Three cheers for Senator Nelson and Jim Bridenstine.
At one point, during his opening statement, Nelson praised Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator under President Donald Trump. The irony could not be more obvious. Three-and-a-half years ago, during Bridenstine’s confirmation hearing, Nelson, then-ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, turned it into a kind of star chamber. He and other committee Democrats condemned Bridenstine for a variety of sins, not the least of which was being at the time a politician. Nelson, who subsequently lost his senate seat, is a retired politician now up for the same job. In the interim, he and Bridenstine have come to an understanding. Bridenstine has warmly endorsed Nelson’s nomination. Nelson pledged to seek his predecessor’s advice from time to time.
I doubt that the outgoing Trump boss praised the incoming Biden guy and vice-versa in any other agency
No citations needed I agree with you.
I suppose this was inevitable but this had to be one of the easiest purchasing decisions in NASA history, so I doubt anything will come of it other 3-6 month delay in the moon landing.
The mainstream media did a poor job covering just how better than SpaceX proposal was at 1/2 the cost than Blue Origins or Dynetics. I read the Nasa report on why SpaceX was picked and it is overwhelming.
The TL:DR for the next two excellent articles was the SpaceX bid their Mars rocket (Starship) to go to the moon. Starship is designed to carry more than dozen folks and in 100+ day flight to the Mars.
The contract calls for the astronauts to be launch from the SLS and the Orion spacecraft will then either go to the ISS or dock directly with the Starship which will land on the moon and then return to LEO.
However, it is pretty obvious that SpaceX has it own capability to launch astronauts into space making all the NASA hardware redundant, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to have a couple of options of putting people into orbit.
Imagine calculating this with a slide rule.
Gendal
4377
Thanks, I kept meaning to look into this, because I couldn’t’ figure out what NASA was going to do with the SLS. None of the initial reports really covered anything other than SpaceX getting selected.
They really, really want to justify their pork barrels. Because that whole plan makes zero sense to me.
Before I played Kerbal, I would have had a very very hard time figuring this out with a computer. Now after Kerbal, I think if was I force to I could managed to do it with a slide rule, plus access to the internet and all of the formulas. My understanding is that (Dr.) Buzz Aldrin helped worked out the equations or probably more accurately made sure the astronauts understood.
Matt_W
4379
Pretty sure I could do the trajectory in that video by hand with pen and paper (because I’ve also played a bunch of KSP.) No slide rule required because the equations are all quadratic–no logarithms or higher order polynomials.
Of course, the trajectory in that video is patched conics, while the real trajectory is more complex because the moon’s ROI is pretty large compared to its distance from earth and patched conics isn’t a great approximation. The NASA engineers produced the Newtonian solution using (presumably) some sort of regression. And they also accounted for the variations in the earth’s and moon’s gravitational field caused by its lumpiness, which they’d probed with earlier orbital missions. All of that stuff actually did require slide rules :)
Congratulation to Crew 1 on a successful mission.
SpaceX did probably the best job covering the return of astronauts I seen in decades, even if it was 3 AM EDT. There were some great infrared shots from their aircraft, and watching the parachutes deploy and landing as very cool.
The pucker factor watching the rentry was pretty high. I’ve lost track of how many ships and kerbals I’ve lost in re-entry.
Sometime between noon and 8pm local time (CDT)
Is it just me or does that rocket remind anyone else of classic 1950-60s movie sci-fi rocket designs?
RichVR
4385
It does. And it lands the same way. Uh… mostly.
Yes. And it should therefore always be called a rocket ship.
SpaceX at least got one rocket launch on Starwars day.
Some crazy maneuvering at the end. Falcon boosters are like cats, very agile and come with 9 lives.
Matt_W
4388
Is there any video from Apollo missions inside the LEM on the lunar surface with the astronauts out of their spacesuits?
SN15 manages a soft landing, currently a little bit on fire :)
Edit: Fire looks like it’s out… Next stop MARS.
Yaaaay! Go Humanity! w00p w00p!
Video of the starship landing.
Now, what will we do for cool videos of rapid unscheduled disassembly? Perhaps Blue Origins and SLS will provide a few.
