** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

Man of Honour
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Designed to protect from the 2200°C heat produced when the Orion space capsule is re-entering Earth's atmosphere. The heat shield is covered with a material called Avcoat and the coating burns away as it heats up:

 

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Caporegime
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Oh wow, that's pretty clever. Cosimo I might not contribute much to this thread but I find it damn interesting so thanks for your posts :)
 

JRS

JRS

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What are the 'moon landing was a hoax' people saying about Rosetta?

Presumably....

2ekrbqb.jpg
 
Man of Honour
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Hot off the press, taken by Rosetta:

teNjYkW.jpg

Credits: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

This mosaic comprises four individual NAVCAM images taken from 42.0 km from the centre of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 17 November 2014. The image resolution is 3.6 m/pixel and thus each original 1024 x 1024 pixel frame measured 3.7 km across. The mosaic has been slightly rotated and cropped, and measures roughly 5.0 x 4.1 km.

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/20/cometwatch-17-november/
 
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Some exciting stuff in TW@N. I hope they get funding for asteroid redirect mission. 3d printer in solace is just awesome, surprised they went plastic rather than metal sintering, I wonder what the reason was, unless it literally zero g meaning metal would float everywhere. Although surly use dome sort of temporary binder till the laser works and a vacuum to regather anything that hasn't stuck.
And that composite robot looks awesome.
 
Man of Honour
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Keeping my eye on it.
Have two big issues with it.
The extremely long time table(which just seems to miss the boat, between china doing a lunar sample return mission in the coming years and spaceX want to go to mars in a decade, it just seems underwhelming for the time scale purposed) and the massive cost.
One news article said they will need another 3bn, now the news article might get that wrong. I can't see anything on actual costs unless I'm being blind.

Why can't a company send a 3d base printer, green house and robotic Gardner to the moon, now that would be a mission, actually testing ideas that have been around for ages. Not that lunar one isn't a worthy mission, it just seems like they should be done within 5 years not 10.
 
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Associate
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The kickstarter phase is about setting up project planning from what I can see, there is some information on their website about further funding;

"We’ve undertaken market research in the UK and the USA which demonstrated a strong interest in the mission and the digital memory boxes. Based on the findings, we are able to predict around 15% of the global population would be able to afford the product. And about 1% of that group will purchase a digital memory box. This delivers a mid-point projected revenue of £3billion (around $4.7 billion)."

So I suppose it's a kickstarter to set up a private space program, and more of those can only be a good thing in the long run. I've certainly wasted money on more pointless endeavours.
 
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