What's happening in space (that's interesting)

Related to Hidden Figures, on the work of Katherine Johnson: “The Woman the Mercury Astronauts Couldn’t Do Without”

[quote]Well into her 90s, Katherine Goble could recall that winking dot of light in the sky as vividly as if it were still October 1957. She stood outside in the unseasonably warm autumn nights of that year and tracked the shiny pinpoint as it moved low across the horizon. Throughout America, citizens turned their eyes skyward with a mixture of terror and wonder, eager to know if the 184-pound metal sphere launched into orbit by the Russians could see them as they tried to see it from their backyards. They surfed the radio dial trying to lock onto the artificial moon’s beeping, its sound like an otherworldly cricket.

While Sputnik circled overhead every 98 minutes, Americans demanded to know how their country, so dominant in its victory in the last war, could have been surprised and usurped by a “backward peasantry” like the U.S.S.R. Fear battled humiliation in the American psyche. “First in space means first, period,” declared Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. “Second in space is second in everything.”

From where Katherine Goble was sitting, upstairs in Langley’s hangar, the Soviet move looked rather like a new beginning. Skies all over the world bore witness to four decades of successful Langley research, from passenger jets to bombers, transport planes to fighter aircraft. With supersonic military aircraft a reality, and the industry moving forward on commercial supersonic transport, it appeared that the “revolutionary advances for atmospheric aircraft” had run their course. Furthermore, Langley’s high-speed flight operations were officially ended by a 1958 NACA headquarters edict. As Katherine and her colleagues in the Flight Research Division wondered what was next, Sputnik provided them with the answer.[/quote]

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/804399787047002116

“Loss of Progress occurred at an altitude of about 190 km (118 miles),” Roscosmos said.

The six-member crew aboard the station is not in any danger and has enough supplies for several months, NASA said.

Thursday’s launch was the fourth failed cargo run to the station in the past two years, including one previous Progress failure.

Is that the same rocket design that takes astronauts to the space station?

The Soyuz design has been used to launch both manned and unmanned spacecraft. But, yes:

After the U.S. Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, Soyuz rockets became the only launch vehicle able to transport astronauts to the International Space Station.

Eek! Ok that is very scary.

They don’t know for sure what it was though, plus I can’t remember that last time a manned Soyuz launch failed and a crew was lost. That config also has an escape system for capsule.

I’m glad it was unmanned and doesn’t create a dire situation for the ISS crew, because that allows me enjoy that my first reading didn’t register the upper-case P.

I thought “loss of progress” was a new variant on “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.

I’m not sure how accurate it is to say that the Progress robots are the same as the manned Soyuz capsules. They share the same chassis and the same launch vehicle (the Soyuz rocket), but I’m not sure how far the commonality goes beyond that.

Certainly the internal components are radically different: the Soyuz crew module has a reentry module, while that space in the Progress is used for additional fuel storage; there’s no heat shields, no parachute, no life support, no controls, etc…

And most of all, the Soyuz has an abort system.

There was a super-close call on the pad with Soyuz T-10-1 back in the 70s. It’s the only time a launch escape system has actually been used with a crew aboard.

The launch control team activated the escape system but the control cables had already burned through, and the Soyuz crew could not activate or control the escape system themselves. The LES could be activated by radio command, but it required two launch personnel in a building some distance away to press two buttons within 5 seconds of each other after receiving a code word. This procedure took 20 seconds to perform, by which time the entire booster and pad were in flames.

Like the US, the Soviets have had two fatal spaceflight incidents (as opposed to, say, the Apollo 1 pad fire), both Soyuz, and both at the end of their flights. Soyuz 1 in 1967 had a cascade of failures, culminating in the parachute not opening. Soyuz 11 (1971) had a cabin vent valve open during service module separation, resulting in the only deaths so far actually in space.

There have been a number of other Soyuz incidents, some resulting in injuries, including Soyuz 5, where the service module didn’t separate but eventually broke off during reentry; Soyuz 18a, which had a second-stage issue that caused the rocket to point back towards earth and trigger an emergency reentry; Soyuz 23 which broke through a frozen lake on landing; and three cases of failures resulting in ballistic reentries and hard landings.

Of all the Soyuz models (many of which carried unmanned spacecraft), there have been 939 successful launches and 24 failures.

Sad news:

Man fuck 2016

I keep hearing that but I can’t see 2017 being anything but exponentially worse.

RIP John.

The Japanese Kounotori 6 is heading to the space station with supplies and a 2,296-foot long electrified whip.

The idea is to redirect space junk so it falls into the atmosphere to burn up.

This probably doesn’t belong in a thread that actually discusses - you know - FACTS, but we don’t have any crazy conspiracy threads outside of P&R. Anyway, good news! A planet that doesn’t exist almost certainly won’t collide with the Earth in October! I guess I ought to start saving for Christmas after all.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/05/508354203/mystery-radio-waves-are-coming-from-a-dwarf-galaxy-far-far-away-scientists-say?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170105

Thanks for the article. But ugh. I’m so effing sick of this stupid headline. OMG SCIENSTISTS HAVE DETECTED MYSTERIOUS SIGNALS FROM A GALAXY FAR FAR AWAY (LOL ALIENS AND ALSO A STAR WARS REFERENCE GET IT?! LOL).

It’s always the SAME story. Signals detected, sometimes they know what it is sometimes they don’t, but there always has to be the paragraph about how it’s not aliens. So it’s not aliens but you go for the same worn out obnoxious OMG ITS ALIENS headline every time. STOP IT!

Sorry. Apparently this is a peeve of mine :)

Can’t wait till Elon lands on mars. Gonna be historic!

Supernova visible to naked eye upcoming when a binary system merges.

Only gotta wait 5 more years or so!

@Eric_Majkut This headline is just for you:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/after-two-years-of-study-chilean-officials-cant-explain-ufo-sighting/

Hey at least that one might actually be aliens :P