The latest episode from the TMRO.tv Space webcasts: How we will survive out in Space – Orbit 12.13
Engineer Brittany Zimmerman of Paragon Space Development Corporation joins us to talk about the different ways Space wants to kill you. We cover how Paragon is working on Life Support And Environmental Control Systems, including water purification to help keep us all alive on out journey to Mars. This one is an eye opener including a lot of stuff that will be required if us ugly giant bags of mostly water are to colonize the solar system.
** The SpotMini looks to be Boston Dynamics‘s first major commercial robot. Here is a video released this week:
It only takes 10 Spotpower (SP) to haul a truck across the Boston Dynamics parking lot (~1 degree uphill, truck in neutral). These Spot robots are coming off the production line now and will be available for a range of applications soon.
** Boston Dynamics robots for warehouse work include Handle and Pick:
Handle is a mobile manipulation robot designed for logistics. Handle autonomously performs mixed SKU pallet building and depalletizing after initialization and localizing against the pallets. The on-board vision system on Handle tracks the marked pallets for navigation and finds individual boxes for grasping and placing. When Handle places a boxes onto a pallet, it uses force control to nestle each box up against its neighbors. The boxes used in the video weigh about 5 Kg (11 lbs), but the robot is designed to handle boxes up to (15 Kg) (33 lb). This version of Handle works with pallets that are 1.2 m deep and 1.7 m tall (48 inches deep and 68 inches tall).
Using a combination of vision sensors and deep learning software, Pick works with commercial robotic arms to palletize and depalletize boxes. Pick enables logistics, retail, and manufacturing companies to achieve high rates of box moving with minimal set up or training for both multi-SKU and single-SKU pallets.
MIT’S new mini cheetah robot is the first four-legged robot to do a backflip. At only 20 pounds the limber quadruped can bend and swing its legs wide, enabling it to walk either right side up or upside down. The robot can also trot over uneven terrain about twice as fast as an average person’s walking speed.
This video shows the progression of increasingly complex gait strategies from ATRIAS through recent results with Cassie. Specifically, Cassie’s controller now includes planned footstep placements in addition to dynamic balancing, allowing access to substantially more complicated terrains.
The attempt by SpaceIL, a private non-profit organization, to land the Beresheet craft softly on the Moon last week went awry just a few minutes before it was to set down onto the surface. Initial results of an investigation into what went wrong were released today:
Here are the findings of the preliminary investigation of #Beresheet’s landing maneuver: It appears that during the landing process a command was entered that led to a chain reaction, which caused the main engine to switch off and prevented it from being reactivated.
The teams of #SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) will continue to investigate what occurred during the mission. In the coming weeks, the final results of the investigation will be released.
The Arch Lunar Library contains 100GB, or 30 million pages of text and pictures, literally embedded in 25 nickel disks in the tiniest type you can possibly imagine. You don’t need anything more specialized than a microscope to read it, and the etchings should survive for billions of years.
This library was supposed to be delivered to the surface of the moon — specifically, the Sea of Serenity — by Israel’s Beresheet Mission last week. The bad news: After a glitch that turned its engine off and on again at the worst possible moment, the Beresheet lander smashed into the moon at 300 miles per hour.
The good news: Those disks were designed to be indestructible. And the Arch Foundation is all but certain its payload survived the crash.
“We have either installed the first library on the moon,” says Arch Mission co-founder Nova Spivack, “or we have installed the first archaeological ruins of early human attempts to build a library on the moon.”
A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket carrying a Cygnus resupply spacecraft is seen during sunrise on Pad-0A, Tuesday, April 16, 2019 at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Northrop Grumman’s 11th contracted cargo resupply mission with NASA to the International Space Station will deliver about 7,600 pounds of science and research, crew supplies and vehicle hardware to the orbital laboratory and its crew. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
will deliver about 7,600 pounds of science, supplies and hardware to the orbital residents. Flight Engineer Anne McClain, with astronaut David Saint-Jacques backing her up, will command the Canadarm2 robotic arm to reach out and capture Cygnus Friday about 5:30 a.m. [EDT].
… a good half of these startups (7 out of 11) are also developing liquid propulsion. This is partly due to the intrinsic performance, but also the possibility to be reusable (although solid systems can sometimes also be refurbished, such as the Space Shuttle SRBs). Reusability actually seems to be one of the dominant reasons, as nearly all liquid propulsion rockets are being developed with a reusable design, often based on the return of the first stage through retropropulsive landing. It is striking to see the extent of the consensus around SpaceX’s business model within the Chinese private sector, while heated debates in Europe and Russia still take place on its sustainability.
** DARPA’s Launch Challenge competition aims to support companies developing rockets that can “demonstrate flexible and responsive launch capabilities in days, not years” –
“Over the weekend, due to rough sea conditions, SpaceX’s recovery team was unable to secure the center core booster for its return trip to Port Canaveral,” said James Gleeson, a SpaceX spokesperson. “As conditions worsened with eight to ten foot swells, the booster began to shift and ultimately was unable to remain upright.
“While we had hoped to bring the booster back intact, the safety of our team always takes precedence,” Gleeson said in a statement. “We do not expect future missions to be impacted.”
Elon Musk later tweeted that the “Engines seem ok, pending inspection”. There are reports that the rocket is lying horizontal on the platform so we’ll see the level damage when the platform returns to Port Canaveral. Though the vehicle is unlikely to fly again, having the core will be useful to SpaceX to examine to better understand the wear and tear that it endured during the flight. Also, perhaps some components like the engines can be reused.
**** FH fairings returned to Port Canaveral. As mentioned in the previous roundup, Elon Musk says the fairings will be used for a Falcon 9 launch of the company’s Starlink Internet satellites:
**** Cargo Dragon flight to the ISS set to launch on April 26th from Cape Canaveral at 5:55 am EDT (0955 GMT). This will be the 17th operational Dragon mission to the ISS.
**** A giant space telescope a good fit for the Starship. Most all of the mainstream space industry and government agencies are going out of their way to pretend the Super Heavy Booster/Starship project doesn’t exist. So while this is just a graphic done for fun, it’s nevertheless a bit of a surprise that even a lower level group at NASA would dare to show the proposed LUVOIR telescope in a Starship:
1. Monday, April 15, 2019; 2-3:30 pm PDT (4-5:30 pm CDT, 5-6:30 pm EDT): No show for today. Monday is for special and timely programs only.
2. Tuesday, April 16, 2019; 7-8:30 pm PDT (9-10:30 pm CDT, 10-11:30 pm EDT): We welcome back Dr. Greg Autry for space economics, budgets, ISDC 2019, and US China space policy.
3. Wednesday, April 17 2019; Hotel Mars. See Upcoming Show Menu and the website newsletter for details. Hotel Mars is pre-recorded by John Batchelor. It is archived on The Space Show site after John posts it on his website.
4. Friday, April 19, 2019; 9:30-11 am PDT; 11:30 am – 1 pm CDT, 12:30-2 pm EDT. No show today as am at the Space Access Conference.
5. Sunday, April 21, 2019; 12-1:30 pm PDT, (3-4:30 pm EDT, 2-3:30 pm CDT): No show today due to Easter and the Space Access Conference.
Some recent shows:
** Tue, 04/09/2019 – Dr. Mike Gruntman gave a “historical analysis of Tyuratam Missile Range to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, aerospace education, returning to the Moon, inspiration, Elon Musk, SpaceX, Jeff Bezos and much more”.
