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Friday, September 6, 2024

Busy Day in Space News

Hours after the post about Blue Origin scrambling to launch the Mars Escapade mission in it's rapidly approaching eight day window, NASA announced that the agency and Blue had agreed to drop this launch attempt and try to make the next best launch window. Then they talked about a launch window I haven't heard mentioned. 

While future launch opportunities are under review, the next possible earliest launch date is spring 2025.

A graphic I've had on my computer for a while - obtained from Reddit. This is the current version. The colors of the dots correspond to the Delta V (change in Velocity) with red, orange, yellow being faster than the greens and blues. In all cases the warmer colors reduce the travel time, read from top to bottom, scale on the left. Yup. The faster you go the faster you get there. What a surprise! 

Note the two years between windows. Each launch window is the vertical batch of colored dots, and note there isn't one labeled Q2 2025. 

Starliner has left the ISS and is expected to land in New Mexico early Saturday morning - around 10 PM Friday night local time.  

Undocking from the ISS and drifting slowly away after a few spritzes from the thrusters is obviously the easiest part of the return trip. The part that had everybody nervous is later this evening when the reentry starts. The deorbit burn will start at 11:17 PM EDT (0317 UTC) to target landing at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, shortly after midnight EDT.

The return is designed to minimize the hazard to the ISS of misbehaving thrusters on Starliner. After the springs on the docking collar push the capsule away, the thrusters will push it farther out ("above") the Space Station, then safely away from it before positioning itself to reenter safely.  This is not the generally accepted, generally used way to go to or from the ISS. 

Starliner will need to use the RCS thrusters again to point itself in the proper direction to fire four larger rocket engines for the deorbit burn. Once this burn is complete, the RCS thrusters will reorient the spacecraft to jettison the service module to burn up in the atmosphere. The reusable crew module relies on a separate set of thrusters during reentry.

Finally, the capsule will approach the landing zone in New Mexico from the southwest, flying over the Pacific Ocean and Mexico before deploying three main parachutes and airbags to cushion its landing at White Sands. Boeing and NASA teams there will meet the spacecraft and secure it for a road voyage back to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for refurbishment.



4 comments:

  1. Damn, I hate being right all the time. Still time for NASA to transfer to SpaceX.

    As to Turdliner? If the heat shield performs like the last one, well, nope.

    We'll have to see.

    And Polaris Dawn keeps getting rescheduled due to bad weather. Let's hope the weather clears.

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  2. I got interrupted and had to run back the video. yes, it did land safely but empty. The comments at the end about a "successful" mission floored me. The mission was a failure in the fact that it left its passengers stranded in space. Hope the send some clean underwear for Butch and Sunni on this next Crew Dragon.

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  3. I thought it funny that the whole return is done at night with touchdown just after local midnight.

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  4. A successful touchdown means they'll probably sacrifice the crew on the next one, no matter what the error warnings say.

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