The Space Thread

A little follow up: The planet's orbital eccentricity may be high enough that it may have a 2:3 orbital resonance (like Mercury) rather than a tidal lock. In that case its surface would have far more clement conditions.

Does that mean it rotates all the way around or just sort of wobbles back and forth?

Three whole rotations for every two orbits.

Or to put it another way, each day (full rotation of the planet) is a year and a half (planet orbits sun 1.5 times) long.

Can't it's atmosphere help with heat distribution?

Iirc Venus's day is pretty long,but the extreme pressures help stabilize the hellish heat so that even the nights are hot.

It depends on the density and composition of the atmosphere. Right now we don't even know if it has an atmosphere.

Seems like the bigger deal breaker for life than the radiation or tidal locking.

@Native Jovian I think you mean each YEAR is a DAY and a half

Er, yes. There are three days in a two year period. Numbers are hard.

SpaceX rocket explodes at Cape Canaveral ahead of launch

On the plus-side, that's a fair bit less awful than at launch. -_-

Nobody hurt, thank god.

That's odd, an explosion during fueling? Maybe a short or something?

LOX problem, quoth Internet scuttlebutt.

Seems to have been involved with the liquid oxygen fueling process, not the test firing proper. The good news is that that sort of thing is relatively simple to fix compared to if something had happened during the actual rocketry. The bad news is that they had to lose a rocket to figure out they had a problem.

Here's a video of the explosion (skip to about 1:10):

I may have been on the internet for too long. The article I found this one (this one from Ars Technica) labelled that video with "Note: If you love rockets, this is difficult to watch" and my brain immediately translated that to "trigger warning: LOV". Better than LOCV, at least.

edited 1st Sep '16 12:21:14 PM by NativeJovian

Christ,that is one expensive explosion.

Also, a very badly framed one. Michael Bay's first instinct probably was to get unhappy at the static cam and at the lost opportunity for a decent film of a really expensive set of bangs. Need more drones.

On a serious note: that went downhill very, very quickly even just eyeballing it. They probably realised they were lighting up for the wrong kind of boom milliseconds after ignition, given instrumental feedback. :/

edited 1st Sep '16 7:36:05 PM by Euodiachloris

So I saw a headline that Elon Musk is claiming that had the rocket been manned, the astronauts would have survived the explosion? I admit to not watching all the coverage, but isn't an explosion underneath you pretty much guaranteed to kill you one way or the other?^note either the explosion itself, or the sudden stop when the thrust from it propels you into something?

Depends, the command capsule might be designed in such a way that it can detect an explosion beneath it and launch itself into the air temporarily before coming down slowly via a parachute.

Yeah, manned rockets often have what essentially amount to ejection seats on the crew capsule. When Something Bad™ happens, the entire crew capsule gets blasted free of the rest of the vehicle. I don't know if the Falcon 9 specifically has something like that, but I imagine it would.

The LES on space X rockets is built into there capsuls, the orbital thrusters have enough ooomph to push it away from the rocket IIRC.

China can no longer into space. http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/a22936/tiangong-falling-to-earth/

Sabotage may be behind Space X launch failure Dam ULA to hell.

Yes because Space X hasn't screwed up before there is no possible way this their fault this time to.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Sputnik.

edited 5th Oct '16 10:18:16 AM by optimusjamie