Orion flight test rescheduled for tomorrow
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
UPDATE ( 7:14 ) - Ground wind violation, Launch delayed.
UPDATE ( 7:46 ) - New T-ZERO time 7:55
UPDATE ( 7:53 ) - Launch on hold. Another wind violation.
UPDATE ( 8:15 ) - New T-ZERO time 8:26
UPDATE ( 8:23 ) - Launch on hold again.
UPDATE ( 8:28 ) - Left and center booster anomalies ( Valves sensors, showing not closed ). Quote from official NASA blog : "A fill and drain valve on the rocket did not function correctly. Standing by as rocket and spacecraft are safed."
Sounds like they're disabling a bunch of automated safeguards (like the wind speed monitoring) to get this thing up.
He'd make an excellent NASA caster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd83B85CUI8&list=UUxzC4EngIs...
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edit - But it is what Jack Parsons would have wanted. Well, nothing but a goat skull, maybe.
Dead silence. Nothing. Not a word of commentary. To a kid, that conveys boring. I could hear some white noise and after a while some faint public address system speech way off in the background. So disappointing.
NASA, do you still have an educational component to your mission? It would be really great if these big launches were explained a bit on the live video feed. If there's nothing going on to explain, there should be a ton of material waiting from NASA history to fill the air time.
Its not secret. Its not hidden. Its not classified. Its in the open. Ever seen our astronauts launch in a Soyuz from the Russian launch facility? No, because they don't stream it! Its certainly technically possible, its most likely administratively denied.
Being open requires more than a livestream. For instance I doubt the accelerometer data from the Orion itself is available, but its something. Fund public science. Make results public.
EDIT: Seems they've swapped their stream for the ustream one, guess they can.
For a long time the LCS broadcasts were always very stuttery on twitch, so much so that streams were also set up on Youtube and Azubu to help.
About 6months - 1yr ago twitch suddenly got a lot better in this regard but I certainly wouldn't expect NASA to do a better job than a site dedicated to streaming. (The 12yr old playing the game is a red herring, they're just streaming to twitch.)
Twitch previously were Justin.tv but switched to gaming as clearly it was a fast growing niche, otherwise their old platform would have been suitable for factual content like this.
That was basically what I was getting at though - if the 12 year old can stream off their home broadband to twitch reliably for free, why is NASA bothering with their own, worse streaming solution?
But to their credit NASA responded very quickly, took their own streaming off and embedded ustream instead, so I guess I don't really have anything to whinge about.
I have ran into streaming issues in the past, but I don't think it's a site specific thing as much as it was Chromecasts lack of support for Silverlight. To watch Amazon Prime videos for instance, you need to go to some obscure setting and force Amazon to serve up Flash videos.
Does NASATV normally use Silverlight? That might be the explanation.. Although the last comment on this Reddit post indicates it's potentially something NASA could fix;
http://www.reddit.com/r/Chromecast/comments/28cz98/will_chro...
that is a very strong conclusion to come to from two coincidental data points and no concrete evidence...
1. There is (was?) a boat in the exclusion zone
2. The second stage propellant needs more conditioning
The hold was going to end in 2 minutes, they're going to cycle the clock to at least T-9mins when they've decided exactly when T0 is.
EDIT: as of 12:07 GMT we're at T-10mins.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/aircraft/Ikhana/index....
Update 2: at 7.53am EST, a new launch time being established due to wind anomalies.
https://www.google.de/maps/place/Cape+Canaveral+Air+Force+St...
I'm really excited for this! Let's hope the wind dies down.
Oxygen can be kept in a liquid state by either keeping the temperature extremely low or keeping it under high pressure. Since reinforcing the tanks to handle incredibly high pressures would require too much weight, the tanks are instead constantly being topped up with cryogenic fuel until the moment of launch.
As for the venting: the fuel starts heating up and evaporating as soon as it's pumped into the tanks causing the pressure within the tanks to rise. Since the tanks aren't rated for high pressure, they have to vent the excess oxygen to keep within safety margins.
Of course, it wouldn't be the "long-term deep space habitat" module - that would be a specialized module.
... propulsion is the interesting part of interplanetary travel. What is the propulsion tech for this?
Ultimately, Orion's supposed to be launched on NASA's new Space Launch System [1], but it's not ready yet. I believe the first scheduled test flight for Orion and SLS together is supposed to be sometime in 2017.