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Russian Cargo Ship Successfully Makes Orbit, Will Supply ISS
An anonymous reader writes: Early this morning, a Russian Soyuz rocket successfully launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The rocket carried a Progress capsule containing 2,700kg of supplies for the International Space Station. It's a much-needed victory after a series of launch failures that saw ISS resupply missions from Orbital ATK, Russia, and SpaceX end in failure. "The station, a joint project involving 15 nations which is staffed by a crew of six astronauts and cosmonauts, currently has a four-month supply of food and water, NASA said. The arrival of the Russian cargo ship, and the planned launch of a Japanese HTV freighter in August, should replenish the station's pantries through the end of the year, NASA said. Friday's successful launch clears the way for three new crew members to fly to the station later this month."
Right here.
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When a successful launch was newsworthy.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
We're losing the space race to the Russians.
A rocket engine is to a launch vehicle what a northbridge is to a computer. It's absolutely critical, does a whole hell of a lot of work, but you pretty much have to design it to the rest of the system or family of systems.
WHICH one? The ones used on the Saturn V? The Saturn V has the F-1, and J-2. Which do you want to use? The ones use on the landing module? It had two, one to land, one to go back up. The ones use on the orbiting capsule? That's the AJ10-137.
Which do you want to use? How do you want to use it?
Not to mention that each piece of hardware is built with the assumption of there being extant suppliers for its component parts. For Apollo hardware, this is rarely true, so you'd have to retool and test for each part. The sad thing is it'd actually be cheaper to build a brand new Saturn-V equivalent than to make an exact duplicate.
This is actually one of the sorts of cases where 3d printing (no, generally not things like plastic filament extruders... meaningful printing, like laser sintering, laser spraying, etc, as well as CNC milling, hybrid manufacture techniques and lost wax casting on a 3d-printed moulds) has the potential to really come into its own: all of these sort of parts that you only ever need half a dozen of them made but might some day suddenly want some more a couple decades down the road. Another interesting advantage on this front is also that of incremental testing - I know of one small rocketry startup that has set themselves up to sinter out aerospikes in an evolutionary fashion - they print one out, connect it straight to test, measure its performance, scrap it and feed that performance data back into the generation of the next printout, in a constant model-refining process. Combustion simulations can be tricky to get right, but real-world testing data doesn't lie ;)
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
There are several docking ports on the space station. This diagram may help clarify just what goes where, although this block diagram may be easier to follow.
Dragon normally docks with Harmony, where the Space Shuttle used to park, while Soyuz and Progress would dock with the Zvezda, Rassvet, Pirs and Poisk modules on the Russian end.
I can't see them just letting the astronauts starve to death.
The ISS has a reentry lander, independent of these supply launches, they'd bug out at some point if it became necessary.
What happened to the Apollo engine? Couldn't that be re-built and used by the U.S.A.?
They are:
http://arstechnica.com/science...
An F1 powered rocket with modern improvements would be tremendous, iit was a monster then, an updated one would be doubleplusgood.
Amazing they let it languish for solid boosters.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You could, but why would you? It wasn't the most efficient engine (around 263 Isp using RP1). The SSME is far more efficient (~452 Isp using LH2), though it is wickedly expensive at about $40M each. There are several other engines would be far more efficient, cost far less overall and be more reliable.