Space and Astronomy in general

Mixolyde wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

The color is all messed up too!

Nah, the entire world was actually that color until recently.

now it's only North Korea

Mixolyde wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

The color is all messed up too!

Nah, the entire world was actually that color until recently.

Oblig. ref.

merphle wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

The color is all messed up too!

Nah, the entire world was actually that color until recently.

Oblig. ref.

Thank you! Was just about to post that.

Hmmm, perhaps there is no color on the moon?

Color only exists on Earth. Once you enter the Æther, it's all black & white.

Scott Manley looks at video of the collapse.

.

This "mega hubble" looks cool:

It looks like Starship SN8 may actually be go for launch!

Tank farms have activity now and it seems the fueling has begun. NASA's high altitude observation planes took off from Huston.

ETA on the take-off less than an hour from now!!

NASASpaceFlight blog live stream.

LabPadre is another blog that's live streaming.

SpaceX stream (not yet active).

Aurorae possibly visible in northern US on Thursday

Aurora - Aurora may be seen as low as Pennsylvania to Iowa to Oregon.
tboon wrote:

Aurorae possibly visible in northern US on Thursday

Aurora - Aurora may be seen as low as Pennsylvania to Iowa to Oregon.

That’s cool! Hope it’s clear on Thursday.

Approx. 15 mins to Starship launch. This is supposed to be 12.5km flight, controlled dive with fins, and hopefully flip + landing.

T -3 minutes now

Edit: and that’s a scrub

Raptor engine scrub at T-1.3s

Just watched an ISS flyover again. Really good viewing tonight, 5 minutes long, 50-something above the horizon. Tomorrow, a 70-degree above 6-minute view I'm going to try to catch too.

My 2-year old was unimpressed, but she saw it.

Starship SN8 retry looks like it's a go for today. NASA planes (some at least) are in the air and the rocket fuel is loading.

Everyday Astronaut blog live stream.
NASASpaceflight blog live stream.

SpaceX live stream of the launch.

New T - 0 estimated at 4:40PM CST.

--Edit--
Updated link and ETA.

--Edit2--
Hold at T - 2min, looks like it was a range violation.

That was awesome!

Badferret wrote:

That was awesome!

No kidding! That was an amazing flight! The rotation right at the end was spectacular!

That was insane! It was really hard to tell how much was according to plan. Was 1 of the raptors supposed to cut off partway through ascent? Was another one? Was it supposed to flip upright as seemingly late as it did?

That it came so close to 1) hitting the landing mark, and 2) arresting all speed before hitting the ground was impressive regardless but like quadruply so if any of the above was not according to plan.

Pretty sure that first raptor engine cutting out during ascent was not part of the plan.

And only two raptors relit at the landing. Everyday Astronaut has great slowmotion footage.

Looks like one of the engines gave out on landing. Plus I don’t think the landing legs deployed.

On to SN9

Wow! Just wow! Incredible!

It looks like they lost one engine on the way up. You can see two engines relighting. Then lost another about 300m above the landing pad and the final single engine didn't seem to be enough to arrest the fall completely.

Did any of the feeds have the max altitude? Did they hit 12km? Im assuming not with the loss of an engine. Plus towards the peak you could see the condensation stream going mostly perpendicular to the vehicle, suggesting it wasnt really gaining much altitude for a while.

The explanation appearing on Wikipedia is

A test flight on December 9, 2020, resulted in SN8 exploding on the landing pad after completing 6 minutes and 42 seconds of flight because of low pressure on fuel header tank, causing high touchdown velocity. Ascent, switchover to header tanks and flap control was successful.

Poly, It seems that sideways movement was intentional and part of the upper flip manouver. It looks like SS hovered sideways in a westerly direction for a while on one engine and then started the flip back towards the east. It was also falling for quite some time. Then it had to burn sideways again, after relight, in order to upright itself. So I'm guessing they needed quite a bit of sideways distance when they started the upper manouver from vertical.

I had both the spacex feed and the everyday astronaut feed up and it was phenomenal! I was so giddy! I can't wait for SN9.

Really neat.

Badferret wrote:

Pretty sure that first raptor engine cutting out during ascent was not part of the plan.

And only two raptors relit at the landing. Everyday Astronaut has great slowmotion footage.

it definite looked like it flamed out and burned the inside of the rocket in a not-designed-for way.

is the stream of vapor that appears at the same time the engine flames out intended?

Scott Manley has a quick review and explanation video up.

It seems there was really no anomalous events until after the bottom flip when, as Musk already twitted, they didn't get enough fuel pressure from the fuel header tank. This caused one of the engines to flame out, and the other then started getting fed by super oxygen rich mixture that caused the copper in the engine to burn (ergo the green flames). The engine shutoffs as they were approaching apogee were expected behaviour.