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NASA Rocket Barrage Will Light Up Mid-Atlantic Coast
coondoggie writes "NASA will this week detail a mission where it will launch five rockets in five minutes from its Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia that will light up the night sky for millions of folks in a swath between New York City and about Wilmington, NC. The five rocket blasts, which could occur between March 14 and April 4, are part of what the space agency calls the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX), a Heliophysics sounding rocket mission that aims to gather data needed to better understand the high-altitude jet stream located 60 to 65 miles above the surface of the Earth, NASA said."
NASA will be hosting a teleconference at 1PM EST on Wednesday to discuss the mission. They also have brief PDF descriptions of the rockets involved: Terrier-Improved Orion, Terrier Oriole, and Terrier Malemute.
Barrage is not really the word one uses for rockets going up, but for rockets coming back down again with destructive force. A bombardment. An attack. This is all just cover for the final phase of the secret military space weapon. Oh yes, it will light up the sky.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
and the meek shal inherit the Earth.
Plainly they will spray chemtrails along with the markers for HAARP target on their way to Iran to start WW3 so that the Federal Reserve can, at the request of the Rothschilds, have a glowing sky to celebrate the birthday of oh... Elvis's alien baby.
None of the article say when it's going to happen. They only say, "could occur between March 14 and April 4". Eh.... Not quite specific enough to be useful.
What would be even more hilarious would be the Chinese and Russian response. Then we'd be rid of the self-appointed world poli^H^H^H bully once and for all.
Seriously I would expect some very strong diplomatic objections .... together with sighs of relief.
China would continue to sell junk to us and Russia would continue to swill vodka and brag about themselves. Basically, nothing would change, so suck it.
Ha! They're competing with Apple's product release. Are they trying to be ignored?
You mean, things like grammar lessons?
These are sounding rockets.
The Orion is a single stage sounding rocket which will achieve an altitude of 60 km with a 250 lb payload or 90 km with a 75 lb payload.
The Terrier-Malemute is a two-stage, solid fuel rocket consisting of a Terrier 1st stage and a Malemute 2nd stage. It is capable of lifting a 200 lb payload to an apogee of approximately 700 km or a 500 lb payload to approximately 400 km.
The The Terrier-Improved Orion consists of a Terrier 1st stage and an "improved" Orion second stage. This vehicle is capable of achieving an altitude of 75 km with an 800 lb payload and 225 km with a 200 lb payload.
(source: http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/mpl/srockets.html)
To be compared to the LGM-30G Minuteman-III which is a three-stage, solid fuel rocket capable of lifting an approximately 600 lbs warhead to over 1100 km. We have 450 of these more or less ready to launch.
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30G_Minuteman-III and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W87)
In short, the Chinese already know we have "the capability of rapidly launching a barrage of orbit-capable warheads", and either way, these rockets aren't demonstrating anything of the sort.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Wouldn't it be hilarious if some passenger planes flew into some large office blocks in the only country which has ever used nuclear weapons, what a hoot!
As if one thing had anything at all to do with the other...
Somehow, "fuck-wit" just doesn't seem adequate in this case.
Not at all. These rockets are little more than a scaled up version of those flown by hobbyists. The basic design is 50-some years old. They probably don't cost nearly as much as you think.
Does anyone else find it odd that NASA, whom I thought was mostly out of funding, is going to launch 5 rockets to test the jet stream?
No. First, sounding rockets, even the ones used by NASA, are cheap. I'd be surprised if the rocket launches themselves are over a million dollars apiece even with NASA prices. And NASA has a vast amount of funding. Second, atmospheric studies are part of their portfolio. So no oddness here.
Second, from the article:
According to NASA, the five rockets will release a chemical tracer that will form milky, white tracer clouds that let scientists and the public to "see" the winds in space. In addition, two of the rockets will have instrumented payloads, to measure the pressure and temperature in the atmosphere at the height of the high-speed winds.
So they're introducing a chemical tracer. Rockets do so faster, more accurately than balloons, have a great mechanism (their exhaust) for doing so, and can cut through a cross-section of the jet stream while balloons would float with the jet stream.
Grammar_Nazi == Loser
"Miracle" is exactly the word I would have used. These aren't orbital launch vehicles. The biggest one, the Terrier-Malamute, will drop into the ocean about 700km from the launch site. That's about half-way to Bermuda. Granted, that's with a launch angle of 77 degrees, and I expect they might be able to extend the downrange performance a bit by reducing the launch angle (which they won't do.) But the only land mass that's anywhere near the performance envelope of these vehicles is Bermuda. Last I checked, Bermuda hadn't petitioned for admission into the Axis of Evil.
if you can laugh about bombing iran, you can laugh about the bombing of the twin towers.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Congratulations for missing the point almost entirely. And BTW, bombing is seldom funny.
It's difficult to find specific numbers for "launch costs," as they're different for each mission. Wallops has some numbers on their website indicating that a LEO insertion will require a vehicle that costs $5M-$10M. That doesn't include any of the facility costs, nor the collateral costs like clearing the downrange area of ships and payload recovery. A typical 100kg payload launch program on a mid-sized sounding rocket from Wallops will run you about $12M total.
"Wouldn't it be hilarious if some passenger planes flew into some large office blocks in the only country which has ever used nuclear weapons, what a hoot!
As if one thing had anything at all to do with the other...
Somehow, "fuck-wit" just doesn't seem adequate in this case."
No, he's right. When I was in the army in the late 1980's we did joke about commercial assets, including airliners, being used as weapons. The idea was viewed with contempt since it seemed most terrorists wanted to live regardless of whatever they got out of the terrorist act. Most concern was on large military engagements from other powers and not on individual isolated attacks. Suicide attacks had been used very rarely and not on a large scale against the US so the end view was no one was crazy enough to directly attack a country with a nuclear stockpile that could destroy the entire world several times over. It was also viewed as self-defeating as anyone doing so and their supporters would be rendered extinct the next day by both sides just to keep the peace.
They are already doing both, They have competitions for designs for ribbon material for a space elevator and machines to climb such ribbons, and conferences on colonisation. But both topics are still in the blue sky stage. A space elevator needs a material about four times stronger than anything yet manufactured, and it is a bit early to talk about colonisation when we have not yet reached Mars once, and have no plans for a moon lander. NASA is doing all it reasonably could be doing at this stage.
Japan will certainly not have a space elevator in 2012, nor for many years after. Actually, Japan's space program is not going particularly well. They have a lot of partial and complete failures.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I saw Jay Leno bomb once..it was hilarious.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Eventually someone will build a proper tower of babel in the middle east. The Burj Kalifa just needs to be made a few thousand times taller.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Just launch one and photoshop the others in.
Have gnu, will travel.
Wallops Island did win the contract to be the launch site for manned space for the US. It also has been the launch site for unmanned for a while. They needed to test to see if the delta V rocket could get there. Seeing parts of a huge rocket on the bridge getting there was something. They build a new launch site on the island just for the purpose of launching bigger rockets. They are supposed to be doing a test of the big rocket sometime this spring. That maybe a were since the budget cuts.
We could load them with infected USB memory sticks.
Have gnu, will travel.
What, exactly, are you sorry about?
Nobody claimed they couldn't get into LEO (although of the three only the Terrier-Malemute is really capable of it).
Neither of these rockets are new - both the Orion and the Malemute first flew in the 70's, so the military (and anyone else interested) has had plenty of time to consider them as launch vehicles.
Also, the "Terrier" in Terrier-Malemute and Terrier-Improved Orion is the old RIM-2 Terrier Surface-to-Air missile from the 50's used as a first stage for the Malemute and Orion rockets, making them two-stage for improved altitude and payload.
Finally, while there certainly is a fuzzy border between top-performing sounding rockets and small lift launch vehicles (generally defined as being able to lift 2,000 lbs to LEO), these three vehicles belong squarely in the sounding rocket category.
This is not a test of a new inexpensive launch vehicle, nor is it a way to demonstrate our military capabilities. It's just science.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Wallops has some numbers on their website indicating that a LEO insertion will require a vehicle that costs $5M-$10M.
LEO insertion is a much harder and more regulated problem than the suborbital launches these guys are doing. Even so, I have to change my mind and agree somewhat with you. NASA has a habit of overpaying a lot for such things.
Alien Tourist Rocket Extravaganza
I'm on to you NASA.