US Launch Vehicles and Spacecraft: Discussion & News

Tsavo Lion wrote:The United States has done away with the RD-180 and is preparing a space weapon against Russia

This was coming- now RD-180 makers must find other buyers or something else to produce.

Spoiler warning: It's a YouTube video

Same bullshit as always

Rd-180 was spotted above Phillipines 2 days ago.

R u sure? It could be the RQ-180.

Good...

Russia has been suggesting to the US an agreement to ban weapons from space, so if the US are so dumb as to start work on space weapons then go right ahead.

The US depends on space so when Russia starts making weapons to counter the US then a lot of those systems are going to be focused on destroying objects in orbit rendering space a new no go area for the US.

The US started the ABM race by tearing up the ABM treaty which led directly to S-400 and S-500 and Nudol, as well as a range of other things like Poseidon and Thunderbird and Avangard... and Zircon to deal with AEGIS cruisers in the arctic and Pacific and Atlantic oceans protecting the US... and who knows what else....

This is going to spur development in other areas of weapons... it will also boost their work on anti satellite weapons too...

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft with civilian crew lands near Florida

https://tass.com/science/1339505

Crew Dragon Endeavour spaceship lands in Atlantic Ocean near US State of Florida

The launch of the third crew aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station has been scheduled for November 10

NEW YORK, November 9. /TASS/. The SpaceX Crew Dragon manned spaceship with the second crew aboard has landed in the Atlantic Ocean off Florida’s coast, according to a live stream on the NASA website.

Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft, with four astronauts aboard: Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur of NASA, Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) automatically at 14:05 Eastern Time on Monday (22:05 Moscow time) and landed in the Atlantic Ocean at 22:33 Eastern Time (6:33 Moscow time on Tuesday).

SpaceX Crew-2 reached the ISS in April to join Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov, NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Mark Vande Hei, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.

The launch of the third crew aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) has been scheduled for November 10, with docking due at 3:10 Moscow time on November 12. Assigned to the mission are NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, and Kayla Barron, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer.

https://tass.com/science/1358949

Space X launched a Dragon spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday, TASS correspondent reported from the site.

A Falcon-9 carrier rocket blasted off a launch site at Cape Canaveral in Florida at 05:07 am EDT (13:07 Moscow time). The spacecraft will deliver about 3.3 tonnes of cargo to the ISS, including food, supplies, equipment for the crew and materials for various experiments. This is the 24th Commercial Resupply Services mission.

https://tass.com/science/1378733

This 50-second animation provides an auditory as well as visual glimpse at data collected by Juno’s Waves instrument as the spacecraft flew past the Jovian moon Ganymede on June 7, 2021. The abrupt change to higher frequencies around the midpoint of the recording represents the spacecraft's move from one region of Ganymede's magnetosphere to another.

The audio track is made by shifting the frequency of those emissions — which range from 10 to 50 kHz — into the lower audio range

The animation is shorter than the duration of Juno's flyby because the Waves data is edited onboard to reduce telemetry requirements.

https://naukatehnika.com/pervyij-orbitalnyij-polet-starship-mozhet-sostoyatsya-v-marte.html

in March #Ракетостроение and astronautics Marcia Dunn Yesterday at 16:07 303 0 On Thursday, Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX, said that the first orbital flight of the future starship - the most powerful rocket ever built in the world - could take place in a month or two. Not without problems, but by the end of this year, Starship will be launched into Earth's orbit, Musk is sure. Musk unveiled his first major Starship update in more than two years, standing next to a 119-meter rocket at SpaceX's Spaceport in Texas. He admitted that "Actually, it's hard to believe that this is real." NASA plans to use Musk's reusable starship to land astronauts on the moon as early as 2025. Meanwhile, the founder of SpaceX has repeatedly voiced his dream - to create a whole fleet of starships to colonize Mars. SpaceX's first orbiter, the SN20, is mounted on its massive Super Heavy 4 accelerator at Starbase's facility near Boca Chica in South Texas on Feb. 10, 2022. In the meantime, the first Starship launches will solve a more mundane task - to deliver Musk's Internet satellites, called Starlinks, into orbit. As Elon Musk put it: "There will probably be a few bumps on the road, but we plan to smooth it out through satellite missions and test launches of the ship before taking people on board." The Super Heavy launch vehicle with the first stage of SpaceX has not yet launched. But a futuristic bullet-shaped steel starship located on top of a hill and serving as an upper stage was able to successfully launch and land on its own last May after a series of explosions. The rocket rose to a height of more than 10 kilometers. SpaceX is awaiting approval from the Federal Aviation Administration before proceeding with the next phase of the Starship program: going into orbit. Musk said he expects approval in March and that the rocket should be ready to fly by then. That means the launch will take place in the next couple of months, he added. Musk said Starship launches could be moved to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida if the FAA doesn't give permission. But that would delay the first orbital launch by more than six months, he said. In addition to Cape Canaveral in Florida and the southern tip of Texas near Boca Chick, Musk said, starships could eventually be launched from floating ocean platforms anywhere in the world. He envisions spacecraft being launched three times a day, using rapid reuse and the ability to replenish fuel at orbiting space refueling stations for more distant missions, such as a mission to Mars. According to him, the first refueling test may take place by the end of next year. Musk estimates that launching Starship could cost less than $10 million, maybe even just a few million dollars, which would lower the price of space launches. He called it an "insanely low" and "ridiculously good" price by current space standards. Starship already has one private customer: a Japanese entrepreneur who bought a flight around the moon and plans to take a dozen artists with him. Musk has hinted that there are other stakeholders in space travel on a starship ready to buy tickets.


https://naukatehnika.com/doletet-do-marsa-za-45-dnej-pomozhet-lazer.html

To fly to Mars in 45 days will help the laser #Ракетостроение and astronautics Roman Barsky Yesterday at 19:13 254 0 The main problem of the colonization of Mars, which will have to be solved in the near future, is the question - how quickly to deliver people to the Red Planet? A group of researchers began to search for solutions to this problem and put forward an extraordinary idea, they propose to use the laser installed on Earth to send ships to Mars in just 45 days. Note that at the moment the flight from our planet to Mars takes at least 115 days. A team of scientists from McGill University (Canada) proposes to use a laser array installed on Earth to power the orbiting spacecraft. Research into the viability of such a concept was conducted on behalf of NASA. Phys.org writes about it. A huge laser located on Earth will heat hydrogen plasma in a chamber behind the spacecraft, creating thrust and delivering it to Mars, whose atmosphere will use aerobraking. Thus, in the future, it would be possible to send payloads to colonists or even transport people. It is assumed that such a project will involve an array of ground-based lasers of unprecedented size (diameter 10 m) and power (100 MW), which will be made possible thanks to current developments in photonic laser technology. The heating chamber and its associated regenerative cooling and fuel management systems are key design elements that are particularly emphasized in the new study. Astrodynamics and the extreme aerocapsulation maneuver required to reach Mars are also analyzed in detail. The ability to withstand much larger laser fluxes allows for a combination of high thrust and high specific impulse, making this approach advantageous compared to a laser-electric motor and meeting a parameter limit similar to gas-core nuclear thermal rockets, the researchers said. The cargo, previously launched into Earth orbit, will be equipped with a reflector that directs a laser beam from the Earth into a heating chamber containing hydrogen plasma. When the core of the plasma is heated to 40,000 degrees Kelvin, the gas around the core reaches 10,000 K and, breaking out of the nozzle, creates enough thrust to push the ship. Such tremors will occur at intervals of 58 minutes. This will allow the ship to accelerate to 17 km / s. To the lunar orbit at this speed can be reached in just eight hours, and on approach to Mars in a month and a half, the speed will still be 16 km / s. To bring the cargo to the 150-km orbit of Mars is a more difficult task, since the proposed ship does not have a chemical engine like rockets (otherwise it is not possible to take the required amount of cargo). And until the inhabitants of Mars build a similar laser system for catching parcels from Earth, the only way is a risky aerodynamic capture maneuver. In this case, during the descent, the device will experience a load of 8 g, and the heat from friction will be higher than traditional protective materials are able to withstand. It remains to be hoped for those that are in the development phase. The advantages of the proposed laser-thermal system include an extremely favorable ratio of mass to energy - in the range of 0.001-0.01 kg / kW, better than that of advanced atomic propulsion systems due to the fact that the energy source remains on Earth, and the transmitted flow is processed by an inflatable low-mass reflector, the authors of the idea explained. The first humans will get to Mars, most likely, without the use of laser-thermal propulsion technology. Space X founder Elon Musk is "80-90% sure" that the company's super-heavy launch vehicle will be able to enter orbit as early as next year, and by 2024 it will be ready to perform an unmanned flight with cargo to Mars.

Источник контента: https://naukatehnika.com/doletet-do-marsa-za-45-dnej-pomozhet-lazer.html
naukatehnika.com

Cygnus cargo spacecraft docks with ISS — NASA

https://tass.com/science/1407129

SpaceX Crew-5 boards the ISS – NASA

Crew Dragon docked automatically

NEW YORK, October 7. /TASS/. SpaceX Crew-5 boarded the International Space Station after the Crew Dragon spacecraft docked with the ISS on Thursday. The broadcast is conducted on the website of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The docking of Crew Dragon took place automatically at 00:01 a.m. Moscow time. After more than an hour and a half, the ship's hatch was opened.

The crew members - NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Kassada, Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata - moved to the ISS.

On Wednesday, Kikina became the first Russian cosmonaut to travel to the ISS on a Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of a cross-flight program between NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos. Initially, the launch was scheduled for October 3, but NASA experts postponed it twice due to Hurricane Ian. The crew will stay on the ISS for 145 days.

On July 15, Roscosmos announced the signing of an agreement on joint cross-flights by Russian and US cosmonauts to the ISS. The commander of the Roscosmos cosmonaut team, Oleg Kononenko, said the agreement envisaged three flights by Russian cosmonauts on the US spacecraft Crew Dragon. Under the cross-flight program US astronaut Frank Rubio set off for the ISS aboard the Russian spacecraft K. E. Tsiolkovsky (Soyuz MS-22) from the Baikonur cosmodrome on September 21.

https://tass.com/science/1519053

Starship appears to have exploded – SpaceX

https://tass.com/science/1708239

Crew Dragon spaceship carrying Axiom Mission crew docks with International Space Station

https://tass.com/science/1735011

Interesting that some here are so keen to post about Russian failures that this piece of news was ignored... almost a month ago this happened...

US Lunar Lander Peregrine Terminates Unsuccessful Moon Mission
07:35 GMT 19.01.2024 (Updated: 07:36 GMT 19.01.2024)

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - US lunar lander Peregrine has ended its operation following post-launch problems and failing to make a soft landing on the lunar surface as planned, the Astrobotic Company announced on Friday.
On January 8, United Launch Alliance's Vulcan booster carrying Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander was launched on schedule from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
"As expected, Astrobotic lost telemetry with the Peregrine spacecraft at around 3:50 p.m. EST [20:50, GMT]. While this indicates the vehicle completed its controlled re-entry over open water in the South Pacific at 4:04 p.m. EST, we await independent confirmation from government entities," the company wrote on X.

The Peregrine lander was scheduled to touch down on the Moon on February 23 carrying NASA scientific equipment and other cargo, including people's DNA to be symbolically buried on the Moon.
Due to an emergency situation, the spacecraft's lunar landing was canceled and the company decided to end the mission with a controlled insertion of the probe into the Earth's atmosphere.
Peregrine was part of NASA efforts to return the United States to the Moon within the Artemis program. Astrobotic's contract with NASA for its development was estimated at $108 million. Apart from Peregrine, the company is building another, more capacious Griffin lander, also under a contract with NASA. It is expected to be launched to the Earth’s satellite at the end of this year.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240119/us-lunar-lander-peregrine-terminates-unsuccessful-moon-mission-1116264246.html

GarryB wrote:.
Astrobotic's contract with NASA for its development was estimated at $108 million

.. and this is twice as much as the entire cost of developing Luna-25.

Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying Roscosmos’ Borisov undocks from ISS — NASA

https://tass.com/science/1757945