Why NASA's Next Mars Lander Will Launch from California Instead of Florida | Hacker News Reader

Why NASA's Next Mars Lander Will Launch from California Instead of Florida

gizmodo.com

74 pointscurtis54 comments

As someone who worked directly on VAFB's spacerange modernization: they also have slightly better equipment for launches than Kennedy.

VAFB's vertical wind profiler[1] is slightly more reliable, VAFB's disaster planning is easier too.

If you're not launching something supermassive that should be as close to where it was assembled, Kennedy is not your best call. That's why a lot of small and on-the-dl loads tend to go there. Also: weather is consistently more favorable in California that far south.

The less great part about moving more launches there is that the options for public viewing are way worse.

[1]: Science trivia: it's awful old school to use weather balloons to measure wind shear layers. Now they have radars so good they literally point them straight up and let the wind shear bounce radars back down. It's amazing that this works. It's so good that it can see birds!. Some operators claimed to be able to discriminate breeds, although I have no idea how they'd validate that.

You can actually classify mosquitoes and other insects by wing flapping. Time series is a perfect application for things like this.

Neither site is ideal, even restricting choices to the USA.

For polar orbit, obviously northern Alaska is proper. This minimizes the amount of east-west movement that must be cancelled out.

For more typical orbits, being near the equator is better. There are many choices, but Jarvis Island is probably the best. It has excellent weather and is nearly on the equator. Other good choices are Palmyra Atoll and Baker Island.

There is something to be said for altitude and dry air. Altitude is kind of obvious, yet not. Although the height is not significant relative to orbit, getting above a few miles of thick air is nice. Dry air is helpful with cryogenics; remember that ice destroyed a space shuttle. Due to the high heat inherent in solid-liquid transition of water, ice formation puts lots of heat into the cryogenics. These considerations point toward a site near Tuscon or on Hawaii's big island. The astronomers probably don't want to share either spot, but hey, they might get space telescopes in exchange.

Not Tuscon but just west of White Sands Test Range (hence the Virgin Galactic spaceport) having the advantage of White Sands' unlimited restricted airspace to keep launches clean.

Definitely to the west ... those winds are killer: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id...

You launch eastwards anyway. With WSMTR to your east you get the advantage of clean air to a degree that even Canaveral can't guarantee.

They actually do have to clear all launches with White Sands, though. I mean... not that they have many launches from there (yet?)

Shipping rockets to tropical islands is brutal from a corrosion perspective, though. If I recall correctly, that was the root cause of SpaceX's failure of the first Falcon 1.

Interesting you say that. The engineers I talked to always told me that they preferred lower (sea level) launches because of disaster recovery (lower winds and lower potential contamination area) and because stats suggested lower launches gave more stability at the start of the flight when the rocket is typically most unstable.

I am _not_ rocket engineer though. This is simply what I remember experts telling me >10 years ago. :)

> The less great part about moving more launches there is that the options for public viewing are way worse.

Is this a concern for them? The article also says, "They chose Vandenberg to lighten the load off of Kennedy and allow West Coasters to experience an inter-planetary launch."

If they want to encourage public viewing, it seems odd that they schedule the launch for 4:05am…

Launch times are determined by the Earth's position around the Sun, and the overall transfer window is only a month long due to Mars' and Earth's relative positions. Unfortunately, they don't have much choice in the matter.

I'm not sure it is for anyone. I'm simply stating facts about the geography and public viewing spaces.

It's amazing if you work there though. There are these sketchy rusty bleachers you can go chill at that are distressingly close to the launch site. Everyone has to wear inner and outer ear protection, no kids allowed. Pretty epic, but only for contractors and airforce staff.

> Some operators claimed to be able to discriminate breeds

It's well known that experts can distinguish the African Swallow from the European Swallow simply by airspeed.

Plus, they can determine whether the bird is carrying a payload.

Guard: Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate? Arthur: Not at all! They could be carried.

How do eastward lunches work from Vandenberg?

They don’t. South (or, very rarely, west) is all you can do from there.

Aren't south launches are usually for polar orbits, how do you get from it into a Mars Transfer Orbit?

Orient your polar orbit perpendicular to the sun, burn to achieve Earth escape velocity approximately when you’re over the equator, and you’ll end up on an elliptical solar orbit in the same plane as Earth’s orbit. Burn the right amount and adjust the plane a bit and you’ll be in a Hohmann transfer to Mars.

What’s the added cost for that? I know that the Shavit launches are all retrograde despite the geography allowing for a southward launch because transfer from polar orbit to LEO isn’t cost effective for their platform.

Polar is a kind of LEO, at least if it’s low polar. The burn from LEO to Mars transfer will be about the same regardless of whether you’re coming from an equatorial orbit or a properly-aligned polar orbit, so the added delta-v cost will be the speed of Earth’s rotation at the launch point, which you don’t get to use for a polar launch.

In terms of dollars, if you’re flying on a rocket with enough excess capacity anyway (as seems to be the case here), it’s free. If you’re not, then you’ll need to cut your payload or use a bigger rocket, which would be extremely expensive.

It's open ocean straight south of Vandenberg AFB all the way to Antarctica. This geographic quirk makes it a safer location to put satellites into polar orbit - Earth-observing sats launched out of Cape Canaveral have to take a "dog-leg" course correction to avoid overflying populated areas to the south, which uses up fuel and reduces available payload.

It's also the site for regular ICBM test launches, which are aimed southwest at the Kwajalein Atoll. Missile launches aren't quite as dramatic as those bound for orbit - a Minuteman III tends to be over the horizon in under a minute.

> Missile launches aren't quite as dramatic

The video from the last test of Trident D5, launched from offshore, was unreal.

Someone happened to catch it with a good lens from a fairly dark hilltop, and then spacecraft experts annotated the video to point out what was going on.

You could see the bus rotating and ejecting warheads (or decoys) all the way through its inventory. Amazing.

I'm told by family that it's even more amazing to see the RVs re-entering overhead if you are lucky enough to be downrange during a test.

Maybe it's just my personal biases - the rumble of a Minuteman compared to a Delta or Atlas seemed rather abbreviated, and the launches themselves were often obscured in inclement weather. An SLBM popping out of the water would be rather surreal to behold, for sure.

My favorite launch memory was of a Delta II night launch at SLC-2, from an elevated position on north base. The flame seemed to light up the horizon, and when the sound hit there was a power to that thunder that really must be witnessed firsthand to fully appreciate.

Related, someone submitted a binaural recording of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch to SmarterEveryDay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImoQqNyRL8Y

Conveys your sentiment regarding how it really sounds to be there. It unfortunately cannot convey the actual feeling of being there, and the impact of the launch on the body.

The Falcon Heavy double-landing was also pretty unique -- two triple sonic booms.

I was there that day, it was pretty amazing.

Yep! I was in Jetty Park so I'd be close to the landing!

Have a link to that video?

Maybe this?

https://www.space.com/31122-trident-missile-test-photos-vide...

I wasn't able to locate it in a few minutes of searching, sorry. Youtube's search pollution problem for popular topics is really bad.

Edit: Here's an article[1] that seems to have the video embedded, with a link to the annotation.

[1] https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/video-analysis-of-trident-...

It might be here [1].

Around 5:00 minutes, the vehicle seems to shed smaller objects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc0_wZat4nI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DASO_25_Video_(Cleared_fo...

RVs re-entry on Russian testing range - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8csh1_8Sh4

Some of those missile launches look like they are flying directly over the SF Bay area.

ULA has one Delta II still unsold, which will now probably never fly. I should think they would be happy to unload it. Must be a little more to the story. My guess would be some mass growth in the mission that made them bump it up to an Atlas V.

Museum model perhaps?

TL;DR: They're launching from Vandenberg for cost-savings; they're using a larger-than-usual rocket, so they have power to spare, so they can reduce the load on Florida.

I haven't been keeping up with Mars missions lately, so this was the first time I'd heard of the InSight mission. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they are using the Mars Phoenix Lander as the base for this mission. I played an extremely small role in that mission as a co-op student back in 2005. One of my most memorable experiences, and I'm especially pleased to see it having a continual impact all of these years later.

What a time to be alive that we’re shifting launch locations because we’re launching so frequently. May the cadence continue!

What's the carbon footprint of a rocket launch? The liquid H2/O2 fuel should be neutral but what about solid or other propellant?

A Falcon 9 produces about 149 metric tons of carbon dioxide from launch. The US produced about 9.5 metric tons a second. In 16 seconds the US has produced the same amount of carbon as a Falcon 9 launch. I don't think that is terribly significant

I think you're off by an order of magnitude:

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

~5 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year ~158 tons per second

Hydrogen is mostly produced by stripping it off of hydrocarbons; it's not really a carbon neutral fuel.

It could be, but it mostly isn't.

Assuming you make your hydrogen purely by electrolyzing water, you still need a power source to do that. Unless your power source is carbon neutral, it doesn't make sense to say the hydrogen is.

Why do we care? That’s like being concerned about wood being used to build ships in the 15th century. The carbon footprint of all of the private jets that flew to the Paris Climate talks dwarfs anything put out by a rocket, yet were people interested in emissions suggesting WebEx instead?

Wood consumption for shipbuilding, inclusive of charcoal for iron and brass manufacture, was actually a consideerable concern at the time.

It was a concern because of the availability of ressources, not because of ecological concerns.

Oddly, those two are not unrelated.

Also: it was, as you note, a concern. That being my point.

I don’t think either rockets or private jets are worth fretting about when it comes to climate change, but I’ve seen a lot of people suggest that flying to compare conferences is hypocritical and everyone should just videoconference over the internet instead.

Unrelated I guess but I'm kinda tired of Yet Another Mars Lander. I realize we have a lot of experience and success in the endeavor, and Mars is a particularly amenable planet for them (minimal atmosphere, relatively close etc.). But it's just boring at this point. Granted less boring than nothing at all, but there are much more interesting destinations in the solar system; Jupiter's moons and Venus to start.

I'm aware of the huge technical leap from landing on a dead planet to an active one with a punishing atmosphere, much less dealing with Jupiter's gravity well, but the potential discoveries (and imagery) attained from a successful landing on these more challenging bodies would be worth 1000 more Mars landers.

The Soviet's managed at least one Venus landing back in the 70's, imagine what we could do today.

I do remember reading somewhere that Venus's atmosphere was so thick that a lander could soft land on the planet with just parachutes, or minimal retros, so maybe it's not all bad.

If going to Mars leaves you flat (so jaded!), there is always Europa Clipper (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/) with current launch expected around 2024 (IIRC). It was only 2 years ago that Juno (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html) arrived at Jupiter.

Jaded...absolutely. I'm still waiting for my hoverboard. NASA likes to brand a lot of their missions as "looking for evidence or possibility of extraterrestrial life", and I certainly understand that, despite the science being much more grounded and concrete. Still...if there is any hope of finding that in our solar system, Europa, and other moons of Jupiter, have far greater possibilities, relatively, than a well studied barren rock.

IMO, leave Mars to Musk and the like and start focusing NASA's resources and extensive science probe/lander experience on more mysterious targets.

Or give NASA a lot more money for (not-manned) exploration, and do both. That works too.

The idea that Mars is "well studied" doesn't bear out, anymore than the Earth is well studied. We've probably explored less than 1% of the surface of Mars.

It's hard to say where life (or past life) is most likely to be found, I think. It's only after the most recent rover (Curiosity) arrived at Mars that we discovered clear evidence of long-lived lakes and streams on ancient Mars, and chemical species compatible with life (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6169/1242777.full).

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