When the sun angle is right, I see little bright specks zipping away from the car. Evidently there is outgassing carrying away small particles. (speed and direction are wrong for them to be bright background stars.)
SpaceX plan to send tourists (and possibly also NASA astronauts) around the moon in a Dragon launched by FH. Unless plans have changed, that means they will be man-rating FH.
Right from the start you could tell they were the same: both feeds had the connection to the center core at the top, and the background land was in the same orientation. To be correct, one or the other should have been flipped by 180 degrees.
Having said that, I only suspected we were getting a duplicate feed up to the point when they headed for the same landing pad. I had to rewatch to get confirmation it was the same feed from the start.
Also, there is a live feed of Starman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... As I type, you can see south east Australia in the background.
Except that NASA's Office of Planetary Protection would never let them put the car anywhere near Mars. There are lots and lots of bacteria in that car. If it lands on Mars, it could seed Mars with Earth life, potentially wiping out Mars life, which would be a massive loss to science.
I expect (although I've never seen it discussed) that the target orbit will have some resonance that ensures it never gets near Mars.
Japan already has lots of other bigger missiles (actual military missiles with warheads) that can reach NK. South Korea has artillery that can reach most or all of NK (and missiles). NK is in range of the entire SK and Japan airforces. And we haven't even got around to the USA yet.
This launch does NOTHING to the balance of power with NK.
The SS-520 was first launched in 1998. It is based on the S-520 which was first launched in 1980 (source).
Yes, the SS-520 and S-520 could be used as weapons, but that has been the case for decades. Nothing in this test makes them more weaponizable than they were before the test. There is no reason to think this test had any ulterior military motives.
Japan has not announced plans for any further orbital launches with the SS-520 – and last year’s launch was originally intended to have been a one-off, but project is an experiment which JAXA and the Japanese space industry hope will lead to an operational nanosatellite launch system in the future.
So the future "operational nanosatellite launch system" might use an air launch, but for a one-off test it was not worth developing this capability.
Air launch is something that is done by Pegasus and is being developed by a few other operators. It makes more sense at the small payload end of the market than the big end, so it might be a good approach.
Scott Manley is a great youtube commentator on space stuff. Last year he made a video on the smallest orbital rockets.
Since then, Electron and now SS-520 have orbited satellites, so it is a little out of date. He starts with the Electron and talks about the previous SS-520 launch is covered at 4m40s. Numerous other rockets get a mention.
My favourite book of all time: To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis, a Victorian time travel mystery and farce. I think it would work well as an anime, with Ned's internal imaginings being played out by chibi characters, and shojo sparkles when people have time-lag (which, among other things, makes people overly sentimental.)
My second favourite by Willis is Passage, which would be good as a TV series/mini-series. Our heroine is researching induced near-death experiences. (Being near death is not required.)
Although I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about it as I was as a teenager, Anne MacCaffery's Pern series has all the requirements of a high profile big budget pay TV SF/fantasy megaseries. In particular, lots of dragons. There is some flexibility on how much sex and violence is in there, down to kid-friendly at the low end, although they wouldn't stretch to GoT levels at the high end.
He is a genius tech billionaire who can launch satellites and, due to Tesla, has a public reputation of Great Guy Who Is Trying To Save The Planet. Join the dots.
For launches there are bits of ocean, including the landing point, where boats are forbidden and this is checked by the space center's range safety people, who I think are airforce or navy. This isn't insurmountable, but Musk either needs to divert the rocket out of the forbidden zone (without this being noticed), suborn the range safety people to ignore the secret landing barge, "ASDS Just Read the Extortion Note", or hide the recovery vessel in some way, e.g. a submarine capable of quickly swallowing a Falcon 9 booster.
It was the USA government which seized Megaupload's assets and shut the company down overnight. This was clearly wrong, because it was done on the basis of legal proceedings similar to issuing a search warrant. Megaupload was utterly destroyed without having any opportunity to put its side of the argument to a court. (I'm not saying Megaupload could have successfully have defended itself, but justice demands it should have had the opportunity.)
I can well believe that Dotcom has some case to make against NZ, but for the vast majority of that $6.8B claim I can't see how it can be laid at the door of the NZ government.
This is 100% speculation: Their payload was much lighter than maximum capacity. Therefore they could afford a less than optimal ascent profile. Because this was primarily a test, they were keen on getting complete uninterrupted telemetry. Therefore they used an ascent profile which would keep the rocket in line of sight of the receiving dishes at launch site, from launch to at least stage 2 shutdown.
According to Musk, the primary reason for existence of Tesla is to get the world to move more quickly to electric cars. It does this by making good enough cars, and making enough money from them, that other companies realize they are missing out and so chose to emulate Tesla. I'm sure that Tesla also want to become a long term profitable major car manufacturer, but if we believe Musk, that is a secondary goal.
Given all this, and given Tesla motor's significant growing pains and limited resources (compared to GM, Ford, VW etc) it seems to me that self driving is a major distraction which uses resources better used elsewhere. I suspect they'd have been better off just to go for the standard levels of automation in high end cars (e.g. autobraking.)
And all you mindless Musk haters, pay attention: this article shows how you can intelligently criticize Tesla, rather than pretending there was some vast supply of government subsidy money that any halfwit could have sucked up, yet somehow only Musk thought to do so, or was allowed to do so.
Update: here is a paper discussing the black death/Y pestis link. It is behind a paywall, so I only have the abstract:
Recent correspondence on the cause of Black Death1–3 includes incorrect citation of unpublished results obtained by one of us (MBP).2 The origin of this correspondence was a report4 of a conference presentation by James Wood suggesting, on the basis of epidemiological data, that Yersinia pestis was not the cause of the Black Death. Two recent books come to similar conclusions with different datasets.5,6 Didier Raoult and Michel Drancourt point out1,3 that their observations7,8 of Y pestis DNA in teeth from putative Black Death victims provide hard evidence to refute any epidemiological hypotheses suggesting different causes for the Black Death.
Some time ago (a decade?) I saw a TV documentary calling into question whether the Black Death was caused by the Y. pestis bacterium.
Y. pestis was shown to be the cause of a plague outbreak in 1894. Because that plague outbreak was very similar to the symptoms of the Black Death, it was believed to be the same disease.
Eventually (around 2000?) this was questioned. Arguments against that I remember include that, where available, records of who caught the disease when in a given village were more consistent with human-to-human spread; that the 1894 plague was accompanied by very many dead rats, but medieval descriptions do not mention this; and that the required rat species wasn't actually around in most of the European places hit by the plague.
Shortly thereafter, ancient DNA evidence conclusively showed that Y. pestis was indeed the cause of the Black Death. However this research fits nicely with the objections from above.
This is a fine example of science questioning old assumptions/results, and gaining better understanding by doing so, even though a false conclusion (that BD was not caused by Y. pestis) was reached along the way by some scientists.
The Zuma failure is only a rumour, and if it happened, it was caused by hardware which SpaceX was not allowed to see or touch, so it isn't their fault.
Falcon has had two full failures: CRS7 failed in flight AMOS-6 failed on the pad. Falcon has had one partial failure: CRS1 was successful but a secondary payload did not make its intended orbit and was lost. They also blew up a 'grasshopper' experimental vehicle but that is in no way comparable to a Falcon failure.
Two and a bit failures from 48 flights (or intended flight in the case of AMOS-6) is neither great nor terrible.
To be allowed to fly people, SpaceX and Boeing have to convince NASA they have less than 1/270 chance of losing crew.
Slashdot Mirror
Update:
The core did not land OK.
This was the first thing Musk said at the news conference.
I'd thought the same thing.
This is a company which has released compilation video of their rocket explosions (mostly failed landings.)
When the sun angle is right, I see little bright specks zipping away from the car. Evidently there is outgassing carrying away small particles. (speed and direction are wrong for them to be bright background stars.)
For more details on rocket nozzles and why atmospheric and vacuum nozzles differ, watch this.
SpaceX plan to send tourists (and possibly also NASA astronauts) around the moon in a Dragon launched by FH. Unless plans have changed, that means they will be man-rating FH.
What twitter posts are these? I have seen no news on SpaceX or Elon Musk's twitter.
Right from the start you could tell they were the same: both feeds had the connection to the center core at the top, and the background land was in the same orientation. To be correct, one or the other should have been flipped by 180 degrees.
Having said that, I only suspected we were getting a duplicate feed up to the point when they headed for the same landing pad. I had to rewatch to get confirmation it was the same feed from the start.
Also, there is a live feed of Starman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As I type, you can see south east Australia in the background.
Except that NASA's Office of Planetary Protection would never let them put the car anywhere near Mars. There are lots and lots of bacteria in that car. If it lands on Mars, it could seed Mars with Earth life, potentially wiping out Mars life, which would be a massive loss to science.
I expect (although I've never seen it discussed) that the target orbit will have some resonance that ensures it never gets near Mars.
For a while his twitter avatar photo had him holding a white Persian kitten and sucking the tip of his little finger.
Japan already has lots of other bigger missiles (actual military missiles with warheads) that can reach NK.
South Korea has artillery that can reach most or all of NK (and missiles).
NK is in range of the entire SK and Japan airforces.
And we haven't even got around to the USA yet.
This launch does NOTHING to the balance of power with NK.
The SS-520 was first launched in 1998. It is based on the S-520 which was first launched in 1980 (source).
Yes, the SS-520 and S-520 could be used as weapons, but that has been the case for decades. Nothing in this test makes them more weaponizable than they were before the test. There is no reason to think this test had any ulterior military motives.
From here:
Japan has not announced plans for any further orbital launches with the SS-520 – and last year’s launch was originally intended to have been a one-off, but project is an experiment which JAXA and the Japanese space industry hope will lead to an operational nanosatellite launch system in the future.
So the future "operational nanosatellite launch system" might use an air launch, but for a one-off test it was not worth developing this capability.
Air launch is something that is done by Pegasus and is being developed by a few other operators. It makes more sense at the small payload end of the market than the big end, so it might be a good approach.
Scott Manley is a great youtube commentator on space stuff. Last year he made a video on the smallest orbital rockets.
Since then, Electron and now SS-520 have orbited satellites, so it is a little out of date. He starts with the Electron and talks about the previous SS-520 launch is covered at 4m40s. Numerous other rockets get a mention.
My favourite book of all time: To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis, a Victorian time travel mystery and farce. I think it would work well as an anime, with Ned's internal imaginings being played out by chibi characters, and shojo sparkles when people have time-lag (which, among other things, makes people overly sentimental.)
My second favourite by Willis is Passage, which would be good as a TV series/mini-series. Our heroine is researching induced near-death experiences. (Being near death is not required.)
Although I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about it as I was as a teenager, Anne MacCaffery's Pern series has all the requirements of a high profile big budget pay TV SF/fantasy megaseries. In particular, lots of dragons. There is some flexibility on how much sex and violence is in there, down to kid-friendly at the low end, although they wouldn't stretch to GoT levels at the high end.
He is a genius tech billionaire who can launch satellites and, due to Tesla, has a public reputation of Great Guy Who Is Trying To Save The Planet. Join the dots.
For launches there are bits of ocean, including the landing point, where boats are forbidden and this is checked by the space center's range safety people, who I think are airforce or navy. This isn't insurmountable, but Musk either needs to divert the rocket out of the forbidden zone (without this being noticed), suborn the range safety people to ignore the secret landing barge, "ASDS Just Read the Extortion Note", or hide the recovery vessel in some way, e.g. a submarine capable of quickly swallowing a Falcon 9 booster.
It was the USA government which seized Megaupload's assets and shut the company down overnight. This was clearly wrong, because it was done on the basis of legal proceedings similar to issuing a search warrant. Megaupload was utterly destroyed without having any opportunity to put its side of the argument to a court. (I'm not saying Megaupload could have successfully have defended itself, but justice demands it should have had the opportunity.)
I can well believe that Dotcom has some case to make against NZ, but for the vast majority of that $6.8B claim I can't see how it can be laid at the door of the NZ government.
This is 100% speculation:
Their payload was much lighter than maximum capacity. Therefore they could afford a less than optimal ascent profile. Because this was primarily a test, they were keen on getting complete uninterrupted telemetry. Therefore they used an ascent profile which would keep the rocket in line of sight of the receiving dishes at launch site, from launch to at least stage 2 shutdown.
According to Musk, the primary reason for existence of Tesla is to get the world to move more quickly to electric cars. It does this by making good enough cars, and making enough money from them, that other companies realize they are missing out and so chose to emulate Tesla. I'm sure that Tesla also want to become a long term profitable major car manufacturer, but if we believe Musk, that is a secondary goal.
Given all this, and given Tesla motor's significant growing pains and limited resources (compared to GM, Ford, VW etc) it seems to me that self driving is a major distraction which uses resources better used elsewhere. I suspect they'd have been better off just to go for the standard levels of automation in high end cars (e.g. autobraking.)
And all you mindless Musk haters, pay attention: this article shows how you can intelligently criticize Tesla, rather than pretending there was some vast supply of government subsidy money that any halfwit could have sucked up, yet somehow only Musk thought to do so, or was allowed to do so.
Update: here is a paper discussing the black death/Y pestis link. It is behind a paywall, so I only have the abstract:
Recent correspondence on the cause of Black Death1–3 includes incorrect citation of unpublished results obtained by one of us (MBP).2 The origin of this correspondence was a report4 of a conference presentation by James Wood suggesting, on the basis of epidemiological data, that Yersinia pestis was not the cause of the Black Death. Two recent books come to similar conclusions with different datasets.5,6 Didier Raoult and Michel Drancourt point out1,3 that their observations7,8 of Y pestis DNA in teeth from putative Black Death victims provide hard evidence to refute any epidemiological hypotheses suggesting different causes for the Black Death.
Some time ago (a decade?) I saw a TV documentary calling into question whether the Black Death was caused by the Y. pestis bacterium.
Y. pestis was shown to be the cause of a plague outbreak in 1894. Because that plague outbreak was very similar to the symptoms of the Black Death, it was believed to be the same disease.
Eventually (around 2000?) this was questioned. Arguments against that I remember include that, where available, records of who caught the disease when in a given village were more consistent with human-to-human spread; that the 1894 plague was accompanied by very many dead rats, but medieval descriptions do not mention this; and that the required rat species wasn't actually around in most of the European places hit by the plague.
Shortly thereafter, ancient DNA evidence conclusively showed that Y. pestis was indeed the cause of the Black Death. However this research fits nicely with the objections from above.
This is a fine example of science questioning old assumptions/results, and gaining better understanding by doing so, even though a false conclusion (that BD was not caused by Y. pestis) was reached along the way by some scientists.
All four engines are of the same type in the 747. I'm not aware of any plane using different engines in different positions.
The Zuma failure is only a rumour, and if it happened, it was caused by hardware which SpaceX was not allowed to see or touch, so it isn't their fault.
Falcon has had two full failures: CRS7 failed in flight AMOS-6 failed on the pad. Falcon has had one partial failure: CRS1 was successful but a secondary payload did not make its intended orbit and was lost. They also blew up a 'grasshopper' experimental vehicle but that is in no way comparable to a Falcon failure.
Two and a bit failures from 48 flights (or intended flight in the case of AMOS-6) is neither great nor terrible.
To be allowed to fly people, SpaceX and Boeing have to convince NASA they have less than 1/270 chance of losing crew.
please