About 7 minutes into the mission, and all is well. A few live screenshots:
Leaving the atmosphere:
Separation of panels:
It’s now going 15,000 miles per hour, around its orbital velocity.
It still amazes me that a primate can do this, only 10,000 years after it invented agriculture.
Exactly what I was thinking Jerry!
Oh – and glad us Brits helped you get a good view of it!
Me too – my NASA feed blipped out right at the last 10 sec of the countdown.
Sorry. I watched the BBC feed, which was perfect.
Thanks to youse, I had both running and was able to switch to the Beeb. Hat’s off to the British license fee payers.
You’re welcome 🙂
Great stuff
I missed the live launch, and am looking for footage.
It’s interesting that we’re back to capsule payload technology. The space shuttle was amazing in its way, but wildly impractical, costly, and dangerous. I’m a fan of SpaceX.
+1 – As beautiful as the fantasy of humans treading other worlds is, I often wonder if I’ll really live to see it (and have no expectation I will live to do it). All that life support and required safety comes at an astronomical cost, and the inevitable loss of astronauts is so devastating, I’d rather see robots do the pioneering – especially over not pioneering at all.
As a child I would not have believed robot development would outpace the development of human-safe, reusable spacecraft – but it is now demonstrably the case. Maybe breakthroughs in material science and bio hacking will bend the curve but I wouldn’t bet it will happen fast enough for me to witness it unless the Singularity is waaaay closer than it appears.
I read a good article (which of course I now can’t find) that talked about the likelihood of landing a manned mission on Mars in the time frame of the 2020s/2030s. The article argued that a manned flyby is more likely at first. It also thought that NASA would do this before Space X.
SpaceX has very little commercial reason to go to Mars — the only motive is Musk’s deep desire to do so. So yeah, NASA should be first to Mars, but it should really consider doing so with SpaceX gear, as their launchers and vehicles are likely to be far cheaper than any NASA-built ones.
” . . . as their launchers and vehicles are likely to be far cheaper than any NASA-built ones.”
Is it reasonable and appropriate that, whenever one contemplates the idea of “far cheaper,” one should also contemplate safety?
Absolutely, but I’ve yet to see any suggestion that SpaceX launchers or vehicles are less safe than those of NASA, whose own safety record has Challenger and Columbia.
“It still amazes me that a primate can do this, only 10,000 years after it invented agriculture”.
In the words of Sophocles:
“Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man”.
What a piece of worke is a man! How Noble in reason? How infinite in faculty? In forme and mouing how expresse and admirable? In action, how like an Angel? In apprehension, how like a God?
All this time people have been searching for God and it is right inside of us all the time.
And we may be the aliens, space invaders and ancient astronauts whose existence will be debated by life forms on other worlds. All these decades of looking to the skies and imagining more advanced civilizations, and maybe we’ve been the galaxy’s advanced civilization all along (Juggaloes and Deepakity notwithstanding).
If you have cable head over to NASA TV. They’re running lift-off videos from sites all over the launch pad and from cameras mounted on the vehicle itself. Oh baby!
If you have an iOS or Android, you can watch using the NASA app as well.
It was my great good fortune and joy at school today to watch the last two and one-half hours of the event on NASA TV. To be able to see the Earth at a distance of 3600 (3604, to be more accurate, if not exact) miles out the capsule porthole, via video camera, as if I were there; to see from 15,000 feet the real-time deployment of all the chutes.
I reflected to students in at least a couple of classes, “See what happens when one troubles himself to learn a little science and math?!?” It seemed to be lost on most, awash as they were in middle school insouciance and social preening and electronic digital social media and convenience/entitlement.
Wow, what a great time to be alive July, 1969 – December 1972. Got a little taste of that today.
“Wow, what a great time to be alive July, 1969 – December 1972. Got a little taste of that today.”
I’d just been thinking that, after all the enthusiasm here. 🙂
But back then, of course, pretty much the whole nation was on the edge of their seats..
For the first time since the Saturn V 40 years ago we have a rocket powerful enough to take a manned craft beyond earths orbit. Yay
We’ve had manned flight capable craft for over a half a century. They’re called Soyuz craft.
The rocket that launched here is not new. The rockets payload, the Orion spacecraft, is what is new.
The rocket was a Delta IV Heavy, which first flew in 2004, operated by United Launch Alliance. ULA is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The Delta IV Heavy is not Man Rated, meaning it can not be used to launch people. ULA has said that they may produce a man rated version of the Delta IV Heavy sometime in the future.
The only thing NASA is testing on this flight is the Orion capsule. It is Orion’s 1st test flight and it will be some time yet, several years I would think, before it is ready for manned flight. And, currently, there are no man rated launch vehicles available that are both capable of lofting Orion and man rated.
Space X and ULA are currently the only realistic possibilities for contractors lofting a manned Orion. But both have years to go before they could have a booster capable and qualified to do so.
NASA also has a program to produce a new booster system, called SLS (Space Launch System). SLS will very likely take significantly longer to produce than the contractor options, Space X and ULA.
Long story short, unfortunately, no, we don’t have a rocket powerful enough to take a manned craft beyond earth orbit yet. And it will be several years, at least, before we do.
A very exciting thing though is that it is possible that Space X could beat NASA to that punch. Their Dragon spacecraft has already had several test flights and has carried cargo to the ISS. They could achieve man rating for it, and their Falcon 9 booster, within a couple of years. That would give them the capability of manned orbital flight. For beyond Earth orbit they would need to have their Falcon Heavy. There is even a NASA propsal for a mission to Mars, unmanned, using Space X’s Falcon Heavy booster and Dragon spacecraft, but it has not yet been funded. And, of course, may never be funded.
The hypothetical Mars-and-beyond missions I read about as a kid tended to assume there would be a broad infrastructure – space stations and moon bases, that kind of thing – to support it. Seems like we are a long way from initiating missions remotely like that aren’t we? Lunar missions are on the Orion roadmap I think. My sense is that humans could spend generations taking these baby steps (not that each step isn’t exciting and mind-blowingly complex).
Beyond Earth / Moon system Manned missions are hard technically. Harder than we thought in the 50s & 60s. Basically we are up against fundemental physics, two things in particular.
1)We are at the bottom of a deep gravity well and it takes a huge amount of energy to get out of it.
2) The rocket equation. Or, rather, the realities about mass, momentum and velocity that the equation describes. In short the problem is that a rocket is propelled by expelling mass out the back. To go somewhere you spew mass, that you must carry with you, out the back. At some point you have to turn your ship around and spew more mass, again that you had to carry with you, the other way to bring you to a stop at your destination.
The more massive your spaceship, the more fuel mass you have to spew for a given change in velocity. To figure out how much fuel you need for a given mission you need to include fuel to accelerate the shipand the mass of the fuel. You need to include fuel to decelerate which you have to carry from the beginning, which means you have to figure more fuel to carry that fuel. And the more fuel you need to carry, the bigger the ship needs to be to carry it, and that adds more mass which requires more fuel, which means more mass . . . .
To give you and idea of those two problems combined, look at the Apollo missions and compare Launch mass to the mass of the command module that returned back to earth orbit (i.e. completed mission). Launch mass was about 2.77 million kg (6.23 Mlbs), and the CM mass was about 12,450 kg (28,000 lbs). Thats about .004 times the total launch mass. And of the Launch mass about 2.48 million kg (5.58 Mlbs) was propellant.
But, we have the technological capabilities to send people to Mars right now. Maybe even bring them back. Orion is intended for general use beyond earth orbit, which could include Mars, but doubtful. In any case, the NASA mission to Mars using the Space X’s Dragon capsule and Falcon Heavy booster is unmanned, and Space X could be ready to do that in 5 years. If it gets funded. Musk is likely to do something like it whether it is the NASA mission or one of his own.
It is a political decision that has made transplanetary missions so hard and expensive, for science and exploration both. See my longish comment below.
Maybe a wise decision. Maybe not. No one has done a study on it, I think…
Absolutely. But it is more than the nuclear issues with the Orion concept. We could have already done quite a bit with conventional rocketry. Certainly out to Mars. In the early ’80s I studied a NASA mission plan, several massive binders of hard copy, that had been done in the late ’60s. Down to the most meticulous detail. All doable with then current technology. But, at massive cost and massive risk.
And that is the other major political issue. Massive costs, even on the scale of powerful nations, and high risk.
But, even if we hadn’t gone for the huge missions like Mars, over the past 40 years we could have been making incremental steps in creating an infrastructure. Fuel depots, niche specialized craft, etc. At least now SpaceX, and hopefully a few more, are paving the way to make spaceflight relatively routine, and much less expensive.
Actually neither of these is a fundamental obstacle. There are ways around both of them.
1) The gravity well. You don’t really need to spend energy to get out of it; you just need to exchange energy with something that’s already out of it. Drop mass down a gravity well and you can lift an equivalent mass up to orbit at near zero net energy cost. Numerous schemes have been proposed to exploit this fact: space elevators, rotating tethers, orbital mass drivers, and so on. There are of course formidable engineering challenges to building such systems, but no fundamental physical barriers.
2) Rocketry. What you throw out the back of a rocket is not mass per se, but momentum. For a given momentum you get to trade off mass v. velocity. Chemical rockets eject a lot of mass at relatively low speed. Ion rockets eject negligible mass at very high speed. For long interplanetary flights, ion or other electrically-powered propulsion is the clear choice. And with electric propulsion, you don’t even need to carry the power source with you; you can leave that in Earth orbit and beam power to the ship by laser or microwave. Again, some serious engineering issues, but no fundamental physical obstacles.
They are both fundamental aspects of reality that you can’t trick your way around. Any method of dealing with them means a large application of energy some how, some way.
1) Space elevators, rotating tethers, orbital mass drivers, and other concepts all require huge amounts of energy to construct and operate. You absolutely do need to expend massive amounts of energy to get mass out of Earth’s gravity well with any of those concepts. They may be more efficient, at least if you don’t figure the costs to build them, and they may, particularly as in the space elevator, allow you to be able to expend the energy at a much slower rate, but they all still take enormous amounts of energy. TANSTAAFL.
2) Electric propulsion is more efficient, but it is not magic. You have to generate electricity, and you still have to have mass to expel. There are many different propulsion schemes and they have advantages and disadvantages. Electric propulsion, at least within current reach, is very low thrust and limited to solar power. It is not practical for manned missions, or large missions of any kind, and won’t be until we can put nuclear power plants, or some other electrical source of similar magnitude, on spacecraft.
Even beamed propulsion schemes still require huge amounts of energy, much more actually. They do, of course, allow you to leave your power source at home. And then there are various types of sail concepts. With those your fuel is free, but it is very difficult to collect and very sparse. But you still need similar amounts of energy to accelerate a given amount as compared to any other propulsion schemes. You’ve switched your engineering challenges from producing that energy on board to collecting it from the environment around the spacecraft.
As you say, engineering issues, I agree with that. But I am not sure why you disagree that these things are not fundamental physical obstacles. They are fundamental properties of reality, and they are obstacles. They are the two main obstacles that result in space travel being the difficult engineering challenge that it is. Nothing in any of that suggests that we won’t be able to deal with these obstacles. Eventually it is likely that our technology will be such that space travel will be so easy it is no longer a challenge. It is a big one right now and will be for quite some time to come.
To me, a “fundamental physical obstacle” implies that the laws of physics set a lower bound on, say, the amount of energy needed to lift a kilogram of mass out of Earth’s gravity well. That’s not the case. As I explained, if you lower a kilogram of mass into the gravity well, you can lift another kilogram out at no net cost in energy. In the long run, ignoring construction costs and assuming balanced import and export traffic, space elevators and other such schemes operate at near zero net energy expenditure. Any residual inefficiencies can be compensated by importing slightly more mass than you export, and the magnitude of those inefficiencies is a matter of engineering, not fundamental physics.
With respect to rocketry, with chemical engines the reaction mass is orders of magnitude greater than the payload mass, and increases exponentially with delta-V, since you need fuel to accelerate the fuel that accelerates the fuel. With electric propulsion, it’s the other way round: payload mass dominates, so the lion’s share of energy expended goes to accelerate payload, not fuel, and reaction mass therefore increases essentially linearly with delta-V. The exponential blowup that you touted as a “fundamental physical obstacle” is avoided by inverting the ratio of payload to reaction mass. This is a net energy savings since you’re no longer accelerating huge amounts of mass that you’re just going to throw away.
That is indeed the case.
Lowering a mass into Earth’s gravity well in order to propel another mass out is an application of a very large amount of energy.
That is moving the goal posts, changing the context and a sizable exaggeration. And far in the future. And is an example of exactly what I am saying. That getting out of Earth’s gravity well is hard because of fundamental physical properties. Or, are you saying that a space elevator is easy?
I suppose it depends on how you define or categorize things. Where are you going to put the stuff that you need to generate gigawatts of electical power? The rocket equation still applies. Like I said, electric propulsion is more efficient, it has its weaknesses, and it isn’t magic.
That I touted? Really? No, it is not avoided. Electric propulsion is more efficient, and has significantly higher theoretical limits. It doesn’t change the fundementals at all. It comes down to energy. To produce energy to accelerate propulsion mass takes mass in equipment and fuel. For example a nuclear reactor.
And again, you are giving examples that precisely support my original point. All of your examples are possible future technologies, some more likely than others. We haven’t gotten there yet because it is hard.
No, I was quite clear in saying that there would be “formidable engineering challenges” to building one, but that once built, the net energy cost per kilogram to and from orbit tends toward zero. What you said, in contrast, was “You absolutely do need to expend massive amounts of energy to get mass out of Earth’s gravity well with any of those concepts.” This is false. Such systems don’t expend energy; they bank it and recover it.
The fact that these are future technologies is beside the point. The point is that there are viable strategies for significantly reducing the energy costs of space flight, and that we are very far from the fundamental physical limits of such technology.
Greg, you seem to be intentionally obtuse here for your own reasons. You are determined to be right even when you are wrong, and to be rude about it. I’m done.
Sorry you feel that way. For what it’s worth, I didn’t come into this looking for a fight, and I’m not entirely sure how we ended up in one. For my part, I wasn’t trying to be rude, just clear.
Fascinating stuff, Darrelle.
Yes, I would like to see a lunar base to launch missions from. I suspect they’d be cheaper since escape velocity from the moon wouldn’t be hard.
I don’t think a lunar base would offer many advantages for mission launches, unless one were actually manufacturing the launchers and/or creating propellant from indigenous resources. There’s no point in carrying stuff from Earth down another gravity well — if you need a place to stage gear delivered from Earth, you’re better off to do that in orbit.
One way to get around the reaction-mass problem for deep space missions would be to build a rail gun on moon, powered by solar or nuclear, for launching payloads into Mars orbit (or wherever). The large accelerations attainable might be too great for people, but it could launch life-support gear, food, oxygen, water, tools, instruments, robots, vehicles for exploration, reaction mass and spacecraft for landing and escaping from Mars and for getting home — basically everything people would need would be waiting for them, with no reaction-mass penalty except for doing the one-time Mars rail-gun project and lugging the stuff to the moon.
All these scenarios are just so cool!
If only we weren’t fighting wars on terror and could actually fund them…
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I streaming web site that has the live stream, interviews, and interesting minidocumentaries about the big picture of this program is at:
space.com.
It’s hard to get too excited about a lot of technical accomplishment these days–we almost have come to take it for granted. But landing on that comet that is 317 million miles away (more than 3X the distance between sun and earth) is simply breathtaking. Anybody who tries to deny human brainpower and ingenuity in the face of that flight over such an immense distance and then finding and landing on that comet is a bona fide idiot.
I hope that our technical abilities increase quickly. Things like battery technology, for example, make huge differences in the devices we can use. I’m the type of person that wants advances now, now, now, now! I sometimes think I was born before my time.
“It’s hard to get too excited about a lot of technical accomplishment these days–we almost have come to take it for granted.”
That is certainly true of those who use/financially exploit the technological results of – but can’t be bothered to do any intellectual heavy-lifting to understand – the science and math which makes these technical accomplishments possible.
Still using Deltas — that family goes back to 1960. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Re-use has worked well for Russia/USSR.
When you have a system with proven reliability (this is a tough design space), then DON’T MESS WITH IT.
I do think it is fantastic that some smallish primates can accomplish this. It is impressive.
That said, I have been profoundly irritated with the way NASA has spun this, as “the first step to Mars”. There has been little explanation that, no, people won’t actually travel to Mars for six months in something the size of minivan, and no, the rocket isn’t anything new here, and won’t be the actual rocket used for future missions.
Talking up Orion in this way is misleading — its like suggesting that a major milestone in doing a trans-Atlantic flight is taking a taxi to the airport. Orion really is essentially a taxi to whatever larger vehicle it will rendezvous with in Earth orbit that will actually take people to Mars. And that’s a job that could be done just as well, if not better, by existing or very-near-term alternatives, such as SpaceX’s Dragon.
Really the whole Orion/SLS project is just a way for congress members to keep federal money flowing to their districts post-Shuttle. NASA would be far better off promoting and using commercial options for most of its crewed space needs, including the function that Orion is supposed to serve.
(Heck, SpaceX and Bigelow could put together a credible Mars mission in a relatively short time frame, using their technologies. And unlike Orion, Dragon has been constructed from the start with an eye to landing on and taking off from the Martian surface, a capability Orion doesn’t have.)
Actually, NASA plans to research and use a waypoint lunar orbit for Orion/Mars transfer vehicle staging, a fuel mass saving Distant Retrograde Orbit. [ http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/2014/20141119-how-nasa-plans-mars.html ]
The current Orion is sized to be a safe craft for that. (Can keep the crew alive for 1-2 weeks in cis-lunar space in case of accidents.) But of course it won’t be used that way in a decade. (9 years minimum, 11 years if the first real SLS mission goes to Europa Clipper instead.)
And in that time you could develop a Commercial Crew vehicle to do the same job cheaper and possibly safer (lesser of expensive extreme materials).
I was talking with my dad about Mars missions and with publicly funded organizations like NASA that it must be so hard to get the funding for what they need to do because people want to know what the financial benefits are for missions. It is hard to predict what spin-offs come from exploratory or theoretical science and the only thing you can go from is what has happened in the past as a possible predictor of the future spin offs.
I suspect NASA spins things in such a way to get people excited about the missions as a way to ensure that the funding keeps coming in.
No doubt, but I think it is profoundly misleading all the same, and no more excusable because it is done for a worthy cause. It also interferes with the public’s deeper understanding of the actual science — implying that we can send folks to Mars in a tiny capsule really confuses the issue, and downplays the difficulties involved (and, for that matter, the funding that will be needed).
Or you could always invest in this. http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/space_skylon.html
I’m sure they’d be happy with any billion you can spare.
Incidentally there is an important constraint at work. Launching orbital vehicles may well be very forbidding with more massive planets/denser atmospheres.
Possibly they can use an Orion, the original one, a nuclear pulsed rocket, since all you need are 100s-1000s of small timed thermonuclear devices and a 1 m thick steel plate with a hole in the center to throw the charges through. We could do that in the 60s, before the nuclear disarmament programs kicked in, and it is still the only realistic transstellar vehicle technology we know how to make. (Can get up to ~ 3-10 % of the universal speed limit, depending on if you use fission or fusion charges.) [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29 ]
I’m still saddened that politics and overly anti-nuclear concern shut that technology down, or else we could have visited most of the system by now.
But if other planets can’t use an Orion, we are among the lucky few species that explores our near space non-remotely.
Splashdown!
I guess this is the first splashdown of a NASA capsule in 35 years (SpaceX Dragons have been in service a couple of years though)? I assume the Apollo-Soyuz docking was the last, or maybe a Spaclab mission?
Just to note: it takes thousands of primates to do this, working in concert and honing their skills over 80-ish years (if you start counting from von Braun, decades more if you start counting before Goddard). This only adds to the wonder of it!
What is so special about Orion? (no, I’m not flippant here, but I just would like to know). I mean, we launched a crew to the moon in 1969, nearly half a century ago.
Although not manned, Orion somehow mysteriously appears to be considered a prelude to a manned mission to Mars. I think that manned space exploration, at least at present, is not a good idea.
Space, without the Earth’s magnetic field that protects us from being ‘roasted’ by radiation, is a kind of hostile place for us, if I may use such an understatement.
I think that unmanned space exploration will teach us infinitely more for a small fraction of the price of manned exploration.
Note, I have no doubt that sooner or later we will overcome the ‘un-hospitality’, let us call it by its name: *dangers* of space travel (e.g. by strong artificial magnetic fields around space crafts), but I think we’re very far from there now.
OF course, the first day of the launch I was home and watching…scrubbed. the actual launch? coming home from work, had a flat tire in the rain instead. nice. ah well.
and as for the 10,000 years since agriculture? that’s a long time, Prof. what’s more impressive is that within my great grandfather’s life time he saw humanity go from horse and buggy & steam engines to automobiles and a rocket putting a man on the moon. Of course, he also had to experience two world wars and the Great Depression, but still, how mind-blowing must that have been to experience such a life?!
Reblogged this on Shashank Patel.