The Space Thread - Launches, Events, Live Streams, Governments, Corporations, drama in Spaaaaaaaaaaaace

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Odd how there's been no manned moon missions since around 1970. Hopefully, this mission can be a successful flight, and also not some Clown World circus act nor a freakshow.

Anyway, the rocket launches as 22:24 UTC, or 18:24 EDT.

🚀 🌕​
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Is it just me or was there a lack of publicity for the event?

I wouldn't have known about it had I not tuned into some talk radio station the other day.
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I think because this flight is meant to be a test regarding future missions to the moon, from what I understand theyre just going around the moon not landing.
 
As much as I shit talk modern NASA and have issues with the Artemis project I hope it all goes well. Swallowing my pride for a bit is a small price to pay to finally see space exploration move the fuck onwards.
 
The actual mission won't land on the moon but is a shakedown run of the craft for future moon missions and a test of a new communications tool.

Artemis II will test and demonstrate optical communications to and from Earth using the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O). The O2O hardware will be integrated into the Orion spacecraft and includes an optical module (a 4-inch [100 mm] telescope and two gimbals), a modem and control electronics. O2O will communicate with ground stations in. The test device will send data to Earth with a downlink rate of up to 260 megabits per second.
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ToroidalBoat said:
I still think it is better to have a different thread for a big thing, instead of having to go to page 800 of a 1000 page thread.
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What's the point of having a space happening thread if every time something happens we make a separate thread anyway? May as well just delete the mega thread then. Are we going to do separate threads for Artemis III, IV and the Starship launch too?
 
"Artemis II Is Not Safe to Fly" (L | A)
... when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.

NASA’s initial instinct was to cover up the problem. In early press releases, they stressed that both rocket and spacecraft had performed exceptionally, while declining to publish the post-flight assessment review. The first mention of heat shield damage came from Orion program manager Howard Hu on a call with reporters in March of 2023. Hu said: “we observed there were more variations across the heat shield than we expected; some of the expected char material that we would expect coming back home ablated away differently than what our computer models and what our ground testing predicted.”
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This left NASA in a quandary. The Orion capsule for Artemis II was already mated to its service module. Taking it off to make changes to the heat shield, even if the agency knew what changes to make, would take years. Nor was there room in the schedule to conduct a flight test, or any spare hardware to conduct the flight test with. Each Orion costs north of a billion dollars, and the only rocket it can launch on (SLS) costs two to four billion dollars a shot, depending on how you do the accounting.
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In a nutshell, Camarda argues that NASA is demonstrating the same dysfunction that led to the Columbia and Challenger disasters. Faced with an unexpected engineering failure, it has built toy models to convince itself that the conclusion it wants to reach (it’s safe to fly) are supported by evidence. These toy models are not grounded in physics, but because they appear to be quantitative, they create a false sense of security and understanding, an epistemic fig leaf for management to hide behind.

Put more simply, NASA is going to fly Artemis II based on vibes, hoping that whatever happened to the heat shield on Artemis I won’t get bad enough to harm the crew on Artemis II.
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Good evening/morning sirs, we are under 24 hours now for tomorrow's launch and it is going to be a doozy. We aren't going to watch another Falcon 9. This day is (hopefully) The Day for the second launch in the Artemis programs history.


ARTEMIS II

The Artemis II mission will be a demonstration flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) combined into one stack. As part of the test, this mission will be manned by a crew of four, though it must be noted the mission will be flown by computers. The crew will only take over if something goes catastrophically wrong. They are there to be test dummies and prove that the system can carry humans safely.

The crew for the mission are
Reid Wiseman
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Victor Glover
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Christina Koch
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Jeremy Hansen
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The mission is one of the most complicated under taken by NASA in at least half a century. Orbital insertion by a crewed vehicle into low earth orbit, followed by escape burn to break orbit and intercept the moon. No orbit of the moon will be attempted, and the Orion Crew Vehicle will instead slingshot around the far side and into a terminal insertion into the earths atmosphere, whereupon the vehicle will decelerate from Mach 32 to 0 over a period of 20 minutes.

The landing will be a parachuted "splashdown" into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California.

The entire mission is slated to take 10 days.
mission.webp


THE ARTEMIS PROGRAM
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The Artemis Program is the successor to the Apollo Program and was established by the Trump Administration in 2017 with Space Policy Directive 1, and marks the first (serious) attempt by NASA to resume manned lunar missions since the end of the Apollo program in the the 1970's. The goal of the project is twofold. Return humans to the moon, while simultaneously developing the technology to boost the capability of manned spaceflight beyond earth orbit.

To that end, Artemis has developed the largest "stack" of crew module and launch vehicles in NASA's history, and at present the combined SLS and Orion modules are the largest space launcher on the planet. Until SpaceX works the bugs out of "Starship" anyway. It is also doing this on a (comparatively) much smaller budget then the Apollo Program, leading to concerned voices that the project is "rushed". Not the least that only the second test ever of the combined Orion and SLS stack will be launched today with a manned crew. Much faster then Apollo, whose first manned mission was Apollo 7. NASA has countered by saying this is largely due to the fact that Apollo was breaking new and untested ground with various new technologies and materials. Artemis by comparison is doing so in an environment where materials science is much more understood, along with much more powerful computers able to model simulations of how the vessel will behave.

Despite NASA's optimism the SLS has been fraught with design issues, including persistent hydrogen leaks that caused the initial launch of Artemis II to be scrapped back in March. A repeat of similar issues that dogged the first test of the Stack in the Artemis I mission. Further, the heatshield on the Orion module indicated far greater impacts then projected during this same test flight. Needless to say, lots of hearts will be in throats for this one. A catastrophic failure of Artemis II will be a devastating blow to manned space missions, and would almost certainly doom the Artemis program all together, and make NASA beholden to Elon Musk's SpaceX for future manned missions.

T -0:00:00:01 is at 6:24 (18:24) ET, April 1st from the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If you are an enterprising Kiwi, you have just under 24 hours to get your ass down there to watch the launch in person. Delays of launches are common however, and its going to be cloudy. It will clear up by 7 PM though. Either way, get your "April Fools Day" jokes ready. The launch window lasts until April 6th.

For everyone else




 
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Get ready for months of articles about the first nigger/first waman on the Moon. Not trying to dismiss their qualifications, just the fact that articles like that will flood media.
 
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