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SpaceX completed the last big test of its crew capsule before launching astronauts in the next few months, mimicking an emergency escape shortly after liftoff Sunday.
No one was aboard for the wild ride in the skies above Cape Canaveral, just two mannequins.
A Falcon 9 rocket blasted off as normal, but just over a minute into its capsule catapulted off the top 12 miles (20 kilometers) above the Atlantic. Powerful thrusters on the capsule propelled it up and out of harm's way, as the rocket engines deliberately shut down and the booster tumbled out of control and exploded in a giant fireball.
The capsule reached an altitude of about 27 miles (44 kilometers) before parachuting into the ocean just offshore to bring the nine-minute test flight to a close and pave the way for two NASA astronauts to climb aboard next time.
Everything appeared to go well despite the choppy seas and overcast skies. Within minutes, a recovery ship was alongside the capsule and preparing to pull it from the water.
"I'm super fired up," Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, said at a news conference. "It's just going to be wonderful to get astronauts back into orbit from American soil after almost a decade of not being able to do so. That's just super exciting."
NASA astronauts have not launched from the U.S. since 2011 when the space shuttle program ended.
[...] Last month, meanwhile, Boeing's Starliner crew capsule ended up in the wrong orbit on its first test flight and had to skip the space station. The previous month, only two of the Starliner's three parachutes deployed during a launch abort test.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @09:29PM (19 children)
What would Greta say about the amount of CO2 released by this display?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @09:35PM
Saint Grumpy wouldn't have anything good to say, that's certain!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @09:36PM
I drove ten hours to see this.
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Monday January 20 2020, @09:40PM (4 children)
The CO2 was destroyed in the explosion.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 21 2020, @01:01AM (3 children)
But, but, but, isn't that even worser than having CO2 in the air? Lemme think about this . . . shouldn't there be a law against the destruction of matter?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @01:39PM (2 children)
There was until that Einstein guy said the answer was E=mc2 instead.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:02PM (1 child)
But, that other guy said the answer is 42. This gets so confusing . . . if E=mc2, and E=42, then mc2 has to equal 42?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @11:25PM
If mc2 = 42 then obviously mc = 4
m= 2
c = 2
It's all so simple. Everthing is 2.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @09:47PM (2 children)
I don't think you'll find that Musk is a hero to extinction rebellion types.
To actually answer the question, LOX / RP-1 is hell for the environment, and if you compared a rocket to flying in a plane, the rocket would absolutely crush the plane on carbon emissions. Several kT of carbon per launch.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @12:26PM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9 [wikipedia.org]
RP-1 is just C12H26 (more refined kerosene) so you get a reaction with xO2 +C12H26 -> 12 CO2 + 13 H2O... 170kL of kerosene is 0.8*170 = 136 tonnes.
So, as you can now see, we don't even need to do any calculation as we a launch of Falcon definitely produces less than "several kT of carbon" as it doesn't even have that much loaded... actually, the water to carbon dioxide ration means that 2/3 of the fuel weight is converted to carbon emissions. So ballparking we are talking maybe 250-300 tonnes of CO2??
liquid oxygen + kerosene. The only "hell" is that it's very rich mixture of fuel so your combustion is actually not that good. But otherwise, it's very light footprint for the environment even compared to most efficient planes or cars. The main reason is rocket launches are so sparse that their emissions are negligible.
Naturally, planes are much more efficient and less polluting per kg transported. But it's like comparing a car to a plane here.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 21 2020, @02:33PM
Alright, fine, I'll admit it, I used the entire fuel mass as an analog for the carbon emissions because I was lazy.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Monday January 20 2020, @10:34PM (8 children)
What I hear from most environmentalists is that it's a waste and we should spend that money here on Earth instead of "wasting" it in space.
I've had some success in getting people to reconsider that by discussing orbital solar power stations. It's hard to argue with zero CO2 non-nuke 95%* available baseload generation that works even at night and on cloudy days. I won't say I've changed their minds, but it's a crack in the "space is a waste" meme.
* You lose 5% to eclipses, but you can reduce the impact by being clever.
I'd love for us to start asteroid mining and shut down the nascent seafloor mining industry. People don't realize that's happening and that it is literally bulldozing unique and poorly explored hydrothermal vent ecosystems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @02:16AM (2 children)
You should also point out that the eclipses happen near local midnight, when base load is low, so they don't matter much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23 2020, @01:08AM (1 child)
Solar eclipses occur at noon.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday January 23 2020, @02:35AM
In this case the alignment would be Sun >> Earth >> Solar Collector, i.e. the satellite in space is in Earth's shadow. Assuming it is in a geosynchronous orbit it should happen near the receiver's local midnight.
This is different from a Sun >> Moon >> Earth eclipse. For those you are correct.
(Score: 1) by Jay on Tuesday January 21 2020, @04:30PM
Orbital solar power stations are a stupid idea unless you're planning to use all the energy in orbit.
To get that energy to earth you're stuck making a concentrated beam. That beam has losses through the atmosphere, and has issues with heavy cloud cover that far exceed the 5% lost from an eclipse. Not to mention that it's a death-ray. Unless you want to spread it out over a larger and larger area so the power isn't concentrated into a death-ray, at which point you've recreated terrestrial solar power.
It is a waste to stick stuff in orbit that we want on earth. Take all that energy and just make a bigger distribution network of renewables and call it a day. A study done in the last year or two found that Texas could probably rely 100% on wind, given a robust enough distribution network. Between the plains and the coasts, there's always plenty of wind somewhere. That's scalable to the whole country, and maybe the whole continent. No rocketry needed.
Now if you're talking about completely moving heavy industry into orbit and using space minerals and solar power, that's potentially a massive leap forward for humankind. But also not feasible for decades.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday January 21 2020, @04:47PM (3 children)
Yeah, I wouldn't trust orbital solar power stations for transporting that energy back to earth. That just seems to be asking for an entire town to be death beamed at some point.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Tuesday January 21 2020, @10:56PM (2 children)
The beam isn't concentrated enough to hurt you at ground level. The collection area gets about 400 w/m2, that's about one third the power of sunlight.
A 10GW station would have a collection area of 6 km diameter. The beam has to travel from GEO, even keeping it to 6km beam width is going to require good focusing. Turning it into a death ray just isn't possible.
The main advantages are 24/7 availability and you can use a cheap wire grid with rectifiers at the intersections to collect it. Stick the grid up on poles and you can graze animals or grow crops under it.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday January 21 2020, @11:38PM (1 child)
A couple of numbers put this into perspective.
The land based receiver for a 10GW orbital solar power station is about 27km2. That is 6km diameter as parent said.
For comparison, a 1 MW terrestrial PV plant is about a hectare, 0.01km2. Scaling that up to 10GW is about 100km2 of just PV panels, ignoring the other infrastructure. The big win isn't from the space though. It's from the uptime. The Terran panels lose roughly 12 hours a day from the rotation of the Earth. An orbital station loses less than an hour and a half.
We'll need to field test the receivers to see if we can use them as nature parks or if they end up as barren desertified wastelands. The projections lean toward the former, but I want to see it before I believe it.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday January 22 2020, @01:51AM
Few points.
The eclipses are not an everyday thing. If the SPS's are in GEO then their orbit is inclined at 23° to the ecliptic. The eclipses only happen through two short periods twice a year - spring / autumn equinoxes - and they last about 20 minutes.
Terran panels lose a lot more than 12 hours a day. Depending on location and climate terran panels produce a maximum of about 8 hours a day equivalent. Most of the time it is less than six.
IMHO if the land under your receiver is unusable then your receiver is obviously missing too much energy.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.