I had a very nice Thanksgiving with family.
Brother makes a great, moist turkey and stuffing that is hard to quit eating.
I even experimented with chocolate chip cookies, a first for me, and I didn't make anyone sick. :-)
Mixed emotions about the ORION spacecraft as it seems to be more fitting to use for lunar missions than to an asteroid or Mars.
It does help to develop a lot of technologies and keep us looking up towards space.
A couple of links that contain more information within that might help clarify what is going on.
- LRK -
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Orion Launch Weather Forecast Improves
Meteorologists upgraded their outlook for Orion’s launch tomorrow morning to give it a 70 percent chance of acceptable conditions. The forecast says drier conditions are expected and the chance of coastal showers has diminished during the 2-hour, 39-minute launch window. The primary rules concerns remain flight through precipitation and high winds. With less than 23 […]
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Meteorologists upgraded their outlook for Orion’s launch tomorrow morning to give it a 70 percent chance of acceptable conditions. The forecast says drier conditions are expected and the chance of coastal showers has diminished during the 2-hour, 39-minute launch window. The primary rules concerns remain flight through precipitation and high winds. With less than 23 […]
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This is an article from Bloomberg Businessweek starting out with a statement that NASA is launching a spacecraft that will take humans to Mars which is a catchy sound byte but no way would one want to spend 7 months with only 4 crew in a very confined space. We shall see how much it excites students. There are links and videos that might be viewed to help fill out where we are headed, or not. We do what we can with the cards we are delt.
- LRK -
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Mission to MarsNASA Is Launching a Spacecraft That Will Take Humans to Mars
By Justin Bachman December 02, 2014
NASA is launching its boldest test flight in decades this week. An unmanned capsule will head off on Thursday to reach a distance of 3,600 miles from Earth—the farthest space mission with a craft designed to accommodate humans since the final Apollo 17 trip to the moon in 1972.
Called Orion, the program will mark a key initial step toward a human mission to Mars. Orion is also designed to excite the public’s imagination for deep-space exploration, much as the Apollo moon missions sparked an interest in space and produced civilian engineering triumphs. With the first test flight on Thursday, NASA wants to make it abundantly clear that much of the hardware that can get humans to Mars already exists and is ready to fly.
“My hope is that when we fly the capsule on Thursday, it will energize the public and energize that middle schooler [who] isn’t quite sure what he wants to do, but he likes math and science,” says Richard Boitnott, an engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center.
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The following link is about ORION and gives you a lot of material to digest.
This will let you know how far we have come and shows you just how many companies are participating.
- LRK -
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INSIDE:LEADING EDGE DESIGN AND ENGINEERING
TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION
BUILDING ORION
TESTING ORION
INVESTING IN OUR FUTURE
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Paul D. Spudis has some comments about how useful the ORION spacecraft will be.
- LRK -
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The Flight of OrionA new spacecraft takes flight, but to where?
By Paul D. Spudis
airspacemag.com
December 2, 2014
A milestone in the program to develop a new human spaceflight system is set to occur this week, as the first unmanned flight of the new Orion spacecraft lifts off from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 37 on Thursday. This mission will test the overall flight qualities of the new Orion spacecraft. Many systems are still to be developed, with pieces of the spacecraft needed for human occupation replaced on this flight by instrumentation. The tests are designed to observe the vehicle’s responses to the dynamic environments of launch, orbit, high-speed re-entry and splashdown. Such flight test articles are called “boilerplate” vehicles.
The flight profile of Thursday’s test is similar in scope to the first test flights of the Apollo boilerplates. The general concerns are to monitor aerodynamic stresses during the key flight phases of launch and re-entry to assure that hull integrity is maintained and that operations in space are as expected. It is a test flight with limited objectives and expectations. But as the only human spaceflight event of any future significance in the calendar year, it has ramped up media interest and their coverage about the significance and potential of Orion.
The flight profile of Thursday’s test is similar in scope to the first test flights of the Apollo boilerplates. The general concerns are to monitor aerodynamic stresses during the key flight phases of launch and re-entry to assure that hull integrity is maintained and that operations in space are as expected. It is a test flight with limited objectives and expectations. But as the only human spaceflight event of any future significance in the calendar year, it has ramped up media interest and their coverage about the significance and potential of Orion.
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- LRK -
Thanks for looking up with me.
- LRK -
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WordPress: http://lrkellogg.
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -
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