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| Science & Technology |
| Private Spaceship Reaches Space Station. |
| 2013-09-30 |
| h/t Instapundit NASA's newest delivery service has finally made it to the International Space Station. After a week's delay, Orbital Science Corp.'s Cygnus cargo ship pulled up at the orbiting lab Sunday morning. The space station astronauts used their robot arm to grab it. The capsule is making its debut on this test flight, and contains more than a half-ton of food, clothes and other supplies for the six astronauts. It marks a major accomplishment 260 miles up. Only one other private company has ever made such a high-flying shipment. Orbital Sciences launched the Cygnus capsule from Virginia on Sept. 18. It was supposed to reach the space station four days later, but got held up by inaccurate navigation data. A software patch fixed everything. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #4 More, bigger-n-better ventures like this is whats sirely missing from the Bammer's attempt to get enviro-correct "Green Techs" off the ground, as opposed to giving mucho scarce Govt-Taxpayer dollars to Greenie ventures + related that go bankrupt in short time. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2013-09-30 19:46 |
| #3 at 4 mins on that video (first shot was about 2.2) you see separation and then the puffs of vapor from the sides of the first stage as it starts adjusting to re-enter in a controlled way. It got a bit too much spin on it that caused the fuel to centrifuge to the walls of the tank avoiding the fuel sump for one of the engines. When they did a re-light just above the surface of the ocean that engine quickly went out and the stage hit the ocean at an angle breaking into large pieces. SpaceX was able to salvage these. In next years SPX-3 flight it's hoped that opening the legs just before the water will stop the spin allowing a vertical entry into the ocean. They expect that or some further form to get working this year so now they are discussing with the Air Force and Cape Canaveral about acquiring an obsolete pad on the tip of the cape to vertical land first stage boosters on. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2013-09-30 13:45 |
| #2 On that not both SpaceX and Proton had beautiful launches on Sunday. SpaceX of its new rocket. They were almost able to safely land their first stage vertically on the ocean. Plan to try that experiment again in late Jan early Feb on SPX-3 with legs added to the rocket. This non-official YouTube vid is really nice. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2013-09-30 13:36 |
| #1 not inaccurate data but rather two different GPS date formats. One with 10bit dates the other 13 bit dates. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2013-09-30 13:30 |