SpaceX launches 22 Starlink satellites
SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites, lifting off from Cape Canaveral using its Falcon 9 rocket.
The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
63 SpaceX
40 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 72 to 40. It also now leads the entire world combined, 72 to 65, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 63 to 65.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites, lifting off from Cape Canaveral using its Falcon 9 rocket.
The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
63 SpaceX
40 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 72 to 40. It also now leads the entire world combined, 72 to 65, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 63 to 65.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Apparently the Atlas V 551 NROL-107 launch is put off again, until Sunday at 08:47 EST, due to electrical problems in the “pogo” circuit. Pogo is oscillatory feedback caused by fuel flow surging affecting thrust levels, but what circuit controls it God knows. I guess Tory Bruno does.
I have often heard the launch crew call out “pogo” late in the countdown for Falcon 9s, but never any explanation of it.
Ps. I heard that pogo-ing got the last N-1, causing it to break up just before 1-2 staging, right at the hot-staging latticework as I recall. Heads-up, Elon.
Pogo was a problem during the second Saturn 5 launch, causing premature shutdown of engines. They got the capsule into orbit and were able to more or less complete the mission, but the very next flight of the Saturn 5 was Apollo 8, with three men on board going to lunar orbit. They launched in December 1968 because Von Braun’s team in Huntsville was convinced they had found the issue and solved it.
Apparently there are electrically controlled bellows in the long main propellant feed lines that actively damp the longitudinal vibrations otherwise called “pogo”. They were so severe in the April 1968 Apollo 6 test launch that it would have seriously injured a crew had one been onboard. Other large rockets in the past have been destroyed because of it.
American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 72 to 40. It also now leads the entire world combined, 72 to 65
I had this post in mind when I ran across one of the most wrong-headed takes in recent memory on Twitter (which is saying something): “My real problem is that space should not be privatized, anything and everything done in space should be done through publicly funded and operated organizations. SpaceX should not be allowed to be independent.”
Tory Bruno helpfully explains this a little today on Twitter:
Louis McCarthy @mccarthy_louis
What’s the pogo system?
Tory Bruno @torybruno 8:10 AM · Sep 9, 2023
Three broad categories of combustion instability in liquid fueled rockets: screech (acoustic resonance inside combustion chamber), buzz (resonance with the medical structure), and pogo (long fluid column resonance in feedlines). Mighty Atlas kills pogo via a fluid energy absorber