Booster Engines Vs Booster Bidet & Shouting At Voyager - Deep Space Updates August 7th

foreign Scott Manley here it's August 7th it's time for another batch of deep space updates and as usual we start with the launches from the past couple of weeks and we have to go all the way back to 18th of July because Summer's busy I have a lot of vacations but yeah 18th of July rocket lab launched another electron baby come back and come back indeed it did we have an awesome 14 minute video showing an onboard camera from stage separation all the way to touch down in the ocean so this uh will launch the payload on it was primarily four um cubesats for NASA called Starling not starlink uh that'll really confuse the spell correcting uh that is a series of four satellites are supposed to demonstrate uh coordinated operations formation flying uh you know Communications between them there's a two lemur 2 satellites for Spire Global and there's also a fairly large Leo Leo 3 as it's called demonstration satellite for tele sat so very good they recovered the bushing as Peter Beck said they went fishing and they found themselves a booster moving on to the 20th of July Kwai Joe 1A launching from Jaquan carrying a satellite called tianmu which uh yeah it's uh meteorology Satellite by the looks of things and 500 kilometer Sun sync orbit this launch was sponsored by Chinese car maker Don Feng who put up a bunch of cars next to it and released a bunch of uh PR images I guess you know 20th of July there was a falcon 9 from Vandenberg which looked pretty good because I could actually see it launched close enough to Sunset that it was actually visible the upper stage was visible against the night sky and we had a few UFO all reports from the West Coast 22nd of July in China the series 1 from Jaquan uh carrying a pair of satellites called a chiangkon and jinshadai of course I yeah forget the pronunciation yeah another 500 kilometer Sun synchronous orbit this mission was actually called lemon tree so uh Chang Kun is well they're launched into a 500 kilometer orbit as I understand it this company that built this satellite they want to demonstrate very low orbit satellites down about 300 kilometers closer to the targets using ion thrusters to keep them going against the drag of the atmosphere the other satellite well it was described as being a hyperspectral remote sensing satellite developed by Ada space but the blurb also mentions things like blockchain technology which is probably something they said to get investors on board they have published images from the satellite showing a like Salt Lake City but they also published images showing a screen on the side of the satellite showing ads in space to a camera so they can show this on the ground yeah but also space fans in China they went looking for the booster and they found out in the desert so that's kind of cool I haven't seen one of these recovered so 23rd of July there was another Chinese launch in the forum for Long March 2D from taiyon uh three satellites into sun synchronous orbit these are sky sight satellites that are built by like a Chinese University the idea I think is there's three different Earth observation satellites number one is the SAR synthetic capture radar number two is Optical and the the third one is infrared and there's also a fourth payload on board from Galaxy space which is a flat panel communication satellite think Chinese version of the starlink satellite design you know nice flat satellites that unfold uh 24th of July there was another Falcon 9 carrying a starlink group 6-6 from Florida this was carrying 22 V2 Starling satellites uh yeah building out the V6 console or sorry the sixth generation constellation uh the sixth shell I guess 26th of July there was another long march 2D carrying three yogan 36 reconnaissance satellites for Chinese Department of you know Chinese military whatever armed forces and uh 28th of July Falcon 9 another batch of starlink 22 V2 satellites from Florida but yeah the interesting one was the 29th of July there was a falcon heavy carrying a Jupiter 3 also known as ecostar24 this holds the record for the biggest satellite launched into geostationary Earth orbit actually the heaviest satellite because we don't know how big it unfolds into but it's a 9.2 satellite ton satellite dry apparently it has little uh engines on it little uh plasma thrusters to allow it to remain in orbit but this was the Dual rtls recovery with both boosters coming back and providing a spectacular site with a double triple quad drupals on lots of Sonic booms all the Sonic booms you could want and the second stage performed three Burns now it didn't quite put the satellite into geostationary orbit what it did was it performed the boost up and in about three hours later part way through the geostation transfer orbit the engine lit up and it took out a lot of the inclination so that when the satellite got up to geostationary orbit it didn't need to sort you know provide as much thrust and I think I'm not sure but I think the idea is that that left the second stage still with a perigee close to there so it would come back and burn up but yeah biggest satellite launched to introduce stationary orbit good job SpaceX uh India on the 30th of July the pslv 2nd of August we had Antares launch and this is the final launch of Antares in its current configuration because of course this is a rocket which is it's an American rocket a Ukrainian first stage and Russian engines and that means that first stage with those engines is never flying again so the replacement is of course supposed to be built by Firefly and they are currently working with Northrop Grumman on that it will be a couple of years but this time they launched a cygnus cargo spacecraft to the space station this one was called Laurel Clark named for one of the astronauts on Colombia during sts-107 it broke up she was the one that had a run rig CD in her class if you're Scottish you know who run rhaegar right they're a Scottish Rock Band and um apparently that CD got recovered and brought back to the the other people in the band so that's already docked at the space station with a bunch of Hardware also the second stage of the rocket carried a trio of cubesats which are being deployed independently there's like a c-line for the U.S Coast Guard Academy and the UT Pro Set for Virginia Tech um yeah they're all part of this Mission and they'll be operating up there 3rd of August another Chinese launch Long March 4C for fangyong that's again a sun synchronous orbit 500 kilometer altitude meteorology satellite uh fenging 3F as part of their series of satellites that do that so on the 3rd of August we had a falcon 9 carrying Galaxy 37 also known as Galaxy 13r because it's a replacement for Galaxy 13 that's a satellite which uh launched you know I don't know in the early 2000s it launched on sea launch to geostationary orbit it's been doing uh you know obviously Communication service up there but it uses portions of the electromagnetic spectrum the ground uh providers want freed up for 5G so that's big reason for launching this replacement it was originally going to fly on an Ariane 6 but since that's delayed and they have a time limit on getting the Spectrum freed up that's why they shifted over to a falcon 9. finally uh on August 7th just few hours ago we had a falcon main carrying another batch of 22 starlink V2 minis from Florida and now we go over to the regular space news except this is going to take a regular diversion into the land of room temperature superconductors which you've probably heard the stories the rumors Etc you know flash we'll go back a few days there was this paper which appeared on uh archive which is a preprint server by Korean teams supposedly claiming to have discovered superconductivity in a sample of material called LK 99 they had you know made in ovens and by grinding up material with a lanarkite and copper phosphate and things like that in it I don't know the exact recipe but the interesting thing about this is that yes this is pretty bold claims to say that you've discovered like a room temperature superconductor like Nobel Prize worthy but the fact the material preparation was something that people could do with minimal amount of equipment meant a lot of people have been mucking around with this including a guy Andrew mccullop who works at varda space there's the space link you see VAR the space they are all about doing in-space manufacturing they have a spacecraft in orbit right now that is supposedly manufacturing a drug which is easier to make in zero g and they want to recover it and uh you know sell it on the market that's their demonstration but obviously they have a lot of material scientists on their staff to try to identify such products and so yeah they started trying to make it and they put up a twitch stream and there was people literally just watching hours and hours of this oven just you're baking this sample so the question is still definitely out there as to whether this is an actual superconductor or just something that is strongly diamagnetic the demos that we've seen are primarily things floating over magnets and first of all yes you can fake this by special effects I don't think it would be very hard for me to actually fake this if I tried but even if it was a real Rock levitating you still have to contend with the fact that you can make things like graphite levitate it's not superconductive but it is strongly diamagnetic and really what we're looking for is not just magnetic levitation you're actually looking for like flux locking where this sample uh can will actually hold position because modern superconductors rather than the traditional Elemental metal types where you've got the Nuketown kind they allow the magnetic field to penetrate it and it sort of holds the thing in place so look I'm fascinated by this I don't know enough to talk about it because I'm not really a solid state physicist having said that I know a lot more than a lot of the videos out there but you know be skeptical don't think this is going to revolutionize the World overnight but uh be very excited still nevertheless moving onwards in more mundane terms aerojet rocket down is now officially part of L3 Harris the rare the deal has been closed the website already moved over when I was making my AJ tan video I was making it very hard to find stuff apparently their headquarters is going to be moving out of Sacramento to you know Florida uh in deep deep space Voyager 2 lost contact with Earth after a command sequence unfortunately made it 0.2 degrees off center and that attenuated the reception enough that it was unable to receive Earth however the deep space network was able to detect the carrier wave at the start of August and a few couple of days ago they performed a shout into deep space they got their best antenna I believe it was this Australian one was the best aligned they you know ramped up the power and the most powerful transmitter they probably pushed it right to the Limit you know uh maybe into the red line I don't know what what their exact thing was but uh they shouted a signal out into the void and 37 hours later the signal came back from Voyager as it realigned with Earth um in Boca Chica Texas boy it has been a wild few weeks first of all uh serial number 15 the first big successful flight of a Starship that booster is being scrapped oh dear what a tragedy we had a full test of the booster b day uh it looks very impressive and then we went on to actual booster testing starting out with a spin Prime test and yesterday we had a full 33 engine burn uh however it actually only fired 29 engines because four of the engines either shut down during ignition or were taken out of the loop prior to ignition due to problem so this is not a hundred percent successful but the most successful thing was the booster bday versus the booster Rockets did not result in massive a rapid unscheduled digging this time there was a lot of steam it looked very very impressive the burn time was apparently only like 2.78 seconds I think they were aiming for five seconds so that might be a pointer to something else going on also simultaneously they have been testing various ring designs for hot staging that's where they're going to light up the engines on the second stage before the first stage uh separates and they need to obviously have some vents there to allow that to escape they've been putting these on stress test stands with a you know uh instruments to measure the Distortion of it presumably they are going to take the booster 9 and move it back to the high Bay or one of the high base so that they can work on it a bit more correct any problems with the engine integrate this hot staging your vent ring and probably add a bit more shielding because I think they might need a bit more shielding on the top of the booster it's really not clear but they're obviously going to have to test this the other SpaceX thing I guess that's going on is that well it's sort of tangential you know Polaris Dawn there's been some talk recently from uh Jared they've confirmed that they are going to be flying now in 2024 so that's pushed the thing out a whole lot if you remember there was a chance originally it was going to be Christmas of 2022 and I I didn't think that was happening 2023 I was thinking was pretty good but 2024 that's where it is now yeah they've just talked about how the team has been going and working on area you know avionics briefings and all that other stuff but more interestingly the team was out at Oshkosh that's the biggest Gathering of the experimental aircraft uh people we had of course Jared in his MiG-29 some Alpha Jets uh some you know l-39 albatrosses all that stuff flying information wowing the crowds and getting some cool photos from um John Krause who got to sit in the back of like a bomber in the Gunner site shooting film or shooting photographs of this it looked pretty amazing I would love to I would love to have actually got there uh Draco yes NASA and luck in DARPA and Lockheed Martin have basically all signed on to develop Draco right that's the nuclear propulsion demonstration in space so the reactor is actually going to be built by a bwxt Advanced Technologies Lockheed Martin is going to build everything else the demo is slated for no later than 2027 but I won't be surprised if it ends up later the current Mission profile looks like an operational orbit above 700 kilometers probably below 2000 that will perform engine fire demonstrations but it won't do any major maneuver so I'm presuming that they will light be firing at 90 degrees to the orbit basically making plane changes if they do that the engine that they have designed for this initial demo is only going to get about 700 seconds of specific impulse which is low for a nuclear engine the kind of engines we saw demonstrate in the 60s had got the specific impulse up to 800 and your more modern designs were even higher than that but yeah they're just really hoping to demonstrate the end-to-end functionality of a nuclear engine in Space the mission will only last a couple of months because they're primarily going to be constrained by the fact that they have to use Liquid hydrogen as a propellant and that will get you know boil off over time another DOD related thing is that space command was going to be moved to Huntsville Alabama you know Trump made that decision and now Biden has reversed that decision and uh U.S space command is going to stay where it currently is in Colorado I'm presuming this is a way of saving money because you don't bend any money moving it uh there's some on Mars there are some new close-ups of Ingenuity on the ground it's looking great Percy has caught up with Ingenuity which had sailed on ahead after it's a winter um rest and uh yeah we get some nice great close-up images what close issue the camera on perseverance is actually quite good at zooming in and making things closer than they they are up here also Lego in the US released their Lego model of the perseverance and I was building that on uh you know live stream in the last couple of days we now have an August 25th planned launch date for crew 7 that's going to be Jasmine mosberly Andreas morgensen uh Satoshi furokawa and uh Constantine borisov on another uh long duration mission to the space station and the selection for crew eight uh has has gone up that is going to be in February 24th it's gonna have uh Commander Matthew Dominic uh pilot Michael Barrett Mission specialist Jeanette Epps and a Ross Cosmos astronaut uh Alexander grabenken and they will join at Expedition since 70 and 71. uh so this is well so first of all Jeanette Epps you might have heard her before she was originally gonna fly on a soyuz and then got mysteriously removed from it um and uh then was gonna fly on Starliner and obviously that still isn't going anywhere well she's finally gonna get to fly after all this time this is also I think the least experienced in terms of flight hours uh of any crew I think I've seen in a long time so the only person I think on this list that has any space flight experience is Michael Barry he's flown two space shuttle missions and he's but he's only like short duration missions to deliver Hardware he didn't stay on the station for six months so you know it's just we're moving we've got a whole bunch of astronauts that need to fly you've got to give him a chance um Axiom 4 has been confirmed so there is going to be another Axiom mission after Axiom 3 there I'm sure there's a lot of countries already planning to add their astronauts to the list and get that uh you know uh Prestige from flying astronauts to the space station Astra the Alameda based rocket Builder ah yeah this week they laid off 25 of their Workforce uh they have reassigned a bunch of their rocket building people to work on their space engine that's their little ion Thruster which I think was Apollo Fusion that was a company they bought with their spec money and it's now the most profitable part of the company and possibly the only profitable part of the company and that does lead to questions as to whether rocket 4 will actually fly whether it's getting enough attention to actually do what it's supposed to Meanwhile an unflown Astra uh Rocket 3 is now on display at Chabot Space and Science Center in Auckland I want to go and visit it and frankly I don't know how they got it through the front door and got it set up that I'd love to see some pictures about that finally India's chandrayaan 3 is now in lunar orbit it's already sending back images and of course it's expected to land uh later this month and I will be looking forward to it and crossing my fingers and hope that it's successful because I want to see the excitement of the launch replicated on the landing and that's the news I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

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Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023