Space News and Discussions

weatheriscool
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SpaceX Targets First Starship Orbital Flight in August
July 29, 2021 by Brian Wang

SpaceX is done testing Booster 3 and is working on Starship 20 and Booster 4. SpaceX Starship 4 could be ready for orbital flight testing by August 5th. Felix at What About It? is indicating the activity and rumors of a SpaceX orbital launch test target date of August 5th. This would likely be the start of fueling tests and other pre-launch activity.

Above is a rendering of Starship 20 with its heat shield stack onto Booster 4. Rendering from RGV Aerial Photography.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/07/s ... ugust.html
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raklian
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Not sure whether to believe it but I'm leaving this here anyway.




The company that is supposedly going to build it - Orbital Assembly Corporation.

https://twitter.com/OACspace
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weatheriscool
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Space station situation with Russian module misfire more serious than stated: report
Source: Space.com
Last week, a Russian module accidentally pushed the International Space Station out of place. Now, a NASA flight director has revealed that the event was more serious than NASA initially reported.

On Thursday (July 29) morning, Russia's long-awaited research module Nauka docked with the space station. But a few hours later, the module accidentally fired its thrusters, briefly tilting the space station and causing it to lose what engineers call "attitude control."

However, while NASA said on Twitter and officials repeated during public comments about the incident that the orbiting lab tilted about 45 degrees, that appears not to have been the full story. According to reporting by The New York Times, Zebulon Scoville, the NASA flight director leading mission control in Houston during the event, says the station tilted far more severely than just 45 degrees.

According to Scoville, the event has "been a little incorrectly reported." He said that after Nauka incorrectly fired up, the station "spun one-and-a-half revolutions — about 540 degrees — before coming to a stop upside down. The space station then did a 180-degree forward flip to get back to its original orientation," according to the report.

Read more: https://www.space.com/nauka-module-spac ... re-serious
weatheriscool
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SpaceX Super Heavy with Raptor Engines for Orbital Flight This Month
August 2, 2021 by Brian Wang
The SpaceX Super Heavy booster has been loaded with Raptor engines. The Starship SN20 has most of its heat shield.






https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/08/s ... month.html
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raklian
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Booster 4 rollout to the pad for testing (cryogenic and static fire). Elon Musk is tailing along in his black cowboy hat. :)



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raklian
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To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
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wjfox
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This is a press release from a University, so I think it's okay to post the full article as opposed to an excerpt.

------------

A bug’s life: millimetre-tall mountains on neutron stars

New models of neutron stars show that their tallest mountains may be only fractions of millimetres high, due to the huge gravity on the ultra-dense objects. The research is presented today at the National Astronomy Meeting 2021.

Neutron stars are some of the densest objects in the Universe: they weigh about as much as the Sun, yet measure only around 10km across, similar in size to a large city.

Because of their compactness, neutron stars have an enormous gravitational pull around a billion times stronger than the Earth. This squashes every feature on the surface to miniscule dimensions, and means that the stellar remnant is an almost perfect sphere.

Whilst they are billions of times smaller than on Earth, these deformations from a perfect sphere are nevertheless known as mountains. The team behind the work, led by PhD student Fabian Gittins at the University of Southampton, used computational modelling to build realistic neutron stars and subject them to a range of mathematical forces to identify how the mountains are created.

The team also studied the role of the ultra-dense nuclear matter in supporting the mountains, and found that the largest mountains produced were only a fraction of a millimetre tall, one hundred times smaller than previous estimates.

Fabian comments, “For the past two decades, there has been much interest in understanding how large these mountains can be before the crust of the neutron star breaks, and the mountain can no longer be supported.”

Past work has suggested that neutron stars can sustain deviations from a perfect sphere of up to a few parts in one million, implying the mountains could be as large as a few centimetres. These calculations assumed the neutron star was strained in such a way that the crust was close to breaking at every point. However the new models indicate that such conditions are not physically realistic.

Fabian adds: “These results show how neutron stars truly are remarkably spherical objects. Additionally, they suggest that observing gravitational waves from rotating neutron stars may be even more challenging than previously thought.”

Although they are single objects, due to their intense gravitation, spinning neutron stars with slight deformations should produce ripples in the fabric of spacetime known as gravitational waves. Gravitational waves from rotations of single neutron stars have yet to be observed, although future advances in extremely sensitive detectors such as advanced LIGO and Virgo may hold the key to probing these unique objects.

https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/resear ... tron-stars


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Credit: ESO / L. Calçada
Licence type Attribution (CC BY 4.0)
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wjfox
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raklian wrote: Sun Aug 01, 2021 3:13 am Not sure whether to believe it but I'm leaving this here anyway.




The company that is supposedly going to build it - Orbital Assembly Corporation.

https://twitter.com/OACspace

Sounds like another Mars One.
weatheriscool
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Yuli Ban
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Biggest ever rocket is assembled briefly in Texas
The American SpaceX company has stacked the biggest rocket ever constructed.

The vehicle's two segments - an upper-stage called Starship and a booster called Super Heavy - were connected together at the firm's Starbase R&D facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

Standing roughly 120m (400ft) in height, the SpaceX rocket dwarfs any previous launch system.

When it eventually lifts off, it will produce about twice the thrust of the vehicles that sent men to the Moon.

The main engines on Apollo's famous Saturn V rockets delivered some 35 meganewtons (nearly 8 million pounds of force) off the pad. The new SpaceX Super Heavy booster should achieve around 70 meganewtons.

A massive crane was needed to join the two segments together. They were held in position for an hour before then being separated again.
Exciting that the biggest rocket ever exists right now.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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