MIRV

Couple of scary photos I came across yesterday.

Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) hitting their targets during a ICBM test as seen from a P-3 Orion

Testing of the Peacekeeper reentry vehicles: all eight (of a possible ten) were fired from only one missile. Each line shows the path of an individual warhead captured on reentry via long-exposure photography.

I suspect the 'long-exposure' was no more than a few seconds. I mean these warheads are coming in a super-, maybe even hyper-, sonic speeds.

Artemis

NASA's next-generation Moon rocket, the Space Launch System [SLS] rocket with the Orion crew capsule, lifted off from launch complex 39B as part of the unmanned Artemis 1 mission to the Moon on November 16, 2022. [File: Joe Rimkus Jr/Reuters]

The SLS finally flew. I was beginning to wonder. Seems they have been working on this thing forever. Finally took off and sent the Orion capsule around the moon. Aljazeera has some pictures.

The Silicon Greybeard has been following the Artemis project.

I've also been wondering why the SLS project cost so much money. Finally turned up an answer. It wasn't that it cost so much, it's because Congress wanted to shovel money out the door and Boeing said 'we'll take it'.

The Artemis Program

The Artemis Program
Megaprojects

Finally some straight talk without a lot of fluff. He covers the main issues involved with getting to the moon, but promises more in a follow up video. It's been four weeks, Simon, where is it?

Not one word about how grossly expensive the SLS (Space Launch System) has proven to be, but that should be expected since it was designed and built by government employees and government defense contractors. In NASA's defense, they are working out there on the bleeding edge, trying things no one has done before and documenting them so that other people can make use of that information. As for Boeing (the prime SLS contractor), they're big and fat and happily ensconced in the government pack. I doubt they could move nimbly if their life depending on it. You get in with the pack and nothing is more important than keeping your fellow pack members happy. Sure, you show up for work and you do things, but coffee, donuts and chitchat are just as important, aren't they?

The bit about the construction of the Orion module was interesting. An aluminum-lithium alloy, stronger than titanium? I wonder if anyone else is using it for anything. Hit me Google.

The primary use for Aluminum-Lithium alloys is in aerospace, i.e. making parts for airplanes. It has been around since the 1920s although it didn't start being used in aircraft till the 1950s.

Getting to the moon is one thing. Getting down to the surface is another, especially with all the gear you are going to need to establish some kind of permanent base. SpaceX's Starship could very well get us there, but the Starship is 160 odd feet tall and the bottom 100 feet are all fuel tanks. When it lands, you've got to descend 100 feet to get to the surface. You could use a winch to move between the ship and ground. A high speed electric winch would make it quick, but it would still be a nuisance. What happens when you want to move something like a bulldozer, or a nuclear reactor? The Starship is a chunk, maybe a 100 tons sitting on the moon. You want to shove a ten ton reactor 20 feet out the door and lower it to the ground? You ever see those videos of giant cranes falling over when they try to pick up something too heavy? So we might need something like this:

Dynetic's HLS (Human Landing System) Concept

Airplane of the Day

Boeing P-8 Poseidon taking off from Reno

The Poseidon is the Navy's jet powered replacement for the ASW Orion. The Poseidon has been here before. The Orion has appeared here before as well.

To Infinity and Beyond!

Buzz Lightyear

I subscribed to NASA's YouTube Channel in the hope they will send me something interesting. Mostly it's been astronauts talking about life in the space station, or videos of hurricanes. Chit-chat doesn't do much for me, and once you've seen one hurricane blanketing the Earth with a fluffy white blanket of clouds, you've pretty much seen them all. Today though, we got something a little different. I suspect the video is more front-men bloviating, but the blurb that accompanied it was enlightening.

An Oct. 11 opinion article written by President Barack Obama and published by CNN, outlined a vision for the future of space exploration. In it, the president echoed the words in his 2015 State of the Union address about the importance of sending humans on a roundtrip mission to Mars by the 2030s, and developing technology to help us stay on the Red Planet for an extended time. That same day in a blog post, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden and John Holdren, assistant to the President for Science and Technology, discussed two NASA initiatives that build on the president’s vision and use public-private partnerships to enable humans to live and work in space in a sustainable way. The first was the selection of six companies to develop habitation systems as part of the agency’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships or NextSTEP program, designed to lay the groundwork for deep space missions. And this fall as part of the second initiative, NASA will start the process of providing companies with a potential opportunity to add their own modules and other capabilities to the International Space Station. The move is in-line with NASA’s plan to support and foster the growing community of scientists and entrepreneurs conducting research and growing businesses in space. - NASA YouTube video.

Link to NASA's NextSTEP press release from last year.
Pergelator posts about Orion Spacecraft

I am a gearhead so I tend to focus on the spacecraft we will need for future missions to infinity. But to my mind, spacecraft are the easier problem. I mean it's all done with metal and numbers and physics and the tests necessary to prove their capabilities are pretty straight forward. Either it survived the trip into space, or it didn't. The harder problems are going to be sustaining a human crew for more than a few days, and how to keep them from killing each other. Compared to these kind of problems, building a spaceship is child's play. I only found one post on these difficult problems: HI-SEAS Mission

P.S. Had a hard time finding a picture of Buzz in space, and after I found this one I realized that he's using the Superman pose of holding his arms out in front on him. Hmm, symbolism.

Pic of the Day

LOCKHEED MARTIN P-3 Orion (15-9887) night time in the south Pacific, 30 second exposure. LT Scott Shea, USN

Asteroid Mining

CABL Type Mining Base

A one ton chunk of gold is worth about $30 million on Earth, which is about one half of the cost of launching a big satellite into orbit.

One ton of gold is not going to make a big impact on the market. There are over 100,000 tons in stock piles now, and 2,000 tons are produced annually.

Gold is not the only valuable metal. There are half a dozen others with similar value. They don't have gold's cachet, so I use gold for my example.

Heavy metals are rare on the surface of the Earth, so the theory goes, because when the Earth was forming it was a ball of molten rock, and as most metals are denser than rock, they sank to the bottom. So there is a treasure trove of valuable metals at the center of the Earth. They're just a little difficult to access. Any metal we find on the surface of the Earth comes from asteroids that hit the Earth after it had cooled enough to have a solid crust.

There are a zillion asteroids in the asteroid belt, and while most of them are probably stupid rocks some might be metal, and some of those might be metals that are valuable on Earth.

So all we have to do is launch a space ship to travel to the asteroid belt, hang around out there long enough to identify some metal asteroids, and then give them a little rocket assisted kick to send them on a long descending spiral orbit to Earth. Once we get them into orbit around Earth it should be piece of cake to get them down to the surface.

It would probably take five years to get to the asteroid belt, and five years to get back. With that kind of time investment, we would probably want to hang around out there for five or ten years. For that much time we are going to need better living accommodations than a tin can. We are going to need something like one of those big ring space stations, the ones that spin so we can have artificial gravity so we can have live human beings instead of flying monkeys.

I was thinking that if we were going to build a space station where we are going to have a crew living and working for twenty years, we would want a fairly sizable population, like five or ten thousand people. Then I realized with our current space program that might not be possible. Right now we send up three people at a time. If we launch three people at a time once a month, that means we could put 36 people a year into space. At that rate it would take us thirty years to get a thousand people up there and 300 years to get ten thousand into space. Obviously we would need a bigger spacecraft, like Orion, which I think can hold seven, and many more launches. One Orion launched once a week could put 300 people into orbit every year, so in thirty years we should be able to get ten thousand up there. Being as building a space station might take 30 years, given that we would need to build a smelter and launch facilities on the moon, it would be okay if it took that long to populate it.

Problem is that until we get something built that can provide artificial gravity, people are going to be limited to how long they can stay in orbit due to loss of muscle mass and bone strength. If they are planning to spend the rest of their lives our there, maybe they won't care. Kind of a permanent decision.

List of related blog posts:

• Globe
• Lonrho
• Moon Landing
• Space Rock
• Ceres
• ESA (European Space Agency) Lunar Base Concept
• Space Travel, Space Opera
• Life Form
• Lost In Space
• How Deep's That Gravity Well?
• Space Bubbles
• Space Habitat Plan #2
• Moon Base Launcher
• Moon Base Power
• Airlocks
• Space Habitat
• Rocket to the Moon, Part II
• Rocket to the Moon

Night Sky

Earth, Sun, Stars & Everything

Mucking about with my Google Maps and I find one that I don't recall creating. Open it up and we have the Earth floating in the night sky. Click and drag and the Earth rolls around, which is kind of expected (fabulous, but we live in a fabulous time, so fabulous is the new expected), but what I wasn't counting on was the background changing to depict the night sky. Very cool. I think those three stars in a line along the right hand edge of the image might be Orion. Clicking on the caption should take you there. I don't know what the line across the sun is, it's not on the original. Possibly a bug in my new image editing program.

Castaways

4 guys were stranded on a tiny island when their skiff capsized.

They were rescued after they were spotted by the crew of a US Navy P-8 Poseidon. The Poseidon started showing up at US air bases in 2012. It is the replacement for the aging P-3 Orion.

The Poseidon is a militarized version of a 737. It has a bomb bay that can carry torpedoes and hard points on the wings for carrying missiles. The Australian Air Force has a good description.

There are no airstrips on any of the islands of the atoll where our castaways were stranded. They either got there by crossing 60 miles of ocean in a boat, or they flew in on a seaplane.

The atoll where they were stranded is 2,000 miles from anywhere, except Papua New Guinea. I'm not sure that helps.

The atoll is 8 miles long. The island where they were stranded is the one on the middle left.

The red markers indicate our target atoll. The yellow ones are the nearest airstrips. The green is a lagoon where a seaplane could land. The orange marker is the nearest real, jet capable airport. It's 170 miles away.

So I am sort of wondering how these guys got to this atoll, what they were doing there, where did the P-8 come from, how long did it take to get 'on station' and once they got there, how long did it take before they found our castaways?
More about flying boats in the South Pacific here.
More about the Albatross here.
Map of South Pacific airports here.
P-3 mentioned here.

Touch

NASA's Orion Spacecraft

I saw a story the other day about how NASA is studying manual dexterity as it pertains to operating controls in spaceships during zero gravity conditions. The story kind of implied that everything was moving to Apple iPads, which is just the kind of moronic populism that NASA has to cater to in order to maintain their funding, witness Jeff Daniels' character in The Martian.

Avid S3 Mixing Console

When it comes to audio equipment, sliders were popular with some people and maybe they still are. They got some cachet when big mixing panels used in theaters and recording studios came out from behind their curtain. Oh, cool! thought I and a bunch of other people. They might be okay in their original applications, or where space is at a premium and you need to cram in a bunch of seldom used controls into a tiny patch of panel, but for everyday audio controls they suck.
    You grab hold of a rotary control it is easy to tell how far you have turned it, even if the knob is on a radio mounted in the dashboard of car that is bouncing down a pothole filled road. Try adjusting a slider under those conditions and you can't, not with any degree of precision. You can't even adjust a slider accurately without being able to see it so you can tell how far it has move. Okay, maybe this is a personal problem. Maybe sliders don't cause you any difficulty.

    I've been having trouble with Cruise Control in my truck, and now I'm having the same trouble with the power locks in the Hyundai. The problem is that sometimes when I push the button it does what it's supposed to, and sometimes it doesn't.
    I think I figured out what the problem is. When I first got these vehicles, when I pushed the button, I would wait for it take effect before I released. It doesn't take long for that to happen, a few hundredths of a second, I imagine. As time goes by and I become habituated to the way these controls work I start releasing that button sooner. Since this shit is probably computer controlled, there isn't a direction connection between the switch and the device, everything goes through the computer, and the computer is scanning all the controls and it can only do it so fast, so if you tap the button and the computer isn't looking in that millisecond wide space of time, it will miss and it will appear that the switch is flaky. So you have to adjust. You have to hold that button down for just a little longer, long enough for the computer to register your tap.
    Problem is that sometimes your tap comes at just the right time, and even though it is really quick, it happens to fall in that window when the computer is looking and so it works fine.

    I don't like these touch screens, no tactile feedback, you have to look at them to tell where to put your fingers, and they all seem to require different amounts of pressure. Knobs and switches are what I grew up with and if they were good enough to win the great war, they ought be good enough for going to Mars.
    Mechanical switches do have problems with reliability, they're mechanical and mechanical things wear, and eventually wear out and fail. The design and construction methods employed in building our spaceships determine their life span. Sometimes they don't make it that long, but sometimes they keep going long past their expiration date. If you have your choice of a component that will wear out and one that won't, it's probably a good idea to use the one with the infinite life.

Spacecraft

Kennedy Space Center, Florida, Feb. 2, 2015. Charles Bolden delivers a “state of the agency” address. Left to right, the three spacecraft on display are the Boeing CST-100, NASA's Orion and the SpaceX Dragon. Photo: NASA/Amber Watson

Typical NASA, the didn't identify the spacecraft in their photo. I had to figure that for myself. Stack Exchange provided an answer. The Dragon and Orion have both been to space, though not with any passengers.

This diagram shows the seven pieces of Orion’s primary structure and the order in which they are welded together. Credits: NASA

I came across this photo while I was reading about the welding operation NASA was using to build the Orion. The are going to a great deal of trouble, building one complete shell structure just to check their tools and procedures. A spacecraft is a pressure vessel, and while the pressure is not that high, the spacecraft itself is rather large. I have an air compressor in my garage that holds 100 PSI, but it's only about a foot in diameter. These craft are considerable larger, and while the pressure is lower, when multiplied by the area it gets big, as in tons of force. The shell has to be able to withstand the strain, and it probably doesn't weigh any more than my air compressor.


Robotic Friction Stir Welding Automation - Courtesy of CRIQ
To my surprise, I found they are using friction stir welding, which is kind of a bizarre technique. Watching the way aluminum will gum up a file or a grindstone might give you some idea of why it works.

Update: Jack provided this snippet from a different Wikipedia article:

Friction welding (FRW) is a solid-state welding process that generates heat through mechanical friction between work pieces in relative motion to one another, with the addition of a lateral force called "upset" to plastically displace and fuse the materials. Technically, because no melt occurs, friction welding is not actually a welding process in the traditional sense, but a forging technique

Update November 2020 replaced missing video.

Yvonne Craig

Bipolar Orion Slave Girl

Actress Yvonne Craig, who is best known for playing Batgirl (and alter ego Barbara Gordon) on the third season of the ’60s Batman TV series, has died at the age of 78. - Heavy Metal

She also played an Orion Slave Girl on Star Trek (video clip above).  I love her last line in that clip (2:30).

Precision Attitude Determination Subsystem (PADS)

A Marine fires a TOW (tube-launched optically-tracked wire-guided) anti-tank missile during a live-fire demonstration, March 30, 2015, as part of a military exercise at Camp Adazi, Latvia.

Cool photo, looks like it could be some kind of Sci-Fi death ray weapon. Then I notice the odd bar-shaped box on top of the site, the one with the two rounded ends, the thing that looks like it could be a film magazine for a movie camera. Turns out it is a Precision Attitude Determination Subsystem (PADS). Supposedly it uses GPS. If that's the case, I'm guessing the two round compartments on the ends hold GPS antennaes and the length is there to give them enough separation so that their difference in altitude is measurable. Why do you need something like that? Because you could be shooting at something that was 5 miles away.

Looking for info about this device is what led me to the Orion Attitude Control Motor.

Orion Attitude Control Motor

NASA Tests Orion Launch Abort System (LAS) Attitude Control Motor (ACM)
This is a solid rocket motor. It weighs 1700 pound. It has one charge and one combustion chamber with eight valves and eight nozzles. Once ignited it burns until it is exhausted. It is used to control the attitude, or orientation, of the Orion spacecraft. In normal operation it is used to orient the spacecraft in preparation for re-entry. It would also be used in case of emergency during launch when the spacecraft is separated from the booster.

Update August 2015. Replaced missing video.

Pic of the Day

Fort Irwin, Calif., Feb. 25, 2015. Armored personnel carrier. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Richard W. Jones Jr.

Somewhere in the Mojave desert. Could just as well be on Antares. Or the shoulder of Orion.

Pics

White Sands Missile Range, N.M. Dec. 3, 2014. An A-10 on dirt. Must be really hard dirt to keep those tiny little wheels from sinking in. U.S. Air Force Photo by Ryan Callaghan

Indian Space Research Organisation's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle-Mark III (GSLV-Mark III) lifts off carrying Crew Module Atmospheric Re-entry Experiment (CARE) from the east coast island of Sriharikota, India, on Dec. 18, 2014. Xinhua/ISRO

Looks like Orion might have some competition.

South Korean Frigate picked up a little ice on the way to Russia's port city Vladivostok. Photo: huanqiu.com

Reentry

Bill is... concerned, about this reentry trajectory.

I got to thinking about the Orion spacecraft the other day, in particular splashdown and recovery of the capsule. The US Navy had a ship standing by and they were able to successfully retrieve the capsule, which is good. But then I got to wondering about how accurate was the splashdown? Was it within a few yards of the predicted point of impact, or a few miles? Or should we be talking about hundreds of miles? I mean the thing is traveling 5 miles per second, it wouldn't take a very big mistake to have you end up on the wrong side of the world. Even if you miss your landing site by only 100 miles, it is still going to take the recovery ship hours to get to you, and that could lead to a sticky situation. One way to compensate would be to deploy several ships in the vicinity, but that would raise the cost. Sending even a small Navy ship out has got to be expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if a destroyer cost something like a million dollars a day to operate. Makes that million dollars a year to field a soldier in Afghanistan look like a real bargain.

MX re-entry vehicles over Kwajalein, following their launch aboard an MX missile some 30 minutes earlier from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, October 1985.

     So I started poking around, looking for answers, and not finding much of anything. And then, snap, I realized this is probably all classified because of nuclear warheads and ICBM-s (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles). You don't need to be real accurate with ICBM-s because, well, nuclear bombs. Still, you would like to be within a mile or so of your target. You can bet the military has spent billions on this very problem. When I started looking into this from the ICBM angle I found all kinds of information, everything that is except how accurate they are.
    The big factors affecting reentry are the time when fire your retro-rockets, and how much you slow down. You want to be accurate about this because a little too much or too little, too soon or too late, can easily kill you. But after you've fired the retro-rockets there isn't much you can do except pray.
    Except I seem to recall something about Orion being able to adjust it's attitude, which could easily affect it's trajectory, except how can you tell? GPS will be useless as the fireball you generate as you plunge into the atmosphere pretty much ruins any chance to sending or receiving any radio communications. Well, how about inertial guidance? That used to require big heavy chunks of equipment that was marginally accurate and marginally reliable, but I think we've gotten better at it. So it's not inconceivable that Orion was able to steer itself quite accurately.
    Once you deploy the parachutes, you kind of lose your steering capability, but you also become much more visible, so the pickup crew should be able to find you. As if they haven't been tracking you on radar since you appeared over the horizon ten minutes ago.

Minuteman III attacks Kwajalein
This video has some odd bits, but it also has some good shots.

Other posts about Orion. Most of them are about the spaceship, only a couple are about the airplane.
A couple of other posts about reentry.
Some posts about inertial navigation.

Update January 14, 2015. Just received an automated reply from NASA about this issue. As you might expect it contained no useful information.

Orion

Orion Trial By Fire - A quick overview of the recent test flight, from before the flight.

Those tiles look like they got a little warm, but the flag is still intact. Let's hear it for heat resistant paint.  

The video prompted me to read up on the Van Allen radiation belts. They're kind of weird and reading didn't help. The explanations I found were mostly impenetrable. Or maybe I was just tired. I'll stew on it for a bit (take a nap) and we'll see if they make any more sense on the far side.

Sky Writing

AD - Chevrolet Motor Company - Sky Billboards (1935)
Yes, I know, NASA's Orion spacecraft went on a test flight yesterday, and here I am still stuck in the past. It's all IAman's fault, that and radial aircraft engines, like they used in the Corsair and the B-17.

I like that the pilot's audience is wearing heels to climb on the wing. Very important to look your best when climbing around on machinery. The plane might be a Waco or a New Standard D-25. Found on Vintage Aeroplane Writer.

Update January 2022 replaced wrong video. Somehow the original got replaced something entirely different.

Orion Spacecraft

Orion as it will appear in space for the Exploration Flight Test-1 attached to a Delta IV second stage.