OrbitalHub

Wikipedia dicit:

Starship is a fully-reusable and super heavy-lift launch vehicle in development by SpaceX. Both of its stages – Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft – use liquid oxygen and liquid methane as propellant. Starship’s main features are its very high payload mass capability and low potential operating cost. A tanker variant spacecraft is planned that will refuel other Starships in orbit, increasing the 100 t (220,000 lb) transport range to higher energy orbits and destinations, including the Moon and Mars. The earliest Starship variant will deploy satellites, while later variants will also serve space tourists, or be optimised for lunar landings. Starship’s potentially low cost is key in enabling SpaceX’s Mars ambitions as well as making point-to-point rocket travel on Earth possible.

Starship will launch at Starbase, Kennedy Space Center, and two offshore launch platforms. It would launch upright, with the booster’s thirty-three Raptor engines operating in parallel. After Super Heavy separates, the spacecraft fires its three Raptor Vacuum and three sea-level engines, inserting itself into orbit. The booster then controls its descent via its four grid fins, targeting the launch tower’s arms. At the end of the mission, the Starship spacecraft de-orbits and enters the atmosphere, protected by a series of hexagonal heat shield tiles. The spacecraft then glides towards the landing site using its flaps for control and flips to land.

The rocket was first outlined by SpaceX as early as 2005, with frequent design and name changes as the concept matured. In July 2019, Starhopper, a prototype vehicle with extended fins acting as fixed landing legs, performed a 150 m (490 ft) low altitude test flight under the power of a single Raptor engine. In May 2021, Starship SN15 successfully flew to 10 km (6 mi), transitioning to horizontal free-fall before successfully landing for the first time after four failed attempts by previous prototypes. As of February 2022, the BN4 booster and SN20 spacecraft are scheduled for the first full-stack flight in early 2022, though this schedule is subject to change.

Video credit: SpaceX

Wikipedia dicit:

The Cygnus spacecraft is an expendable American cargo spacecraft developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation and now manufactured and launched by Northrop Grumman Space Systems as part of NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program. It is launched by Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket or ULA’s Atlas V and is designed to transport supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) following the retirement of the American Space Shuttle.

Since August 2000, ISS resupply missions have been regularly flown by the Russian Progress spacecraft, as well as by the European Automated Transfer Vehicle, and the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle. With the Cygnus spacecraft and the SpaceX Dragon, NASA seeks to increase its partnerships with domestic commercial aviation and aeronautics industry.

The Cygnus spacecraft consists of two basic components: the Pressurized Cargo Module (PCM) and the Service Module (SM). The PCM is manufactured by Thales Alenia Space in Turin, (Italy). The initial PCMs have an empty mass of 1,500 kg and a volume of 18 m3·. The service module is built by Orbital ATK and is based on their GEOStar and LEOStar spacecraft buses as well as components from the development of the Dawn spacecraft. It has a gross mass of 1,800 kg with propulsion provided by thrusters using the hypergolic propellants hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide (the propellant mass is 800 kg). The service module is capable of producing up to 4 kW of electrical power via two gallium arsenide solar arrays. On 12 November 2009, Dutch Space announced it will provide the solar arrays for the initial Cygnus spacecraft.

Video credit: NASA

Wikipedia dicit:

The Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25, also known as the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), is a liquid-fuel cryogenic rocket engine that was used on NASA’s Space Shuttle. NASA is planning to continue using the RS-25 on the Space Shuttle’s successor, the Space Launch System (SLS).

Designed and manufactured in the United States by Rocketdyne (later known as Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and Aerojet Rocketdyne), the RS-25 burns cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants, with each engine producing 1,859 kN (418,000 lbf) of thrust at liftoff. Although the RS-25 can trace its heritage back to the 1960s, the concerted development of the engine began in the 1970s, with the first flight, STS-1, occurring on April 12, 1981. The RS-25 has undergone several upgrades over its operational history to improve the engine’s reliability, safety, and maintenance load.

The engine produces a specific impulse (Isp) of 452 seconds (4.43 km/s) in a vacuum, or 366 seconds (3.59 km/s) at sea level, has a mass of approximately 3.5 tonnes (7,700 pounds), and is capable of throttling between 67% and 109% of its rated power level in one-percent increments. Components of the RS-25 operate at temperatures ranging from −253 to 3,300 °C (−400 to 6,000 °F).

The Space Shuttle used a cluster of three RS-25 engines mounted in the stern structure of the orbiter, with fuel being drawn from the external tank. The engines were used for propulsion during the entirety of the spacecraft’s ascent, with additional thrust being provided by two solid rocket boosters and the orbiter’s two AJ10 orbital maneuvering system engines. Following each flight, the RS-25 engines were removed from the orbiter, inspected, and refurbished before being reused on another mission. On Space Launch System flights, the engines will be expendable. For the first four flights, engines left over from the Space Shuttle program will be refurbished and used before NASA switches to the simplified RS-25E variant.

Video credit: NASA’s Kennedy Space Center

NASA’s SpaceX 24th commercial resupply services mission liftoff.

Video credit: NASA/SpaceX

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Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is a NASA space mission aimed at testing a method of planetary defense against near-Earth objects (NEO). It will deliberately crash a space probe into the double asteroid Didymos to test whether the kinetic energy of a spacecraft impact could successfully deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. DART is a joint project between NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), administered by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, with several NASA laboratories and offices providing technical support. International partners, such as the space agencies of Europe, Italy, and Japan, are contributing to related or subsequent projects. DART was launched on 24 November 2021, at 06:21:02 UTC, with collision slated for 26 September 2022.

DART is an impactor, mass of 610 kg (1,340 lb), that hosts no scientific payload other than a Sun sensor, a star tracker, and a 20 cm (7.9 in) aperture camera (Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation – DRACO) based on Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) onboard New Horizons spacecraft to support autonomous navigation to impact the small asteroid’s moon at its center.

It is estimated that the impact of the 500 kg (1,100 lb) DART at 6.6 km/s (4.1 mi/s) will produce a velocity change on the order of 0.4 mm/s, which leads to a small change in trajectory of the asteroid system, but over time, it leads to a large shift of path. Over a span of millions of kilometers, the cumulative trajectory change would eliminate the risk of a previously-Earth-bound asteroid hitting Earth. The actual velocity change and orbital shift will be measured a few years later by a spacecraft called Hera that would do a detailed reconnaissance and assessment. Hera was approved in November 2019.

DART spacecraft uses the NEXT ion thruster, a type of solar electric propulsion. It will be powered by 22 m2 (240 sq ft) solar arrays to generate the ~3.5-kW needed to power the NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster–Commercial (NEXT-C) engine. The spacecraft’s solar arrays use a Roll Out Solar Array (ROSA) design, and this was tested on the International Space Station in June 2017 as part of Expedition 52, delivered to the station by the SpaceX CRS-11 commercial cargo mission.

Using ROSA as the structure, a small portion of the DART solar array is configured to demonstrate Transformational Solar Array technology, which has very-high-efficiency solar cells and reflective concentrators providing three times more power than current solar array technology.

The DART spacecraft is the first spacecraft to use a new type of high gain communication antenna, that is, a Spiral Radial Line Slot Array (RLSA). The antenna operates at the X-band NASA Deep Space Network (NASA DSN) frequencies of 7.2 and 8.4-GHz. The fabricated antenna exceeds the given requirements, agrees well simulations, and has been tested through environments resulting in a TRL-6 design.

Video credit: NASA/SpaceX

Wikipedia dicit:

The SpaceX South Texas launch site, referred to by SpaceX as Starbase, and also known as the Boca Chica launch site, is a private rocket production facility, test site, and spaceport constructed by SpaceX, located at Boca Chica approximately 32 km (20 mi) east of Brownsville, Texas, on the US Gulf Coast. When conceptualized, its stated purpose was “to provide SpaceX an exclusive launch site that would allow the company to accommodate its launch manifest and meet tight launch windows.” The launch site was originally intended to support launches of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles as well as “a variety of reusable suborbital launch vehicles”, but in early 2018, SpaceX announced a change of plans, stating that the launch site would be used exclusively for SpaceX’s next-generation launch vehicle, Starship. Between 2018 and 2020, the site added significant rocket production and test capacity. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk indicated in 2014 that he expected “commercial astronauts, private astronauts, to be departing from South Texas,” and he foresaw launching spacecraft to Mars from the site.

Between 2012 and 2014, SpaceX considered seven potential locations around the United States for the new commercial launch facility. Generally, for orbital launches an ideal site would have an easterly water overflight path for safety and be located as close to the equator as possible in order to take advantage of the Earth’s rotational speed. For much of this period, a parcel of land adjacent to Boca Chica Beach near Brownsville, Texas, was the leading candidate location, during an extended period while the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) conducted an extensive environmental assessment on the use of the Texas location as a launch site. Also during this period, SpaceX began acquiring land in the area, purchasing approximately 41 acres (170,000 m2) and leasing 57 acres (230,000 m2) by July 2014. SpaceX announced in August 2014, that they had selected the location near Brownsville as the location for the new non-governmental launch site, after the final environmental assessment completed and environmental agreements were in place by July 2014. An orbital launch of the Starship would make it SpaceX’s fourth active launch facility, following three launch locations that are leased from the US government.

SpaceX conducted a groundbreaking ceremony on the new launch facility in September 2014, and soil preparation began in October 2015. The first tracking antenna was installed in August 2016, and the first propellant tank arrived in July 2018. In late 2018, construction ramped up considerably, and the site saw the fabrication of the first 9 m-diameter (30 ft) prototype test vehicle, Starhopper, which was tested and flown March–August 2019. Through 2021, additional prototype flight vehicles are being built at the facility for higher-altitude tests. By March 2020, there were over 500 people employed at the facility, with most of the work force involved in 24/7 production operations for the third-generation SpaceX launch vehicle, Starship.

Video credit: SpaceX