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Falcon 1 Ready to Launch
DarkNemesis618 writes "SpaceX's new rocket, the Falcon 1 is set to launch February 8. Twice now it has been delayed for technological problems and then for structural. It's payload is set to be the FalconSat-2 satellite. What's interesting is that this satellite was built by the cadets at the USAF Academy. The satellite is going to be studying the effects of space plasma. It appears NASA & the shuttle are not the only ways for the government to launch satellites anymore."
There must have been some heavy editing going on at wikipedia if it said that.....
Sea Launch are using russian Zenit rockets and launch from a ship. (hence the name)
SpaceX have there own rocket and launch from land (a small island or an airforce base)
They don't have much in common besides going up.
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Falcon-1 was built by SpaceX, which is not a part of the Sea Launch consortiun. See this wikipedia entry.
Uhm no. Nowhere in the Wikipedia entries for either SpaceX or Falcon 1 is there an association with the Sea Launch consortium. SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk and he is fronting all of the costs associated with the development and launch from his own personal fortune.
Also given the nature of his lawsuit against Boeing and Lockheed, I doubt that he would want to be part of an organization that is run by Boeing. Secondly, the launch is from a facility in the Kwajalein Atoll on solid ground, not from a SeaLaunch platform.
It's not that four countries are working together as much as four companies.
I Pong
The only satellites that NASA has launched recently are the Chandra Space Telescope and the ISS itself.
The most recent US Government non-NASA, non-Military satellite was NOAA-18, launched May 20, 2005 on a Boeing Delta Rocket.
If you don't believe me, check the Launch Log.
There is no requirement that NASA must launch all US government payloads. The parts of the ISS, unfortunately, were designed to fit exactly in the Shuttle Cargo Bay. There is no law stating that they must be launched by the shuttle, however, it will be expensive to modify them to take launch loads from another launcher.
There are many launch providers in the world, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Orbital, China, Russia, India, Ariane, Japan... and others I can't think of right now. Elon Musk thinks he can do it much cheaper than the competition. Let's see how it goes first. Personally, I think he is going to run into a lot of unexpected costs and techinical problems as the Falcon 1 evolves into the Falcon 5 and 9. I'd be happy to see him pull it off, but I have my doubts.
Wikipedia has a clearer description:
"used to sample plasma in the upper atmosphere. The data will be used to correlate the effect of ionospheric plasma on trans-ionospheric radio communications."
If by recycled oil rig you meant "self-propelled, semi-submersible drilling rig" then yes ;).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Odyssey
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
I'm just glad they're getting it off the ground. The Falcon I is mostly just a technology test. It can't fly payloads of any real interest as it simply doesn't have enough cargo capacity. The Falcon V, OTOH, could outright replace the Delta II for a fraction of the price. And if the proposed Falcon 9 ever happens (don't hold your breath), we could be looking at Space Shuttle sized cargos for only $78m! That's about as much as you pay for a Delta II once ground support, insurance, and payload integration costs are figured in. (SpaceX claims their prices include all these costs.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Plasma comprises about 99% of the volume of the Universe, and locally, about 99% of the volume of the Solar System. Even though the interplanetary (and interstellar) medium is nearly vacuum, it is still technically a very diffuse plasma as it is filled with the charged gases discharged by the sun.
The point at which the Sun's ejected plasma slows below the speed of sound (in the plasma) is the Termination Shock (the Voyagers reached this point a while back), the point at which the pressure of the Sun's plasma equals the average pressure of the interstellar plasma is the Heliopause.
There's practically nothing up there but plasma. The only places in the universe that aren't practically all plasma are planets and bits of space junk, a negligible fraction of the universe's (observable) mass. Maybe you're confused because you think plasma is some sort of exotic substance. Compositionally, the only difference between a gas and a plasma is that some fraction of the atoms in a plasma are ionized. That just means one or more of the electrons that, at lower temperatures, would be bound closely in orbit around the nucleus are instead banging around loose.
That seems like a small difference, but oh! what a difference. In a familiar gas, the atoms only interact when they collide, so at very low pressures nothing much happens. In a plasma, particularly at very low pressure, the particles interact with immediate neighbors, via the electric force, at distances of centimeters, and with large masses, via magnetic forces, at distances up to light years.
Plasma dynamics, the description of how masses of plasma behave, is fiendishly complex, largely because the positive particles (nuclei) are all at least 2000 times more massive than the negative particles (electrons). As a result, anything that accelerates a nucleus at X cm/s/s blasts any electrons at more than 2000X cm/s/s the other way. Furthermore, plasmas can be neutral, or biased positive, or biased negative. When a biased plasma moves, it produces a magnetic field, and any magnetic fields it moves in affect the its motion.
Even an ionization of one in 10 000 particles is enough to make celestial stuff behave by plasma-dynamical rather than ordinary gas laws. Under rather weak electric fields, the ions accelerate enough to ionize and re-ionize the neutral atoms, a process called "entraining". Motion of biased plasma amounts to an electric current, which self-generates a magnetic field that, in turn, concentrates the current (and particles of the conductive medium) into flux tubes, called "Birkeland currents", that span solar systems (e.g. producing the Aurora) and galaxies.
The equations that describe real plasma dynamics are fiendishly complicated, and the observed behavior exhibits so many fundamental instabilities, that nobody can solve typical problems mathematically. Serious researchers fall back on computer simulations and extrapolation from vacuum-lab observations. Most fall back, instead, on a (usually) distinctly unphysical approximation known as "MHD".
Typical astronomers and astrophysicists have had a semester of MHD, where they were misled about how little it resembles any phenomenon they will ever observe. As a result, most astronomers are ill-equipped to evaluate such observations. They tend to ignore them, instead, and to discount explanations that depend on awareness of actual plasma-dynamical phenomena. This causes them two problems: they have to explain what they see using only gravitation, stellar-core fusion, and shock waves; and they have to explain why plasma dynamics has no effect on the system. Their colleagues generally give them a pass on the latter. Such common plasma-dynamical phenomena as ultraviolet and x-ray emission have traditionally been easy to ignore.
Most of the working plasma dynamicists are not involved in astrophysics, and their contribution isn't generally welcome in astrophysical journals. Of course the most vocal of the ones interested in astronomy, and thus most easily found in web searches, are highly-motivated and ... interestingly quirky. Nonetheless, there's a lot to learn even from those of the catastrophism cultists who are also working physicists.
As another reply pointed out there have been many space plasma instruments launched over the last decades. Think of the Voyager spacecraft. Voyager 1 passed the termination shock last year and has a plasma instrument (unfortunately not functional). Voyager 2 which is approaching the termination shock has a fully functional plasma instrument and the results are at worst astounding.
... well perhaps I'm too entrenched ... good luck to those guys and I'll keep my eyes on the scientific literature ... time will tell.
It would be silly to try to name all of the spacecraft that have flown plasma instruments during the space age as many would be left out (Helios-xx, IMP-xxxx, Ulysses, Galileo, Cassini, Wind, ACE, etc...insert many more here.......)
Of course I did not RTFA but plasma instruments are difficult to build, calibrate, etc... You can't just slap one together on a bench and launch it. We would all love to see significant scientific advancement coming from a new launch, this just seems like a waste of funds
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
And Zenit, and Proton, and Soyuz, and Long March, and Pegasus, and Shavit, and Ariane... (need I keep going?) Even if you're only going to count US launch systems, there are half a dozen *families* of launch vehicles that we can use.
Seriously, Slashdot: quit adding ignorant taglines to your articles.
Son, a woman is a lot like a refrigerator. They're six feet tall, 300 pounds... they make ice... umm...
Does it run Linux....
I don't know if the rocket itself runs Linux, but Dell's website cites SpaceX as an example of a company which uses Linux for high-performance computing. From Dell's site:
SpaceX uses an eight-node cluster of Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Infiniband switches to further the company's mission to dramatically reduce the cost and increase the reliability of access to space. With this cluster, SpaceX should be able to reduce the time needed to run computational aerodynamics simulations, structural analyses and trajectory optimizations. More information on SpaceX is available at www.spacex.com;
This rocket (the whole family) was named Falcon after Millenium Falcon. See http://www.spacex.com/media21.php That's what happens when geeks go into space business. Go, Falcon, go!
There are a plethora of other launch vehicles out there.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The overwhelming majority of satellites are put up by traditional launch vehicles. The shuttle is 10x more expensive to operate than a rocket. Check out: http://ask.yahoo.com/20010116.html