SpaceCast - 4/15/2017
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NASA unveils new plans for Mars
- During an Advisory Council meeting, NASA revealed plans related to a Mars mission
- There are two main phases to the design, a small lunar space station called the “Deep Space Gateway” or DSG, & a crewed vehicle called the “Deep Space Transport” or DST
- Both make use of the SLS (of course, gotta keep the contractors happy)
- Deep Space Gateway:
- Supports a crew of 4 for 42 days w/ Orion docked
- Will have a Canadarm and possibly a cupola module for views of the moon
- Would be assembled by SLS over 3 flights starting in 2025, and would rely on commercial partners for resupply
- Will have a 40kW solar-electric propulsion system that will allow it to change orbits (i.e. from an elliptical halo orbit to one allowing for moon landings)
- Deep Space Transport:
- Supports a crew of 4 for 1000 days, able to be reused for 3 round-trips
- Will take “full advantage” of the SLS’s large fairing size (up to 8.4m diameter)
- Predicted mass of 41 tons (way smaller than ITS)
- Would be launched on a single SLS flight in 2027, do a one-year test cruise in 2029, and a crewed Mars flight in 2033 (possibly w/ a Venusian gravity assist)
- Of course, plans for Mars mission have existed since the 60s and have always been axed with changes in administration (yay politics) so there’s little reason to believe this one will be any different, unless international or private-sector cooperation push it forward
New world record for fastest hex-core CPU overclock
- German overclocker Roman Hartung has broken another world record by overclocking an AMD Ryzen 5 1600x processor to 5.9 GHz
- The overclocking was done on an ASUS Crosshair VI Hero motherboard with a bus speed of 130 MHz and a multiplier of 45.5
- The processor was liquid nitrogen cooled and is expected to be able to clock even higher when BIOS updates provide better support for extreme overclocking
- This is only a CPU frequency score but all cores and threads were enabled
F9 fairing and second stage reuse?
- SpaceX plans to have the Falcon 9 fairing reusable by the end of the year
- Elon Musk is “fairly confident” that the F9 upper stage can be reused as well
- SpaceX originally planned to have the whole F9 be reusable, but technical difficulties led to abandonment of upper stage reuse plans
- Ideas on how it might be possible:
- Block 5 (the newest version of F9 and the Merlin engine) offers a significant thrust increase, leaving more delta-v in the second stage
- Larger payloads will move to Falcon Heavy, leaving lighter loads (which require less delta-v) for the F9 block 5
- It is unclear how the upper stage would reenter/land, possibly using SuperDraco thrusters on the leading end of the stage (accompanied by a heatshield)
