Recent content by mfb

Vulcan Centaur launched another military satellite. There were a lot of sparks 65 seconds after launch. From a different perspective, it looks like there are already flames at the wrong spot 20 seconds after launch. ULA calls it "an observation". If that reminds you of something, it's probably...

China successfully performed an in-flight abort test of Mengzhou, its next crewed capsule that will support both missions to LEO and to the Moon. It was also a landing test for Long March 10: Soft splashdown next to the ship that is expected to catch it in the future.

Artemis II Wet Dress Rehearsal: Test Terminated at T-5:15 A hydrogen leak they couldn't fix. If they can retry the WDR soon then they might still make a February launch window, but if it delays things by more than 3 days then the launch will shift to March.

SLS is fully loaded, T-27 minutes. That's most of what we'll see externally, besides retracting the crew access arm at T-8 minutes. At NSF commentators discussed that a successful launch of Artemis 2 will likely delay Crew-12 until the astronauts return, apparently NASA cannot or does not want...

10 hours 30 min The poll to begin tanking will be in 10 min, if things go well then a small amount of propellant will be used to cool down everything starting in 20 minutes, and serious tanking will start in 1 hour 5 minutes. NASA NASA Spaceflight The Launch Pad This is only the WDR, but it...

The countdown to the wet dress rehearsal (WDR) has started, 45 hours to go. Here is the schedule. The core stage will be powered up in ~5.5 hours. Things will get much more eventful in the last 12 hours when tanking begins.

Amazon asks for an extension for its Kuiper/Leo constellation They have launched 180 since April last year. Unsurprisingly, they won't reach 1600 by July this year. Amazon now wants this deadline to move by 2 years. They also bought 10 more Falcon 9 launches to speed up deployment as their other...

Artemis II wet dress rehearsal shifted to February 2 due to bad weather. That means a launch no earlier than February 8 (ruling out the first 2 of 5 options).

I have no idea how to parse this run-on sentence. What is your question? That's a statement about forces, not energy. Different from what? The difference in unordered kinetic energy of water molcules is the gain in thermal energy if you heat water. E = mc^2 is the energy of an object at rest.

The cleaned up neutrino thread is here: CERN team claims measurement of neutrino speed >c (confirmation)

Launch window calendar: February 6, 7, 8, 10, 11 March 6, 7, 8, 9, 11 April 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 30 Each day has a 120 minute launch window during the local night. You want a fixed orientation between launch site and direction of the Moon, which happens every ~25 hours. Artemis II will fly around new...

The rocket for Artemis II will roll out in two hours Alternative coverage The launch is still planned for February 6. It will be the first time in over 50 years that humans leave low Earth orbit again, and fly around the Moon.

Successful return of Crew-11, the crew just left the capsule. Everything looked completely normal. If it's something related to zero-g then we might learn about it eventually, otherwise it's completely up to that crew member. SpaceX has launched 72 people and returned 74, with the difference...

Crew-11 will return earlier It won't be an emergency return, they'll follow the normal procedures and wait for a regular landing opportunity. The crew member is stable but they aren't sure what it is and the ISS doesn't have the diagnostic tools of a hospital. Whatever it is, I hope they can...

Mars being slower at aphelion wins over the other effects. Earth's orbital velocity is 29.3 km/s to 30.3 km/s with an average of 29.8 km/s. Mars' velocity varies between 26.5 km/s and 22 km/s. Relative to Earth and using Earth's average, that's 3.3 km/s when Mars is at perihelion and 8.2 km/s...