Orbital ATK Returns To Flight With Successful Antares Launch To Space Station (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Orbital ATK Antares rocket -- the same rocket that exploded on its way to the International Space Station two years ago -- returned to flight today with a much-anticipated launch. Lifting off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the Antares rocket is now on its way to deliver the Cygnus spacecraft filled with over 5,000 pounds of cargo to crew members aboard the ISS. Today's launch was particularly special for Orbital ATK, a company contracted by NASA to deliver 66,000 pounds of cargo to the ISS through 2018. After their Antares rocket exploded during a launch in 2014, destroying thousands of pounds of experiments and cargo bound for the space station, Orbital ATK worked for two years to upgrade that rocket and prepare for its return to flight. Today, the Orbital ATK was finally able to fly Cygnus on top of their own rocket again. The RD-181-equipped Antares rocket carried Cygnus, which housed science experiments and supplies for the ISS crew, for their fifth operational cargo resupply mission for NASA. Along with crew supplies, spacewalk equipment and computer resources, Cygnus will bring over 1,000 pounds of science investigations to the five crew members on the ISS. One of those experiments is Saffire-II, the second Saffire experiment to be conducted inside Cygnus in order to study realistic flame propagation in space. Cygnus will spend over a month attached to the ISS. In late November, the spacecraft will be filled with about 3,000 pounds of trash and then released to begin its descent back to Earth. During reentry through Earth's atmosphere, the spacecraft, along with trash and Saffire-II, will be destroyed.

Comments

Satellites monitor global warming

[Traf-O-Data-Hater]

Guess how satellites that monitor global warming, weather, ocean current, polar ice and a whole lot more get up there so they can, as you ask, "solve real issues like climate change"?
Think before you post.

Re:Great, now let's do something useful instead

[idji]

A lot of the raw data to monitor climate change is space-based data. We now know where the energy goes into weather and seas, and we can see forest and agricultural usage only from space. This will give us the tools we need to enforce climate change.
Beautiful photos and videos from the cameras on the Space Station, and human damage seen from there will have a massive impact on people's passion to see this earth fixed and cared for.
go and spend a while looking at https://www.nasa.gov/topics/ea...
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/1238...
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/go...
https://weather.com/tv/shows/t...
Space Science is going to help us understand how El Nino and El Nina work - and that is critical for the lives of millions of Americans.
Yes, porkbarreling by Senators for useless space projects needs to stop. That is why NASA is supporting SpaceX, etc and focusing themselves on deep space missions like Pluto and Juno.
Anyone living on the Moon or Mars will be living underground. Humanity will move to the stars - we will solve these problems.
Look at the Space Budget, and the War Budget and see where money is really being wasted. Fix the health bureaucracy in America if you want to see money not being wasted.

Avoirdupois pound

[sjbe]

You mean american pounds?

Specifically I'm referring to the international pound sometimes called the Avoirdupois pound which is by far the most commonly used measurement by the name of pound.

Re:Why dump the trash?

[Rei]

keep that stuff up there for a while

Yeah, they could just store it in all that extra space they don't have.

or hauling an equivalent mass of titanium, aluminium, whatsit next time it's needed?

1) The trash is mostly plastic

2) You seem to envision that there's some sort of little magical manufacturing box that takes random trash as inputs and produces random useful things engineered to spacecraft tolerances as outputs. The real world doesn't work that way. In the real world, trash is a jumbled mix of materials in an extremely wide range of forms, often inseparable, while manufacturing processes require carefully controlled input streams, which differ for each desired output product. Some random food pouch may be comprised of various bulk polymers like polyethylene, polypropylene, etc, with an aluminized EVOH lining or similar. Think you can break it back down into polyethylene beads, polypropylene beads, EVOH gel and aluminum dust? Yeah, good freaking luck with that.

I know it's popular in sci-fi circles to envision that it's cheaper to make things in space. But in the real world, it distinctly is not. Yes, launch costs are expensive, but even more expensive is labour in space and the engineering costs to make each potential type of new production system. Unlike in sci-fi, you can't just magick these things into existence.

Still using Russian equipment?

[mi]

The RD-181-equipped Antares rocket

Mentioned only in passing, the RD-181 is Russia-designed and created rocket engine...

While lower-level Democrats are gleefully spreading rumours about Trump being a Putin's man, the Democratic Administration continues to buy this high technology from the adversary. In a typical manifestation of hair-splitting, even though Congress banned the use of RD-180 in 2015, NASA claims, use of RD-181 is acceptable...

Re:Still using Russian equipment?

[Rei]

Nice attempt at shilling, but the group opposing the ban was primarily Republicans from ULA areas, particularly Richard Shelby (R-Boeing)

Re:Still using Russian equipment?

[Rei]

Oh, and since you're citing the Wikileaks emails..... have you ever actually read any of them? Directly, not, you know, carefully selected blurbs designed to make you mad at Clinton? Have you read what she says about Russia behind closed doors? Here, since the Goldman transcripts were the most recent news, let's look what she says there. She talks about them thusly in relation to Syria:

The Russian's view of this is very different. I mean, who conceives Syria as the same way he sees Chechnya? You know, you have to support toughness and absolute merciless reactions in order to drive the opposition down to be strangled, and you can't give an inch to them and you have to be willing to do what Assad basically has been willing to do.

That has been their position. It pretty much remains their position, and it is a position that has led to the restocking of sophisticated weapon systems all through this. The Russians' view is that if we provide enough weapons to Assad and if Assad is able to maintain control over most of the country, including the coastal
areas where our naval base is, that's fine with us. Because you will have internal fighting still with the Kurds and with the Sunnis on the spectrum of extremism. But if we can keep our base and we can keep Assad in the titular position of running the country, that reflects well on us because we will demonstrate that we are back in the Middle East. Maybe in a ruthless way, but a way that from their perspective, the Russian perspective, Arabs will understand.

So the problem for the US and the Europeans has been from the very beginning: What is it you -- who is it you are going to try to arm? And you probably read in the papers my view was we should try to find some of the groups that were there that we thought we could build relationships with and develop some covert connections that might then at least give us some insight into what is going on inside Syria.

But the other side of the argument was a very -- it was a very good one, which is we don't know what will happen. We can't see down the road. We just need to stay out of it. The problem now is that you've got Iran in heavily. You've got probably at least 50,000 fighters inside working to support, protect and sustain Assad. And like any war, at least the wars that I have followed, the hard guys who are the best fighters move to the forefront.

So the free Syrian Army and a lot of the local rebel militias that were made up of pharmacists and business people and attorneys and teachers -- they're no match for these imported toughened Iraqi, Jordanian, Libyan, Indonesian, Egyptian, Chechen, Uzbek, Pakistani fighters that are now in there and have learned through more than a decade of very firsthand experience what it takes in terms of ruthlessness and military capacity.

So we now have what everybody warned we would have, and I am very concerned about the spillover effects. And there is still an argument that goes on inside the administration and inside our friends at NATO and the Europeans. How do intervene -- my view was you intervene as covertly as is possible for Americans to intervene. We used to be much better at this than we are now. Now, you know, everybody can't help themselves. They have to go out and tell their friendly reporters and somebody else: Look what we're doing and I want credit for it, and all the rest of it.

So we're not as good as we used to be, but we still -- we can still deliver, and we should have in my view been trying to do that so we would have better insight. But the idea that we would have like a no fly zone -- Syria, of course, did have when it started the fourth biggest Army in the world. It had very sophisticated air defense systems. They're getting more sophisticated thanks to Russian imports.

Does it sound like she's a fan of Putin behind closed doors? I could keep going (for example, she responds to a questioner whose premise is "A lot of our problems is because we have a com