Slashdot Mirror

Here is a link with a picture of the explosive unit used for this experiment. It is a copper self-forging projectile (using HMX as the explosive I have read elsewhere) made by SCI Pyrotechnics. Here are some cool pictures of it being tested. The 2.5 kg pure copper liner is fired at 2 km/s.

According to a presentation slide, SpaceX recently completed a “successful dry run of Day of Launch Closeout Crew procedures with representative crew members, space suits, and Model X’s.”

Including it's flawless inability to dock on its own

https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...

SpaceX's revised FCC filing calls for about 1.6k of the initial 4.4k constellation to be at 550km orbit. Brings the minimum latency down to 15ms, instead of 25-35ms.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
https://forum.nasaspaceflight....

I don't know what their long term goals are, but this rocket is competition with Rocket Lab's Electron rocket, not SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

Zhuque: (alternative news source) Mass at launch 27 tonnes, 300 kg payload to 300 km LEO or 200 kg to 500 km sun synchronous orbit.

Electron: Mass at launch 10.5 tonnes, 150-225 kg payload to 500 km sun synchronous orbit

Falcon 9: Mass at launch 549 tonnes, 22,800 kg payload to LEO in expendable mode.

There are about a dozen companies looking to compete in this ~200kg payload market. Rocket Lab are in the lead at the start of this race, but there is still a long way to go.

This is a troubling trend, and not because these are Chinese rockets. There is a finite amount of satellites that can be put into orbit without causing too much clutter to achieve higher orbits. It is in each company's interest to place as many satellites into orbit as possible to maximize profit. There is no incentive to avoid a Kessler syndrome. Unless an international body starts regulating the number of satellites that can be launched, we're going to have a big problem.

I don't know what their long term goals are, but this rocket is competition with Rocket Lab's Electron rocket, not SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

Zhuque: (alternative news source)
Mass at launch 27 tonnes, 300 kg payload to 300 km LEO or 200 kg to 500 km sun synchronous orbit.

Electron:
Mass at launch 10.5 tonnes, 150-225 kg payload to 500 km sun synchronous orbit

Falcon 9:
Mass at launch 549 tonnes, 22,800 kg payload to LEO in expendable mode.

There are about a dozen companies looking to compete in this ~200kg payload market. Rocket Lab are in the lead at the start of this race, but there is still a long way to go.

The Dragon capsule is no where near being man-rated, so the changes of actually flying with a human is ZERO right now.

says someone commenting on an article about the timetable for crew-rating the Dragon capsule in the near future.

Here are some articles about the crew-rating of Dragon and Starliner:

https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...

The Dragon capsule is no where near being man-rated, so the changes of actually flying with a human is ZERO right now.

says someone commenting on an article about the timetable for crew-rating the Dragon capsule in the near future.

Here are some articles about the crew-rating of Dragon and Starliner:

https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...

You must be one of these bright young engineers surfing a bit of Slashdot on company time.

Those bright young Lockheed engineers fall under the leadership of Rick Ambrose, who recently said, "Lockheed Martin's business model is to bill federally contracted hours". I'd put that in a block quote, but I can't find a link to Rick's speech where he made that statement in an attempt to mitigate the near riotous discontent inside Lockheed shortly after the Falcon Heavy test flight, featuring Starman in a Tesla Roadster. One of those bright, young Lockheed engineers that heard that speech in person conveyed that the room full of engineers he was in became visibly angry at Rick's overall speech, because like the rest of Lockheed's senior leadership, he's completely out of touch. That bright young engineer recently abandoned Lockheed for greener pastures. And overall, Lockheed is having a very hard time attracting and keeping new talent. They've bumped up their pay to try to compete, but their stodgy, bureaucratic and inefficient culture is a bit much to take for someone that is actually motivated and intelligent. There are simply too many more rewarding places to work.

Lockheed pays a lot of money and works hard to polish their public image. Look at all the positive publicity around the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter.

In reality, Lockheed dropped the ball on integrating and testing other vendor supplied components, and they nearly lost this spacecraft. It was saved by some bright folks at JPL, not by Lockheed.

In order to make up for the propulsion system failure and the unintended orbit that this spacecraft is now in, the mission has been extended, and guess who's paying for it? Yep, the US taxpayers! Thanks Lockheed! The press releases have all been polished very nicely. Lockheed really really wants those government checks to keep flowing.

Lockheed definitely has a lot of success in space, but with their costs and whitewashed inefficiencies, and the recent success of a more market driven competitive approach to funding and awarding contracts, why keep throwing good money after bad?

Listen folks, before you get all giddy with the possibilities presented in this article, take a long, hard look at Lockheed Martin's past involvement in the US Space program. Then, dig beneath the surface and see if anything has changed, if your tax money is being used effectively or efficiently...

NASA awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin to build a replacement for the Space Shuttle. The first test article was called the X-33, the final version was to be the VentureStar.

This was a high-risk program that integrated a lot of new technologies with the hopes of creating great new capability, namely single-stage to orbit and rapid, low-cost re-use, with a launch turn-around in the order of days. Lockheed got close, very close, but were ultimately thwarted by their own senior leadership who ignored their own engineers - repeatedly - and insisted on constructing fuel tanks that would never have worked. Not surprising, these fuel tanks failed in test. That leadership bungle ultimately cost them the program. The engineers came up with a stop-gap solution that would have worked, but by then Lockheed's relationship with NASA had soured, in part because they refused to pay for their own mismanagement, and they kept insisting on more money. Ultimately this led a former NASA director, Ivan Bekey, to testify before congress (emphasis mine):

What I would recommend is that NASA and Lockheed Martin face up to the risks inherent in an experimental flight program and renegotiate the X-33 cooperative agreement so as to delay the flight milestone until a replacement composite tank can be confidently flown.

Both NASA and Lockheed Martin should make the investments required to build another composite tank and to absorb the program costs of the delay, because only then will the X-33 program be able to meet its objectives

Lockheed refused to invest anything in the program and insisted that congress cough up everything to construct a new, proper set of tanks. Congress declined, the program was cancelled. Four years later Northrop Grumman demonstrated the composite tank technology needed to complete the X-33, and ultimately the VentureStar. But neither congress or Lockheed showed any interest in reviving the X-33 program. As a result, the United States abdicated it's manned space program to the Russians, a sad state of affairs that remains to this day.

If you read between the lines of Ivan Bekey's testimony before congress, only a small fragment shown above, you can see the seeds for a new type of development mentality in NASA taking root - instead of the hour-billing cost-plus bureaucratic boondoggle exemplified by Lockheed Martin and the X-33 (a situation that exists to this day, see the Orion Capsule), something resembling a market driven commercial enterprise.was needed. Ivan Bekey's testimony contributed to the death of the X-33/VentureStar, but it laid the foundation of NASA's Commercial Crew Development Program, or CCDev.

The CCDev program is what created SpaceX - which was created from the ashes of Lockheed Martin's X-33/VentureStar failure. I'm not going to summarize SpaceX's accomplishments over the last 10 years - this audience should already be quite familiar with what they've been up to.

Now, in closing: linked above is the funding section for Lockheed Martin's Orion Capsule. Here are the highlights:

funding through completion of development by 2023, is $20.4 billion (nominal).

and

There are no NASA estimates for the Orion program recurring yearly costs once operational, for a certain flight rat

I was very surprised by this since I've read about the Oceanographer McCullogh before and wasn't impressed.

I can't find any official source confirming this except perhaps Univ of Plymouth which is where McCullogh works. Is there an official DARPA announcement out there somewhere?

The only information I can find is from Motherboard (an interview) and forums/McCulloughs twitter. There is some more info here:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight....
search for flux_capacitors post about 1/3 down.

The information seem to be from McCulloughs twitter and the money is for him and a post doc "developing the theory" and two experiments by other people.

The first experiment is this one
http://www.jbis.org.uk/paper.p...
which is supposed to replicate the em drive effect with lasers instead of em radiation.

The second will test a LEM drive (whatever that is).

In short, this is all related to the EM drive which explains why DARPA might think it is worth a small investment. It's not that DARPA suddenly thought QI sounded interesting but rather practical experiments to figure out what is going with the EM drive.

I am still surprised McCullough gets money for doing theory but the experiments sound like reasonable high-risk high-reward investments.

Here is a story about a reusable rocket-plane using a modified Space Shuttle main engine, designed for DARPA, to launch medium sized military satellites (a bit over two tonnes.) It is intended to have 24 hour turnaround.

Like Falcon 9, the booster stage is reusable but the second stage is not. Unlike Falcon 9, the booster will glide back to a runway like a shuttle. First flight is targeted for 2021.

Wow 2021 before they can produce something that might work? Hope they can compete with Elon; he'll be pimping discount rocket launches on Amazon by then.

Here is a story about a reusable rocket-plane using a modified Space Shuttle main engine, designed for DARPA, to launch medium sized military satellites (a bit over two tonnes.) It is intended to have 24 hour turnaround.

Like Falcon 9, the booster stage is reusable but the second stage is not. Unlike Falcon 9, the booster will glide back to a runway like a shuttle. First flight is targeted for 2021.

My favourite space news and analysis site is www.nasaspaceflight.com. (This is a misnomer - it covers space stuff world wide, not NASA specific, and so far as I can tell has no affiliation with NASA.) They last looked at the commercial crew program in April in a pair of articles:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...

Both were pretty up-beat about prospects, however the SpaceX article says:

[...] SpaceX aims to conduct a crew test flight of Dragon, known as DM-2. This mission is currently slated for December 2018 but is likely to slip into early 2019.

And the Boeing article says:

Officially, Boeing is targeting August 2018 for its Orbital Flight Test (OFT), their uncrewed certification mission for Starliner, to be followed in November 2018 with their Crew Flight Test (CFT). Those dates are based on the last quarterly review by the Commercial Crew Program in February, and there is some indication that those dates are likely to slip at the next quarterly review in May – with the CFT slipping into 2019.

TFA takes early 2019 as a start point:

SpaceX and Boeing Co are the two main contractors selected under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s commercial crew program to send U.S. astronauts to space as soon as 2019, using their Dragon and Starliner spacecraft respectively.

and seems to be talking about delays beyond this.

“Boeing and SpaceX continue to make progress developing their crew transportation systems, but both contractors have further delayed the certification milestone to early 2019,” the report said.

Reading between the lines, I take it that there is a significant time between certification and first crewed flight, so certification in early 2019 means no crewed flight in early 2019. Both capsules will have an uncrewed test flight some months before the first crewed flight. I don't know whether certification comes before or after the test flight.

My favourite space news and analysis site is www.nasaspaceflight.com. (This is a misnomer - it covers space stuff world wide, not NASA specific, and so far as I can tell has no affiliation with NASA.) They last looked at the commercial crew program in April in a pair of articles:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...

Both were pretty up-beat about prospects, however the SpaceX article says:

[...] SpaceX aims to conduct a crew test flight of Dragon, known as DM-2. This mission is currently slated for December 2018 but is likely to slip into early 2019.

And the Boeing article says:

Officially, Boeing is targeting August 2018 for its Orbital Flight Test (OFT), their uncrewed certification mission for Starliner, to be followed in November 2018 with their Crew Flight Test (CFT). Those dates are based on the last quarterly review by the Commercial Crew Program in February, and there is some indication that those dates are likely to slip at the next quarterly review in May – with the CFT slipping into 2019.

TFA takes early 2019 as a start point:

SpaceX and Boeing Co are the two main contractors selected under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s commercial crew program to send U.S. astronauts to space as soon as 2019, using their Dragon and Starliner spacecraft respectively.

and seems to be talking about delays beyond this.

“Boeing and SpaceX continue to make progress developing their crew transportation systems, but both contractors have further delayed the certification milestone to early 2019,” the report said.

Reading between the lines, I take it that there is a significant time between certification and first crewed flight, so certification in early 2019 means no crewed flight in early 2019. Both capsules will have an uncrewed test flight some months before the first crewed flight. I don't know whether certification comes before or after the test flight.

Oof. I thought that unit cost for Skylon was unrealistically high. Turns out it's from a Reaction Engines paper published at IAC 2014, which assumed a 5 billion Euro subsidy for 50 vehicles. It's actually one of the lower numbers in the paper. Others:

~$11 B in airframe development cost
~$6 B in engine development cost
~$700 M in upper stage development cost
~$1.3-2.1 B per spaceport

PDF: https://forum.nasaspaceflight....

..If the folks over at nasaspaceflight are to be believed

Looks like the setup was very sloppy indeed.. with the wattage too low making any signal disappear into noise..

Quoting:

Looking at the pictures of Tajmar's experiment, no wonder they are seeing nothing but Lorentz. First of all their twisted pairs do not appear to be twisted enough. There should be at least two twists per inch. In the image below it appears that there is maybe one twist per two inches or so. And then look at the location of the main amplifier and the length of the main leads! :o

At only 2W of RF power, no wonder they are only seeing Lorentz. It's almost like they designed their experiment to be susceptible to this form of error.

This launch was also the first launch of the new fairing https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/02/spacex-falcon-9-paz-launch-starlink-demo-new-fairing/. The fairing is the two halves of the nose-cone which protect the payload from wind when the payload is going up in the atmosphere (as well as helping keep the overall rocket have less drag). Once the rocket hits the upper atmosphere (generally about the same time or shortly after 2nd stage cut off, depending on the specific rocket), the fairing breaks off since it is extra, unnecessarily mass at that point. SpaceX has been very interested in recovering the fairings and the upgraded fairing is both slightly larger (which is good because volume limitations are an issue for the Falcon 9 and even more so for the Falcon Heavy), and is also aimed at trying to make fairing recovery possible. If they can get fairing recovery and reuse to work then SpaceX will have another way of reducing the cost of launches since the fairings cost a few million to manufacture. The fact that this fairing was used without any apparent major glitches is very promising.

The SS-520 was first launched in 1998. It is based on the S-520 which was first launched in 1980 (source).

Yes, the SS-520 and S-520 could be used as weapons, but that has been the case for decades. Nothing in this test makes them more weaponizable than they were before the test. There is no reason to think this test had any ulterior military motives.

From here:

Japan has not announced plans for any further orbital launches with the SS-520 – and last year’s launch was originally intended to have been a one-off, but project is an experiment which JAXA and the Japanese space industry hope will lead to an operational nanosatellite launch system in the future.

So the future "operational nanosatellite launch system" might use an air launch, but for a one-off test it was not worth developing this capability.

Air launch is something that is done by Pegasus and is being developed by a few other operators. It makes more sense at the small payload end of the market than the big end, so it might be a good approach.

The Zuma failure is only a rumour, and if it happened, it was caused by hardware which SpaceX was not allowed to see or touch, so it isn't their fault.

Falcon has had two full failures: CRS7 failed in flight AMOS-6 failed on the pad. Falcon has had one partial failure: CRS1 was successful but a secondary payload did not make its intended orbit and was lost. They also blew up a 'grasshopper' experimental vehicle but that is in no way comparable to a Falcon failure.

Two and a bit failures from 48 flights (or intended flight in the case of AMOS-6) is neither great nor terrible.

To be allowed to fly people, SpaceX and Boeing have to convince NASA they have less than 1/270 chance of losing crew.

From the CBC article:
"The classified intelligence satellite, built by Northrop Grumman Corp, failed to separate from the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket and is assumed to have broken up or plunged into the sea, said the two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity."

This doesn't make sense. Stage 2 goes all the way to orbit (accepting SpaceX's assertion that Falcon worked entirely as planned). It only 'plunges into the sea' if they deliberately make a deorbit burn. (I assume that they do normally make a deorbit burn sometime after separation, to avoid making space junk, but launch coverage never talks about this part and at best only follows stage 2 up to payload separation, so I have no confirmation of this.) If the satellite failed to separate, they would delay the stage 2 deorbit burn while they tried to troubleshoot. If that failed, depending on the nature of the satellite, they might try to operate it with reduced capability while still attached to stage 2.

From here
"...it is known that the Zuma payload was not processed in any of SpaceX’s payload processing facilities." This appears to imply that if there was a problem with separation, it is Northrop Grumman’s fault rather than SpaceX's.

I've seen in SpaceX launch coverage crowds of SpaceX employee spectators crowded around the glass walled SpaceX launch control room. I guess that for a classified launch that area would be out of bounds, to avoid uncleared people seeing satellite separation, so they must spectate from somewhere else for these missions.

The intro in not correct in calling the Falcon Heavy the rocket that will take humans to Mars. This is just a heavy payload version of Falcon which still uses the Merlin engine. The BFR (Big Fucking Rocket) will have 31 Raptor engines (more powerful) and a completely redesigned booster and second stage. It's the BFR that will go to Mars. https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...

Now I wonder what 3 BFR attached together will look like.

Except that it just wouldn't work. Going 1000 km/h (or about 277 m/s) at even the height of a tall mountain would turn your rocket into a pancake. The air is just too thick.

That isn't even considering the idea that the tube could be a vacuum. It would be like hitting a brick wall.

Look at the altitude vs velocity graph here: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.c...

Rockets have to be really high up before they really turn on the speed.

Now, look at your "1000 km/h". That is exactly nothing. To reach the ISS you need to be going at over 27000 km/h. If your gun has a muzzle velocity of 1000 km/h, you would still need a huge rocket just to reach orbit.

The intro in not correct in calling the Falcon Heavy the rocket that will take humans to Mars. This is just a heavy payload version of Falcon which still uses the Merlin engine. The BFR (Big Fucking Rocket) will have 31 Raptor engines (more powerful) and a completely redesigned booster and second stage. It's the BFR that will go to Mars. https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...

NASA has now approved use of flight-proven boosters, which is huge for SpaceX.

The re-use rate in 2017 will be about 25%. SpaceX is aiming for 50% in 2018, and will pivot to block-5 which will further decrease work required during booster turnaround.

Exciting times... looking like rocket reuse is finally a thing!

I didn't notice anyone, much less the US Congress, forcing ULA to buy their engines from the Russians. If anything, AJ/Rocketdyne and ULA on their own decidednot to fork out the money to manufacture the engines domestically about a decade ago.

That's a Saturn V/STS/SLS crawler-transporter. It's not used for Falcon.

The Falcon 9 is moved from factory to launch site using a much more basic/standard trucking rig, on the highway (See Core Spotting for pics of it on the road.) When it gets to the launch site, it's placed on the transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) and mated to the second stage (which is also road-transported) and payload. The TEL moves it from the horizontal integration facility (HIF) to the actual pad.

SLC-39A The current sat image of SLC shows the TEL in a horizontal position at the pad (with no rocket on it). The HIF is just outside the ring around the pad. The track between the two is visible, as is the old rotating service structure from the Shuttle days.

Because the journalists at techcrunch.com don't know what a kilogram is.
Thankfully NASA does. https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...

The original source first mentions kilograms

CRS-12 will deliver 2,910 kilograms (6,415 pounds) of cargo to the station

https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
Pretty sure NASA is American...

' We can build Saturn V rockets all day.'

Actually NO!

He's the NASA link explaining why we _can't_,
https://forum.nasaspaceflight....

There's some reasonable, in-depth analysis on the failure here: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=42798.200. Be warned, if you like rockets and spaceflight, going to that site will cost you time.

Summary: The first stage/boosters failed to generate enough thrust to achieve the proper staging point, as shown by the planned plot on the broadcast and the actual track. Some speculation points at a failure of one the boosters during the initial flight phase (before the boosters separate). The second stage separated and fired considerably later than planned and at some point, the mission was declared to be unsuccessful, due to flight anomalies.

Politics aside, please note that the open broadcast of the launch is what enables this informed discussion, and for that, us space geeks can appreciate the access granted by the Chinese Space Agency to the live broadcast.

Opinion: this was not helpful for the Chinese launch program, but at least the vehicle didn't RUD (rapid unplanned disassembly). Analysis of the telemetry will assist them in determining the cause, and may help them to engineer a fix. It's still a setback to their heavy lift ambitions for this year.

Everyone's comparing apples to oranges here.

For the ULA price quoted, we're talking about a cost estimate done by the Air Force for national security launches in 2020. And apparently, that's an estimate of the maximum price, not the average. ULA has since published more information:

Launch cost over the whole ELC duration of 78 missions averages to $225M a pop with Delta IV Heavy at ~$400M and Atlas starting at ~$164M.

SpaceX have published a price of $65M for a basic commercial launch. That's a much lower price than e.g. NASA is paying for its Commercial Resupply missions to the ISS: the CRS-1 missions cost around $180M each. That does include a Dragon spacecraft, but I doubt that alone costs $120M.
Apparently there are a lot of optional extras you can specify on your SpaceX launch, and SpaceX hasn't published any of those prices. USAF launches will be closer to NASA prices than 'basic commercial' launches.

ITS has an unusually large gamble involved, even by the standards of Musk's companies. Just to pick issue one of many: it's cryogenic composite tanks. Composites and cryogenics don't play well together; there have been attempts in the past, and they were failures. Musk is wanting to take us from "zero launch vehicles of any size using composite cryogenic tanks" to "by far the largest launch vehicle ever built, fully reusable up to a thousand times (for the booster), out of composites". That's a huge jump. ...

They're also working on insanely high pressure, full flow staged combustion engines with a rarely used propellant mix, used up to a thousand times each with low maintenance...

Ordinarily I'd agree with you. If we were talking about the usual suspects (NASA/Boeing/LockMart), they'd have a pile of paper at this stage and not much else.

But SpaceX has (had) a giant carbon fiber tank which they successfully burst tested to 2/3rds the design pressure back in November, then blew up testing with liquid nitrogen on February 17th 2017. (Judging by the pictures, it failed at the equatorial seam.)

They've built and tested a 1/3rd scale Raptor engine (which I presume you already knew, but other readers might not). It's the first full flow methane fueled rocket engine ever to be test fired, and only the second full flow design in history. (The first was Russia's RD-270, tested back in 1967.)

Having done those things is impressive enough, but the absurdly fantastic part is how rapidly they've done it. They were in Mississippi at the Stennis Space Center in late 2013 to refurbish and modify the E2 test stand to handle methane. Slashdot covered that. They were done with that process April 21st, 2014. Slashdot didn't notice that part. They used that test stand to validate their design and conducted the scale model test firing on September 26th, 2016, just 2 years, 5 months, and 5 days later. And it worked. They were so sure it would work, they didn't even bother with the customary 'burp' test to be sure it would ignite properly. That's a ridiculously rapid development process for any rocket motor, let alone for a design that's been done only once before in history and never for the fuel they selected. For comparison, development of the F-1 used on the Saturn V started in 1955 for the Air Force and it wasn't until 1965 that it underwent a successful test firing without destroying itself, after three years of self-destructive test firings.

SpaceX have definitely set themselves some very hard tasks, but their demonstrated ability to actually get to the test article stage, and from there to the production stage, and to do so quickly, is unmatched in modern times.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.c...

"BREAKING news: Payload fairing LANDED SUCCESSFULLY. Fairing has thruster systems and steerable parachute. Was just shown pic of intact fairing floating in ocean."

Unlike the Russians or the Chinese.

BTW, SpaceX is planning their next launch on sunday jan 8.

Thank you. That "article" is one of the worst things I have ever read, the only saving grace being that besides being completely contentless it was also short. And why are we driving eyeballs to this unknown newsrag anyhow?

This article, from your link describes the first Epsilon launch in 2013 and generally the development projects which led up to it. Quoting the overview:

Epsilon, which will replace the M-V rocket which was retired in 2006, is a three or four stage rocket which combines upper stages used on the M-V with a first stage derived from the H-IIAâ(TM)s strap-on boosters. It is the latest in a line of solid-fuelled orbital launch systems operated by Japan, following the Lambda and the Mu.

Historically, Japan had two space agencies, each with its own fleet of rockets. The Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, or ISAS, developed small solid-fuelled rockets, while the National Space Development Agency, or NASDA, opted for larger, liquid-fuelled vehicles.

NASDA and ISAS, along with Japanâ(TM)s National Aerospace Laboratory, merged in 2003 to form the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA. ISAS operated the Lambda and Mu rockets from the Uchinoura Space Centre, while NASDA flew the N and H from Tanegashima.

I'm not particularly sure why this is news, but especially puzzled at the choice of headline. This is apparently the second Epsilon launch, but not exactly JAXA's first time on the ranch. It's their fourth launch this year, and the next one is in mid-January. It must be a slow news day. Anyhow, for anyone else's further purview, the Wikipedia article on the satellite it's launching is here, and it could perhaps be considered a replacement for this one which was deactivated in 2015.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...

I've been following this for a year or so - very interesting. Over at Nasa Space Flight board there are a lot of people making these EM drives in their back yard, with varying results. A lot of this comes from the original work by Roger Shawyer. He has stated that he will show a drone running EM drive in 2017. If that works ...that would change everything. Cheap access to space would mean space-based solar arrays for terrestrial use. Here's an article about his patent. There's also some very strange results with laser timing through an EM drive cavity. Almost like spacetime is being warped.

The bill includes specific milestones for an unmanned exploration mission by 2018 and a crewed exploration mission by 2021.

So in other words its a ton of hot air and complete horseshit. At best it's a way to secure funding for NASA under a label that'll be hard to attack

This is the authorization bill, not the funding bill.

It tells NASA what to do. Funding them to do that is separate.

The "unmanned exploration mission by 2018" refers to the Insight lander; the "crewed exploration mission by 2021" probably refers to SLS launch EM-2 (testing the launch system with a crew.)

If you weren't convinced that "25 years to Mars" is a horseshit timeframe, its appearance in a Congressional budget bill should remove all doubt.

This isn't a budget bill.

If you want to do some armchair physics, these forums are really interesting. https://forum.nasaspaceflight....

People are attempting to recreate the "thrust-less" momentum at home basically. Lots of skepticism, lots of optimism, but real numbers being thrown around.

We're almost past the point of whether or not it works and moving onto why it works.

> The only "good" reason I could think of is that they wanted to retain the
> formula "Rocky planets inside, gassy planets outside" and Pluto kinda messed
> with this. But with Pluto no longer being a planet, the order is restored.

When Ceres was discovered, it was originally called a "planet". More and more bodies were discovered in a similar orbit. Rather than having thousands of "planets", the definition changed to make Ceres and friends "asteroids".

Fast-forward a century or two. Uranus' orbit was not as predicted for a 7-planet solar system. Mathematicians scrawled away with their pencils, and astronomers found an 8th planet, Neptune. This was a major triumph for Newton's Law of Gravity.

Neptune's mass was estimated, but after a while, Uranus and Neptune were still not orbiting exactly as predicted. Another planet hunt began, and we stumbled over Pluto, which was originally estimated to be about the size and mass of Neptune. However, even as early as 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... it became obvious that Pluto was a lot smaller/lighter. It obviously wasn't the cause of anomalies in Uranus' and Neptune's orbits. The downward revisons to Pluto's size continued. From 2600 mile diameter (1934) to 2372 km or 1474 miles (2015).

Actually there was no "Planet X perturbing Uranus' and Neptune's orbits". The original estimate for Neptune's mass was off by 1/2 of 1%. This threw the calculations off. The Voyager 2 flyby gave the correct value for Neptunes mass, which was figured out 2 or 3 years later. https://www.nasaspaceflight.co... When the corrected Neptunian mass was plugged into the gravitational equations, the "orbital anomalies" disappeared.

Anyhow, a whole bunch of similar objects have been found in the area. Just like with Ceres, it became obvious that Pluto was merely one of many. The discovery of Eris, approximately same size as Pluto, brought things to a head. There was no way of classifying Pluto as a planet, without also classifying Eris, Sedna, etc as planets. This hearkened back to "the asteroid problem" of the 1800's. Just like Ceres, Pluto was kicked out of the planet club.

LIVE: US EVA-36 - August 19, 2016 http://forum.nasaspaceflight.c...

When you use pure electricity for the propellant it will not take much in terms of weight...
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co... ... When/If they get it working....

Another way would be to use the asteroid itself as propellant.. Harvest matter from the asteroid and launch it with a high velocity in the opposite direction of where you want to go... Kind of like a ion engine, but needs to support different types of matter.

at places like NasaSpaceflight.com, which gets its hands on NASA documents rather frequently and is frequently posted to by people in the industry and in NASA and space journalists.

The subject was also covered in press conferences back then and was also discussed publicly by then-shuttle-manager Wayne Hale.

Here is just one of the related docs to wet your appetite, and here is an NSF article about it, although this one is not related to the study of turning the shuttles over to industry.

Here is a link to an NBC news story about one of the 2011 (3 years into Obama admin) options considered to keep shuttles flying until 2017.

Here's another thread from back then for you to tug on.

Now that you have a starting point and evidence that my post was not the fevered imaginings of an Obama hater, I leave it to you to dig around and discover that some of this stuff was just journalistic fluff as usual, but several of the studies were very serious and involved high levels of NASA people.

The whole "Bush killed the shuttles and Obama was a blameless and helpless victim of it" meme is politically convenient for Obama's more space-geeky followers and fanboys, but as usual when politics are involved, the story is far more complex and the mess is far more bi-partisan. This president is no shrinking violet when resisting Republicans in congress, who have greatly angered their base voters by caving-in to him on everything for many years, so his supporters have long pretended that his allowing the shuttles to die was because it was a locked-in irreversible situation before he got into office. That's simply never been the truth. Note: I am no Bush fan and am not trying to remove any blame from him, I'm just debunking the myths of the koolaide-drinking, pudding-eating, NikeShoes-and-purple-napkin-wearing Obama fans who deny well-documented reality while planning their future lives on the comet of perpetual happiness (google: famous suicide cults).

They are done by the private industry... The Cygnus spacecraft is owned by Orbital, not NASA (the article summary used here isn't very clear on that). NASA contracts ALL U.S. resupply missions out to Orbital ATK and SpaceX.

So far.

But they just added Sierra Nevada to the list of commercial resupply providers:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
http://www.sncorp.com/AboutUs/...

I am typically first in line to balk at mysterious propulsion systems that are claimed to work while violating our current understanding of physics. We have them by the truckload and they are bullshit.

But wait...

Back in 2001 a small satellite propulsion research company was investigating different techniques involving electric engines. That in itself is nothing spectacular. For whatever reason, they developed and tested a closed cavity microwave drive. I do not now the story of why they did such a thing, since it would not be viable under the law of conservation of momentum. But their data showed otherwise. When the announcement hit the conspiracy theory world, I remember debating the matter with my conspiracy theory friends, citing said law as proof the data is wrong or outright faked.

Over the years scientists here and there have got wind of the original research, built the device, achieved similar results, wrote a paper and moved on. More recently NASA, or at least a propulsion research group at NASA has been messing with it. Despite not knowing how the thing works fundamentally, they have been able to make modifications that have brought it to a level of viability and foresee being able to increase it's thrust even greater. Pretty much the final argument against data showing it works was the proposal that thermal currents accounted for the extra energy. So it was tested in a hard vacuum. Still works.

If you have never heard it, NASA has a very in depth article on it here: Evaluating NASA’s Futuristic EM Drive

I highly suggest reading the whole thing. As it currently appears, it could be used, right now, to dramatically reduce the cost and time involved in getting humans to Mars. My brain is fighting itself on this. First, it appears it should not work. Second, should we use a highly effective space propulsion system without knowing how it works?

It sounds like the powers-that-be behind ITER are going to press ahead with it, despite the fact that progress would come better, faster and cheaper by switching to an ARC-like design.

Just as the powers that be are pressing forward with Space Launch System, even though we could put more stuff in orbit, sooner and cheaper, by developing the Falcon XX instead.

The phrase "shaking my head" is apt here.

NASA officials admitted today the Space Launch System — the agency’s next big rocket — is a vehicle without a mission plan NASA Spaceflight reports. The agency acknowledged what is essentially an empty flight manifest for the SLS at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, during an all-hands meeting on Monday.

The meeting was held to discuss uncertainty about the SLS. Its first test flight with humans aboard has already been delayed once, and the schedule for the SLS’s tests are shaky — there is no definitive launch schedule for the rocket beyond its first uncrewed test flight, which is slated for September 30th, 2018. After that, the SLS's next flight dates are mostly tentative, and the rocket doesn't have any definitive mission plans — only the promise of going to an asteroid and then to Mars someday.

The SLS was born out of NASA's now-defunct Constellation program, an effort aimed at returning humans to the Moon. Though it was once considered the replacement for the Space Shuttle program, the group far exceeded its budget. President Obama cancelled the initiative in 2010, and out of its ashes, the SLS concept was created — both as a way to salvage parts of Constellation and to provide NASA with a primary vehicle for sending astronauts deep into space. It was also a way to save the jobs of thousands of NASA employees who had been working on Constellation.

But the SLS is expensive, and NASA's budget is at the lowest it has been in decades, even with the new budget allotment of $19.3 billion for the 2016 fiscal year. The cost of developing the SLS through 2017 is expected to total $18 billion. And once the rocket is built, each launch is going to cost somewhere between $500 and $700 million, which makes it unlikely that the rocket will carry astronauts more than once a year.

By comparison, Elon Musk has said that that SpaceX could build the Mars Colonial Transporter(MCT), a vehicle in the 140-150 t payload range, for $2.5 billion, or $300 million per launch. If Musk is going to build the MCT anyways, does NASA need to continue the SLS?

Actually, I do know these things, but didn't bother to include all the sources, given it being Christmas and all. Since you are so insistent about it though...

Points 1 & 3 are taken from direct quotes by Elon Musk
Point 2 is taken from the design of the Falcon 9, available at spacex or nearby wikipedia.
"re-use without refurbishment" another direct E. Musk quote.

Spacex current launch rate (6 per year) and cadence and published launch costs and satellite weights for commercial space companies are just a google search away. Try this excellent site: http://www.spacelaunchreport.c... for starters

A very informative and useful place to find much of this information and discussion by knowledgeable space experts and enthusiasts is at: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com...

The rest is just simple math.

To sum up, I do have details, I'm not guessing, and I note where I make assumptions. Find fault with my assumptions if you like, but please explain why those assumptions are flawed with specifics, not generalities.