NASA Rocket Barrage Will Light Up Mid-Atlantic Coast 69
coondoggie writes "NASA will this week detail a mission where it will launch five rockets in five minutes from its Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia that will light up the night sky for millions of folks in a swath between New York City and about Wilmington, NC. The five rocket blasts, which could occur between March 14 and April 4, are part of what the space agency calls the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX), a Heliophysics sounding rocket mission that aims to gather data needed to better understand the high-altitude jet stream located 60 to 65 miles above the surface of the Earth, NASA said."
NASA will be hosting a teleconference at 1PM EST on Wednesday to discuss the mission. They also have brief PDF descriptions of the rockets involved: Terrier-Improved Orion, Terrier Oriole, and Terrier Malemute.
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i doubt japan will have a fully capable elevator this year. They are working on it but everything I've read says they are a decade away from it.
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and the meek shal inherit the Earth.
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Grammar != /. (Score:1)
Grammar_Nazi == Loser
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They are already doing both, They have competitions for designs for ribbon material for a space elevator and machines to climb such ribbons, and conferences on colonisation. But both topics are still in the blue sky stage. A space elevator needs a material about four times stronger than anything yet manufactured, and it is a bit early to talk about colonisation when we have not yet reached Mars once, and have no plans for a moon lander. NASA is doing all it reasonably could be doing at this stage.
Japan will
Something to feed the conspiracy folks (Score:5, Funny)
Barrage is not really the word one uses for rockets going up, but for rockets coming back down again with destructive force. A bombardment. An attack. This is all just cover for the final phase of the secret military space weapon [slashdot.org]. Oh yes, it will light up the sky.
Re:Something to feed the conspiracy folks (Score:4, Informative)
These rockets will come down (see the graphic in the two first links in the summary), so barrage isn't as mal placé as you think.
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That would be a far better word.
Yes, I'm sure these rockets won't achieve escape velocity, they'll come back down. But the headline here is that a barrage will light up the sky, which I rather doubt. A barrage is a bombardment, and the rockets crashing down into the ocean I don't think is what will light up the sky, but the rocket engines themselves launching in rapid succession will, and that's a salvo.
Anyway, I was just making a joke about the other slashdot story earlier in the day, and the rampant consp
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Woosh?
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Wouldn't it be funny (Score:1)
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What would be even more hilarious would be the Chinese and Russian response. Then we'd be rid of the self-appointed world poli^H^H^H bully once and for all.
Seriously I would expect some very strong diplomatic objections .... together with sighs of relief.
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Wouldn't it be hilarious if some passenger planes flew into some large office blocks in the only country which has ever used nuclear weapons, what a hoot!
As if one thing had anything at all to do with the other...
Somehow, "fuck-wit" just doesn't seem adequate in this case.
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if you can laugh about bombing iran, you can laugh about the bombing of the twin towers.
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I saw Jay Leno bomb once..it was hilarious.
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"Wouldn't it be hilarious if some passenger planes flew into some large office blocks in the only country which has ever used nuclear weapons, what a hoot!
As if one thing had anything at all to do with the other...
Somehow, "fuck-wit" just doesn't seem adequate in this case."
No, he's right. When I was in the army in the late 1980's we did joke about commercial assets, including airliners, being used as weapons. The idea was viewed with contempt since it seemed most terrorists wanted to live re
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Wallops Island did win the contract to be the launch site for manned space for the US. It also has been the launch site for unmanned for a while. They needed to test to see if the delta V rocket could get there. Seeing parts of a huge rocket on the bridge getting there was something. They build a new launch site on the island just for the purpose of launching bigger rockets. They are supposed to be doing a test of the big rocket sometime this spring. That maybe a were since the budget cuts.
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ObConspiracy (Score:1, Funny)
Plainly they will spray chemtrails along with the markers for HAARP target on their way to Iran to start WW3 so that the Federal Reserve can, at the request of the Rothschilds, have a glowing sky to celebrate the birthday of oh... Elvis's alien baby.
Almost interesting (Score:2)
None of the article say when it's going to happen. They only say, "could occur between March 14 and April 4". Eh.... Not quite specific enough to be useful.
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This is just one of those "we're planning to send some stuff up but we're going to pretend this is a ridiculously expensive publicity stunt 'in plain sight' operations."
It's kind of like how Saudi Arabia announces "We're taking our airspace monitoring stuff down for maintenance but don't fly through our airspace! That wouldn't be nice at all!" followed closely by some military operation which happens to unfairly take advantage of their lowered guard.
Of course, none of these things ever happen... it's all
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So how would you do tests?
Conspiracies happen*, but you kind of need proof of you allegations.
*see Tobacco companies.
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There are lot of factors here, most of which resolve around the weather. The FAA has given consent for this to happen between midnight and 4am for those dates. Outside of those hours will be too disruptive to air traffic.
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The boats are either not let out, or told to get away. Unless it is the US Navy all other boats are not an issue. You could also go to Ocean City MD to get a great view of this. It is only like 30-40 minutes north of the Wallops. You may miss the rocket taking off from the ground, but you should still be able to see it in the air.
Research? Sure. (Score:1)
I'm certain that there is some sort of scientific value to this.
Of course, demonstrating to the Chinese that we can rapidly launch a barrage of orbit-capable warheads, er, payloads isn't a bad thing either.
Re:Research? Sure. (Score:5, Informative)
These are sounding rockets.
The Orion is a single stage sounding rocket which will achieve an altitude of 60 km with a 250 lb payload or 90 km with a 75 lb payload.
The Terrier-Malemute is a two-stage, solid fuel rocket consisting of a Terrier 1st stage and a Malemute 2nd stage. It is capable of lifting a 200 lb payload to an apogee of approximately 700 km or a 500 lb payload to approximately 400 km.
The The Terrier-Improved Orion consists of a Terrier 1st stage and an "improved" Orion second stage. This vehicle is capable of achieving an altitude of 75 km with an 800 lb payload and 225 km with a 200 lb payload.
(source: http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/mpl/srockets.html [nasa.gov])
To be compared to the LGM-30G Minuteman-III which is a three-stage, solid fuel rocket capable of lifting an approximately 600 lbs warhead to over 1100 km. We have 450 of these more or less ready to launch.
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30G_Minuteman-III [wikipedia.org] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W87 [wikipedia.org])
In short, the Chinese already know we have "the capability of rapidly launching a barrage of orbit-capable warheads", and either way, these rockets aren't demonstrating anything of the sort.
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What, exactly, are you sorry about?
Nobody claimed they couldn't get into LEO (although of the three only the Terrier-Malemute is really capable of it).
Neither of these rockets are new - both the Orion [astronautix.com] and the Malemute [astronautix.com] first flew in the 70's, so the military (and anyone else interested) has had plenty of time to consider them as launch vehicles.
Also, the "Terrier" in Terrier-Malemute and Terrier-Improved Orion is the old RIM-2 Terrier Surface-to-Air missile [wikipedia.org] from the 50's used as a first stage for the Malemut
Bad time for a briefing... (Score:2)
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Re:NASA isn't dead? (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone else find it odd that NASA, whom I thought was mostly out of funding, is going to launch 5 rockets to test the jet stream?
No. First, sounding rockets, even the ones used by NASA, are cheap. I'd be surprised if the rocket launches themselves are over a million dollars apiece even with NASA prices. And NASA has a vast amount of funding. Second, atmospheric studies are part of their portfolio. So no oddness here.
Second, from the article:
According to NASA, the five rockets will release a chemical tracer that will form milky, white tracer clouds that let scientists and the public to "see" the winds in space. In addition, two of the rockets will have instrumented payloads, to measure the pressure and temperature in the atmosphere at the height of the high-speed winds.
So they're introducing a chemical tracer. Rockets do so faster, more accurately than balloons, have a great mechanism (their exhaust) for doing so, and can cut through a cross-section of the jet stream while balloons would float with the jet stream.
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Wallops has some numbers on their website indicating that a LEO insertion will require a vehicle that costs $5M-$10M.
LEO insertion is a much harder and more regulated problem than the suborbital launches these guys are doing. Even so, I have to change my mind and agree somewhat with you. NASA has a habit of overpaying a lot for such things.
Do it like Iran (Score:2)
Just launch one and photoshop the others in.
ATREX (Score:2)
Alien Tourist Rocket Extravaganza
I'm on to you NASA.