lunney, was put in charge of the Apollo office as a whole.

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Today is the beginning of a particularly exciting week in 1986: the Halley Armada. Five spacecraft from the European Space Agency (ESA), the Soviet Union, France and Japan would explore Halley's Comet during this week, marking the first up-close measurements of a comet.

It started 27 years ago today when Vega 1, a bus probe that was a joint-effort between France's independent space agency (CNES) and the Soviet Union, approached within 8,890 km of the nucleus. Several months before, it had dropped a lander and balloon set on Venus.

The measurements made by Vega 1 would be used by the ultimate probe, ESA's Giotto, to penetrate the coma and encounter the nucleus itself.



Unfortunately, the Soviet Union used straight TV cameras to image the comet. So the pictures themselves weren't that great.

 

45 years ago today, the first Soviet test of a vehicle designed for manned flight to the Moon ended in failure.

Zond 4, returning from a flight at a super-high Earth orbit away from the Moon (its apogee was about 300,000 km), suffered a reaction control failure. As a result, instead of doing a skipping re-entry to return to Kazakhstan (where it re-enters the atmosphere, exits briefly, then falls back for final entry and landing; the way Apollo did it), it was going to land in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of western Africa.

To avoid risking the loss of equipment to the U.S., the Soviets self-destructed the command module at 10 km altitude. It was unmanned.

 

27 years ago today, the Halley Armada mission continued with the closest approach of Japan's Suisei probe.

Suisei did not have a video camera. Its primary purpose was to take ultraviolet measurements of the coma. Its closest approach was 151,000 km.

 

27 years ago today, the Soviet-French Vega 2 probe flew by Halley's Comet at a distance of 8,030 km.

The stage was set for Giotto.

 

27 years ago today, as part of the Halley Armada, Japan's Sakigake probe "flew by" Halley's Comet.

If you count 7 million km as "flying by".

Halley was a secondary objective for it anyway. It was a technology probe to prove Japan could do the interplanetary mission anyway.

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On this day in 1969, Apollo 10 was rolled out to Launch Pad 39B. Apollo 10 would be the first mission launched from Pad B. The previous four Saturn V launches (Apollos 4, 6, 8 and 9) were from Pad A.

 

27 years ago today, Giotto approached within 596 km of the nucleus of Halley's Comet, taking spectacular photographs from within the coma.

Shortly after closest approach, a particle impact took out Giotto's camera. The spacecraft itself, however, survived. In 1992, it would make an even closer approach (200km) to a second comet, Comet Grigg-Skjellerup.

 

23 years ago today, the last satellite to be repaired in orbit, Intelsat 603, was launched by a Commercial Titan III rocket. Its second stage failed to separate in a timely fashion, causing its upper stage to fail and leaving it in an unusably low orbit.

It was visited by the maiden flight of Endeavour in 1992, where it was captured, put on a new upper stage, and sent on its way.