1. This is the equivalent of the Apollo 4 mission in that it also flew without a crew, and was used to prove, validate and verify that Saturn V and associated systems were fully mission-capable.
2. Events like this represent our future. Events like this are the catalysts for our future generation. The children around the world (perhaps one or more of your own) that are viewing this event are the ones that will be galvanized to dream, to explore, to go into astrophysics, computer science, mathematics, etc. Just imagine the seeds that are being planted with every event, be it brought to us by ESA, ISRO, NASA, SpaceX, etc. Our 5 year old is asking questions: what makes a rocket launch? Why is the explosion so big? I mean, we're already having conversations that start to tear me up a little, partly because that connection brings me back in touch with my own passion for technology, and partly because it is a small glimpse that represents Our collective future.
I sat and watched the countdown (the video cut out at T-00:15) with my 3.5-year-old son this morning. He was extremely excited, to the point that he was able to sit still for a half-hour just listening to the announcements of various system checks. Even without being able to watch the actual launch live (we watched a taped version a few minutes later), he still seemed to be catching quite a bit of excitement, and asked a myriad of questions ("How does the rocket return to earth?" "What's that flame?").
When I was in grade-school in the early-mid 90's, I brought a news clipping of a Shuttle launch in for a "current events" classroom segment. Many of my classmates responded with disinterest: "Why do you care? There are Shuttle launches all the time." We were young enough not to remember Challenger, so space-flight seemed routine and boring. As tragic and disappointing as the Columbia disaster and end of the Shuttle program were, I think they actually reminded us not to take manned spaceflight for granted.
I work with an astronomer and physicist with a PhD from MIT. She was actually less excited about today's launch than I expected, mainly because she's more interested in the science being done by robotic missions. I'm sure she's right that they're much more cost-effective and able to deliver almost as many results, but I'd place a small wager that manned spaceflight was at least partially responsible for her interests and career path.
Also, I realized this morning (while looking at diagrams comparing the sizes of various launch configurations) that just seeing a picture of a Space Shuttle with its rockets still makes me a bit emotional. I can't say for sure what effect it had on me growing up, but I'm sure that it played a part in my development as a civic- and tech-minded individual.
I'm not sure if that's the best comparision. I'm something of a cheerleader for the SLS program, but this is just a dumb capsule test. This isn't the rocket we're going to be using. That rocket isn't even built yet. Historically, rockets are hard and capsules are easy. Assuming that it stays on schedule, which is a big assumption, we won't have a test flight for the SLS until 2018.
We're still a long ways off here for the Orion/SLS launch, at least a decade until a real mission, probably longer. Its incredible how the poorly conceived Bush-era constellation program set us back here. We should have had a SaturnV-level replacement the day the Shuttle was retired.
I wouldn't discount the capsule. From the sound of it, the plan is for this to be a fairly universal capsule for years to come. If it has the longevity of Soyuz, we might be flying Orions (with design upgrades) for 40 years. That's not a bad thing.
It seems to me that NASA is backing away from building one giant integrated system. They're working on building a collection of systems that can be composed into different missions. There will be rockets, and service modules, and future space craft.
This is probably a better strategy given the political reality that you only have continuity for 4-8 years at best. No matter what the next president & congress plan, we will have a capsule that is useful. It is bought and paid for.
Also, the capsule might not be as futuristic looking as a space plan, but it is a workhorse. That's all it needs to be. The fact that you can launch it with basically any rocket that is powerful enough is a feature not a bug. I'd love to see Orions on top of SLS, future SpaceX rockets, etc. If it was something super specific it might not be able to fly on other rockets.
"We should have had a SaturnV-level replacement the day the Shuttle was retired."
I think, in part, the historical reason involves the following [1]:
The reality is that we need something other than the threat to national security to polarize us towards a common goal. That's what happened during the Space Race. The Soviets launched Sputnik 1, and that lit the fuse on a world-altering journey.
In the US, this brought about the creation of NASA. NASA's budget soared to nearly 5% of the total federal budget during that time. This "money no consequence" era resulted in a drive by the government to inject capital into the education system by funding the National Defense Education Act. This was designed to address the fact that more engineers and mathematicians were needed to advance science forward.
Fast-forward, and NASA is probably at 0.5% of the federal budget now, if that. The Space Race ended, and funding levels couldn't be sustained, largely due to the fact that the threat to national security had faded. The enthusiasm faded, along with the funding; the need for Saturn V-level lift capability simply could not be convincingly sold to the public.
I've mentioned this before, but at this time, it often feels like there is an under-current feeling of, "Where are we heading, as a nation?" I know this is anecdotal, but today, I was asking colleagues if they watched this morning's launch, and the only response I received was, "What launch?"
I don't have all of the answers. Part of the answer is that our finest hour is when we innovate, when we explore, when we dream. Part of the answer is that it will take a change in attitudes towards science in general, and space exploration in specific. I think Neil deGrasse Tyson summed it best:
"Right now, NASA's annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that — a penny on a dollar — we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow."
(I hope InclinedPlane chimes in. His/her knowledge on space-related topics exceeds mine, from what I've read in associated comments. Raising the bat signal...)
[1] I feel that I need to caveat that I'm speaking as an American here, although I believe that I am "a citizen of the world" in my world-view. I get excited about all launches, regardless of space program or country of origin. I realize that this is a global forum.
...it often feels like there is an under-current feeling of, "Where are we heading, as a nation?"
Thank goodness, if this is actually the case. It might be heresy to "leadership" aficionados, but "national" goals are usually windfalls for a few people, fairly benign to most of the elites, and disastrous for the rest of us. Less national direction, please!
I only wish that this had of been able to attract more publicity. New capsules are always cool and NASA is the king of them all... But as a government body in a tech 2.0 world it doesn't attract the attention or respect that is worthy of its (occasionally bloated, cost-overrun, but nonetheless amazing and awe-inspiring) achievements
edit: my apologies, incorrectly thought this was a first flight of the Orion launch system and not capsule
Not thinking outside the box. Thankfully Elon is. Hopefully, a few other engineers/businessmen will.
NASA has a $20 billion budget. WhatsApp cost almost NASA's budget. Uber is already valued at $41 billion. Apple earned $181 billion in fiscal 2014. Perhaps a half dozen companies will create a business around space and we'll have a trillion dollar space industry to augment NASA's puny budget.
A manned Mars mission is within the grasp of existing technology (and has been for 40 years).
Fusion power isn't.
Mind that I'm not arguing for or against a manned mission to Mars. I don't think it would prove any tremendous benefits, though it would be most decidedly cool. I also believe that permanent or long-term Mars settlements are well beyond present technical capabilities.
But the difference here is political will and financing. Not underlying technical viability.
I'm the guy who cut pictures of the Viking missions out of the paper when he was 10. I've seen lots of enthusiasm. The Shuttle, Skylab, Hubble, the Space Station, the Rovers on Mars, etc.
You are in an echo chamber of enthusiasm on HN. It doesn't translate to the rest of the America. We aren't going to magically triple NASA's budget because of enthusiasm. We canceled a larger supercollider more than CERN 20 years ago because it was a few billion over budget. We said Hubble or SSC, not both. It certainly would have been nice to learn 20 years ago what we are learning today.
It's impressive, but no Apollo 4. That launched on the production stack, with a ready to go capsule including all life support systems. 4 was a Phoenix after the disaster of Apollo 1.
I should point out that "it" is still going on, the mission is rather hectic four hour mission concluding in atmospheric re-entry, splashdown and recovery. There should be plenty of fantastic footage coming up in the next few hours, it's worth staying tuned.
Now to grab some lunch to be back in time for the second stage burn to 3200 nm apogee orbit (3640 mi = 5760 km).
I will cheer every launch but I must admit, after watching so many SpaceX launches, I twiched when I heard "feet per second" and all the other imperial units :p
Miles for casual talk, KMs for speeding tickets. Pounds when cooking, stones for people & kgs for everything else. Inches in carpentry and horsepower for cars.
In a lot of places metric is a lingua franca kind of like latin. It's used in international, formal or academic settings (like a space launch) but the average farmer speaks a local dialect more natively.
It's similar in Canada. The country formally converted from imperial to metric between 1970 and 1983 for temperature measurements, road signs and speed limits, consumer goods packaging (volume and weight), and so on.
However, due to our physical and cultural proximity to the US, many consumer goods are sold in "soft-metric" quantities: 454 grams of butter, 273 milliletres of pop and so on.
Food recipes are still mostly imperial - cups, teaspoons, tablespoons and so on - though recipes by weight (e.g. for baking) come in either or both formats. Similarly, body weights are still mainly imperial (pounds but not stone) unless you're at the doctor's office, in which case your weight is taken in kilograms.
Realistically, most Canadians know both systems and routinely convert between them.
For weather, we tend to use whichever measure sounds more dramatic: Fahrenheit for hot summer days (109 degrees with the Humidex!) but Celsius for cold winter days (minus 30 with the wind chill!).
Yeah, I like metric but I still prefer my beer measured in pints. The difference is that while people have preferences like this, everyone knows metric is The Standard.
Hilariously, people in the comments on that article demand miles because they're 'English.' I sometimes think Americans secretly miss being ruled from London.
> Yeah, I like metric but I still prefer my beer measured in pints.
Its funny. Orwell was against the metric system, so there is a small amusing scene in 1984 where on the proles (an old man) in a bar complains that he hates liters of beer.
"'Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four quarts to the gallon. 'Ave to teach you the A, B, C next."
"Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and half litres - that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf in front of you."
"I likes a pint," persisted the old man. "You could 'a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man."
As Arizona Republic comment sections go (especially on stories related to the border with Mexico, language or immigration), that one's so tame it's almost charming.
It seems that every place uses some kind of mix. Here at Brazil we get TVs measured in inches (the government just issued a law forcing them to be measured in cm, so there is also a small, mostly hidden number, with 2 decimal places, somewhere on the box), and receipts are measured in cups and spoons (but I've never seen a correctly sized spoon).
Some farmers use a crazy set of measurement, where units vary in size from one state to another, and even between neighboring cities, and stuff with a small market use whatever their biggest market use (what normaly means, whatever the US uses).
Not true in my experience. I've lived in five different provinces and I've never met a Canadian who uses Farenheit. I've never met anyone under 40 who knows much more than >100F = hot either.
Unfortunately the feed died for me ~20s before launch (in S. America, and also for several people I was online chatting with [US, Ukraine]). After a bit, the audio briefly came back and I heard the sound of the rocket engine and the announcer say "exploration", which I take to mean the rocket launched. NASA's twitter account also says the rocket lauched[0] and 17 min to orbit[1].
EDIT: Looks like the feed is now revived (12:11 UTC).
It went down for a lot of people, looking at the twitter feed on the side of http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv a lot of people are complaining.
I was at T-9 seconds and it died.
I was wondering why I missed it. The video wouldn't load for a few minutes and when I finally was able to start viewing again the rocket was already T+2:35ish :/
To be fair, there were a ton of international mirrors in popular streaming services (livestream.com, ustream.tv) as well as international news agencies (bbc.co.uk for example) which worked flawlessly.
I was watching livestream.com using VLC + livestreamer script and it worked without any issues.
The problem is that these mirrors should have been listed clearly at the nasatv site as well as in www.nasa.gov/orion.
Actually I'd put them on around the same level of complexity from an engineering perspective.
Have you thought, recently, how difficult it really is to broadcast video to millions of viewers and all of the individual moving parts that make that happen? It's mind boggling.
> Have you thought, recently, how difficult it really is to broadcast video to millions of viewers and all of the individual moving parts that make that happen? It's mind boggling.
Yes. And as far as I can tell, YouTube has it down to a science. If I were NASA, I would let YouTube broadcast the live stream, and embed a YouTube player on the NASA website.
Yes, but arguably, NASA has rocket science down to a science too. My point still stands: it's still a pretty complex and difficult thing to pull off with a high rate of consistency.
This looks so complex BUT it is coming in so fast (20,000 MPH) into the atmosphere BUT there are so many points for failure. Surprised there wasn't a simpler and safer solution.
IIRC Space X is going with small rockets to slow decent instead of parachutes. Or in addition to parachutes?
I wonder if that would be applicable for the required dV. Or if that is even safer.
The goal is an eventual "soft landing" on a rocket, which isn't feasible with parachutes. Such a rocket could be landed in a specific location, refilled with fuel, and be available for relaunch fairly quickly.
I really enjoyed the part when they streamed from the camera attached to Orion and the audio gradually silenced, since the rocket was leaving the atmosphere and no air could be used for a sound wave medium.
The audio from all the different camera views was the same, I noticed. Notably, the sound obviously came from a microphone on the ground, fairly close to the rocket. This can be deduced by the fact that there is very little delay between the light up and the start of the noise, and the fact that the character of the sound changes when the rocket is a couple of rocket-lengths above the launch platform.
While I personally would prefer to have the authentic sound, I can understand why they did it this way.
The ustream feed has been the most reliable for me; NASA TV site stream always seems to stutter or go offline at all the most exciting parts of any event.
They just stated that the force experienced by crew on reentry would be 8g, while the force on a Soyuz capsule is just 4g. 8g is more than enough for a person to black out, this seems like a major disadvantage.
Up to 12G is okay, in a proper body position. Mercury routinely came in at 8G, and those guys were usually trying to control the thing semi-manually, since the automatic systems weren't that good. These days the monkey in the can won't need to do much. The Mercury suborbitals came in at a nice 11-12G.
The difference between Orion and Soyuz is a question of speed; the EFT profile was supposed to simulate a "deep space" reentry, which is faster and steeper than a low-earth-orbit rentry.
You can see the difference in the Apollo program, using the same capsule but with different flight profiles:
Apollo 7 and 9 come in at 3.3G-ish, and the rest 6.5-7G-ish.
If it's actually 8G, that does seem a bit high; but Orion's actually a pretty huge thing, and denser than Apollo, so I guess that makes sense. And they only let the best trained very healthiest multiple-phD government employees ride the thing, so I don't think it's a big deal.
They don't have an option on that one. The acceleration experienced on re-entry depends on the speed of approach. Re-entry from low earth orbit is no big deal, hence being able to slow down with just 4G. Re-entry from a bit further away is more serious, as there is more velocity to shed. Remember that the module has been falling from more than 3600 miles up, which is a lot of energy to get rid of.
The g-load experienced during the re-entry is more a function of the entry trajectory that is flown than the speed of entry.
For example, the crews of several Soyuz missions experienced 8+ G's when the so-called "ballistic" re-entry mode occurred due to various systems problems.
Apollo crews returning from the moon commonly experienced 6 - 7 g loads during re-entry
The US space shuttle's entry profile was designed to limit decelerations to 3 g's (as was the ascent profile).
It isn't the speed, it's how you fly the ascent/descent profile. And yes, the conical Apollo capsule form (largely re-used by Orion) is a lifting body that is actually flown through the atmosphere.
Congratulations to the ULA and Lockheed teams that put this together. It is always a big milestone when you have hardware flying! Let's keep the momentum going!
This is really the most amazing day for humankind.
Today we took the first step to be a multi-planitary species.
Today we took the step to go further.
Today we started the countdown clock to step foot on Mars.
Today we took only small step in a very long process, but many small steps got us to where we are today, to be able to send a rocket into space (a rocket!!! into space!!!) and many small steps lay before us to take a small step onto the Martian surface.
The ULA guy in the pre-flight news conference[1] said the rocket is not modified for this flight but they had to do analysis because the payload is not inside the payload fairing.
1. This is the equivalent of the Apollo 4 mission in that it also flew without a crew, and was used to prove, validate and verify that Saturn V and associated systems were fully mission-capable.
2. Events like this represent our future. Events like this are the catalysts for our future generation. The children around the world (perhaps one or more of your own) that are viewing this event are the ones that will be galvanized to dream, to explore, to go into astrophysics, computer science, mathematics, etc. Just imagine the seeds that are being planted with every event, be it brought to us by ESA, ISRO, NASA, SpaceX, etc. Our 5 year old is asking questions: what makes a rocket launch? Why is the explosion so big? I mean, we're already having conversations that start to tear me up a little, partly because that connection brings me back in touch with my own passion for technology, and partly because it is a small glimpse that represents Our collective future.
I'm stoked.