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NASA's Orion Capsule Reaches Orbit
PaisteUser sends word that NASA's Orion capsule successfully reached orbit this morning after a flawless launch atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket. Video of the launch is available on YouTube, and the Orion Mission blog has frequent updates as mission milestones are reached.
Mission managers said the rocket and capsule performed perfectly during the initial phases of the test. "It was just a blast to see how well the rocket did," said Mark Geyer, NASA's Orion program manager. After Orion makes its first circuit around the planet, the rocket's upper stage will kick it into a second, highly eccentric orbit that loops as far as 3,600 miles from Earth. Then Orion will come screaming back into Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 20,000 mph — 80 percent of the velocity that a spacecraft returning from the moon would experience. This particular Orion is missing a lot of the components that would be needed for a crewed flight, and it won't be carrying humans. Instead, it's outfitted with more than 1,200 sensors to monitor how its communication and control systems deal with heightened radiation levels, how its heat shield handles re-entry temperatures that are expected to rise as high as 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and how its parachutes slow the craft down for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
The capabilities of the rocket.
It's stated capability will be 10 or 20x it's real world capability.
yea, because wings really work in space.
Not even that, its a Delta V Heavy which has been flying for a while now.
To be pedantic: the rocket's capabilities were known, but the capsule's capabilities (heat shield, rad shielding, chutes, etc) needed testing. Large, complex systems on whose function lives will depend should be checked and tested in at least one realistic run before crews are committed to them.
I-I don't even... what ? Wings in space ?
This is the "trial by fire" they need to see if you can leave earth orbit in the Orion capsule. They're taking it out on a long burn to pass through the inner Van Allen belt which ought to give them all the info they need on radiation exposure and its effects on the capsule's systems. Then they get to find out how well the heat shield holds up on re-entry (at that speed the shield should reach 4000 degrees F).
All of this is also completely automated, which is a bonus feature for safety reasons if the crew ever gets incapacitated.
Most of the command module avionics, control system, fore and aft heat shield, power and thermal subsystem, and recovery systems like the parachute system.
Quite a few things, actually,
I get it confused with the old Project Orion. Plus one of my favorite novels as a kid was Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise which featured that propulsion technology.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Good Ghod, man, didn't you see Star Wars? You HAVE to have wings for space!
You mean Toy Story. "High pressure space wings."
Here is a blog reporting lift to the second orbit: http://space.io9.com/will-orio...
She'd have given us zero gee vaginas also.
When would you expect that we would build and launch a spacecraft that is designed to stay in space, be driven by a nuclear reactor with lots of room for storage and living, scads of power, ion drive, and be used for regular excursions. Seems to me we have all the basic technology required.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Plus there are experiments onboard to measure van Allen belt radiation.
Not enough. Just X, Y and T wings work.
They are making sure that their spacecraft actually works before putting people in it. Not that hard to suss out.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
In case anyone is interested.
http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
What great news to wake up to! Hoping for many more optimism-promoting successes like this on the road to humans living in space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal or lunar ores.
Here is a PBS NewsHour video with launch footage:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/up...
BTW, that PBS NewsHour Orion article led me to another PBS NewsHour article which formed the basis of my most recent "optimistic" Slashdot story submission on how restoring 1970s overtime regulations could boost the US economy:
http://slashdot.org/submission...
With a stronger economy, maybe there would be even more demand for space-related ventures of all sorts?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Capabilities of the space craft being 3600 miles above Earth.
I am a bit disappointed though, I would like to see how she performs at least after a loop or two around the moon. To get Orion out in space for a couple loopty loops around the planet feels like such a waste of taxpayer money. Know, baby steps, but can we at least take a full step rather than this edging forward. When we look at the size and scale of Apollo in comparison to this, we would have already been launching people after the engineering modifications, after barbequing a trio of astronauts.
We have been working on Constellation/Orion/SLS since 2005 or possibly earlier, post Columbia 2003, when we thought the space shuttles were going to need to be retired. Sadly, if this had been Apollo, we would already be seeing Neil on the Moon's surface waving back at us. There should be no reason why we shouldn't be able to get our own people up to a space station largely funded by us. I say we push forward with Orion testing, but also use it as a supply tool for the ISS.
Place something witty here
You HAVE to have wings for space!
Dude, they're not wings, they're "S-Foils." Get with the program.
Unfortunately, "because we can" is the primary justification for this project and eventual Mars mission. If one wants to prove they can establish a long term outpost off earth, the moon is far more practical. But there is no compelling reason to doing so on either.
I was reading "Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization" by Spencer Wells this morning. He makes the point that hunter/gatherers tend to walk away from social conflicts, whereas people in large militaristic agricultural hierarchies instead tend to end up fighting wars for resources as they see no other alternatives. I had a lot of youthful optimism in the 1970s stemming in part from the US space program and many space-related TV shows (Thunderbirds, Star Trek, Space: 1999, Lost In Space). To be potentially capable of the military conquest of the planet Earth, a country probably has to be of the scale of WWII Germany or the USA -- having about 5% of the planet's population and land. So that means, ignoring moral aspects and such, the maximum return on military investment for Empire can be at most about 20 to 1 relative to the total resources (including people) you are starting with and essentially gambling. By contrast, investments in Research & Development, such as the space program like with Orion or new energy sources like hot or cold fusion or dirt-cheap solar PV or whatever have the potential to produce much greater returns than 20:1 on investment. Imagine if the USA had poured the cost of the Iraq war (three or more trillion US$ at this point) into fusion research. We might have 1000X as much cheap less-polluting energy to use (including for space launches) than we have now. Increasing human capability to get into space and live there in self-replicating space habitats potentially could produce another 1000X or more return in land area to live in. Even as 100 trillion dollars to make the first such self-replicating space habitat, the ROI is so much higher than that of preparing to fight a global war of empire-building.
Maybe we can see a return to other ideas, like those from back when NASA overall was more optimistic under Carter?
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions"
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/...
"This document is the final report of a study on the feasability of using machine intelligence, including automation and robotics, in future space missions. The 10-week study was conducted during the summer of 1980 by 18 educators from universities throughout the United States who worked with 15 NASA program engineers. The specific study objectives were to identify and analyze several representative missions that would require extensive applications of machine intelligence, and then to identify technologies that must be developed to accomplish these types of missions. This study was sponsored jointly by NASA, through the Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology and the Office of University Affairs, and by the American Society for Engineering Education as part of their continuing program of summer study faculty fellowships. Co-hosts for the study were the NASA Ames Research Center and the University of Santa Clara, where the study was carried out. Project co-directors were James E. Long of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Timothy J. Healy of the University of Santa Clara."
There are probably nuances here regarding how much of the country is at risk in such a military gamble and so on, as well as the value of military investments for deterrence (how much is enough?), but that is the broad brush picture I've always seen based on that early optimism. And given that a supervolcano like Toba (mentioned by Spencer Wells as killing of most humans about 70,000 years ago) or a pandemic (like Ebola) could wipe out most people (from a decade long winter and a new ice age), it seems investments in cooperation to develop productive innovations including space habitats has a much better risk/reward ratio than most military investments which ultimately still don't secure you against supervolcanos or plagues and similar things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
While it has sometimes been called "The Conquest of Space", it is a very d
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Since space exist, it's harmful, he haven't and we need space vehicles to get there I guess we can say intelligent design is bullshit.
(Also he obviously made us evil and didn't taught us his message from birth, or everything there is to know about the world in general. Which seem like a huge flaw. Especially if we're design to be as he.)
Agreed, though it brings up a bigger (albeit personal) bitch-n-moan on my part...
We went from zero to Moon in about 24 years (1945-1969), but then did approximately bupkis in the realm of manned exploration for 45 years after that (okay, Space Shuttle, ISS, etc - but we're talking manned planetary exploration here, not just repeating the same shit we've done over and over again with only trivial increments.)
I remember as a kid anticipating a shot of going to distant worlds as an adult, but damn - by the time they *finally* get around to putting someone on Mars, I'll be damned near retired (and definitely too old for consideration of such a thing.) I just wish NASA would have gotten their shit straight and kept pushing, instead of dropping it in the early 1970s and deciding 'hey, let's make this shuttle thingy!'
Some of us would have wanted to see things happen faster, and sooner - I know I'm not alone in thinking this...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
the rocket maybe, but the capsule is new.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
And the monkey pushes the button.
By pushing the Orion up to 3600 miles (5750 km or so), it'll re-enter at a speed rather higher than a Soyuz or Dragon has done (higher than anything since Apollo).
Should be coming back in a bit over 9km/sec, in fact.
Note that this is not as high as it'll need for return from a Mars transition orbit (over 11km/s for that), but it's a good starting test.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Especially with how different the electronics must be from the Apollo's. I suspect their radiation tolerance is completely different (drastically smaller traces). Just a layman's thoughts though...
Well, it's further out than we've sent a man rated capsule since 1972.
We have brains (either from god or from nature).If you want to say God gave them to us, that is fine because we have the ability to think of ways to leave our planet, so aparently god DID intend for that, otherwise he wouldn't have made us smart enough to figure that out. Unless you believe god made a mistake?
I am Athiest, and I believe we are a product of nature. Evolution created us over millions of years of responses to our environment; We are the first species on this planet that is capable of preventing and/or surviving an extinction level event.
Somehow I have a feeling they'll use a different 'shuttle' between Earth and Mars, and this will be used as a re-entry vehicle on return.
If that's indeed the case, then they might not even need to take it with them. They'd be better off building another space-station-ish thing, and sending that thing between Earth and Mars. Don't send it into the atmosphere either, use other craft as tenders for that sort of thing.
If Martian space science becomes a big deal, send a permanent orbital facility to Mars tha gets docked-with by the long-distance shuttle, that holds supplies and other bulk-goods at the expense of crew space. It can hold multiple missions' worth of materiel tool, so that one mission that is launched with not-man-rated rockets can send it, while the more expensive man-rated rockets send the human mission.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You mean by dumping the Space Shuttle without a replacement? Making us dependent on the Russians and at the same time souring relations with them?
Yep. I'm right there with you.
It was a good thing that the Soviets did this too; Buran decompressed and the crew would have probably died had they launched with personnel the only time it flew.
It's a shame that they weren't more successful in many ways. We work a lot better when we have competition.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Its not a waste.
Making a "couple loopty loops" is a required step along the way.
The Apollo project didn't start by going straight to the moon. There was a lot of testing before
Earth orbit testing
Lunar orbit testing
Then landing on the moon.
emt 377 emt 4
Congratulations, NASA. I'm pleased to see this launch go off without a hitch (as long as you don't count the scrub of the launch yesterday...)
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Even if stacked under this capsule was the entire mars one stack, you would still need the capsule in case something goes wrong from from T-0 through SECO. Being able to abort and bring people home is a critical element to this.
Once you're in orbit, now you can spin the capsule around, mate it to the transit vehicle, get comfy and head on to mars. In your nice roomy hey let's go to mars bus!
As for what this cost? Less than we've spent bombing ISIS or for that matter what the DOD spent on diesel last year. We MASSIVELY under fund our space agency. Go check this out: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/02/16/wait-how-big-is-nasas-budget-again/#.VIHeOYqPUyI
It's a joke. We spend NOTHING on our space program. Tests like this are not a waste at all, we need to test these systems before we rely on them.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I think saying space exists and is harmful is a poor repudiation of intelligent design.
Otherwise, you could stop with animals, rocks, gravity and all the killing devices brought to us by our marvelous brains.
He made us capable of both good and evil, and left enough in our hearts that most of us don't feel good when we act evil.
We can be as He, we have to choose it, though.
emt 377 emt 4
NASA could only do what Congress gave them the money to do. Same could be said with the SSC. The Luddites we kept sending to Congress made sure that the money Congress appropriated for federal spending, federal subsidies, and federal tax relief benefited the "people" who put them there. As in - not us, but - their real financial contributors. Remember - you get the NASA and the Congress that you pay for!
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
When each test costs $375 million, it seems like a waste not putting anyone aboard. I'm sure there would be thousands of volunteers even if you told them they had a 1/5 chance of dying. I wonder how many millions NASA could have made auctioning 4 spots.
What's an athiest? A dyslexic who has no dog?
For the sarcasm impaired: that's a joke. Or maybe it isn't. Hmmm...
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
Going to the moon was really cool, for sure. And we were very lucky. Hard to justify doing it again, even to Mars, with taxpayer dollars, considering the serious needs for health, defense, and infrastructure down here. Before robotic instruments were so capable, sending people to explore was the only way. Now we have had those two geology robots on Mars for YEARS and they work wonderfully. When everyone with a PC can Skype across the country so easily, it is hard to justify sending people on dangerous journeys. Moreover, it is very difficult to justify the enormous cost of human space flight, considering the trifling amount of actual scientific results from the Space Station. True believers will claim all sorts of major developments from the space program, and they are real. But adding humans to the space-flight equation increases the cost by at least two orders of magnitude, for zero gain.
Someone dying, even voluntarily, on a mission would cost NASA way more than $375 million. Between administrative, investigative, and PR costs, that is not a risk worth taking. Astronaut deaths cost significant money for a long time afterward in budget considerations alone.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
did approximately bupkis in the realm of manned exploration for 45 years after that
But some fantastically AWESOME things in the realm of unmanned exploration. Which got us all the useful aspects of space exploration which the big price tag or the trouble of launching from mars. Downside: No martian space heroes.
Give it a rest grandpa, robots are the future.
No rocket capable of sending the Orion capsule to the moon exists at the moment.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
They are also doing an experiment to validate models for micro meteor impacts on the shuttle derived tiles used to skin the craft.
Back in 1991, this was to be the year to launch to Mars: http://articles.latimes.com/19...
If you call 1945 "zero", that's your first problem. By 1945, we had just finished a nuclear war. Call it what you want, but WWII was a nuclear war. In 1945 we had jet engines, rockets, unmanned missiles, radar, radio, solid-state RF detectors, computers and digital voice encryption.
Your second problem is that you assume that there's something worthwhile to be done by a man in space. Again, by 1945, Vannevar Bush knew that sending people into space was nothing more than a stunt. He knew it with "zero" knowledge, why can't you?
And your third problem is the emotionally loaded word "exploration". We know what's out there. We know how rockets work. We built them! What's to "explore"?
"I remember as a kid anticipating a shot of going to distant worlds as an adult, "
The adult should know this:
http://www.distancetomars.com/
The adult should also know that kid's shows are no guide to reality. That was *fantasy*.
"wanted to see things happen faster"
They did. We don't even have Concorde anymore. We got better at processing information using less and less energy per bit.
They didn't see that coming in the 1960s.
Things are just the way they are because they can't really be any other way, barring some fundamental upheaval in our view of the universe.
The last upheavals were the ultraviolet catastrophe and using oil for energy and chemical feedstocks.
Late 19th century stuff.
I'm glad to see this flight finally, but the flight trajectory of this flight was eerily similar to the first launch of the Saturn V. That mission also tested the Apollo spacecraft reentry characteristics at higher than LEO speed. Well, plus testing the largest booster ever built in all-up configuration on its first flight. So NASA has basically taken an off the shelf military booster (Delta IV Heavy) and launched an uncrewed Orion spacecraft and it worked -- great. So their PR release should have said, "We have now almost achieved the same capability with Orion as we had in 1967 with Apollo." Instead, the official commentary from Mission Control is, " 'There's your new spacecraft, America,' " Mission Control commentator Rob Navias said as the Orion capsule neared the water 270 miles off Mexico's Baja peninsula. Navias called the journey "the most perfect flight you could ever imagine." In 1967 the commentary from Mission Control would have been something like, "The vehicle performed nominally" One of the things I miss about the old NASA was their understated PR at the time -- just the engineering description of events, little fluff. Now I get the feeling that a division of PR hacks are crafting every word of commentary ahead of time.
Pretty much. Vannevar Bush knew that sending people into space was a stunt.
However, sending better and better cameras to get better pictures of dead rocks and sand, that's not a problem!
But the whole 1960s "Leave it to Beaver in Space" hallucinations will never happen.
Ever.
No single rocket capable of sending the Orion capsule to the moon exists at the moment.
With multiple launches we could send Orion to the moon.
NASA can't do that. It would be political suicide for them if the astronauts died, even if they were volunteers.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
line death row convicts (we won't execute you if you return). Oh, yeah, it is unethical. We should use lethal injection, it is often (when not botched) more humane...
This is flying pork from NASA to keep the manned directorate swimming in dough.
The real science is being done on robotic missions such as the rovers on Mars.
That was the plan long before the current president began "running" things.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
George Bush started Project Constellation. Obama and his Bolsheviks axed it and told NASA to focus on muslim outreach. George Bush would have had us back to the moon by now.
Durring the Apollo days, I bought a TI SR11 pocket calculator, it could do arthimatic, squares, square roots, and had a pi key and cost me $104.00! Now your car is probably 1000X electronically more capable than an Apollo capsule, Onstar would make that more like 100K. The Apollo Guidance Computer had a CPU that was made out of 2,800 dual 3-input NOR gates hand wire-wrapped and bedded in epoxy, 2K of 16 bit read-write magnetic core memory and 36 kilowords of read-only core rope memory.
So most of what you are calling a trace, was actually a 40 gage silver plated copper wire.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
They got thousands of volunteers for John Titor too, I don't know why that's a measure of success.
The funny thing is I work on aircraft hardware that uses 40 gauge wire in many places where they should be traces. Of course none of those are part of the CPU.
If the politicians redirected the money spent on M1 Abrams that the Army said they don't want/need and are immediately being surplused. Or perhaps the Pols should finally cancel the A-10 program that has been replaced by the much more useful AC-130 program and dump that funding onto NASA. NASA is cheap.
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20120307/DEFREG02/303070011/U-S-Army-Congress-No-New-Tanks-Please 252m
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA 16b
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/macomb-county/2014/12/03/levin-plan-selfridge/19839311/ partial numbers only, but had many other pork barrels listed
NASA is anything but a pork barrel project. That 16b was for all of NASA as well, not just one project. Think of everything NASA does, from running all the sat launches, to running monitoring stations for sats, running experiments on the ISS, funding private space ventures, and many other things.
Literally the first sentence of the summary says it's a Delta IV.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
My favorite part was when it transcended the speed of sound. I sure hope they remembered to install a bobbly headed buddha in the cockpit.
You got a source for that decrompression bit? The Wikipedia article doesn't mention any in-flight problems, but then again their whole coverage of Buran is pretty sparse.
(This article is in fact #3 in a Google search for "Buran decompress")
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Why does every flight have to explore?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Vannevar Bush also claimed, right after WW II, that the Pentagon's plan to have ballistic missiles carry nuclear warheads would never work.
The Constellation Program... Riiight! The orbit that Ares I would have put the Orion module into had a negative perigee. That means crash into the Earth. But that's okay. The test flight showed that it would have shaken the crew to pieces. Oh, and if they had to abort, the heat from the flaming solid rocket fuel would have melted Orion's parachutes. Not bad for a $14billion rocket. Ares V could have carried it easily, but the cost of the Ares V was upwards of $20billion to develop and half a billion per launch. By the way, that would have taken all the money NASA had. No more telescopes. No money for Mars rovers, comet missions, or other such plans.
Constellation deserved to be axed. There were cheaper plans out there. Plans that would have eliminated the gap in American space flight capacity. Plans that would have put us on the moon for a third of the $35billion dollar Constellation program.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Uranus. Deep and hard, the way you like it.
they're not wings, thet're phase-arrayed sensor panels, they just looks like wings.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
besides, there would be nothing gained to put a person in there...and huge risk.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Which was then shown to be wrong within a decade. He still hasn't been shown wrong about space stunts.
As a matter of fact, you space nuts are taking almost as long as fusion power nuts to deliver ... anything, really.
Also, am I to assume that if someone was wrong ONCE, they're wrong about EVERYTHING?
Because if you apply that logic to the mindless predictions of the space fanbois...
See where that goes?
You guys are making the fantastic claims about exploration. I'm saying it's the furthest thing from exploring. At best, it's "mapping".
No. The word "explore" appears nowhere in the summary and you (or another AC) were the original poster who brought it up.
Hell, the first replier said it was technical verification, *not* exploration.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
You're wrong and you know it. You know your opinion is unpopular at best but more likely you're blatantly trolling. Go ahead and log the hell in so I can unleash my mod points upon thee!
I was just fooling around. There is no god. We can make imagine they are anything.
Since we're/has been Earth bound that's likely the reason we're suited for it.
"Large, complex systems on whose function lives will depend should be checked and tested in at least one realistic run"
I wasn't going to mention the healthcare.gov website, but since you brought it up ...
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.