Space and Astronomy in general

That is a lot of fire, currently pointed in the correct direction so we can go to space.

The first 4 mins of 8.8 million pounds of thrust and other cool stuff

*follow the link for several parts of the video this is just the first piece.

Sometimes I'm surprised with the lack of 'explosiveness' a rocket takes off with, like how its a surprisingly slow start to liftoff. Not this time. It was in a hurry

polypusher wrote:

Sometimes I'm surprised with the lack of 'explosiveness' a rocket takes off with, like how its a surprisingly slow start to liftoff. Not this time. It was in a hurry

Places to go, people to see, things to do. You know how it is.

I don't think the Artemis I flight timeline has been posted yet in here - or if it has, it at least hasn't been posted recently. Click to embiggen.

IMAGE(https://www.rmg.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/max_2600x2600/public/2022-08/Artemis%201%20mission%20NASA%20infographic%202022.jpeg)

Yeah I was wondering. Looks a bit slower trip than Apollo. Thought it was 3 days to moon?

Three days to the moon? In this economy?

Well the lack of humans onboard presumably gave the flight planner a lot more leeway for cost-cutting/cargo-increasing/optimization.

merphle wrote:

Well the lack of humans onboard presumably gave the flight planner a lot more leeway for cost-cutting/cargo-increasing/optimization.

Strong disagree.

The entire point of this exercise is to prove out the system so humans can be on subsequent launches.

Half-assing it would defeat the purpose.

Does this rocket actually accelerate faster than Saturn 5? Seems like that would not be fun for the people who will eventually be inside it.

Jonman wrote:
merphle wrote:

Well the lack of humans onboard presumably gave the flight planner a lot more leeway for cost-cutting/cargo-increasing/optimization.

Strong disagree.

The entire point of this exercise is to prove out the system so humans can be on subsequent launches.

Half-assing it would defeat the purpose.

Yeah, I was wondering about that as I wrote it. A month round trip seems like a pretty long voyage, in what sounds like pretty cramped quarters.

From Spacecenter.org:

One significant difference between Orion and the Apollo command modules is their crew capacity. While the Apollo command modules (left below) carried a crew of three, the larger Orion spacecraft (right below) will carry one extra crew member for a total of four Artemis astronauts. The Apollo command modules had a habitable volume of approximately 210 cubic feet. That will increase to a habitable volume of roughly 316 cubic feet in the Orion spacecraft. This extra space allows for the accommodation of an extra crew member.

So each person can have about 2 feet clear around them in any given direction? Roomy!

Its about as much room as I have in my cubicle

fangblackbone wrote:

Its about as much room as I have in my cubicle

Just for funsies, here's a pic of a pretty standard 6x6x53" cubicle:

IMAGE(https://www.cubicles.com/uploads/light-box/65/LargeImage/6x6-h-m-cubicles-ops-6x6x53.jpg)

If you remove the actual desk portion, that'd be about 159 cubic feet of space - up to the top of the wall. Stick two of those cubes side-by-side (or one on top of the other) and you get almost exactly the Orion's habitable volume. Now put four crew members in there for a month.

So, a dorm single with a four person lock-in party?

If you didn't see it yet, they have a mission tracker that lets you look over the whole thing built in Unity:

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/tracka...

NSMike wrote:

If you didn't see it yet, they have a mission tracker that lets you look over the whole thing built in Unity:

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/tracka...

Awesome.

Looks like it's 1/3 of the way there in 15 hours. So maybe it's not taking 8 days each way after all?

Stele wrote:
NSMike wrote:

If you didn't see it yet, they have a mission tracker that lets you look over the whole thing built in Unity:

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/tracka...

Awesome.

Looks like it's 1/3 of the way there in 15 hours. So maybe it's not taking 8 days each way after all?

It's slowing down as it travels away from Earth.

Sorry I haven't played enough Kerbal.

Only Outer Wilds which was pretty zippy

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Does this rocket actually accelerate faster than Saturn 5? Seems like that would not be fun for the people who will eventually be inside it.

I have no idea, but SLS took off like a bat out of hell when those solid boosters lit. Very fun to watch!

I was actually kind of bummed out by how fast it was. I really liked how "slow" the Apollo launches were. It really reenforced how f*cking hard it is to do.

I get what you are saying but I had the opposite reaction. Those boosters were monstrous and I said to myself, "wow, it really is that hard to leave the atmosphere". The Apollo launches were so steady, it looked easier to me. It seemed more like it just took persistence more that raw power.

This isn’t the final version of the SLS so that might be while it’s taking so long.

IMAGE(https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/sls_vehicle_evolution_doc_0-e1472369235277.jpg)

I got to touch that core stage and both boosters at various points after it was stacked. This is just plain cool.

Frustrates me using old material stuff. I assume they didn't have enough funding to do some more fundamental research and come up with something not based on the stone age of polymers... its not like there isn't funding for new missile types in need of heat shields...

The Minecraft End Poem story led me down a rabbit trail to find Zsch Weinersmith's, husband of Dr. Kelly Weinersmith and author of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Science: Abridged to the Point of Uselessness. It's a short comedic book about all the disciplines of science and their major insights. It has a bunch of cute two-part parallel construction jokes like this:

Genetics: The study of specific ways you are broken at the molecular level. Genomics: The study of all the ways you are broken at the molecular level.

It's very short, go read it.

Things that I learned this week during very early-morning in-bed browsings of reddits:

The Fermi Paradox is neither Fermi's nor a Paradox

Additional funness:

The two guys attributed for coming up with the "Fermi Paradox" now have wildly divergent careers, neither of which makes them look good. Tipler has his "Omega Point Cosmology," which is like The Singularity but with religion and space-time, and Hart is a full white separatist who writes and speaks on the subject of separating nations' populations by race.

So, next time you talk about the Fermi Paradox, remember that it's actually nonsense, has nothing to do with Fermi, and was invented by a crackpot and a white supremacist.

NSMike wrote:

So, next time you talk about the Fermi Paradox, remember that it's actually nonsense, has nothing to do with Fermi, and was invented by a crackpot and a white supremacist.

This applies to most things in pop science, tbh.