Artemis II
 

Interesting what attracts the attention of the idioterati on PPRuNe.

Artemis II just launched, headed for the moon (Alice). Not a peep out of the allegedly aware who obsess over space, UFOs and volcanos in Hawaii.
As we say in South Texas: tu madre.

The launch reminded me a little bit of the Apollo years of my youth.
But as jaded and cynical as I am, all I could do was breath a sigh of relief that the launch went off well.
Challenger is still, 40 years on, fresh in my memory.

Just watched it live on this side of the pond too, and agree, after watching Challenger all those years ago, I genuinely felt quite anxious. Those astronauts are so, so courageous. Apparently it will be the furtherest any human has been from Earth.

Was lucky enough to be in Florida when Discovery was launched, but on the Gulf coast side. We watched it live on TV then ran outside and were able to see the flare from the space shuttle from the other side of the state before it left the atmosphere.

I’ll be following the whole 10 day mission with interest.

Good to see the real America doing well -- as the real America so often does. :)

(On my way to school many years ago, we stopped to listen to Armstrong set foot on the Moon. Our daughter has shaken hands with one of those who also walked there. We will follow this closely with great interest!!)

Agreed.
Early morning in Japan, but what a powerful lift-off, and what a relief it is all working as planned.

I was watching it live (as live as the slight broadcast delays can make it.)

The chances of success over the Shuttle were far higher as there weren't piles of technical risks and political compromises (obvious ones, anyway) in the structure.

They even had engine covers to prevent anything from getting up into the fuel and controls above the engine nozzles.

To cut and paste my comments on the “universe” thread:

I too watched the Challenger launch live in 1986, I remember exactly where I was. Won't forget it. I hope this mission goes
well and that the crew return safely.

I watched the launch live on NASA TV. I watched it again on TV news. There seem to be repeated references to this mission as "historic". What is historic about repeating part of the Apollo 8 mission from about 58 years ago?

A critical part of the Apollo 8 mission was entry into, and exit from, lunar orbit. Artemis II does not do that hence "part of" the Apollo 8 mission.

Thank you all for your replies.

I just watched the address of our President about the war in Iran, and he led off with the Artemis II Launch.

my reaction was:

Uh, thanks for nothing. :mad:

But I am glad that the launch went well.

Just woken up to the news of the successful launch. :ok: I believe this flight will take mankind a little further out than any of the Apollo missions ever ventured.

I happened to be in Florida at the time of the first post-Challenger launch and watched from a board walk by Patrick AFB along with lots of Americans. When the boosters separated I recall a collective sigh of relief and think we had all been holding our breath.

It’s the first time Orion/SLS has launched on a crewed mission.

It’s the first time humans have left LEO since 1972.

The first Canadian to do so.

The first female to do so.

The furthest humans have ventured from Earth.

The mission is an international collaboration on equipment.

There are other ‘historic’ aspects but above all, every flight is a test flight and is quite an achievement regardless of the fact that similar was achieved 58 years ago before politics interrupted progress.

Both myself and Mrs Banda have a fascination with this stuff back to being pre-teens during Apollo 11 and have been following Artemis as we've done other missions down the years.

Shuttle launches to the ISS used VHF comms for a time after launch and I was able to hear it in the Midlands on a couple of occasions using the same kit as for earwigging on ATC.

Learned this morning that Artemis was Apollo's sibling. I missed out on any classics even as a Grammar school boy.

Caught the launch on NASA's YT channel.

Held my breath until the SRBs had separated ...

I am glad I was not the only one watching almost with trepidation. It felt strangely illogical but I suppose Challenger is hard wired in my mind. Despite that it really brought back memories from my childhood.

Most annoyingly NASA’s YT coverage cut away from the ship when the SRBs were about to separate to a view of the onlookers looking up 🤦🏻‍♂️.

Glad the launch went well. Best wishes to Artemis for the rest of the mission. I agree with the 'America at its best' comment.

I too watched a night Shuttle launch from a hotel in Orlando - lift off on TV, then watching the fiery exhaust trail through the window. Fantastic!

I'm old enough to remember as a kid watching Sputnik 1's booster as it overflew the UK. What a surprise! At school the booklet accompanying the BBC Science for Schools radio broadcasts featured on its cover a photo of a satellite from the USA's Project Vanguard. The assumption was that this would be the first satellite to be launched into orbit. But the Soviets beat them to it!

On the night of the Apollo 11 moon landing I was watching the live feed on the TV in a pub in Shaftesbury (England). I heard 'contact light' and so was first person there to realise that the landing was successful before it was announced by the commentators. What a moment! On the 50th anniversary the Times UK newspaper published this diagram summarising the mission.

A nice change to see some positive news headlining across the media this morning and bon voyage to the brave crew of Artemis II.

Sadly, not many pubs left in Shaftesbury to watch from, Disco, and their main focus these days is Sky Sports. Which one was it?

There's a bit of duplication here with the SLS thread. Perhaps a mod will do a merge.

What puzzles me is why the liquid stage is insulated. The Shuttle Orbiter was extremely vulnerable to ice shedding and flight 27 was almost lost due to a SRB nose cone shredding and ripping tiles off the Orbiter underside. The weight of the foam requires 9 times the mass of the propellant to get it up to the point at which the tank is discarded. The tank is unpainted in order to save weight, some 450kg being save on the Shuttle flights 3 and onwards. Given that the foam caused no end of issues and the vibration of launch is enough to shake the ice free in a few seconds, why is there a need for insulation ? Space X seem to do OK with their rockets.

The foam caused issues because it struck something on several occasions. That something, the orbiter, is not in the way anymore. The reason for having insulation on the tank is simply to keep the propellant as cold as possible. The Falcon 9's rocket engine runs on LOX and RP-1, and that second part is a refined version of what we put in cars and aeroplanes. They have less to keep cold compared to the needs of the SLS, as that uses both LOX and liquid hydrogen. Without the insulation, you would boil off more propellant and you would need to keep pumping it in at a high rate. They still need to keep replenishing up until tank pressurisation, but at a much lower rate. That's my understanding of the system.

We saw the climb and acceleration from the backyard 80 miles north of the launch pad when the rocket flew towards us on a ENE heading
Quite spectacular but I had expected to hear a sonic boom after a minute or so but it was quiet.

From the BBC

So after $100Bn investment ($100,000,000,000) the poor buggers don't even have the ability to control their heating system???

I was surprised at how early the propellants were loaded. The foam suffers from a number of issues including the "popcorn" effect and woodpecker damage as seen on the shuttle programme. As far as I can tell, it's not needed on the SLS and simply reduces the useful payload. The Saturn V S2 and S3 stages used the same fuels.

Perhaps a rocket surgeon knows the answer. :8

Yes, I am glad to see that kind of collaboration, and glad to see that a Canadian jet pilot is a part of the crew. :ok:

I would imagine the boom would be heard offshore, if at all. I assume rocket efflux was the dominant sound? I can only imagine.

I did watch Endeavour launch back in 1994 but I would imagine Saturn V and SLS were more impressive in terms of raw power?

The solid rocket motors are inherently impressive to me, if only because once lit, they cannot be unlit. That demands a certain respect!

I too watched with more than a little trepidation and then pride. 50 years ago I was doing structural analysis at Rocketdyne on the SSME now known as the RS25, virtually unchanged from those days. (Little known fact: the engine has a spark plug! But we called it the Augmented Spark Igniter, the ASI)

Is that a case of the old addage 'don't fix it if it's not broken, or the fact that we're still having to use what is essentially, incrementally improved 1940s technology?
The same holds for aircraft and even automobile propulsion systems.
Until scientific advancements deliver practical means of transiting worthwhile astronomical distances, and new materials that are capable of dealing with the hazards of that concept, I see little benefit from these current jaunts to our own 'back yard'.
The proposed Moon Base, would be orders of magnitudes more expensive than even this single use SLS.
Seeing 90% of the SLS crash back to earth, or burn-up, demonstrates how little has changed since Apollo. Sure, SpaceX can re-use boosters a few times, but the concept remains unchanged, just a more affordable version of inefficiency.

You're not wrong, but sometimes those very scientific advancements are driven by starting from the basics. Unfortunately, we pretty much gave up on leaving earth orbit in the early 70s. Unless we actually have the ambition to do so, and keep doing so, and figuring ways to do it better, we're probably going to stay stuck with - as you put it - 1940s technology.

Given the flight management and computational power has improved so much in the 'old' days the craft would splash down somewhere in the Pacific, Now how soon before they can have the capsules land softly on the flight deck of a Arleigh Burke. None of this ungainly scrambling onto a net and being winched up into a Sea King ..

God Speed Artimis ll and safe return

The RS25 is 1960s technology but at 2020s prices. Chalk and cheese when compared to a modern generation engine like the SpaceX Raptor 3.

$145M each as compared to around $1M for a Raptor with a target of $500K. peak. 71 RS-25 engines built over 50 years whilst Raptor is production is now about 7 a week.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2026/0...5-million.html

I would have watched the launch on TV if I'd been home - as it turns out I was driving home from a visit to the dentist at the time. Then again, I'm a rocket nerd on a child of the 1960's moon race.
I've been more nervous about this launch than any I can remember since Apollo - just seems like for all the money spent, the systems are far from mature.
I drove up to watch a couple of the Shuttle launches while I was doing testing at the Pratt facility in Palm Beach Florida back in ~1984. First one was a bit of a bust because we didn't know where we were going, but the second I drove up the night before and slept in the car (along with hundreds of others) along the Indian River across from the Cape. Impressive to watch, then roughly a minute later - just as the Shuttle disappeared through a layer of clouds - the sound hit. OMG - like someone beating on my chest with bass drum mallets! And given the time delay, we must have been 10 or more miles away!

I don't think the Saturn V used meaningful insulation on the liquid O2 tanks, but the liquid H2 tanks had insulation installed internally. I remember a story that the engineers were having a great deal of trouble working with the foam insulation - so they recruited some 'surfer bums' who used a similar foam making their surf boards. But they had a huge problem with 'absenteeism' of the surfer dudes when the surf was up :}. The second stage had a particular issue that there was a common bulkhead between the H2 and O2 tanks - that also needed to be insulated so that the O2 wouldn't freeze to the bulkhead (making it unusable for propellant).
Ice still formed, but as noted - unlike the Shuttle - there was nothing to hit and do damage. As far as payload impact of the foam - liquid H2 boils off so fast that the loss would be a concern, plus the third stage had to keep that stuff from boiling off for a couple hours in orbit before the final burn to send them to the moon. And don't forget - the ice that doesn't shed isn't light either.

Making 'steerable' parachutes of the necessary size for a several ton capsule would be a considerable challenge, and the potential failure modes could be catastrophic.

He sings "time to guide the capsule if you dare" which makes no sense. Wasn't the actual lyric "time to leave the capsule if you dare"? I stopped watching after that.

My post was to reflect that the theory of rocket propulsion is essentially the same as it was 100 years ago...
https://www.nasa.gov/dr-robert-h-god...t%20technology.
If we also consider the boosters, the technology goes back centuries.
Hardly 'chalk and cheese'... Interesting combination for rocket fuel though :)

Patented by Wallace and Grommet….. following a great British tradition of alternative space technologies such as Cavorite.

Wonder if when DJT calls them on Easter Day he gets the answer phone message that his call is important to them and to please leave a message...sorry political drift

One of my neighbors have friends in high places and got invited to the NASA VIP section for launch and took this picture.
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....659d09ec5.jpeg

I recall the sound as loud but not oppressively so, but then again Patrick AFB is around 25 miles south of the NASA launch pads. We probably could have got closer but weren't certain about parking anywhere in Cocoa Beach - and we saw several interesting movements out of Patrick, I recall a USAF U-2 and one of NASA's Shuttle Simulator Gulfstream IIs...

There is good in America

Quote:

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https://www.foxnews.com/media/child-...i-moon-mission

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ROFL.....

Who else noticed the crew evacuation baskets breaking free at the point of launch and running down the wires from the tower towards the safety room ? Was it intentional ? See 16:52 in this excellent collection of engineering and alternative view footage.

The exhaust from the SRBs seems to be a little dark at the point of ignition, was that a concrete rich exhaust plume ?