"I can't wait to dip these in Valium"
Show notes:
First things first, I'd like to give a shout-out to a couple listeners. The show (and my life, same thing) has been through some turmoil and hearing input, or just a plain old “hello” from listeners always kicks my ass into gear.
So thanks to :
Giles Mason, Dimitri, and Peter Bergheim
There's a post on the new site, which is Cosmocast.space detailing what's been up if you'd like to read that, but without further ado, let's get to the show!!
Oh yeah, also to get this out on time I had to cut music and sound effects. They'll be back soon.
Falcon flights!
3 launches in last two weeks!
Intelsat 35-e had no first sage recovery, Bulgariasat was the most difficult landing yet (on a “flight tested” booster) and Iridiumsat was the first Falcon to use the new titanium griffins.
Arca’s built the first SSTO. OR IS IT? (Atlas 10B SCORE)
Atlas 10-B used a “1.5” stage system to deliver its payload to LEO. A 1.5 stage system is really neat, as it drops a bunch of weight (the engines) but doesn't lose a whole stage.
XCOR lays off all employees
XCOR has been through some shit. Over the last year, they've laid off half of their workforce, lost all three founding leaders of the company, and then the replacement for the company leader left for a political position as the deputy chief management officer of the Department of defence.
They will be maintaining some employees to take care of their “intellectual property” and to try to get the company back on its feet again.
Looks like the Lynx Spaceplane will be a future topic for episodes based around “ neat-o things that might have been”
Soyuz 5 is cool and all, but a weak response.
Roscosmos hasn't had the best time with implementing a new rocket family. The Angara series has had some delays. Crewed flight has moved from 2021 to 2022 and it looks like that's a bit of a candy-coated estimate.
Still waiting on a 2017 launch.
Soyuz 5 is a drafted plan to bridge the gap between retiring the Soyuz and implementation of the Angara vehicle.
Perchlorates on Mars. What to do, what to do.
Aight, so there's a ton of perchlorates in Mars.
If we processed ~60kg/soil per day that means we could hit the 550liters of Oxygen an average *naut has to breath a day.
That's because the perchlorates are a chlorine atom surrounded by oxygen atoms.
In the case of the most common perchlorate on Mars, ClO4- , it's a chlorine atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms.
We can, nay, *need* to use this resource. Oxygen is an insanely useful resource, and to find that there's tons of the stuff, pretty much wherever we land, locked away in *dirt* is *good* news.
Furthermore, this has been used to make the argument that living on the surface isn't possible, but we already kind of knew that. Look at the leading designs for Mars habitats. The general idea is that for anything long term, we need to bury the habitats, or put a bunch of dirt on top of them, which is kind of like burying, but in reverse or something.
Also, fucking Mike Pence needs to either keep his paws of flight hardware, or show the same discretion around power lines.
Aaaand with that I'll bring this episode to a close. Our upcoming launch is a...
Soyuz 2.1a with a Fregat upper stage.
It's launching from Baikonur and will be sending up Kanopus-V-lk, which will hang out in sun synchronous orbit, with an operational life of 5 years, and will be imaging and reporting on wildfires. Good stuff.
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