I can't remember the last time I saw a test flight that dramatic, or exiting.
Looking forward to a tower landing.
Looking forward to a tower landing.
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SpaceX and other space stuff
- Thread starter bholder
- Start date
Starliner (crew and ground) still working on helium leakage issue.
The space station has an imaginary "Keep Out Sphere" of 200 meters (~650 feet). Nothing enters that zone until everything is perfect with a visiting craft. Ground control has told the capsule to manually get to 200 meters and keep station there while ground is still working the issue.
Starliner missed the first docking window while ground worked the issue.
Latest: All 6 degrees of freedom have been restored to spacecraft. They are now allowed inside the sphere awaiting next docking opportunity. About 15 minutes. Crew is doing some hot fire test on a few thrusters. Looks like it'll be a manual docking (not certain).
I tuned in for a few minutes of Starship stuff. I thought one announcer was gonna have an organism LOL.
The space station has an imaginary "Keep Out Sphere" of 200 meters (~650 feet). Nothing enters that zone until everything is perfect with a visiting craft. Ground control has told the capsule to manually get to 200 meters and keep station there while ground is still working the issue.
Starliner missed the first docking window while ground worked the issue.
Latest: All 6 degrees of freedom have been restored to spacecraft. They are now allowed inside the sphere awaiting next docking opportunity. About 15 minutes. Crew is doing some hot fire test on a few thrusters. Looks like it'll be a manual docking (not certain).
I tuned in for a few minutes of Starship stuff. I thought one announcer was gonna have an organism LOL.
I wonder how many more flights before they try landing them on barges?
We've got something the size of a 44-story skyscraper, flying faster than a 30.06 round muzzle velocity!
They're not aiming for barges - it's home to the launch tower, and a big hug from the chopsticks.
Lest we forget about the 'little helicopter that could' on Mars, Ingenuity, I found this interview with the Ingenuity Mars project manager. Talks about the leading theory as to why it crashed on a sand dune and it's future.:
Host: And it came in for a hard landing off flight 72. What have you learned about what happened?
Tzanetos: Yeah. A lot. And we’re still learning. The team, actually later on this afternoon, there’ll be some meetings that I’m going to attend, where our GNC [Guidance, Navigation, and Control] team and our mechanical team are still digging through the data to try and better our understanding. We will never know, likely, the full, you know, cause analysis, root cause analysis rather, of what occurred. But here are some of the things that we do know: The area of Mars that Ingenuity was flying over towards the end of her mission — which we’ve now affectionately called the place Valinor Hills for nerdy “Lord of the Rings” reasons — was some of the most featureless terrain that Ingenuity had ever experienced. Because of that, it’s kind of a great victory story for us in that we finally found the edge, right? The whole journey over the last three years is, if you imagine the envelope as a sphere, our flight envelope, we’ve been pushing on in every direction between velocity, how high we can fly above ground level, the automatic landing hazard avoidance. In each vector, we’ve been expanding our envelope, and we now found the edge.
That boundary had to do, we believe the leading theory here is, that it had to do with how featureless the terrain was. That’s important because the way Ingenuity flies is she has a downward looking camera, an altimeter, and a set of inertial sensors like an accelerometer and a gyroscope. Very similar to drones here on Earth. Even if you were to take a drone here on Earth, and you were to put it in a white, pure white room, it wouldn’t be able to visually orient itself and figure out from moment to moment where the features are moving in the field of view. And it uses that information to determine and close the loop of where it actually thinks it is in space.
So going back to Mars here, that terrain near Valinor Hills was very sandy, very fine in terms of the texture of the sand. There weren’t a lot of boulders sticking out. And we saw on the logs in flight 70 and in 71 that the number of features that the baby was able to resolve was dropping and going lower, and she was reporting, “Hey, guys, this is getting very challenging for me to, you know, navigate it.” And there was no other path for us to go. We had to go to the northwest because that’s where the river was headed. So the best thing to do was to keep trying to tweak some parameters if we could, and learn as much as we could and, and we succeeded in that regard. Unfortunately, had the rough landing, we weren’t able to keep flying. But she surprised us still.
And as far as the helicopter, you know, computer system is concerned, it’s healthy as a fiddle. She doesn’t know that the rotor is broken. And she’s going to keep on waking up every single day recording data. We have about 20 years’ worth of storage on board and we’re going to be taking a picture every day for future explorers to you know, get a really great time lapse from.
Anyway, thought it was interesting as an update.
Host: And it came in for a hard landing off flight 72. What have you learned about what happened?
Tzanetos: Yeah. A lot. And we’re still learning. The team, actually later on this afternoon, there’ll be some meetings that I’m going to attend, where our GNC [Guidance, Navigation, and Control] team and our mechanical team are still digging through the data to try and better our understanding. We will never know, likely, the full, you know, cause analysis, root cause analysis rather, of what occurred. But here are some of the things that we do know: The area of Mars that Ingenuity was flying over towards the end of her mission — which we’ve now affectionately called the place Valinor Hills for nerdy “Lord of the Rings” reasons — was some of the most featureless terrain that Ingenuity had ever experienced. Because of that, it’s kind of a great victory story for us in that we finally found the edge, right? The whole journey over the last three years is, if you imagine the envelope as a sphere, our flight envelope, we’ve been pushing on in every direction between velocity, how high we can fly above ground level, the automatic landing hazard avoidance. In each vector, we’ve been expanding our envelope, and we now found the edge.
That boundary had to do, we believe the leading theory here is, that it had to do with how featureless the terrain was. That’s important because the way Ingenuity flies is she has a downward looking camera, an altimeter, and a set of inertial sensors like an accelerometer and a gyroscope. Very similar to drones here on Earth. Even if you were to take a drone here on Earth, and you were to put it in a white, pure white room, it wouldn’t be able to visually orient itself and figure out from moment to moment where the features are moving in the field of view. And it uses that information to determine and close the loop of where it actually thinks it is in space.
So going back to Mars here, that terrain near Valinor Hills was very sandy, very fine in terms of the texture of the sand. There weren’t a lot of boulders sticking out. And we saw on the logs in flight 70 and in 71 that the number of features that the baby was able to resolve was dropping and going lower, and she was reporting, “Hey, guys, this is getting very challenging for me to, you know, navigate it.” And there was no other path for us to go. We had to go to the northwest because that’s where the river was headed. So the best thing to do was to keep trying to tweak some parameters if we could, and learn as much as we could and, and we succeeded in that regard. Unfortunately, had the rough landing, we weren’t able to keep flying. But she surprised us still.
And as far as the helicopter, you know, computer system is concerned, it’s healthy as a fiddle. She doesn’t know that the rotor is broken. And she’s going to keep on waking up every single day recording data. We have about 20 years’ worth of storage on board and we’re going to be taking a picture every day for future explorers to you know, get a really great time lapse from.
Anyway, thought it was interesting as an update.
Right to that, that'll be a big step for sure! Amazing. A 44 story building that flies to orbit then returns with accuracy within inches.
Obviously, it was a lot more tense / dramatic, and exciting in realtime - not know what would happen one second to the next, or how things would turn out.
I watched it on a different channel (I can never find an official SpaceX stream that isn't A.I. Deepfake Elon Musk trying to get me to invest in Bitcoin), and those guys not having direct access to the data that SpaceX mission control have, really added to the flying by the seat of your pants tension.
The full stream is available, but that's over an hour of commitment, and we already know the outcome.
I would imagine that later generations would fix the problem with higher definition, stereoscopic cameras.
But that said, I've spoken to helicopter pilots who've said being in a whiteout is like being trapped inside a ping-pong ball.
The only thing you can do is find a safe place to land, and wait it out.
So I imagine they would need to include some autonomous software, that can make a decision in situations where it is approaching the threshold of insufficient navigational data, to either backtrack, set down, or gain altitude to take in a bigger picture.
Yeah, it can cause vertigo for pilots when they lose internal spatial orientation. Their internal senses are confused, but they're trained to rely on their instruments at that point.
I was maintenance on the SH-60B anti-sub helo. We were at sea on the USS Monterey (guided missile cruiser) and saw the results (not lethal or destructive fortunately). Got a few feet in the air after I released their deck securing system and the helo slammed back down to the flight deck. What the hello kitty!!!
Night mission, but one of those nights where you couldn't differentiate between sea and sky (normally you can). Twilight Zone-ish when you look out and there's nothingness around the ship.
But as soon as they took off, they both got vertigo, and one of 'em slammed it back down to the deck. They were fine, helo was fine (determined the next day), flight cancelled LOL.
Alright, no more sea stories LOL. In best pirates voice, "Arrr, matey, there I was, 40 miles off the coast and not a drop of rum aboard...".
Back to the Mars helo, I imagine it wouldn't last 20 years as the dust builds up on the solar panels. As it flies, it shakes and blows off the accumulation. Not any more. Still neat that it's possible, just not likely, in my opinion. Still, it's gonna do it's daily task for quite awhile.
Happens to both fixed wing pilots and helo pilots. Spatial disorientation, something you train for, has taken down even some very experienced pilots. This is what happened to Kobe's pilot when he flew from VFR (Visual Flight Rules) into an IMC (Instrument Meteorological Conditions) whiteout in the low lying clouds. You need to immediately trust your instruments and not your inner ear equilibrium or it can kill you and your passengers.
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Well, blast... only just saw this:
Invalid Link Removed
Also known as the astronaut who took the famous "Earthrise" photo.
Invalid Link Removed
Also known as the astronaut who took the famous "Earthrise" photo.
I read one of those articles too. Kind of a clickbaity title. They've found more helium leaks but there's supposed to be more than enough to return. June 22 is the scheduled date as of now.
As an engineering nerd (and knowing there are many like-minded here) this delay sets my Spidey Sense tingling.
This situation is a near black box, we can only speculate what's going on under the hood. But as the delay lengthens, my feeling that the Starliner team has a firm grasp on the issue(s) gets weaker and weaker.
Steely-eyed space jocks are ready for anything. But usually all the bugs are ironed out before rendezvous with a big spacefaring object.
I also daresay my prediction up thread is getting more likely. (That they will opt to have this Starliner crew hitch a ride back down, and send Starliner back autonomously.)
This situation is a near black box, we can only speculate what's going on under the hood. But as the delay lengthens, my feeling that the Starliner team has a firm grasp on the issue(s) gets weaker and weaker.
Steely-eyed space jocks are ready for anything. But usually all the bugs are ironed out before rendezvous with a big spacefaring object.
I also daresay my prediction up thread is getting more likely. (That they will opt to have this Starliner crew hitch a ride back down, and send Starliner back autonomously.)
