SpaceX

[Boac]

That'll learn em!

[PHXPhlyer]

Two space fans get seats on billionaire's private flight

https://www.azfamily.com/news/ap_cnn/tw ... _id=997197

Two space fans get seats on billionaire's private flight
BY MARCIA DUNN AP AEROSPACE WRITER
POSTED 2 HRS AGO
SpaceX private spaceflight

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A billionaire’s private SpaceX flight filled its two remaining seats Tuesday with a scientist-teacher and a data engineer whose college friend actually won a spot but gave him the prize.

The new passengers: Sian Proctor, a community college educator in Tempe, Arizona, and Chris Sembroski, a former Air Force missileman from Everett, Washington. They will join flight sponsor Jared Isaacman and another passenger for three days in orbit this fall.

Isaacman also revealed some details about his Inspiration4 mission, as the four gathered Tuesday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. He's head of Shift4 Payments, a credit card-processing company in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and is paying for what would be SpaceX's first private flight while raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

Their SpaceX Dragon capsule will launch no earlier than mid-September, aiming for an altitude of 335 miles (540 kilometers). That’s 75 miles (120 kilometers) higher than the International Space Station and on a level with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Isaacman, 38, a pilot who will serve as spacecraft commander, still won’t say how much he’s paying. He's donating $100 million to St. Jude, while donors so far have contributed $13 million, primarily through the lottery that offered a chance to fly in space.

Hayley Arceneaux, 29, was named to the crew a month ago. The St. Jude physician assistant was treated there as a child for bone cancer.

That left two capsule seats open. Proctor, 51, beat out 200 businesses and nabbed the seat reserved for a customer of Isaacman's company. An independent panel of judges chose her space art website dubbed Space2inspire.

“It was like when Harry Potter found out he was a wizard, a little bit of shock and awe,” Proctor told The Associated Press last week. “It’s like, ‘I’m the winner?’”

Sembroski, 41, donated and entered the lottery but wasn’t picked in the random drawing earlier this month — his friend was. His friend declined to fly for personal reasons and offered the spot to Sembroski, who worked as a Space Camp counselor in college and volunteered for space advocacy groups.

“Just finding out that I’m going to space was an incredible, strange, surreal event,” he said.

Proctor, who studied geology, applied three times to NASA’s astronaut corps, coming close in 2009, and took part in simulated Mars missions in Hawaii. She was born in Guam, where her late father — a “Hidden Figure” in her mind — worked at NASA’s tracking station for the Apollo moonshots, including Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s.

She plans to teach from space and create art up there, too.

“To me, everything that I’ve done ... has brought me to this moment.”

PP

[Boac]

At least SpaceX can be pleased that all their crashes have been on target. Whether they issued a 'destruct' for SN11 or not we will know soon, but apparently there had been a problem with Engine 2 on the way up and something 'awful' happened when they lit up for the landing (aka 'crash') burn.

Scramble SN15! All good entertainment.

[Boac]

You don't want to be standing TOO CLOSE!

Some of our Starship video bloggers lost camera equipment in the downpour.

[TheGreenGoblin]

What were they thinking?

An India Mike production!

Assumed there would be no launch!

[TheGreenGoblin]

[PHXPhlyer]

Was rocket rain in the forecast?

PP

[llondel]

That one didn't all land at the same time. I guess you could call it a distributed landing.

[Boac]

'T'was a bit early (by 1 day) for April 1st.

[Woody]

Definitely a no tea and biccies meeting somewhere along the line

[Woody]

I found this before TGG

[Boac]

Elon Musk has tweeted a call for engineers to work at SpaceX, following the launch - and failure - of the SN11 rocket.

"Please consider moving to Starbase or greater Brownsville/South Padre area in Texas & encourage friends to do so! SpaceX’s hiring needs for engineers, technicians, builders & essential support personnel of all kinds are growing rapidly," the CEO tweeted.

Didn't realise the debris had wiped out so many......................

[Boac]

Slightly better video with a little more info.

[Boac]

A vid of the wreckage now - got a bit close to important 'bits'. I wonder if any residents' houses were hit?



FAA may be sucking their teeth?

According to the Express,

"SpaceX chief Elon Musk has now revealed "something significant" must have happened just before the crash landing."

Can't disagree there, boss!

[TheGreenGoblin]

One must question the utility of launching in IMC when cameras were unable to track the flight visually using cameras. One assumes that engine and system telemetry will yield insights into what went wrong. Given the hard rain that fell I do wonder about the safety of launching in such conditions. How can you confirm range safety, when you can't see the range? A certain hubris seems to be creeping into these operations methinks.

[PHXPhlyer]

SpaceX rocket debris found in Washington state after streaks in night sky

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sp ... y-n1262954

SpaceX rocket debris found in Washington state after streaks in night sky
The discovery of the debris comes after a stunning display in the night sky over the Pacific Northwest that experts said was a rocket stage burning up.

April 2, 2021, 8:34 PM MST
By Phil Helsel
Part of a SpaceX rocket was discovered in Washington state last weekend, days after bright comet-like streaks lit up the night sky over the Pacific Northwest, a sheriff's official said.

The space company recovered the "composite-overwrapped pressure vessel from last week’s Falcon 9 re-entry," the Grant County Sheriff's Office tweeted Friday.

The vessel, which was about 5 feet tall, was found on private property in southwestern Grant County, in the center of the state, last weekend.

There was no damage, and it left a 4- to 5-inch impact mark in the ground, said Kyle Foreman, a public information officer for the sheriff's department. SpaceX was notified Monday and arrived Tuesday to recover it, he said.

Where exactly it fell was not disclosed. "Media and treasure hunters: we are not disclosing specifics. The property owner simply wants to be left alone," the sheriff's office said in the tweet. The Tri-City Herald newspaper reports it fell on a farmer's field.


On March 25, streaks lit up the sky over Washington and Oregon. Some thought they were from a meteor or comet.

SpaceX does not appear to have ever publicly confirmed that its rocket was involved. But signs quickly pointed that way.

The National Weather Service in Seattle tweeted that based on unofficial information, "the widely reported bright objects in the sky were the debris from a Falcon 9 rocket 2nd stage that did not successfully have a deorbit burn." An astronomer told NBC affiliate KING of Seattle it was Falcon 9 rocket debris.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment Friday night.

There have been no reports of damage from the Match 25 event. No other reports of debris have been made to the Grant County Sheriff's Office, Foreman said.

The Falcon 9 is a reusable two-stage rocket. The second stage delivers the payload. The first stage is designed to return to Earth and land. There have been 111 Falcon 9 launches with 71 landings so far, according to the company's website.

Foreman said his understanding is that the pressure vessel that was found is used for the storage of helium.

PP

How does deorbit burn cause debris to more fully burn up?

[Boac]

Not sure what happens, PHX - I know SpaceX originally planned to recover the second stage a la first but abandoned the idea. I would be surprised if total burn-up would happen - things like the rocket engine casing etc I would have thought would not 'disappear' during re-entry, so I have assumed they would aim to drop it in the water - and not in Washington State

Maybe they could drop a few on Mar-a-Lago...................

[PHXPhlyer]

Found this with help from Google.

https://qz.com/1989605/scientists-have- ... n-the-sky/

This isn’t a UFO or a shooting star—it’s space pollution
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches Starlink satellites in August 2020.
SPACEX
A light show came from the part of the rocket above the black stripe.

Tim Fernholz
By Tim Fernholz
Senior reporter

March 26, 2021
If you live in the northwest US, you might have seen quite a show in the night sky on March 26.


I’m sorry, what was that?


Space watchers will recognize the pattern of lights in the sky—what we’re seeing is space debris burning up in the atmosphere.

With tens of thousands of new satellites planned for launch in the years ahead by companies like SpaceX, OneWeb, and Amazon, more hardware like this will burn up in the atmosphere than ever before. Scientists at at the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corporation, an independent US government research center, say we don’t know enough about their potential environmental impact.

“As we begin to see these large constellations going up, that’s a little different from what we’re used to—it’s a real change in what the space environment is going to be, but also a change in things that come down,” says William Ailor, a technical fellow at the Center.

In this case, what came down was the second stage of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, weighing about three metric tons. After launch, it separates from its reusable booster to carry a payload of satellites to their final orbit. Normally, the second stage then uses its rocket engine to perform a “deorbit burn” that would dispose of it more quickly over a remote part of the ocean.

This rocket, either accidentally or on purpose, failed to do that, which put a normally unseen phenomenon on display over a populated area. SpaceX did not respond to questions about why their normal reentry procedures were not followed.


The videos caught by skywatchers offer a glimpse at a phenomenon that researchers want to examine more closely.

What we know about space pollution
Ailor and his colleagues released a forecast last year predicting that if the number of satellites currently approved for launch are actually deployed, the amount of space junk burning up in the atmosphere could rise to a level of 800 to 3,200 metric tons annually, from around 100 metric tons per year today. That’s because most satellites are designed so that 60% to 90% of their mass burns up in the earth’s atmosphere to avoid creating dangerous junk on orbit.

Scientists believe that the particles of matter created by these conflagrations accumulate in the stratosphere, thirty to forty kilometers above the earth, where they will remain for four to five years. But they don’t yet know what that change could mean for the environment.

Sometimes, particles in the atmosphere can cause chemical reactions, as with human-generated chlorine emissions which led to the “hole” in the ozone layer over the south Pole. Other times, particles affect the atmosphere by reflecting or absorbing sunlight, as when volcano eruptions or forest fires release soot into the air.

But it’s not clear how particles from burnt-up spacecraft behave. When objects from space come back to earth naturally, they arrive at an oblique angle and move across the sky, burning up due to heat produced by friction over a footprint that can be as long as 1000 miles. Observing what happens with remote sensors like radar requires multiple stations set up over a wide area. Most of the data available dates back thirty to forty years, along with some information collected by weather radar during the Columbia disaster.

The other challenge is figuring out the chemical composition of the new particles. While space hardware is largely made out of aluminum, it also includes more exotic metals, electronics, and batteries that might react unexpectedly and create new compounds.

How to measure the impact of mega-constellations
“There is a big arrow indicating where the future of research should be on this: How those particles are created, what kind of particles are created and what their size is,” Martin Ross, an Aerospace Corporation engineer, says, noting that NASA and other US government agencies teamed up in the 1990s to collect data on how rocket exhaust affects the atmosphere. “A similar kind of effort needs to be assembled to understand the reentry emission in a complete way.”

The answers to these questions could lead to a broader rethink about space sustainability, which emphasizes disposing of dead spacecraft in the atmosphere. That might mean more focus on bringing defunct satellites back to earth in larger pieces that don’t burn up, moving them out to distant “graveyard orbits,” or even recycling them on orbit.

But understanding how rockets and satellites affect the atmosphere isn’t just for space purposes. Ross says that conversations about geoengineering—intentionally altering the atmosphere to reduce the effects of climate change—highlight the need for a clearer understanding of the environment around the earth.

“We need to baseline the stratosphere to understand how we might change it with geoengineering,” he says. “Part of that baseline is volcanos, large fires at the surface—and the space industry is also part of the background, probably a small part.”

PP

[Undried Plum]

Found this with help from Google.
PP

And a small corner of whatever shall be forever be known as British West Lothian.

We've got this stuff raining down on our heads all the time, y'know.

Model S; Model 3: they're ten a penny. Bit burn't up, but you get what you pay for.

Saw one burned to the ground at the arse end of me garden, y'know.

That's rocketry for ya.

I prefer oil paintings. Good ones. Portraits and landscapes and stuff.

Better than 'money'.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Found this with help from Google.
PP

And a small corner of whatever shall be forever be known as British West Lothian.

We've got this stuff raining down on our heads all the time, y'know.

Model S; Model 3: they're ten a penny. Bit burn't up, but you get what you pay for.

Saw one burned to the ground at the arse end of me garden, y'know.

That's rocketry for ya.

I prefer oil paintings. Good ones. Portraits and landscapes and stuff.

Better than 'money'.

As Rick said to Morty... "this ain't rocket science Morty, this is automotive aviancide, just look at those dead Scottish grouse, and that grumpy, hairy Scotsman waving his stick at us from his ricked space Tesla...!"