SpaceX Aims to Launch Twice this Week

Posted by takebackthesky on October 8, 2017
Posted in: Launches. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Despite delays (and partly because of them), SpaceX now plans to launch two Falcon 9 rockets this week, one from each coast.

Iridium-L3-Patch

Courtesy Spaceflight101.com.

On October 9, a brand new Falcon 9 will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California as part of a series of satellite launches for Iridium’s next generation mobile communications fleet.  This particular launch, which has been delayed numerous times over the past year, will deploy 10 Iridium NEXT satellites, and is now scheduled to lift off at 8:37am EDT (1237 GMT) on Monday morning.

Then, if all goes according to plan, we’ll see the second launch of a Falcon 9 in a little over 48 hours, as the EchoStar 105 communications satellite heads into the black as part of the SES-11 mission from LC-39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  The payload for this mission, which will utilize a previously-flown Falcon 9, is a nearly 11,500-pound (5,200-kilogram) satellite built by Airbus Defense and Space that carries a shared communications payload for Luxembourg-based SES and American EchoStar.  This launch was originally scheduled for October 7, but will now happen mid-week.  Liftoff is currently scheduled for 6:53pm EDT (2253 GMT) on Wednesday, October 11.

17108097439_2d41fd2c9f_z

Courtesy Spaceflights.news

These two launches will be SpaceX’s 14th and 15th of the year, as Elon Musk and crew continue to launch at the fastest rate in the history of the company.  On October 4, Musk said on Twitter and Instagram that SpaceX was also “Aiming for two rocket landings in 48 hours this weekend.”  With the adjusted schedule, those will now be weekday landings, but that doesn’t make SpaceX’s plans any less ambitious.  The Iridium-3 booster will land at sea aboard SpaceX’s drone-barge Just Read the Instructions in the Pacific, and the Falcon 9 first-stage that launches the SES-11 mission will touch down aboard her Atlantic counterpart, Of Course I Still Love You.

You can follow all the action of these launches and landings live on SpaceX’s YouTube channel and at spacex.com.  Webcasts of SpaceX launches go live approximately 20-30 minutes before liftoff.

And remember, with SpaceX launching (and landing) rockets at an unprecedented pace, now would be a great time to contact Elon Musk and/or president Gwynne Shotwell to remind them that you’d like SpaceX’s first Crew Dragon, which is now scheduled to launch next August, to be named after Joss Whedon’s Serenity.  All it takes is a brief letter or postcard, or even just a leaf, to make your voice heard.

Peace, love and rockets…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Autumn is the Time to Send SpaceX a Leaf on the Wind

Posted by takebackthesky on September 24, 2017
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

leaf on the windAutumn arrived in the Northern Hemisphere this past week, which means it’s time for us to reprise our “Leaf on the Wind” campaign to convince SpaceX to name their first Crew Dragon Serenity.

We’ve written about this campaign here a couple of times before, but in case you don’t want to go sifting through the archives to read about it, here’s how it works:

We’re asking each and every supporter of Take Back the Sky to go into his or her yard (or perhaps a park) and pick a leaf.  It should be a leaf that is either still on the branch, or one that is very freshly fallen.  Put that leaf in a small, sealable plastic bag, and put it in an envelope with a short note to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk and/or president Gwynne Shotwell asking SpaceX to name its first Crew Dragon Serenity (and I do mean short– one or two sentences will do).  Once you’ve done that, seal the envelope, slap a stamp on it and mail it to this address:

Space Exploration Technologies
Attn:  Elon Musk (or Attn:  Gwynne Shotwell)
1 Rocket Road
Hawthorne, CA 90250
USA
 

When Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell get piles of leaves big enough to jump in, we’re pretty sure they’ll get the message that Browncoats around the world are passionate about the idea of a manned US spacecraft called Serenity! 

Now, here are a few tips for a successful “Leaf on the Wind:”

Image

Pretty colors are shiny, but make sure you choose a leaf that will make it to SpaceX in one piece!

 

  1. I can’t speak for Canada or Mexico, but for those in America, the US Postal Service will allow the mailing of plant matter only as long as it will not decompose before it reaches its destination, so be sure to pick a leaf that is either still on the branch or very freshly fallen.  Those pretty autumn colors may look just like Serenity’s logo, but Elon Musk will never see them if the envelope gets flagged and pulled because it has a certain aroma of unpleasantness about it when it arrives in California.  If you want your leaf to stay fresh longer, you can blow a tiny amount of air into the bag (not too much, or it won’t fit in the envelope) before you seal it.  That way you really are sending SpaceX a leaf “on the wind.”  Another helpful technique is to take a very small wad of paper towel, toilet paper or Kleenex tissue and moisten it slightly, and then wrap it around the leaf’s stem before you seal it in the bag.
  2. The note you include should be brief and hand-written.  This will set it apart from the letters that have already been arriving.  Again, one or two sentences will do.  (I chose to include a little Haiku with mine:  “Watch your Dragon soar/With the name Serenity/A leaf on the wind.”)  It’s probably also a good idea to sign it, because CEO’s and presidents of big companies tend to get a little nervous when they start getting anonymous notes in the mail! If you want to make it seem informal, yet personal, try signing just your first name and where you’re from (for example, “Chris from Pittsburgh”).
  3. Make sure you know what kind of leaf you’ve chosen so you’re not sending a leaf that’s hazardous to the touch.  (We want Elms and Maples, not Poison Ivy or Poison Sumac!)
  4. For our supporters who are not in North America, you can still get involved, but it will take a little bit more work.  Since your leaves on the wind aren’t likely to arrive before they decompose, you’ll have to think outside the box, but you could send a handmade leaf cut out of construction paper.  They may not be real, but I’m sure they still will be all kinds of pretty, and you won’t have to worry about them losing their beauty before Elon Musk or Gwynne Shotwell ever sees them.  If you don’t want to go through that trouble, feel free to copy, print and cut out this one (coloring it is optional, but including a little note is still a really good idea): leaf
  5. Regardless of whether your leaf on the wind is hand-picked or hand-made, be sure to tell people you’ve sent it on message boards and on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (#LeafOnTheWind), and encourage them to do the same.  If we want this campaign to succeed, we need as many people as possible to participate.  Also, this campaign is not meant to take the place of regular letters.  Ideally, the two should work in tandem.  We need to keep sending those plain old ordinary letters as well!
  6. Don’t forget:  just like letters, leaves don’t have to be a “one and done” statement.  Fall lasts about three months, and that leaves you a lot of time (see what did there?) to send an awful lot of fall foliage to SpaceX!

So, if you’re a Browncoat who would like to see a manned US spacecraft named Serenity, or just someone who believes that bridging the gap between science-fiction and hard science will help rekindle American interest in space exploration, please take a few moments of your time and the cost of a postage stamp to send SpaceX a leaf on the wind– literally.

Peace, love and rockets…

 

The Science of Firefly: Breakin’ Atmo

Posted by takebackthesky on September 20, 2017
Posted in: Articles, Science of Firefly. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Courtesy Dark Horse Comics

Like many engineers, I dream of making the fantastic ships and spacecraft of classic science fiction a reality. Take, for example, the simple concept of leaving Earth itself. Space is only 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) away. Your average automobile, which uses principles of internal combustion largely unchanged for over a century, can cover that distance five times over.

Turn that 100 km on its side, however, pointing straight towards the sky, and suddenly, things get much more complex, almost to the point of getting out of hand. Terms like “expendable launch”, “cryogenic tanks”, “reusable stages”, and “orbital refueling” get thrown in, jumbled around and re-arranged to try to manage energy and cost. Even the most advanced launch vehicles in the world, like the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy, even if both vehicles become completely reusable, are still at the end of the day vehicles the size of skyscrapers used to cover one-fifth the distance that a Ford Focus can before its house-size fuel tanks are emptied.

This is why, unlike most people who are fascinated by exotic hyperspace engines and warp drives, as an aerospace engineer, I’m honestly more attracted and interested in the comparatively more mundane features of these ships. Sure, I’m glad the Millennium Falcon can make the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs and all, but I’m far more impressed that it’s able to lift off of a planet and land on another one without stopping to refuel.

Which brings me to the real star of our favorite cancelled sci-fi western television series. You see, while most popular sci-fi franchises will gloss over their faster-than-light drives with technobabble, their sublight counterparts (i.e. “thrusters” or “impulse engines”) get a wave of the hand, at best– except for Serenity, that is, which has a surprisingly detailed in-universe explanation of how a jet turbine engine can work in the vacuum of space– one that not only actually jives well with known science, and is more plausibly science-based than any other fictional ship, but is also actually close enough to reality to the point where you and I may live to see it.

For this special installment of The Science of Firefly, we’ll be taking a closer look at what literally “keeps her in the air” (aside from love, of course): Serenity’s thruster engines, engine pods or thruster pods. Continue Reading

The SpaceX Files: Top-Secret Space Plane to Launch Aboard Falcon 9 This Week

Posted by takebackthesky on September 6, 2017
Posted in: Launches. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

space_x_logoSpaceX has worked with the US military before, but with Thursday’s scheduled launch of the Air Force’s infamous X-37B space plane aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, Elon Musk and company will become a part of conspiracy theory legend.

The X-37B, otherwise known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), has been referred to by some as “America’s drone space shuttle.”  This orbital space plane, which does resemble a smaller version of the space shuttle, has officially flown four missions, which the Air Force said were to “conduct orbital experiments.”

Some have speculated, however, that the vehicle has been to space far more often, and there have even been claims that the Air Force has been flying two of these spacecraft for years, with one always in orbit and one on the ground.  If you asked many Americans who know of the existence of the X-37B, they’d probably tell you that they believe its true mission is one of espionage, or perhaps even some “Star Wars-style” military mission similar to those outlined in President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative many decades ago.  One need only search “X-37B” on YouTube to find numerous videos by “experts” who describe  the OTV as a “mysterious” and “dirty” project that might even be testing an EM drive, some going so far as to claim that the Russians have threatened to expose the Air Force’s “quake plane” to the world.

x37b

The US Air Force’s “top secret” X-37B. (Photo:  YouTube)

Even the docents who give the tours at Kennedy Space Center apparently love stoking the fires of these wild theories, as I found out firsthand in August of 2015 when my tour group was shown (from a distance, of course) the hangar that housed the X-37B.  Our guide, who was himself ex-Air Force, told us with a twinkle in his eye he could only confirm that the hangar was in fact for the X-37B, but that he couldn’t tell us any more because “then he’d have to kill us.”

Are we really to believe that that X-37B is some clandestine weapon, its flights ordered by some cigarette smoking man in the upper echelon of our nation’s military hierarchy in a facility accessible only to those with the highest levels of security clearance? Well, if it were, then consider this– it’d be pretty careless of the US government to allow the Air Force to contract a civilian space company to launch such a super secret space weapon– let alone the one civilian space company that has what is arguably the highest media profile of any on the planet! And that’s not to mention the fact that tourists are permitted within a few hundred yards of the vehicle’s “secret base” at Kennedy Space Center.  Sorry, but when it comes to the OTV, I’m a bit more of a Scully than I am a Mulder.

What is possibly true of the X-37B is that the Air Force’s “orbital experiments” collect data that could be useful in the development of future weapons systems and delivery platforms that could be employed beyond Earth’s atmosphere.  It is reasonable to assume, then, that the OTV could be a military test plane for space, minus the test pilot.

otv5 mission patch

OTV-5 Mission Patch (Photo:  eBay Ireland)

Whatever its purpose, this week’s launch of OTV-5 will mark the fifth official mission of the OTV and the first time that the X-37B will be carried into space by a privately-built, privately-owned rocket– a milestone that is no doubt the result of the fact that SpaceX’s ability to launch more cheaply than anyone around will save the Pentagon, and ultimately us taxpayers, a decent chunk of change over the long haul.

There is a certain irony to the fact that the OTV was built by Boeing, the company that shares the current Commercial Crew Program contract with SpaceX and with whom SpaceX is (unofficially) racing to be the first private company to return American astronauts to space from American soil.  Either SpaceX’s Crew Dragon or Boeing’s Starliner will be the first spaceship to launch with a crew of NASA astronauts next year, and if it’s the former, then it is our hope that the ship will bear the name Serenity.

It’s also worth noting that for this launch, both the booster and the payload are reusable.  SpaceX plans to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9 at Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral after it sends the OTV into the black, and the X-37B will return to Earth and land like a conventional aircraft once its mission is complete.

The launch of OTV-5 is currently scheduled for Thursday, September 7.  As would befit the launch of a secret space plane, no exact scheduled time for liftoff has been given as of yet.  Hurricane Irma, which is bearing down on the Florida coastline, is not expected to affect the launch in any way, but even so the weather is currently less than optimal, putting the odds of a Thursday launch at around 50%.  Nonetheless, SpaceX should have plenty of opportunity to get the OTV into Low Earth Orbit before Irma would force them to suspend operations.

Despite the secret nature of the payload, there’s no reason to believe that SpaceX won’t conduct its usual webcast for the launch, which should go live approximately 20 minutes before liftoff on SpaceX’s YouTube channel and at spacex.com.

We may never know the real mission of the X-37B, but when OTV-5 launches this week, we’ll be able to say with confidence that the truth is out there, and this time we have SpaceX to thank for it.

Peace, love and rockets…

 

 

 

 

SpaceX to Launch from the West Coast August 24

Posted by takebackthesky on August 23, 2017
Posted in: Launches. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

 

FormoSat5

 

SpaceX is scheduled to launch its 12th Falcon 9 rocket of the year this Thursday, August 24 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

There is a 44-minute launch window for Thursday’s launch, with liftoff scheduled for 2:50 p.m. EDT (1850 GMT).  It will be the fifth launch of a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, and the 40th overall.

The mission is to deploy Formosat-5, a Taiwanese satellite designed to test the country’s aerospace manufacturing capability and collect both color and black-and-white imagery of Earth.

Elon Musk and company will use a brand new Falcon 9 booster for this mission, which will require only a fraction of its lift capability to carry Formosat-5 into orbit.  SpaceX will recover the first stage of this particular Falcon 9 in the Pacific Ocean on the drone ship Just Read The Instructions, after which it will be refurbished and reused.

A live webcast of the launch will commence approximately thirty minutes before liftoff on SpaceX’s YouTube channel and on spacex.com.

 

 

 

 

CRS-12 Helps Investigate Cosmic Rays

Posted by takebackthesky on August 12, 2017
Posted in: Launches. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

SpaceX will launch its third Dragon spacecraft this year to the International Space Station on Monday, August 14, 2017 at 1231 EST, delivering thousands of pounds of science equipment and supplies for the astronaut crew. The engines to be used in the launch completed a successful test-fire on Thursday afternoon.

Successful test-firing of the Merlin engines prior to the launch itself

Chief among the payloads will be the new Cosmic-Ray Energetics and Mass
investigation (CREAM) apparatus, which will be attached to the Japanese external “porch” on its laboratory module. It’s hoped that, over the course of its three-year mission, it will provide scientists with a clearer picture of the structure of our universe.

Also among the science payloads being delivered is an experiment to grow protein LRRK-2. It’s long been known that protein crystals grow orders of magnitude faster in microgravity, and with greater crystalline strength. This particular type has been identified as being correlated to the pathology of Parkinson’s Disease; so it is hoped that this experiment, developed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation and other partners, will help scientists understand the disease itself better.

Additionally, this flight itself will be historic in that it will be the last time that a factory-new Dragon craft will be flown for some time. Eventually, of course, they’ll have to make more, but from here on out, the plan is to fly used, saving the company, NASA, and American taxpayers millions–if not billions–of dollars.

Watch the launch live-streamed with us on YouTube or at http://www.spacex.com.

Browncoat Ball Breaks Atmo in Gettysburg, PA August 11-13

Posted by takebackthesky on August 5, 2017
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment
Back in 2004, the Chicagoland Browncoats decided to hold a one-night banquet that was planned as a formal Sino-Western ball like the one in the Firefly episode “Shindig.”  The event was such a hit that Browncoats decided not only that they would do it every year, but that they would take it nationwide as well.  Officially dubbed the “Browncoat Ball,”  the event has moved from location to location, year after year, and has gradually evolved into a full weekend of social activities, sightseeing at local tourist attractions and celebrating all aspects of the Firefly and Serenity fandom.
browncoat ball
So far the ball has been held in Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Austin, Portland, Charlotte, Warwick (RI), Albuquerque, Phoenix, Greenville (SC), Virginia Beach and Salt Lake City.  This year the event returns to eastern Pennsylvania, as the Pennsylvania Browncoats host the 2017 Browncoat Ball in Gettysburg, PA from August 11-13.
This is the second time that the PA Browncoats have organized the Browncoat Ball, and it’s also the second time that the Delaware Valley Brigade, more commonly known as the Philadelphia Browncoats, have taken point in the preparations.
Matt Black is the head of the planning committee for this year’s Browncoat Ball and a friend of many of us here at Take Back the Sky since 2013, when we spent a weekend working side-by-side at the Browncoats tables at Wizard World Philadelphia Comic Con.  We asked him to take a few moments away from his hectic schedule to answer a couple of questions about the Browncoat Ball, this year’s host city of Gettysburg and why he thinks naming a SpaceX Crew Dragon Serenity would be all kinds of appropriate…

Continue Reading