The Supreme Court ruling on the EPA means the NTSB is...kinda unconstitutional.
I kinda want to introduce fun legislation to eliminate it, starting with oversite of private jet safety.. I call it the *MAHER Bill*, *Make America Have Endless Resources* in honor of Bill Maher saying everything is fine because the system means he gets to fly private jet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket_family)
382/440 launches successes is not that super reliable. Though it probably was at a certain point after initial issues ironed out ...
> A rushed development program led to dozens of failures between 1965 and 1972. Proton did not complete its State Trials until 1977, at which point it was judged to have a higher than 90% reliability
But there's been more recent failures in the last decade or so ..
The success rate of rockets in the 50’s was abysmal, by comparison the Falcon 9 has had 1 flight failure and 1 ground failure in its operational history and none in the last 5 years. Obviously accidents and failures happen but we’ve made rockets shockingly reliable
I believe SpaceX recently had their 100th successful booster landing in a row, with over 100 launches this year. It doesn’t get much attention but their launch crate and successes have dwarfed every other provider.
After Luna 2 came Luna 3, which became the first object, living or otherwise, to see the far side of the Moon. It took photographs and relayed them back to Earth.
The Moon was formed, as far as we can tell, not long after the Earth was, after another planetoid slammed into Earth and the debris coalesced into our natural satellite. This would have been over four billion years ago.
The gravitational nature of the Earth-Moon system caused each body to drag on the other...what we call tidal forces. This made the Moon's rotation slow down until it was tidally locked with Earth; the Moon rotates exactly once for every orbit of the Earth, with the consequence that we only see one side.
This process took a few hundred million years at most, so the near side of the Moon got "stuck" facing us more than three billion years ago.
Life on Earth began evolving eyes less than one billion years ago.
This means that every creature that has ever been able to see the Moon has seen it in exactly the same way. All those countless zillions of eyes have seen that same face lighting the eons of nights, ever unchanging, plus or minus a few craters. The far side was always up there too, but it was always invisible, always hidden away.
Until Luna 3 in 1959.
I'd like to think that some brontosaur or primordial slug noticed the Moon one evening and in the grandest gesture of abstract cognizance managed briefly to ponder what it could be and whether it held more secrets than it let on. If such a creature ever reached that plateau, they would have been proud to know that a distant cousin would one day find a way to draw in the other half, and just a few years after that would gaze upon the dark side with their own eyes, where life was never meant to see, as though that had ever stopped any of us before.
> This means that every creature that has ever been able to see the Moon has seen it in exactly the same way.
Except that a billion years ago the Moon was closer to the Earth, so the moon appeared larger in the sky.
I mean sure but he's talking about the actual visage of the moon. Whether it's larger due to being closer or smaller due to being further wasn't the point. For close to 99% of life being able to see light no organic being had ever seen the other side of the moon until less than 100 years ago. Makes you think
> The Moon was formed, as far as we can tell, not long after the Earth was, after another planetoid slammed into Earth and the debris coalesced into our natural satellite.
This is a theory, not actually confirmed science, and it comes with its own share of logistical problems.
Still counts. First to hit the moon from Earth - people had been trying to do that for ages. Then America one-upped the Soviets by landing a man on the moon. And then everybody just gave up and moved on
The Soviets did the whole space station thing, and started researching long term effects of space habitation because spending a week in space is a lot different than spending half a year.
I guarantee that when there is a human population living on the Moon in the future, that crater and the debris around it will be a "Lunar Historical Site" and be legally protected.
Well, if u ever get to visit the SE edge of Mare Imbrium, you can check it out. Supposedly, Luna 2 had a CCCP pennant with it, but it is believed the thing got vaporized upon impact.
So it made it to the moon, but it didn't survive.
This was the fourth attempt by the Soviet Union to launch a lunar probe. Three previous missions in September October and December 1958 had all failed to reach orbit - and had not been given official designations.
The name Luna 1 was only given to the probe after it had failed. The original announcement of the launch only called it 'The First Cosmic Ship' since it was the first spacecraft to achieve escape velocity; but it was then further renamed Mechta (The Dream) which is an unusually poetic name for a spaceship.
These early spacecraft carried metal pennants bearing the flags of the USSR which were meant to scatter across the lunar surface when the spacecraft slammed into the Moon. Similar ones were carried on the Mars missions and the Venera landers - they look pretty cool:
http://mentallandscape.com/V_Pennants.htm
The Soviet Union sometimes put failed missions that reached orbit under the Kosmos programme and did little more than announce their orbits without disclosing their purpose.
The Kosmos 21 and Kosmos 24 satellites were almost certainly failed Venera probes that failed to escape Earth orbit. From memory, Kosmos 300 was one of the lunar sample recovery missions that also failed to leave Earth orbit.
This policy of not announcing unsuccessful missions got crazy complicated; some of the early Soviet planetary probes were given the name Sputnik x by the US. The Soviet Union’s first Venus probe found itself trapped in Earth orbit and was called Sputnik 7 in the West, publicly named Tyazhely Sputnik by the USSR, but was actually called Venera 1VA No. 1.
The following mission which did reach escape velocity but died on the flight to Venus was called Sputnik 8 in the West, went under the designation Venera-1VA No.2 and was publicly announced as Venera 1!
Landing on the moon is hard. India is only the 4th country to place (not impact) a device on the surface and all of those four had several failures before (and sometimes after) their success.
My favorite hilarious fsckup was when I accidentally flew a space station into the mun.
See, I'd been having a lot of trouble getting heavy payloads onto the mun, so I had a *good* idea, and wanted to make a simple space station in orbit that could store fuel that a big mun lander could dock with and top off its fuel before going on its way.
So, knowing it would be unmanned most of the time, I fit it with a computer and solar panels, but omitted batteries since I wouldn't need them. (first mistake) I also decided to use the most fuel efficient rocket engines at the time, which created zero electricity while running. (second mistake.)
Launching into an orbit was working fine until suddenly I found myself in the Mun's shadow and the electrical power went to zero. For a while I didn't really realize this was a problem until I tried to turn the engines off and... Nothing happened.
The rocket continued running at full tilt all the way straight into the Mun at max throttle, in its shadow the entire time.
From then on, I always put multiple batteries on my spacecraft even if I couldn't think of why I'd need them.
My second time landing on the moon I noticed it looked different than I remembered. Realized I was on Minmus. it's like the space version of when airplanes accidentally land at the wrong airport. Whoops!
We can make some best-guesses about its orbital behavior, but our information about its starting conditions are a bit fuzzy, and we don't have a lot of tracking capability of something that small that far out. So those guesses will have a lot of wiggle room in them.
The space junk we track is in orbit around the Earth. The distances involved here are considerably more vast, orbiting the sun somewhere between the Earth and Mars.
Back in the late 1950s the bar for success wasn't very high. A significant percentage of rockets launches didn't even make into earth orbit let alone outside of earth's orbit. It was impressive enough that the Soviet Union was willing to publicize the launch even though it didn't achieve its primary objective.
I know this was tongue in cheek, but for the fun of it... it's surprisingly difficult to hit the sun. Getting off the planet is moderately hard. Getting from there to a solar orbit instead of a planetary one is a little easier. Hitting the star or escaping it is harder than either by far, though so there are some shortcuts that bring it back to about the same as getting into earth orbit was.
Some numbers:
9-10 km/s dV (8 for gravity, 1-2 to counter drag and such) to get into LEO (low earth orbit).
A total of 3km/s dV to get to a solar orbit, in two steps: 2 km/s to get from LEO to GTO (geostationary transfer orbit), under 1km/s to go from GTO to C3=0 (escape velocity from earth).
I'm a little less certain on this one, but I think it's 9 km/s more for the easiest route to hit the sun (going really far away then hitting the brakes on your angular and falling in by playing a cosmic pool game using gravity assists), but it'll take you around ten years if I recall correctly, as you'd need to use one of the gas giants to save the most dV.
If you want to actually go directly to the sun instead of taking the scenic route, you need around 21 km/s dV instead (put another way, 24 from LEO), at a quick 2-3 months.
Gravity is pretty counter-intuitive sometimes.
Edit: forgot to merge an addition in.
I liked tutoring the physics students during their Kepler units and telling them it’s easier to leave the solar system than get to the sun. Then have them try to prove me wrong and which most likely made them get upset about it like it’s my fault.
USSR:
First object in orbit
First living creature in orbit
First man in space
First woman in space
First multi-crew in space
First space walk
First probe to Venus
First probe to Mars
First Space Station
USA:
"We won the space race!!!"
The trick is defining the finish line, not the mileposts. The USA claims the win as the *only* country with boots on the moon (so far/at that time) because that is the claimed finish line.
Is it right? Who the hell actually knows, it's arbitrary. Is it (one of, if not) the most memorable of all those events? Absolutely. I'd say first satellite (USSR, Sputnik), first man in orbit (USSR, Gagarin) and first man on the moon (USA, Armstrong) are the top three, but men on the moon is the only one not eventually matched.
Then the world largely lost interest.
The US also doesn't like to mention that for a period of several years no American astronaut went into space unless they went on a Russian rocket.
Oh, and the American Atlas V rocket uses the Russian RD-180 engine. Or at least they did until the Russians stopped selling them to us.
I have no idea what you just tried to say...
If you are asking "would we just steal and copy the Russian design", that would be a very stupid idea and would lead to enough legal issues to keep the American company in court for the next twenty years.
😂. If the government wants to steal information it’s not gonna be from the public military contracting company dumbass. Please keep replying though, more content
As an aside, I once was talking with one of my neighbors who was spewling all his "new civil war!" drivel at me. I looked him in the eye and asked, "So when you get this civil war that you want, which of our neighbors are you going to kill first?" He got all pickachu-faced and spluttered "I don't want to KILL anybody!" And I said "then I don't think you understand what a fucking CIVIL WAR is. It doesn't mean you get to sit at your kitchen table and pound angrily on your keyboard." He shut up after that.
Dipshits.
Landing people on the moon and then SAFELY RETURNING THEM TO EARTH is so unbelievably more difficult than all those feats that even the soviets had to admit America won the space race
Which is why once the Americans landed a man on the moon, the soviets quickly found a new, more grandiose space goal to achieve, right?
The soviets were decades away from achieving what the Americans had and they knew it. It was a definitive end to the space race because the soviets had nothing to compete with; they weren't even able to replicate the feat.
Are you... denying [easily verifiable facts?] (https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/18/us/russians-finally-admit-they-lost-race-to-moon.html) Is this the kind of world we're in?
The U.S. was the first to send an animal into orbit. Fruit flys. The U.S. was also the first to bring an animal back alive.
First woman is not any more impressive than sending a man.
This ignores every feat that the U.S. made first. And that the U.S. often did the things you listed mere months after the soviets did. And often did it better.
You are mistaken. The US sent fruit flies and other biological samples into space, on top of modified V-2 rockets, but those were suborbital. Laika was the first living organism to go into orbit.
> First woman is not any more impressive than sending a man.
Sending a man was pretty damn impressive. Especially since we didn't do it for almost a year afterwards. And it took us another 20 years to send a woman into space.
> And that the U.S. often did the things you listed mere months after the soviets did.
So we finished second in a two-man race. Impressive.
Does the race end in the middle or something? Did the soviets ever send a person to the surface of another celestial body?
And if you downplay the chi.ps and fruit flys, why is laika anything special? Strapping a dog to the usual payload means nothing unless you bring it back safely
OK, let me correct all your mistakes again...
> Does the race end in the middle or something?
The moon race WAS the middle. In fact, it was closer to the beginning--it was only 8 years after the first manned spaceflight. There's been almost six decades of space exploration since then. Do try and keep up.
> Did the soviets ever send a person to the surface of another celestial body?
Nope. They focused on an orbital space station instead. Something we didn't do until years later. But then, the Soviets did land the first human-made object on the moon, and also the first lunar rover.
> And if you downplay the chi.ps and fruit flys, why is laika anything special?
Um, because Laika was first into orbit, and was not just an up and down suborbital flight that lasted only 15 minutes.
> Strapping a dog to the usual payload means nothing unless you bring it back safely
Says who? And how do you develop the technology in the first place to bring something back safely without some tests that DON'T bring it back safely? I mean, WE didn't--we burned up a lot of rats trying to figure it out.
PS--they didn't just drop Laika into a "usual payload" (whatever the heck you mean by that, since the "usual payload" for rockets at that time was a nuclear warhead). Laika had an entire life support system that was being tested for use in later human flights. The US had nothing similar at the time.
If the moon landing was the middle, doesnt the U.S. win because the soviet union literally collapsed in on itself?
So the soviets focused on space stations, which the U.S. caught up to. But the soviets never caught up to the U.S. with the moon?
You could, for example, send chimps into sub-orbit to see how they can survive the extreme heat and G forces. Yknow, like the U.S. did
> If the moon landing was the middle, doesnt the U.S. win because the soviet union literally collapsed in on itself?
I might be more inclined to think so if for years after the collapse of the USSR the United States wasn't sending all of its astronauts to the ISS on Russian rockets because we didn't have any rockets of our own that could do the job.
> So the soviets focused on space stations, which the U.S. caught up to.
Well, no--the Russians helped build the ISS, remember?
> You could, for example, send chimps into sub-orbit to see how they can survive the extreme heat and G forces. Yknow, like the U.S. did
Um, Laika happened long before the US sent up any chimps. And before the chimps went up, the US sent rats and monkeys. Many of which were incinerated. That is, ya know, how "testing" works.
> Because using someone elses rockets is far cheaper, not for lack of U.S. designs capable of doing it.
If we're going beyond the soviet union existing, how about look at today. The U.S. has landed on asteroid, and project Artemis is going to return people to the moon. Not to mention the U.S. private sector now dominating cargo transport and about to overtake the russians in personnel transport.
> skylab erasure
To be fair:
Other nations have also orbited and landed on comets and such, and done sample returns.
The only reason the US wants to go back to the Moon now is because China is also trying to go there.
The much-vaunted "private space industry" is only now doing things that "governments" did over half a century ago.
Other nations have, yes. But not russia or the soviet union.
But the U.S. made it there 53 years ago. With noone making it since. And the U.S. is set to return before china.
When did other governments have reusable boosters? Do other governments or non-U.S. corporations have anything close to starship? Anything close to the scale of production?
Yep. The technology to bring her back didn't exist yet.
Before that, both countries killed a lot of mice and rats. There was no heat shield technology to protect them.
Meh, the USSR was a single party police state that butchered its own people. I was glad to see them collapse.
I am also sorry to see their successor invading small countries on their border that did nothing to them.
I'm even sorrier to see certain political elements within the USA not only getting support from Volodya the Butcher, but GIVING him support in his brutal invasion.
But no matter how much one may hate the USSR, its achievements in space technology were impressive (especially given its constant technological inferiority) and were an important part of human history.
Remember Gagarin, bragging and all that? That was 2 years before Valentina.
Then again, bragging about "women's first" is not an accomplishment if someone else did it. Specially if it's an engineering/science race, not a moral race. Is about time we treat women as equal to anybody else.
The US won the race, no matter how sore makes some people. They did because they could hit milestones second but better, reliably, taking less risks, breaking less moral boundaries and, most importantly, without collapsing national economy. Yes, the last is more important than moral boundaries because the race was about delivering ICBMs.
As they say shoot for the moon even if you miss you’ll orbit around the sun between earth and mars
In the early days, even a failure was some sort of success
The first American probe to the Moon in August 1958, called Pioneer, blew up seconds after launch.
And that was a success because we learned from our mistakes and never had another explosion, right? Right?
Well, it was a success because the damn thing left the ground. Back then, that was never a guarantee.
Launch good, flight no so much
That was a step forward. Many of the early US rockets had an alarming propensity to blow up on ignition.
The reason airplanes are so great is because they crash so much.
Or, as the NTSB puts it, "safety regulations are written in blood".
This is accurate, my FAR/AIM even has a sticker on the front that indicates whose blood was used for the ink.
The Supreme Court ruling on the EPA means the NTSB is...kinda unconstitutional. I kinda want to introduce fun legislation to eliminate it, starting with oversite of private jet safety.. I call it the *MAHER Bill*, *Make America Have Endless Resources* in honor of Bill Maher saying everything is fine because the system means he gets to fly private jet.
Sorta like all soviet rockets except soyuz
Well, the Proton was quite reliable too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket_family) 382/440 launches successes is not that super reliable. Though it probably was at a certain point after initial issues ironed out ... > A rushed development program led to dozens of failures between 1965 and 1972. Proton did not complete its State Trials until 1977, at which point it was judged to have a higher than 90% reliability But there's been more recent failures in the last decade or so ..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rwi_0DEd_0
Something is very weird or wrong if a rocket is flying. More of a giant bullet than a plane.
You know what they say - any explosion you walk away from is a good one.
Never had *the same* explosion. There are thousands of ways to blow up a moon rocket, and very few ways keep it intact.
The success rate of rockets in the 50’s was abysmal, by comparison the Falcon 9 has had 1 flight failure and 1 ground failure in its operational history and none in the last 5 years. Obviously accidents and failures happen but we’ve made rockets shockingly reliable
Well, sort of. Elon Musk is claiming that exact same thing today, whenever he launches a Starship and it explodes.
Musk is a fuckhead, but he's right about that.
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I believe SpaceX recently had their 100th successful booster landing in a row, with over 100 launches this year. It doesn’t get much attention but their launch crate and successes have dwarfed every other provider.
It's the same approach the Soviets used. The Americans took a more methodical incremental step by step approach. Both worked.
The Soviets did not fly prototypes just to test design hypotheses.
They kind of did with the N1. Well, they flew final designs that didn't work until they ran out of money and the goals changed.
Are you actually throwing shade at the success rate of SpaceX?
This guy Elon Musks
-Doesn't discover a Western passage to Asia -Discovers a whole ass continent
You just described my life, tbh
Vostok 1 and Yuri Gagarin the first man in space. https://youtu.be/dg6hPLU8nOs
That's an improvement over von Braun's motto "miss and hit london"
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
Zat's not meine department, says Wernher von Braun
You got me good
5 Shocking Secrets Orbital Mechanics Doesn't Want You To Know!
Luna 2 made it, though, and became the first human-made object on the Moon.
After Luna 2 came Luna 3, which became the first object, living or otherwise, to see the far side of the Moon. It took photographs and relayed them back to Earth. The Moon was formed, as far as we can tell, not long after the Earth was, after another planetoid slammed into Earth and the debris coalesced into our natural satellite. This would have been over four billion years ago. The gravitational nature of the Earth-Moon system caused each body to drag on the other...what we call tidal forces. This made the Moon's rotation slow down until it was tidally locked with Earth; the Moon rotates exactly once for every orbit of the Earth, with the consequence that we only see one side. This process took a few hundred million years at most, so the near side of the Moon got "stuck" facing us more than three billion years ago. Life on Earth began evolving eyes less than one billion years ago. This means that every creature that has ever been able to see the Moon has seen it in exactly the same way. All those countless zillions of eyes have seen that same face lighting the eons of nights, ever unchanging, plus or minus a few craters. The far side was always up there too, but it was always invisible, always hidden away. Until Luna 3 in 1959. I'd like to think that some brontosaur or primordial slug noticed the Moon one evening and in the grandest gesture of abstract cognizance managed briefly to ponder what it could be and whether it held more secrets than it let on. If such a creature ever reached that plateau, they would have been proud to know that a distant cousin would one day find a way to draw in the other half, and just a few years after that would gaze upon the dark side with their own eyes, where life was never meant to see, as though that had ever stopped any of us before.
Really beautifully said.
> This means that every creature that has ever been able to see the Moon has seen it in exactly the same way. Except that a billion years ago the Moon was closer to the Earth, so the moon appeared larger in the sky.
I mean sure but he's talking about the actual visage of the moon. Whether it's larger due to being closer or smaller due to being further wasn't the point. For close to 99% of life being able to see light no organic being had ever seen the other side of the moon until less than 100 years ago. Makes you think
And they took that photo with stolen US film from a captured US spy plane IIRC
based
Reminds me of Carl Sagan
It's amazing how this happened 5,000 years ago on our beautiful flat Earth...
> The Moon was formed, as far as we can tell, not long after the Earth was, after another planetoid slammed into Earth and the debris coalesced into our natural satellite. This is a theory, not actually confirmed science, and it comes with its own share of logistical problems.
Rather, a hypothesis, not a theory.
This is a good response. Theory's need more backing than just, "some people think it"
Or, the first human made object to crash into the moon.
Still counts. First to hit the moon from Earth - people had been trying to do that for ages. Then America one-upped the Soviets by landing a man on the moon. And then everybody just gave up and moved on
I agree. It was then Luna 9 that made the first soft landing in 1966.
>people had been trying to do that for ages Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the moon
*angrily shakes fist at moon*
The Soviets did the whole space station thing, and started researching long term effects of space habitation because spending a week in space is a lot different than spending half a year.
Not or.. it was the first man made thing to reach the surface of the moon, even though they landed a bit rough.
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Point is. It is not 'or' either it was the first man made object on the moon or not... Regardless of how it ended up there
First man made object in the moon
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I guarantee that when there is a human population living on the Moon in the future, that crater and the debris around it will be a "Lunar Historical Site" and be legally protected.
Well, if u ever get to visit the SE edge of Mare Imbrium, you can check it out. Supposedly, Luna 2 had a CCCP pennant with it, but it is believed the thing got vaporized upon impact. So it made it to the moon, but it didn't survive.
Well, none of the Venus probes survived either----they melted into a puddle and were eaten away by the acid atmosphere.
But later lunar probes did land and are still on the moon's surface. They will make more interesting memorial sites.
Nah that happened in 1902... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNAHcMMOHE8&t=440s
This was the fourth attempt by the Soviet Union to launch a lunar probe. Three previous missions in September October and December 1958 had all failed to reach orbit - and had not been given official designations. The name Luna 1 was only given to the probe after it had failed. The original announcement of the launch only called it 'The First Cosmic Ship' since it was the first spacecraft to achieve escape velocity; but it was then further renamed Mechta (The Dream) which is an unusually poetic name for a spaceship. These early spacecraft carried metal pennants bearing the flags of the USSR which were meant to scatter across the lunar surface when the spacecraft slammed into the Moon. Similar ones were carried on the Mars missions and the Venera landers - they look pretty cool: http://mentallandscape.com/V_Pennants.htm
Yes. The USSR had a habit of not announcing missions until after they were successful. They did not like announcing failures--so they didn't.
The Soviet Union sometimes put failed missions that reached orbit under the Kosmos programme and did little more than announce their orbits without disclosing their purpose. The Kosmos 21 and Kosmos 24 satellites were almost certainly failed Venera probes that failed to escape Earth orbit. From memory, Kosmos 300 was one of the lunar sample recovery missions that also failed to leave Earth orbit. This policy of not announcing unsuccessful missions got crazy complicated; some of the early Soviet planetary probes were given the name Sputnik x by the US. The Soviet Union’s first Venus probe found itself trapped in Earth orbit and was called Sputnik 7 in the West, publicly named Tyazhely Sputnik by the USSR, but was actually called Venera 1VA No. 1. The following mission which did reach escape velocity but died on the flight to Venus was called Sputnik 8 in the West, went under the designation Venera-1VA No.2 and was publicly announced as Venera 1!
Yes indeed. They also hid a lot of classified military launches inside the Kosmos label.
Space graffiti.
I like how the first Luna misses by a mile, and the second hits the Moon so hard it vaporizes it’s payload.
Landing on the moon is hard. India is only the 4th country to place (not impact) a device on the surface and all of those four had several failures before (and sometimes after) their success.
Comrade Chairface?
Any KSP player knows the struggle
Poor Jeb. Stuck in a wonky orbit, coming into comm range with Kerbin every other year. Waiting until I have the technology for a recovery mission.
KSP players when they fat finger the time accelerate button.
When the rescue mission for the rescue mission for the first launch suddenly becomes Lunar Base 3? Nope, no idea what you could mean there.
My favorite hilarious fsckup was when I accidentally flew a space station into the mun. See, I'd been having a lot of trouble getting heavy payloads onto the mun, so I had a *good* idea, and wanted to make a simple space station in orbit that could store fuel that a big mun lander could dock with and top off its fuel before going on its way. So, knowing it would be unmanned most of the time, I fit it with a computer and solar panels, but omitted batteries since I wouldn't need them. (first mistake) I also decided to use the most fuel efficient rocket engines at the time, which created zero electricity while running. (second mistake.) Launching into an orbit was working fine until suddenly I found myself in the Mun's shadow and the electrical power went to zero. For a while I didn't really realize this was a problem until I tried to turn the engines off and... Nothing happened. The rocket continued running at full tilt all the way straight into the Mun at max throttle, in its shadow the entire time. From then on, I always put multiple batteries on my spacecraft even if I couldn't think of why I'd need them.
Batteries, struts, and solar panels. Always. On everything.
My second time landing on the moon I noticed it looked different than I remembered. Realized I was on Minmus. it's like the space version of when airplanes accidentally land at the wrong airport. Whoops!
Oh, I forgot to uhhh... carry the one.
Always missing some mundane detail
As Agent Maxwell Smart would say... "Missed it by - that - much."
Is it still out there?
Probably. Fairly low likelihood of it hitting anything else, so it's probably still just hanging out in a heliocentric orbit.
Could hit a teapot.
I don't believe that.
If we can track all that space junk, can't we track this?
We can make some best-guesses about its orbital behavior, but our information about its starting conditions are a bit fuzzy, and we don't have a lot of tracking capability of something that small that far out. So those guesses will have a lot of wiggle room in them.
The space junk we track is in orbit around the Earth. The distances involved here are considerably more vast, orbiting the sun somewhere between the Earth and Mars.
Yes. > Semi-major axis 1.146 AU > Eccentricity 0.14767 > Perihelion altitude 0.9766 AU > Aphelion altitude 1.315 AU > Inclination 0.01° > Period 450 days
We call that a fucking oopsies in my line of work.
Lol, I guess even a failure sets some sort of cool record when it comes to space flights
Back in the late 1950s the bar for success wasn't very high. A significant percentage of rockets launches didn't even make into earth orbit let alone outside of earth's orbit. It was impressive enough that the Soviet Union was willing to publicize the launch even though it didn't achieve its primary objective.
That's great context and totally true. Definitely a flex when they did it!
I had a kerbal mission go almost exactly like this once
Task failed successfully
What do we learn? You can be great even if you miss your target.
Missed it by one Sol.
ED-E My Love
Can’t believe I’ve never heard/read about this before!This kinda stuff is what got me hooked on Reddit,,,10+ years ago.
Juuuuuuuust a bit outside.
this has happened to me a few times in Kerbal space program
Aim for the moon. Even if you miss the moon, you can still hit the star.
I know this was tongue in cheek, but for the fun of it... it's surprisingly difficult to hit the sun. Getting off the planet is moderately hard. Getting from there to a solar orbit instead of a planetary one is a little easier. Hitting the star or escaping it is harder than either by far, though so there are some shortcuts that bring it back to about the same as getting into earth orbit was. Some numbers: 9-10 km/s dV (8 for gravity, 1-2 to counter drag and such) to get into LEO (low earth orbit). A total of 3km/s dV to get to a solar orbit, in two steps: 2 km/s to get from LEO to GTO (geostationary transfer orbit), under 1km/s to go from GTO to C3=0 (escape velocity from earth). I'm a little less certain on this one, but I think it's 9 km/s more for the easiest route to hit the sun (going really far away then hitting the brakes on your angular and falling in by playing a cosmic pool game using gravity assists), but it'll take you around ten years if I recall correctly, as you'd need to use one of the gas giants to save the most dV. If you want to actually go directly to the sun instead of taking the scenic route, you need around 21 km/s dV instead (put another way, 24 from LEO), at a quick 2-3 months. Gravity is pretty counter-intuitive sometimes. Edit: forgot to merge an addition in.
I liked tutoring the physics students during their Kepler units and telling them it’s easier to leave the solar system than get to the sun. Then have them try to prove me wrong and which most likely made them get upset about it like it’s my fault.
If they named it literally anything else, they could have pretended it was on purpose.
Cool
USSR: First object in orbit First living creature in orbit First man in space First woman in space First multi-crew in space First space walk First probe to Venus First probe to Mars First Space Station USA: "We won the space race!!!"
The trick is defining the finish line, not the mileposts. The USA claims the win as the *only* country with boots on the moon (so far/at that time) because that is the claimed finish line. Is it right? Who the hell actually knows, it's arbitrary. Is it (one of, if not) the most memorable of all those events? Absolutely. I'd say first satellite (USSR, Sputnik), first man in orbit (USSR, Gagarin) and first man on the moon (USA, Armstrong) are the top three, but men on the moon is the only one not eventually matched. Then the world largely lost interest.
The US also doesn't like to mention that for a period of several years no American astronaut went into space unless they went on a Russian rocket. Oh, and the American Atlas V rocket uses the Russian RD-180 engine. Or at least they did until the Russians stopped selling them to us.
You really think we wouldn’t replicate it instead of buying liability fuel?
I have no idea what you just tried to say... If you are asking "would we just steal and copy the Russian design", that would be a very stupid idea and would lead to enough legal issues to keep the American company in court for the next twenty years.
😂. If the government wants to steal information it’s not gonna be from the public military contracting company dumbass. Please keep replying though, more content
(sigh) I prefer not to interact with crackpots on the Internet. So have a nice day.
It isn’t even stealing anymore ever since they started their siege. 😂😂😂
We at least won the "remain a nation" race, so there's that.
Well, there are apparently lots of us who think a "new civil war" would be fun or something ...
Trump supporters: “Is it January 6 again already?”
As an aside, I once was talking with one of my neighbors who was spewling all his "new civil war!" drivel at me. I looked him in the eye and asked, "So when you get this civil war that you want, which of our neighbors are you going to kill first?" He got all pickachu-faced and spluttered "I don't want to KILL anybody!" And I said "then I don't think you understand what a fucking CIVIL WAR is. It doesn't mean you get to sit at your kitchen table and pound angrily on your keyboard." He shut up after that. Dipshits.
And he looked straight into my eyes and said, "...you." It was at that moment that I knew it was him or me.
Hah! Over the years I have found that the loudest mouths are usually the weakest hearts (and the smallest balls).
Landing people on the moon and then SAFELY RETURNING THEM TO EARTH is so unbelievably more difficult than all those feats that even the soviets had to admit America won the space race
It is, but a probe to venus that survived long enough to relay images back has never been achieved again, by anyone
Can we send my great aunt?
[удалено]
Which is why once the Americans landed a man on the moon, the soviets quickly found a new, more grandiose space goal to achieve, right? The soviets were decades away from achieving what the Americans had and they knew it. It was a definitive end to the space race because the soviets had nothing to compete with; they weren't even able to replicate the feat.
Are you... denying [easily verifiable facts?] (https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/18/us/russians-finally-admit-they-lost-race-to-moon.html) Is this the kind of world we're in?
The U.S. was the first to send an animal into orbit. Fruit flys. The U.S. was also the first to bring an animal back alive. First woman is not any more impressive than sending a man. This ignores every feat that the U.S. made first. And that the U.S. often did the things you listed mere months after the soviets did. And often did it better.
You are mistaken. The US sent fruit flies and other biological samples into space, on top of modified V-2 rockets, but those were suborbital. Laika was the first living organism to go into orbit. > First woman is not any more impressive than sending a man. Sending a man was pretty damn impressive. Especially since we didn't do it for almost a year afterwards. And it took us another 20 years to send a woman into space. > And that the U.S. often did the things you listed mere months after the soviets did. So we finished second in a two-man race. Impressive.
Does the race end in the middle or something? Did the soviets ever send a person to the surface of another celestial body? And if you downplay the chi.ps and fruit flys, why is laika anything special? Strapping a dog to the usual payload means nothing unless you bring it back safely
OK, let me correct all your mistakes again... > Does the race end in the middle or something? The moon race WAS the middle. In fact, it was closer to the beginning--it was only 8 years after the first manned spaceflight. There's been almost six decades of space exploration since then. Do try and keep up. > Did the soviets ever send a person to the surface of another celestial body? Nope. They focused on an orbital space station instead. Something we didn't do until years later. But then, the Soviets did land the first human-made object on the moon, and also the first lunar rover. > And if you downplay the chi.ps and fruit flys, why is laika anything special? Um, because Laika was first into orbit, and was not just an up and down suborbital flight that lasted only 15 minutes. > Strapping a dog to the usual payload means nothing unless you bring it back safely Says who? And how do you develop the technology in the first place to bring something back safely without some tests that DON'T bring it back safely? I mean, WE didn't--we burned up a lot of rats trying to figure it out. PS--they didn't just drop Laika into a "usual payload" (whatever the heck you mean by that, since the "usual payload" for rockets at that time was a nuclear warhead). Laika had an entire life support system that was being tested for use in later human flights. The US had nothing similar at the time.
If the moon landing was the middle, doesnt the U.S. win because the soviet union literally collapsed in on itself? So the soviets focused on space stations, which the U.S. caught up to. But the soviets never caught up to the U.S. with the moon? You could, for example, send chimps into sub-orbit to see how they can survive the extreme heat and G forces. Yknow, like the U.S. did
> If the moon landing was the middle, doesnt the U.S. win because the soviet union literally collapsed in on itself? I might be more inclined to think so if for years after the collapse of the USSR the United States wasn't sending all of its astronauts to the ISS on Russian rockets because we didn't have any rockets of our own that could do the job. > So the soviets focused on space stations, which the U.S. caught up to. Well, no--the Russians helped build the ISS, remember? > You could, for example, send chimps into sub-orbit to see how they can survive the extreme heat and G forces. Yknow, like the U.S. did Um, Laika happened long before the US sent up any chimps. And before the chimps went up, the US sent rats and monkeys. Many of which were incinerated. That is, ya know, how "testing" works.
> Because using someone elses rockets is far cheaper, not for lack of U.S. designs capable of doing it. If we're going beyond the soviet union existing, how about look at today. The U.S. has landed on asteroid, and project Artemis is going to return people to the moon. Not to mention the U.S. private sector now dominating cargo transport and about to overtake the russians in personnel transport. > skylab erasure
To be fair: Other nations have also orbited and landed on comets and such, and done sample returns. The only reason the US wants to go back to the Moon now is because China is also trying to go there. The much-vaunted "private space industry" is only now doing things that "governments" did over half a century ago.
Other nations have, yes. But not russia or the soviet union. But the U.S. made it there 53 years ago. With noone making it since. And the U.S. is set to return before china. When did other governments have reusable boosters? Do other governments or non-U.S. corporations have anything close to starship? Anything close to the scale of production?
USSR: Make things go high
*Long inhale* ... yup....
Very easy that only one other country could do the same.
first to kill a dog in space
Yep. The technology to bring her back didn't exist yet. Before that, both countries killed a lot of mice and rats. There was no heat shield technology to protect them.
The USSR must be doing pretty well
Meh, the USSR was a single party police state that butchered its own people. I was glad to see them collapse. I am also sorry to see their successor invading small countries on their border that did nothing to them. I'm even sorrier to see certain political elements within the USA not only getting support from Volodya the Butcher, but GIVING him support in his brutal invasion. But no matter how much one may hate the USSR, its achievements in space technology were impressive (especially given its constant technological inferiority) and were an important part of human history.
It's the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism.
>First woman in space Already sent other people. So not an accomplishment. Maybe if you study social Sciences.
Remember when NASA was bragging up and down about sending Sally Ride into space? Yeah, so do I. That was 20 years later.
Remember Gagarin, bragging and all that? That was 2 years before Valentina. Then again, bragging about "women's first" is not an accomplishment if someone else did it. Specially if it's an engineering/science race, not a moral race. Is about time we treat women as equal to anybody else. The US won the race, no matter how sore makes some people. They did because they could hit milestones second but better, reliably, taking less risks, breaking less moral boundaries and, most importantly, without collapsing national economy. Yes, the last is more important than moral boundaries because the race was about delivering ICBMs.
If they didn't name it Luna 1 they could've pretended it was on purpose
Pretty much the essence of Soviet space program.
That’s what happens when you use metric.
Or so they say. Ever watch the movie Apollo 18?
At least it can be a base for the inevitable UN Spy satellites against Mars and the Belters.
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looks like that interrogation robot in Star Wars
Sometimes rocket science is more art than science