If they’re talking about the entire payload being whipped around, I don’t see it working. The g forces required would be immense compared to a normal launch, plus you’re dealing with g forces on two vectors instead of just 1.
That’s no moon
Ohhh I hope it really is a moon! Would be so cool. Wonder how long til they get Hubble time on it.
My impression is that they’re intended to use the centrifuge as an energy storage device, and then use some kind of electrical launch system. (I’m gonna guess a rail launcher of some kind.) My workplace does this–we use an enormous amount of power for 6-8 seconds of experiment. Between experiments, we spend a few minutes spinning up a huge flywheel on a motor/generator to store the energy needed for the “shot”. Regardless, if they can only generate 4800 kph, which is about 1.3 km/s of delta-V, that’s quite far from the ~9.5 km/s they’ll need to achieve orbit.
There is a slingatron concept, that actually does spin the payload itself. (article selected at random).
It’s been deemed impractical for various reasons over the years, but seems to get some renewed interest occasionally. I think the existence of ever-smaller solid-state electronics has rekindled interest, since it becomes more theoretically possible to build a useful payload that can withstand the g forces.
This is super cool
We could see the Falcon 9 landing in SF which was pretty amazing, especially since I hadn’t quite realized (but suspected) that’s what it was.
— Alan
Am I the only one still blown away that they’re landing a booster and using it again.
Space is really, really empty.
If the Moon Were Only 1 pixel - A Tediously Accurate Scale Model of the Solar System
http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
And apropos of nothing but cool nonetheless:
Edit: One more thing.
Moons can have moons. They are called moonmoons. No, seriously. Moonmoons.
Damnit Moonmoon…
Huh.
The rocket had taken off for the International Space Station (ISS) when it suffered a problem with its booster.
The crew had to return in “ballistic descent mode”, Nasa tweeted, which it explained was “a sharper angle of landing compared to normal”.
This is crazy, glad they made it back to earth in one piece.
Will be interesting to see the fallout, I’m assuming there won’t be anyone to replace the current ISS crew for a while, it’ll probably have to be empty for some time. Commercial crewed flights are still a long ways off and I don’t see Souyz program bouncing back any time soon either.
Russia’s quality sure is stellar lately. I mean that and holes in modules. WTF.
I’ve seen this on every report about the accident, but forgive me if this is an ignorant question: isn’t every capsule return a ballistic descent? Does it mean they didn’t use parachutes? (They did.) That the retros didn’t fire? (Not sure about this one.)
Yes, every return is ballistic. In this case, I think “ballistic desent” means there was no re-entry burn from the service module; the re-entry capsule just continued on the same ballistic trajectory it was on when the second stage failed, so the spot where the lander came down was unplanned.
I don’t know what happened on the station, but the Soyuz program is ancient. Did they use Soyuz capsules as parts of the actual ISS?
Not technically, but there’s been a Soyuz attached the station the whole time it’s been occupied as a “lifeboat” in case there’s a failure of some kind and the astronauts need to evacuate. Since 2009, there have been two attached in order to increase the size of the permanent crew to 6. The first crew of the station was carried up on Soyuz TM-31 in November of 2000.
Scott Manley (of course) answers my question here (at 5:40):
Not the best quality, but I think this is an awesome picture…