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[MonkeyHead]

... I mean , I have literally worked on this and inspected solar panel segments returned from the ISS held at the UK space centre in Leicester. Some have holes cleanly punched in them the size of a small coin made by sand sized grains. The sheer velocity of the small debris fragments makes them highly penetrating, and you simply can't see them coming. The very nature of spacecraft makes them very vulnerable to the sort of shrapnel we woukd make by blowing anything apart. That was rather why I made the point in the first place. We know where satellites are, and can track\predict orbital paths. Swapping that for hypersonic orbital swarf is madness\a brilliant weapon (delete as appropriate).

[LordBaal]

Develop force fields instead.

[Madman198237]

Develop force fields instead.

Instructions unclear, developed farce fields instead.

[Starver]

I'm just properly going through some footage of SN10 (from the usual YouTube 3rd-parties who have got their output down to a fine art) and its... post-landing disassembly.

Finally think I confirmed what the spinning thing was, right at the end[1]. Looks like it was a pressurised-gas cylinder that was flung away, maybe itself undamaged, but outgassing anyway by the now severed tubing, making it rotate rapidly along its axis (and perpetuating this) as it flies out of shot.

A bit of a "badoom.. tish!" to the event, I suppose. Certainly makes me laugh!

(Also, I wish I could get the YouTube app to work like it used to, and not go into (sideways) portrait mode when I went into the video in landscape, having had the Watch Later list that way, and I want to just go back and manually choose my next chosen Watch Later!  There's probably some setting. Not relevent to Space, but... Grrrrr!)


In other space-hardware news, elsewhere I've seen a slightly heated discussion start about whether Ingenuity should be called a "Mars Rover". ((Sparked by its mention in https://xkcd.com/2433/ ...)) And, if not, what it should be called. (Assuming it gets to be a Mars Anything, of course.) Any (non-heated) thoughts from the far more sensible Bay12 crowd?



[1] First the whole thing shoots up in flames, scattering lower debris; then the majority of it lands again, obviously rupturing the header tank, with loads more bits shooting off, and there is a whole new lot of debris, including something that was "fluttering" away (debris, not a foreground bird).

[Madman198237]

Several of the flying bits were COPVs, at least one of which was being propelled by its own escaping gas through some point of failure or another. I highly recommend Scott Manley and his video on SN10 as he does mention this and does some analysis of the high-speed footage.

Why, exactly, is there a question about whether Ingenuity is a rover? It's going to rove around Mars, at least a little bit. I guess the other argument is that it's merely a science experiment package of the main rover?

[Starver]

...one of the "It's not a Rover" suggestions was that it was a "PUP". Purposefully Unattached Peripheral.

As a UAV for use on Mars, someone suggested Martian Aerial Unmanned Vehicle Extending Reconaissance or "Mauver". But I think they were trying too hard for a 'rhyme'. (And it stopped me revealing my FIDO idea. )


(It was just someone raging a bit, originally, but sides were taken in the fight by others that followed. I just thought it might be interesting, as a tag-on to the last post, but it probably wasn't so this should close it back down again.)

[Starver]

For those previously interested, the Elsa-D craft have just been launched (as part of a multi-item soyuz payload). A pair of target/targetting sats that are going to be trying various catching operations (by magnet, but only as an on-again-off-again grapple, not a distance/orbit reducer) to get a feel of how easy it might be to handle stray objects.

Both will be fully controlled (the target will 'move' to various levels of awkwardness to catch, including initiate a tumble for later tests but can self-nullify that as needed) and will deorbit themselves on their own (ideally!) after all their fun'n'games. Most of the prior attempts at something similar (to my knowledge) tended to be "firing a harpoon at a self-held target extended on a boom", or possibly at a passive target released from the 'targetter' (both elements in guaranteed decaying orbits) so this should be interesting.

(Also maybe some miltech interest, in both the capabilities and otherwise that might be demonstrated. If that isn't secretly already somewhere at the front of the team's minds. )

[Cthulhu]

Develop force fields instead.

We do have whipple shields on some stuff.  Super thin layers of armor over the main body of a craft with a gap between them, hypervelocity bits of shit are going so fast they vaporize on impact with the shielding and the body of the craft just absorbs the impact of hot gas and dust, which isn't as nasty as the bit itself.

Ablative so it wears down over time and it's not gonna save you from a dead satellite crashing into you, but hey.

[Starver]

I see New Shepherd 4 worked well enough go be apparently ready to prepare for its first crewed launch, later next month... Probably worth an anticipatory note.

[bloop_bleep]

I see New Shepherd 4 worked well enough go be apparently ready to prepare for its first crewed launch, later next month... Probably worth an anticipatory note.

lol @ "well enough"

[Starver]

(Urgh... It's the rest of the sentence that I wish I'd written differently. No idea how it ended up with such contorted syntax. And "New Shepard", I must have badly autocorrected myself.)

[bloop_bleep]

I mostly meant it's funny to call something working "well enough" for a crewed launch... 

[Starver]

Oh I know.

I really said that bit that way because, at the time I decided to mark the success, I hadn't seen much more than it had been a success. (Still not much more to say about this attempt. But you've reminded me I've got some Yotube footage marked to Watch Later, which I'll probably Watch Now, thanks for reminding me!)

But pretty much every other bit I used was inaccurate and/or just phrased in a weird/ugly way.  "Anticipatory note"? Sheesh.  I can't even blame it on being a 3:45AM post.

Hey, everybody! It looks like Bezos is finally going to be able to send humans into space next month!

(Or perhaps something riffing on an Amazon delivery date.)


I should say something actually Spacey, though, rather than be self-critical. Loads of stuff going up there, though a lot of it is very nearly yadda-yadda-yadda. All kinds of sats going up, Crew Dragon getting ready to launch its Crew 2, SLS is now getting there, SpaceX will be involved in the Artemis landings (apparently despite the current "SNs tend to go Boom" thing), Percy's doing Ok, Ingy's still getting ready...


So, instead, something I heard announced earlier today...

RIP Glynn Lunney, a key Flight Director during the Apollo 13 emergency.

[Starver]

I didn't want to double-post, but nobody else said anything, and everybody will already know the first flight went well. (No Loop-the-Loop yet... Maybe later!)

But now they've also successfully run MOXIE, the oxygen-generator experiment. Which leads the way to various future missions without having to take all the supplies (probably mostly the oxidiser for the departure stage) down to the surface.

[Telgin]

That's pretty cool.  I don't know exactly how much the oxidizer weighs in proportion to any proposed landers, but every gram saved matters.

I'm sure it's much more challenging but in principle you should be able to extract oxygen from regolith as well, so this could theoretically have some distantly related applications on the moon or other solar system bodies with no atmosphere.