[DrCaleb]

llama66 llama66:

Time to build a Space Shuttle-esque replacement.

One that isn't corrupted into having all it's bits manufactured in all of the 48 States to appease politicians. $1B per launch is just not a sustainable cost.

[llama66]

No, its not.

[DrCaleb]

Speaking of overpriced and underwhelming projects . . .

$1:

There’s a new report on SLS rocket management, and it’s pretty brutal

Boeing has been building the core stage of NASA's Space Launch System rocket for the better part of this decade, and the process has not always gone smoothly, with significant overruns and multiyear delays. A new report from NASA's inspector general makes clear just how badly the development process has gone, laying the blame mostly at the feet of Boeing.

"We found Boeing’s poor performance is the main reason for the significant cost increases and schedule delays to developing the SLS core stage," the report, signed by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin, states. "Specifically, the project’s cost and schedule issues stem primarily from management, technical, and infrastructure issues directly related to Boeing’s performance."

As of August 2018, the report says, NASA has spent a total of $11.9 billion on the SLS. Even so, the rocket's critical core stage will be delivered more than three years later than initially planned—at double the anticipated cost. Overall, there are a number of top-line findings in this report, which cast a mostly if not completely negative light on Boeing and, to a lesser extent, NASA and its most expensive spaceflight project.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10 ... ty-brutal/

[BartSimpson]

Meanwhile the jackass from Tesla has a fucking car heading for deep space because he had no problem at all producing a cost effective and reusable launch system.

[Tricks]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Meanwhile the jackass from Tesla has a fucking car heading for deep space because he had no problem at all producing a cost effective and reusable launch system.

Seeing those rockets land back down so close to each other is actually mind blowing. What an amazing system.

[llama66]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Meanwhile the jackass from Tesla has a fucking car heading for deep space because he had no problem at all producing a cost effective and reusable launch system.

He's a smart jackass.

[DrCaleb]

I thought there were things that were impossible, until I saw this:

[DrCaleb]

$1:

A Soyuz crew makes an emergency landing after rocket fails


On Thursday in Kazakhstan, at 4:40am EDT, a Soyuz rocket took off carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin toward the International Space Station. The ascent proceeded normally until the separation of one of the rocket's booster stages, by which point the crew had already experienced microgravity.

Because the Soyuz spacecraft did not reach orbit at the point of this booster failure, the crew was forced to make a rapid ballistic descent likely under high g-forces. After about 20 minutes of uncertainty, Russian officials confirmed the crew were ok and had landed about 20km east of Dzhezkazgan, a city in central Kazakhstan. As rescue crews arrived, Hague and Ovchinin were reported in "good condition" and found out of the capsule.

Little additional information has been provided. Roscosmos, the Russian firm that operates the nation's space agency and is responsible for Soyuz launches, will not hold any news conferences today. The head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said a state commission has already been established to study the accident.

This failure raises serious questions about the future of the International Space Station, as, since the space shuttle's retirement in 2011, the Soyuz spacecraft and rocket were the only means by which crews have had to reach it. With Thursday's failed launch, just three people remain on the station: American astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor, German ISS Commander Alexander Gerst, and Russian Sergey Prokopyev.

It is not clear how long the Soyuz vehicle will be grounded or how long the current crew can remain in orbit. NASA's own transportation system, the commercial crew vehicles under development by SpaceX and Boeing, have yet to take uncrewed test flights to the station, and those are unlikely to occur before early 2019. The first crewed flights would not take place until several months after that, unless the space agency is willing to take additional risks with those missions. China has a human space flight capability, but it has no crew missions planned before 2020, and NASA is barred by Congress from working with the Chinese Space Agency.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10 ... ket-fails/

[DrCaleb]

$1:

An Outback Australian Observatory Detected 20 Mysterious Radio Bursts From Space in Just One Year

Way out in the Australian desert, a new observatory is making history. In a little more than a year, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) has detected a tremendous 20 of the mysterious signals known as fast radio bursts.

These are not new signals from the famous repeating fast radio burst source FRB 121102 - they are entirely new signals, from new sources. As such, they have nearly doubled the number of recorded fast radio burst sources.

They also include the brightest and closest fast radio bursts ever detected.

"We've also proved that fast radio bursts are coming from the other side of the Universe rather than from our own galactic neighbourhood," said astrophysicist Ryan Shannon of Swinburne University of Technology and OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of space's most intriguing mysteries. They are extremely powerful, generating as much energy as hundreds of millions of Suns.

But they are also extremely short, lasting just milliseconds; and most of them only occur once, without warning.

https://www.sciencealert.com/askap-dete ... ry-signals

[BartSimpson]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

$1:

A Soyuz crew makes an emergency landing after rocket fails


On Thursday in Kazakhstan, at 4:40am EDT, a Soyuz rocket took off carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin toward the International Space Station. The ascent proceeded normally until the separation of one of the rocket's booster stages, by which point the crew had already experienced microgravity.

Because the Soyuz spacecraft did not reach orbit at the point of this booster failure, the crew was forced to make a rapid ballistic descent likely under high g-forces. After about 20 minutes of uncertainty, Russian officials confirmed the crew were ok and had landed about 20km east of Dzhezkazgan, a city in central Kazakhstan. As rescue crews arrived, Hague and Ovchinin were reported in "good condition" and found out of the capsule.

Little additional information has been provided. Roscosmos, the Russian firm that operates the nation's space agency and is responsible for Soyuz launches, will not hold any news conferences today. The head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said a state commission has already been established to study the accident.

This failure raises serious questions about the future of the International Space Station, as, since the space shuttle's retirement in 2011, the Soyuz spacecraft and rocket were the only means by which crews have had to reach it. With Thursday's failed launch, just three people remain on the station: American astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor, German ISS Commander Alexander Gerst, and Russian Sergey Prokopyev.

It is not clear how long the Soyuz vehicle will be grounded or how long the current crew can remain in orbit. NASA's own transportation system, the commercial crew vehicles under development by SpaceX and Boeing, have yet to take uncrewed test flights to the station, and those are unlikely to occur before early 2019. The first crewed flights would not take place until several months after that, unless the space agency is willing to take additional risks with those missions. China has a human space flight capability, but it has no crew missions planned before 2020, and NASA is barred by Congress from working with the Chinese Space Agency.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10 ... ket-fails/

Damn, that was close. The in-capsule video was on TV this morning and it's pretty clear the crew went through hell...and probably no small amount of terror wondering if they were going to get blown to pieces.

[DrCaleb]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Damn, that was close. The in-capsule video was on TV this morning and it's pretty clear the crew went through hell...and probably no small amount of terror wondering if they were going to get blown to pieces.

That's the risk they accept. Soyuz has been pretty good though, dozens and dozens of launches, and this is the first manned malfunction.

The bad part though is there is no other way to get to the ISS. People up there need to be relieved, and resupplied. They can last a while yet, but not till SpaceX is ready to start regular ISS launches. And manned launches.

[DrCaleb]

$1:

How Paul Allen Saved the American Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

The Microsoft co-founder single-handedly revolutionized the American search for extraterrestrial intelligence at a time when no public institutions wanted to touch it.

On Monday evening, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 65. At the time of his death, Allen was the 47th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $26 billion. For the last few decades of his life, Allen used his wealth for a staggering variety of business and philanthropic interests. In addition to owning the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers, Allen founded a brain science institute, an AI institute, and Stratolaunch Systems, which was exploring private spaceflight.

Yet one of the research areas where Allen made the biggest impact was also the one he spoke about the least: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Indeed, Allen almost single-handedly rescued American SETI by donating over $30 million to scientists scanning the cosmos for intelligent radio signals.

SETI’s early years in the United States was mostly defined by intermittent searches bankrolled with public funds, such as the National Science Foundation-funded program at Ohio State University which discovered the Wow! signal, or university endowments, such as Harvard’s Project Sentinel. By the early 90s, however, many of the early SETI programs had ended. The best hope for detecting extraterrestrial intelligence seemed to be NASA’s first foray into SETI, the Microwave Observing Program, which began observations in 1992.

Less than a year after the start of NASA’s SETI program, it was killed by members of Congress who didn’t want to waste money on the “great Martian chase.” The SETI Institute, a nonprofit founded in 1984 by the radio astronomer Jill Tarter, wasn’t going to let SETI die at the hands of a few cynical congressmen, but it also realized that the only hope for the future was privately funded searches.

Fortunately, one of the earliest SETI Institute supporters was Barney Oliver, who founded and directed Hewlett Packard laboratories. So in 1993 Oliver called Bill Hewlett and David Packard of Hewlett Packard, Intel founder Gordon Moore, and Paul Allen to ask for their support.

“It probably only took Barney a few hours on the phone to get each of them to commit $1 million every year for the next five years,” Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, told me on the phone. “I’m not sure any of them were particularly interested in SETI, but they were interested in whatever Barney thought was a good idea.”

This $20 million commitment bankrolled Project Phoenix, a SETI program that ran from 1995 to 1998. Over the course of three years, Project Phoenix rented time on the Parkes radio telescope in Australia and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to scan for signals from 800 stars within 200-light years of Earth.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... telligence

[DrCaleb]

$1:

Astronomers find a cosmic Titan in the early universe

An international team of astronomers has discovered a titanic structure in the early Universe, just two billion years after the Big Bang. This galaxy proto-supercluster, nicknamed Hyperion, is the largest and most massive structure yet found at such a remote time and distance.

The team that made the discovery was led by Olga Cucciati of Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) Bologna, Italy and project scientist Brian Lemaux in the Department of Physics, College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Davis, and included Lori Lubin, professor of physics at UC Davis. They used the VIMOSinstrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Paranal, Chile to identify a gigantic proto-supercluster of galaxies forming in the early Universe, just 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang.

Hyperion is the largest and most massive structure to be found so early in the formation of the Universe, with a calculated mass more than one million billion times that of the Sun. This enormous mass is similar to that of the largest structures observed in the Universe today, but finding such a massive object in the early Universe surprised astronomers.

"This is the first time that such a large structure has been identified at such a high redshift, just over 2 billion years after the Big Bang," Cucciati said. "Normally these kinds of structures are known at lower redshifts, which means when the Universe has had much more time to evolve and construct such huge things. It was a surprise to see something this evolved when the Universe was relatively young."

$1:

An international team of astronomers has discovered a titanic structure in the early Universe, just two billion years after the Big Bang. This galaxy proto-supercluster, nicknamed Hyperion, is the largest and most massive structure yet found at such a remote time and distance. It has a mass estimated at a million billion Suns. Credit: Luis Calçada & Olga Cucciati/ESO

https://phys.org/news/2018-10-astronome ... verse.html

[BartSimpson]

$1:

It has a mass estimated at a million billion Suns.

Would that be a gazillion or an entire fuckton?

[Tyler_1]

Fuckton is not allowed in space.