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Here's new information that indicates a subsurface ocean.
kbd512-
I agree with you on most , nearly all of your above statements.
The lone exception is regarding hydrazine based propulsion, and you gave the "cost of manufacture" as the primary reason for abandonment of N2H4 as a viable fuel. WRONG! Hydrazine is simple to manufacture and at one time was easy to purchase up until around 1990. The most expensive portion of using hydrazine was SAFE SHIPPING! I was using 55 gallon drums of Hydrazine Hydrate in some of my manufacturing processes routinely, and the major expense was needing 5 barrels of Sodium Hypochlorite to safely dispose of the waste. Mixed with enough bleach, hydrazine was completely destroyed and diluted with water, it could go down the sewer system without any quibbles from the EPA.
Shipping Hydrazine by truck freight became almost impossible--nearly overnight.
Anhydrous Hydrazine was another story, and was always heavily regulated by ICC and shippers.
There have been several recent posts on YouTube regarding the possibility of Boeing laying off a load of workers in anticipation of cancellation of the SLS main stage. I've seen nothing more since last week, however.
Thomas; I edited my post and it was corrected by eliminating the colon immediately preceding the actual URL.
Rodger
There are 2 YouTube videos at present;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddMiC2lY-OM, which I posted earlier, and a second one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yeay2n … 4g&index=2
I'm moving this link here from Human Spaceflight; this is a short program by Angry Astronaut.
Here's a YouTube regarding the BO booster landing attempt:
Bob-
I don't have a specific reference, but many different posts on a number of YouTube presentations can confirm this ~80% power rating. I'm sure they will need to increase the chamber pressure and exhaust velocity to get the needed performance to not waste fuel in the liftoff stage and ensure enough payload to orbit.
GW-
According to various reports I've seen, the BO BE-4 engines are running at about 80% of their design pressure limits to extend their lifetimes; so--that accounts for the lower performance and lots of fuel burn overcoming gravity in the early stages of flight. I suspect that they will need to increase the chamber pressures to take advantage of the undoubtedly better performance (which IS available) needed in later flights.
According to comments by Scott Manley, the second stage of IFT-7 was veering off course due to the loss of steering capability, and probably triggering the flight termination system. Of all the usual live space website analysts, he undoubtedly does the most thorough and scientific reporting.
I just saw an update re: Ship 33; the Starship 33 experienced an onboard fire thought to involve leaking Oxygen and methane which was initially detected by onboard cameras. There was a massive RUD over the Turks and Caicos Islands and there are some very cool photos of the debris reentering the atmosphere. There is also a call number provided so that anyone finding debris can notify SpaceX for it's recovery. Thankfully there has been no report of any injuries, since the RUD and debris fallout occurred within the designated exclusion zone for possible reentry.
Here's a link to Scott Manley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfVm4DTv6lM
An amazing "day," although I slept quite a time between the Blue Origin launch and SpaceX flight 7!
My observations: Both ships had beautiful liftoffs and easily cleared their towers; the BO "New Glenn" was a lot slower in it's acceleration, probably due to, a much lower T/W ratio. Scott Manley did a reverse engineering type estimate of maybe a 1.16-1.2 thrust to weight ratio, whereas Starship has power to spare and got outta Dodge a lot faster, in spite of carrying an additional 300 tons of propellants in the new Version 2 Starship. Both boosters performed beautifully up to and through stage separation, and second stages initially looked to be in great shape. The Glenn BE-3 engines seemed to do a very good job and did the necessary relights in vacuum, thereby propelling the upper stage into an initial orbit successfully. The SpaceX booster, or Super Heavy, did a beautiful flip and boost back burn, on course for Starbase, and completed a spectacular tower catch. New Glenn first stage did a boost back burn successfully, but according to BO, telemetry was lost and the stage was presumed lost while attempting to land. I was already in bed when BO second stage completed it's high orbit insertion.
SpaceX began seeing the velocity increase begin slowing and engine out indicators, leading to loss of the second stage and a failed recovery.
BO was finally successful in launching New Glenn, but the landing attempt ended in failure.
See my comment on the earlier BO flight thread.
Very early this morning Blue Origin successfully launched New Glenn and achieved orbit. Unfortunately the attempted booster recovery ended in failure. They undoubtedly learned a lot; especially SPACE IS HARD!
I stayed up and watched the entire launch, which accounts for this rather late report.
The liftoff was impressive but the acceleration was a lot slower than I would have expected, but since they are deliberately restricting the thrust output for longer engine life, this could explain the very slow performance.
Given the amount of time and money spent on Artemis II to date, it's unconscionable for the contractors to green light a faulty heat shield, as well as the administrators. I would think that Jared Isaacman will tell the contractors to FIX THE HEAT SHIELD! I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the next NASA administrator, who will be under pressure to get this damned thing flying around the moon!
They are saying that it will take a year to made a new shield, but I suspect that it could be done by someone other than Lockheed Martin in a significantly shorter time by working 24/7 in order to maintain the schedule?
The BO New Glenn has finally had a successful STATIC FIRE! Initial test flight scheduled around 6 Jan 2025!
I wholeheartedly agree with GW in regards to sending "settlers" to Mars before there are at least two Hohmann transfer cycles to a pioneer base fully functioning and reporting back to Earth about what works and more importantly, what DOESN'T WORK! I'm of the opinion that the Starship as presently designed is too big and needs to have a scaled down version for the first crew landing. The larger ones are OK for cargo missions and we need a huge amount of prepositioned foodstuffs and adequate power. I Believe that attempting to rely on solar power 100% would result in loss of everyone. A 250 KW nuke would allow a margin for error and still make enough LOX and CH4 for a smaller return vessel to operate, but this would also allow for testing of some solar power for base uses.
We need a drill system to drill deep enough, as GW stated. Not the "self-driving nail" that was a failure.
I would encourage SpaceX to revisit the Red Dragon concept with two vessels per Hohmann transfer window; one devoted 100% to a REAL drilling rig, and a second being a small but dormant nuclear reactor. These could be robotically controlled at a given site and would be pretty reassuring to an initial manned mission. These are strictly experimental steps that need to be taken first.
Here's a YouTube segment that purports to reveal the joint plan between NASA and SpaceX for the colonization of the Red Planet.
I watched the entire thing before deciding to post this link here. Not terrible, but thin on details. I found the description of the first manned mission to Mars involved a crew "between 10 and 20 astronauts." That sorta supported my 17 man crew concept from a couple years ago.
kbd512-
I have quite a bit of professional experience with hydrazine, although as hydrazine hydrate. Up until around 1985, it was reasonably cheap. The anhydrous form is more difficult to manufacture, but on the industrial scale--still a cheap chemical. The major expense in using this nasty stuff is the cost and regulations of transport. It was being trucked around the country in tanker truck quantities until the EPA became involved. Lots of other previously "cheap" chemicals became almost unavailable overnight. A case in point was carbon tetrachloride, an extremely useful solvent, which my company used in 55 gallon drum quantities and it was around $400 for a drum. Then the EPA said it could no longer be manufactured because it was almost impossible to dispose of. Not burnable for waste disposal. But it was the solvent of choice for photochemical bromination reactions. Now--it's only available in small laboratory quantities for around $500 a gallon.
tahanson43206-
Maybe if you wanna go back a number of years, you will find a mission architecture predating Elon's BFR concept, that I suggested for what is now being referred to as a "space tug." I was trying to expand on the Mars Direct concept at the time, by suggesting a "modular approach" to getting a larger than Dragon size spacecraft on it's way to Mars, by launching "modules" roughly the size of Falcon upper stages into orbit that would contain one of the Hydrazine type compounds (MMH, or UDMH), and NTO, both of which wouldn't have evaporation issues, and would require no igniter systems. Just have them parked there for "getting outta Dodge," and having one of them also launched to Mars orbit for a return flight. It might be helpful for you to locate that thread? it would be in roughly the 2017 +/- window.
As an aside here, Robert Zubrin has written of the VASIMIR system as being a "hoax." It seems promising ON THE FIRST GLANCE, but as kbd512 has illustrated by the numbers, it requires an incredible amount of energy to in reality, accomplish very little for a massive interplanetary vehicle.
So--kbd512 is correct to state that we still need to rely on chemical propulsion, and in a short time, move on to nuclear thermal for achieving shorter travel times for manned interplanetary travel to Mars, Ceres, Ganymede, and Callisto. The Isp from chemical propulsion seems maxed out at 450 sec for hydrolox; There's about a 100% Isp increase for a NERVA style nuclear thermal engine up to around 850-900 sec. , so that will reduce travel time enough to actually consider manned flight to Callisto and the Jovian system, but starting from Mars.
The rocket equation as tyrannical and the velocity of a vehicle is limited to ~2x exhaust velocity.
One way of managing this problem of using ion propulsion, would be as a "4th stage," after a chemically powered orbital meet-up with a nuclear thermal 3rd stage, and the ion propulsion would become the deep space only propulsion, by using the nuclear thermal propulsion to get through the Van Allen Belts quickly. I see chemical propulsion as the only effective way to get out of the atmosphere, and where a nuclear thermal powered stage could provide escape velocity, after which ion drive could be utilized to reduce interplanetary transit times.
This is overly complex, but possible in the future. Maybe there will be advances in ion propulsion which increase thrust from mere pounds to tons?
Here's Ellie in Space's take and interview:
Isaacman personally flies his own MiG 29, and is a 3000+ hour pilot; his former company, Draken, International, operated a fleet primarily consisting of Czech-built L-39 Albatross jets that were available to our military to serve as surrogates for enemy fighters. Last year there was some presence at the Bozeman, Montana International Airport during the training for the Polaris Dawn mission.
Hopefully, Isaacman will be speedily confirmed. If so--he will undoubtedly OK an attempt to re-boost and repair the Hubble Space Telescope, which he had previously offered to do as Polaris Mission 2--at no expense to NASA or the US Government.
Today, civilian astronaut Jared Isaacman was nominated by President-elect Trump. The SLS is now really on the chopping block with Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk running the new Department Of Government Efficiency, or "DOGE."