

Orbital's Antares rocket makes test flight - nkhumphreys
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22193330

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spiritplumber
The phonesats got deployed! I'm happy because I worked on them.

This would be a routine flight if it wasn't for the fact that everything was
done with a very low budget.

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ritonlajoie
can you tell use more about that ? I heard this rocket has put cubesats for
radio amateurs communication I think, but I'm not sure about that.

Can 'I', if I were a HAM operator, connect to these cubesats ?

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InclinedPlane
Maybe. If you have digital packet radio equipment then you can indeed receive
packets from these phonesats.

<http://www.phonesat.org/packets.php>

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adestefan
There's not even a high cost to the equipment. A $10 rtl-sdr with a $30 home
built antenna will be enough to capture the audio data.

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someperson
Why does Orbital Sciences get $1.9 billion for 8 missions but SpaceX $1.6
billion for 12 missions?

They both had previous experience building rockets (Orbital had
Taurus/Minotaur families with launches over two decades while SpaceX had
little experience with only the Falcon 1) so it seems strange for there to be
such a large discrepancy. That's $133 million per mission including
Dragon/Falcon 9 development vs $237.5 million per mission including
Cygnus/Antares development, more than $100 million extra PER MISSION!!

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wolf550e
Both contracts are for 20 tons to orbit, so the difference is not as large.
Also, there was no competition - both 1st place and 2nd place were assured
contracts. So the competition would have been only for the second place, to
not miss out. But since there were only two entrants...

Now Congress want to down-select commercial crew to force NASA to depend on a
single contractor that can then start jacking up the price like Boeing and
Lockheed Martin regularly do, to kill the commercial benefits of commercial
space and protect the government monopoly way of doing business.

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wolf550e
Correction: There was a third entrant which lost. So there was a competition,
at the proposal phase. Apparently, they asked for even more money.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlanetSpace>

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btilly
My big question about this, what does Orbital do once its supply of pre-built
and never used Russian rockets runs out?

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lavezza
Aerojet, the company that reworks the old engines before sending them to
Orbital, purchased 36 engines. That's enough for 18 Antares rockets. That will
cover the current CRS contract and maybe a follow-up or some commercial
satellite launches. Beyond that Aerojet has a license to manufacture US-made
copies of the engines. That isn't as easy as following a recipe, but it is
something they are working on.

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someperson
Launch video (terrible camera work at launch. Also intermittent video feed in
final minutes): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3L7crGudVU>

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ceejayoz
We watched on NASA TV (I think that's where this footage comes from) and
whoever directed made the baffling choice to show the liftoff as the top half
of the rocket. No flame, no smoke, no apparent movement. Pretty lame for my
3.5 year old son...

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omegant
Why is it using a solid second stage? What are the advantages beyond weight?
It isn´t more risky if you have to compensate for some kind of 1st stage under
or over burn?

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wolf550e
It's a solid upper stage because of time-to-market considerations, not because
it's a good idea. For the first stage, thrust is more important than fuel
efficiency, so a solid first stage (or boosters) make sense (at least for
unmanned flights where there is no escape system), but for upper stages the
fuel efficiency is more important than thrust so the upper stages should be
liquid and if possible LH2/LOX, though that is the most expensive to develop
(up front cost) and handle (recurring cost).

Castor 30 has vacuum isp of 300sec, while Merlin 1Dvac is around 340sec. There
are rumors of SpaceX working on a closed cycle methane engine, which should
have even better fuel efficiency.

<http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/taurus2.html>

<http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/falcon9.html>

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InclinedPlane
It's not a rumor, SpaceX has stated publicly that they're working on
LOX/Methane engines. There are two big reasons for this. On the one hand, it's
just a good idea, liquid methane is a pretty decent compromise between LH2 and
kerosene in terms of Isp vs. density (both of which affect overall stage
performance) and since LCH4 exists at a similar temperature to LOX it doesn't
add any exceptional problems into vehicle design or operations the way LH2
does. But perhaps more profoundly, methane is actually shockingly easy to
manufacture on Mars with a very small amount of industrial equipment (we're
talking about mere kilograms, provided there's sufficient power available). So
the development of methane fueled rockets is also very much a way to build the
systems and technology necessary for facilitating exploration and colonization
of Mars.

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codex
My god, look at the execution here. The CEO, David Thompson, is a visionary.
Is there nothing he cannot do? Truly, I worship the ground he walks on.

