SpaceX in MONEY RING shot, no spare juice for tail backdown this time For the second time in a month, Elon's Musk-eteers at upstart rocket startup SpaceX have fired cargo into space – this time delivering the first satellite owned and operated by the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. The launch was delayed slightly due to thick overhead clouds and thunderstorms in the area, but a gap in …
The change being they won't attempt a controlled landing of this stage because the payload's going into geosynchronous orbit rather than low-earth orbit. The distance involved means the Falcon 9 won't have enough fuel to even try a controlled landing.
Falcon 9 flying as planned and as expected for maximum payload to GTO. A change in plan would have been if first stage tried to re-enter atmosphere in a controlled manner somewhere halfway to Africa.
As for space race breakthrough, is the author talking about this being Turkmenistan's first satellite?
... and it was awesome! Very good footage of the rocket climbing up through the clouds...
Went outside for a ciggie after, and have a question for the local boffins about these launches to geosynchronous orbit. I know they launch over the ocean, but then the first stage separates, and the second ignites... Now my question is, at this point, the second stage must be well into space and probably over land again, so is this visible for the people it passes over, like a "slow" moving flame streaking across the sky?
Around ten years ago I was resting late one evening on a west facing porch in Arizona. I became aware of odd lighted squiggles far off over the western horizon, above the already-setted sun. I'd seen this before, when Vandenburg on the west coast does launches.
As I watched, a bright point began to lift up above the low squiggles, trailing below what started to look a lot like a cowled figure, with the point of light as a head. It was the exhaust cone from the four main engines, stretching itself out in straight lines below the rocket.
As the point rose higher the ghostly cowl below it was shifting, becoming more symetrical as the rocket leaned strongly to the west, directly away from me and at least 300 miles away. Now the four symetrical lobes of the exhaust were very plain and the point occupied the centre.
It had almost stopped rising, when suddenly the light went out, and the sun-lit exhaust cones all seemed to scroll away from the point, going outward fast, and were gone in a second.
What was strange is that the vision of the cowled figure was so compelling that even while knowing exactly what was going on, I still became unsettled.
"It's when the cowled man looks like he's carrying a scythe that you really, really need to start worrying"
I suppose even that depends a lot on the specific circumstances...
It's still not over land. For a geo-sync launch there are two burns, the first one finishes 9 minutes or so after launch and puts everything in a more or less circular orbit, the second is 10 minutes or so later starting just before it crosses the equator to put the payload in the transfer orbit. You'd need to be roughly in Cameroon to stand a chance of seeing it.
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I have. Mentioned in an earlier comment, had to drive for about two hours to get there.
It was at the number two site, in southern Kyushu, the launch was of the Nozomi (Hope), to Mars.
At such a beautiful site, and in the early hours (about three in the morning), it was breathtaking.
I still feel sad about Nozomi, the agency's people did a wonderful job of getting it there late, despite problems, only to be ordered by the IAU to forget it, as there was a chance of it hitting Mars and it hadn't been sterilized to the required level.
Tears still, writing this.
More on our rockets, the pencil rocket, a tiny thing launched in 1955, is being billed around the station nearest where it was first launched as 'The Japan's first rocket', with, of course, a cute mascot.
Forgetting the war-time human-guided ones and the history of fireworks.
The pencil rocket programme is interesting, JAXA has a little on it in English for the majority of Regtards. It was quite close to the fireworks level, but metal, and the first step in a pretty successful programme.
"Now my question is, at this point, the second stage must be well into space and probably over land again, so is this visible for the people it passes over, like a "slow" moving flame streaking across the sky?"
Every Cape launch I've seen when the second stage was visible looked like a bright star without visible flame extension. Or that's how I'm remembering it right now. However, my viewing position for most second stage firings is basically "up the skirt" rather than from the side so I'm in a poor position to see an extended exhaust.
However, the exhaust is quite long on a climbing first stage, even tens of miles down range.
There are extremophiles living at the bottom of The Door To Hell.
Every morning, I wake up and turn on my mobile.
If you think about it, what happens at that point borders on magic and would have caused one to be burnt for a witch, a couple of centuries back.
Yet, it is normal. I am not excited and nervous when I press that power button. I am not even fully awake, to be honest.
This same situation applying to space operations is, I believe, what Musk is looking forward to. And I, for one, am right there with him!
@RIBrsiq
Smartphones are pretty spooky when you stop and think about them, but for serious witchcraft / dark arts have a think about satnav! Little box that talks to you, knows where you are (to within feet), how fast you''re moving, which direction you're facing, knows how to direct you to anywhere, and even anticipates traffic jams. The developers really should get the stake and faggots treatment.
Spooky is about right.
And I don't know about your smartphone, but mine has satnav as well... :-)
It's a quad-core powerhorse with 2GiBs of RAM, 16GiB of internal non-volatile storage, etc.
And the spookiest thing is that it wasn't the most powerful model I could have bought at the time; even without breaking the budget!
No. Scratch that: the spookiest thing is that most people use these supercomputers to play Angry Birds or whatever...
Sometime in the last decade, enough idiots (including myself) had asked vague questions on the Internet and had them answered by kind knowledgeable people that internet search itself has become spookily good at vague queries. Having access to this knowledge in a dark country lane in the middle of the night is pretty weird when you stop to think about it.
The other night, walking the dogs, an image popped into my head, frustratingly without the words that should go with it (I'm getting old). My old mastermind of a dad being dead these past twenty years, I risked it: "OK Google. What's the name of the famous American painting of the old couple with the bloke holding the pitch fork?" Not only did the phone get the speech word perfect, but there was the answer: "American Gothic" by Grant Wood. When did it get that good?
Yet, it is normal. I am not excited and nervous when I press that power button. I am not even fully awake, to be honest.
I do wonder what today's generation will look back on as that sort of moment, if any?
I think back to my Grandmother telling me about everyone going out in the street to watch the first aeroplane they'd ever seen. I remember seeing Neil Armstrong's "one small step", live, I remember the first time I saw colour TV. Today's kids take it all, and more, for granted. What will today's 10-year-olds look back on in 40 years time as "wow, that was amazing"?
"I do wonder what today's generation will look back on as that sort of moment, if any?"
I'm glad people are asking questions like that. You get some transhumanists in a room and they wax poetic about the coming Singularity. But we are so far into the Singularity it's not funny. Rather, it's taken for granted.
Jim Butcher slipped a little away from modern day wizardry in his novel "Summer Knight" to make a widely applicable observation: "Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean when you think about it jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane it defies the gravity of a entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research blood sweat tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies. But get on any flight in the country and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who in the face of all that incredible achievement will be willing to complain about the drinks.”
Singularities. What would some 18th Century luminary think about a jet? A common man for a few day's wages (give or take) can be flung as fast as a musket ball (give or take) and this is the safest means of travel invented by humans in history, where death rates are measured as "1 per several thousand million miles." Engines as heavy as a moderate team of horses generate as much horsepower as all the horses in a 18th Century US state (give or take), and they perform at incredible outputs for hours on end.
Meanwhile, the people inside these screaming darts (of an exotic, not-yet-discovered metal) are not terrified for dear life. Instead, they're wondering if they'll get iced (!) drinks and edible snacks for free, and debating if they want to pay for access to all the knowledge of humanity (give or take) on little devices so they can access pr0n and gossip with friends on the ground, who might be on other continents.
It's kind of wake up call to be sitting in an office like any clerk / scribe in the past few millennia but simultaneously be 1) chatting with parents who are across an ocean, standing at the foot of a Neolithic monument wondering what "druids" were, and 2) be helping a brother lost in untamed Floridian swamps find his boat via images taken from a manmade moon and with navigation supplied by yet more artificial moonlets. (My parents definitely had the better vacation that week, and my brother has never again left his portable GPS in his boat when he got out to hunt.)
Yes, I like it when people step back and appreciate how far technology has progressed.
That's a two-way highway and what you're trying to do is ride the dividers in the middle of it.
On the one hand, anything is mundane and trivial for someone who has lived with it all his/her life, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's no reason one should be expected to spend one's life busy being awestruck by the sheer genius of the wheel, running water, lightbulbs or indeed airplanes or mobile communication. Appreciating that they're all thoroughly remarkable is one thing, continuously acting as if they're pure witchcraft is another (and thoroughly dumb). Fear not, people will still be appropriately awestruck when they see the first teleporter, replicator or warp-capable spaceship.
On the other hand, anyone can play at the "wondering at the marvels of whatever" game if we get down to it, we don't even need any technology (or indeed humans at all) for that - it's easy enough to be awestruck by the way clorophyll works, or DNA does, or how a few numbers with specific values result in all that incredible stuff forming and twirling around in space, the mere proportions of which justify getting wonderstruck all on their own.
But to simply lament that people don't walk around perpetually baffled by stuff that may have been interesting or new at one time for YOU but has been in existence for most or all of their lives is farcical at best. Maybe next time you'll get hauled around half the world instead of the direct route by a greedy cabbie you'll be busy admiring the wonders of the internal combustion engine instead of raising a stink - but somehow I doubt it. In the mean time, I'll be complaining about my drink, thankyouverymuch.
And to think that I was only telling a friend on Saturday, as we left the cinema for the pub, that I'd just ticked something off my bucket list. Which was walking down the up escalator (while moving of course), because the other was out of order and my excuse was I didn't want to wait for the lift.
I'm obviously a bit more easily pleased than you...
I'd just ticked something off my bucket list. Which was walking down the up escalator (while moving of course), because the other was out of order and my excuse was I didn't want to wait for the lift.
The slopey bit between the two escalators at Rotherhithe Station didn't used to have those "Stand on the right" signs (this was before the station was rebuilt). Once when I was a slightly tipsy* student I took a run-up at the top and launched myself down the slope, head-first and sliding on my belly. When I zoomed off the bottom end I did a rather neat tuck-and-roll and came up on my feet and running... smack into the wall opposite. Happy days!
*Keep in mind that "slightly tipsy" for a student is roughly equivalent to "hammered" for most other people.
I travelled through Turkmenistan a few years ago as part of the Mongol Rally and can honestly say that what I saw of Turkmenistan was a hell hole.
I know this is an unfair generalisation but if you do a bit of reading into the place you will be surprised at how much of a police state it is.
There are literally microphones badly disguised and hanging from trees in local parks (I didn't believe that until I saw it for myself). All hotel rooms are supposedly bugged as well.
The bureaucracy and corruption at the border is excessive even for that part of the world.
Internet access is forbidden unless you got to a state run internet cafe and hand over your passport while you're using it.
Mobiles don't work for international calls and text messages only go through 50% of the time.
Granted this was in 2009 so maybe some more reforms will have happened by now.
I didn't managed to make it up to the Door to Hell as it was a good couple of hundred miles out of my route and we had run out of money by this stage owing to the corruption at the border.
There are no cash machines and the only way to get money was through Western Union transfer.
The people seemed relatively friendly but no one really wanted to talk to you openly for all of the above reasons.
Definitely not a place i'll be revisiting any time soon!
travelled through Turkmenistan a few years ago as part of the Mongol Rally and can honestly say that what I saw of Turkmenistan was a hell hole.
A nation run solely on [gas | oil | insert your commodity here ] revenues. Are they any different (aside from a little bit of lipstick on some of the more prominent pigs?).
"The Four Known Ways Carbon Dioxide Cools Earth's Climate" posted at
principia-scientific.org on 01 Mar 2015 explains.
"Greenhouse Gas Ptolemaic Model" at FauxScienceSlayer on the four ways water vapor cools the planet.
"Lukewarm Lemmings and the Lysenko Larceny" the rigged, three sided FAKE climate debate,
coasttocoastam.com/show/2015/03/18 > Climate Change & Thermodynamics
Methane is only 1.7 PPM in the atmosphere and has half life of four years.
(note to Ed)
Holy crap you are right. All that money for a satellite which won't be used. The stupidity is astounding.
It seems if you have a geo-flamethrower running 24/7 for 40 years, somebody could come up with something useful to do with all that free heat.
How about mounting a Liquid Sodium Heat Capture System?
C'mon, if the country can make a giant sun-following statue of their leader, surely this idea will not seem so outlandish.
I think it'd be pretty cool in a way to live in a crackpot nation where the calendar and even certain math equations get re-defined every few years, spending the summers in Rangoon making meat helmets, etc.
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