NASA Livestreams a Test of Boeing's 'Starliner' Spacecraft (cnet.com) 30
"You can watch a big test of Boeing's new Starliner spacecraft Monday as NASA pushes to bring crewed spaceflight launches back to U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade," reports CNET:
The CST-100 Starliner currently sits on a test stand at New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range awaiting a pad abort test scheduled for 6 a.m. PT. The test is designed to ensure that the ship's four abort engines and control thrusters will fire in the case of an emergency on the launch pad, carrying the capsule and astronauts up and away from the potential danger.
Put another way, should there be risk of an explosion or something else really bad happening on the launch pad, the abort system being tested Monday is essentially the crew's life raft. During the test, the engines should carry the empty spacecraft about one mile into the air and a mile north of the test stand before parachutes and landing airbags are deployed for a soft touch down.
Starliner is one of two new spacecraft that NASA has contracted to begin flying astronauts to the International Space Station as part of its Commercial Crew program. The other is the SpaceX Crew Dragon... All [U.S.] astronauts have been launched to orbit via Soyuz rockets since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, and NASA is particularly eager to bring launches back to the U.S. If Monday's test goes well, we might get to see a Starliner launch carrying humans at some point in the coming months.
Put another way, should there be risk of an explosion or something else really bad happening on the launch pad, the abort system being tested Monday is essentially the crew's life raft. During the test, the engines should carry the empty spacecraft about one mile into the air and a mile north of the test stand before parachutes and landing airbags are deployed for a soft touch down.
Starliner is one of two new spacecraft that NASA has contracted to begin flying astronauts to the International Space Station as part of its Commercial Crew program. The other is the SpaceX Crew Dragon... All [U.S.] astronauts have been launched to orbit via Soyuz rockets since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, and NASA is particularly eager to bring launches back to the U.S. If Monday's test goes well, we might get to see a Starliner launch carrying humans at some point in the coming months.
In the meantime... (Score:1)
In the meantime, you can watch a live stream of a bird feeder [youtube.com]. You can even feed them with crypto-currencies for that extra interactive touch.
Just like the book "Dune" (Score:2)
Meanwhile, Musk will be building the hyperloop between Mars City One and Mars City Two before the congressional launch system puts astronauts into orbit.
Abort systems - above and below (Score:5, Informative)
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Sounds good until you find out they're controlled by MCAS.
parachutes + abort + solid rockets == fail ? (Score:5, Informative)
In the Gemini & Apollo programs, parachute aborts worked very well because the exploding rocket was a localized ball of burning liquid fuel.
An aborted solid rocket such as used on the Space Shuttle and the SLS produces a very large debris field of flaming chunks of solid fuel which will pretty much Swiss Cheese parachutes for several miles.
This is an Air Force study showing parachute aborts for Ares would not have been survivable [phys.org].
How is SLS, which has two SRBs, any better?
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These systems are mostly about making a best-effort. It is doubtful anyone would survive most catastrophic failures no matter what scheme you came up with.
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Re: parachutes + abort + solid rockets == fail ? (Score:2)
Soyuz doesn't have solid rocket boosters.
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Yet last year Soyuz had to use its abort system and it worked exactly as planned. They are far from pleasant but they work. Also the CST-100 is not meant for SLS. It's going on the Atlas V and presumably the Vulcan after that.
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And after that, it's going on the Cardassian and on the Romulan.
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The Challenger crew survived, till the cockpit hit the sea.
Some bean counters had scratched the crew rescue system.
Re:parachutes + abort + solid rockets == fail ? (Score:4, Insightful)
> produces a very large debris field of flaming chunks of solid fuel which will pretty much Swiss Cheese parachutes for several miles.
Which doesn't actually matter if you plan for it.
That debris field will all be on ballistic (free-fall) trajectories from the initial explosion. Meanwhile, the capsule will be well above that debris field and moving upward rapidly - that's kind of the point of the escape rockets - to get the capsule far enough away from the explosion to not be destroyed by the blast wave or debris. Some debris might be thrown higher than the capsule, but very little of it (conservation of momentum demands that the center of mass of the debris cloud follow the same trajectory as the pre-explosion rocket), and even less will be thrown higher than the capsule in exactly the right direction to fall down directly past the capsule - which is the only debris you need to be concerned about. And that debris is going to be moving pretty slowly - after all, it had to be thrown higher than the capsule, come to a stop, and start falling down again. And it probably hasn't been falling for long by the time it passes the capsule - at worst it will be going at terminal velocity, and probably far slower - nothing like the speeds it was launched from the exploding rocket at.
Deploy parachutes, and the escape pod will remain above the debris cloud until long after the debris has all reached the ground.
The only variable is how long and hard the escape burn runs if you don't burn hard enough to clear the debris cloud, then yes, parachutes will be big vulnerable targets. However, even then they're still big vulnerable targets that are already intentionally full of holes in order to improve performance - a few more holes aren't going to cripple them, and slow-moving debris may well just bounce off.
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>The abort engines and thrusters have to be able to make the crew capsule travel faster than the rocket for it to be able to get at all clear.
Which just means that they have to be powerful enough to accelerate despite the air resistance, since the rocket is already pushing them at the exact same supersonic speed that it's traveling at. That's not really even a consideration. The real consideration is that they need to be able to get away from the rocket to minimum safe distance *fast* - usually as I re
Starts at 8:50 EST (Score:2)
according to YouTube.
This is nicer than SpaceX's test, where a crappy NASA-emplpyee cell phone video had to leak out.
Thanks, Jim?
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That wasn't an abort test. SpaceX did that awhile ago and did put it online. They were testing the system but it wasn't one of the milestone tests. These things get tested at every chance because of things like that.
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The film crew hired by Boeing must be fired, we couldn't see sh*t! And from what I can tell, one of the main chutes failed, only two remained attached to the capsule, at the beginning of the presentation they didn't say anything about a 2 chutes only test and the animations all shown 3 chutes, so I guess starliner will have another delay.
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You are correct. They are calling it a "deployment anomaly"
https://spacenews.com/boeing-p... [spacenews.com]
They're all trying to be upbeat about it, but that can't be good.
Rei (Score:1)
I can't wait for Rei to provide a breathless blow-by-blow account of the entire livestream. I will learn so many gems about how the engines are 42.5% more efficient than before! Oh wait: wrong corporation.
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It shows that you don't know Trekkies at all.
We're waiting for the trip to Risa!
I sure hope they fixed the MCAS system.. (Score:2)
I'd hate to see another pointless crash because it got confused due to only looking at one dodgy sensor...
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Or metal fatigue in a component that holds the wings on because... guess we don't know why that is yet, my guess is either incorrectly fastened or bad metallurgy.
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There's no such thing as a pointless crash... every crash is a new purchase that hasn't happened yet! /sarcasm
Don't breathe the red cloud (Score:2)
If you watch the video of this the service module ("trunk") is spewing what appears to be Nitrogen Tetroxide after it completes lithobraking.
Don't breathe that; The red cloud is not your friend.
Space is hard.
Looks like the one chute failed (Score:2)