Space Voyages into space

Return burn complete. Great pic of Orion doing the moon flyby...

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Live now on NASA TV: return of Orion in 50 minutes. We are ten minutes from Service module seperation.

 
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(20 Feb 1962) USS Noa (DD-841) recovery of Friendship 7
Cape Canaveral, FL - astronaut John H. Glenn's spacecraft, Friendship 7, being brought alongside recovery ship USS Noa (DD-841) after world orbital flight, Nasa image
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Mission Control is just of the most amazing documentaries made, not only because of the video archives, but the interviews of the guys that are really moving. Especially considering that quite a few of them have now passed away since the documentary was made.

About the Orion mission, there were a few things that suprised me about the moon mission, maybe not most of you, but I am a little dissapointed about it all.

First, I was suprised that the TLI was done with 20% less speed (maybe more) than the Apollo missions. The TLI is when the ship powers its departure stage (the SIVB for the Apollo capsule, the SLS/Orion platform does not have a specific name for it). I was thinking it could have been linked to different departure altitudes.

However, the trip took 6 days instead of 3, and no picture of the Orion orbiting close to the moon was released, instead pictures of Orion very far from Earth and the moon. As a matter of fact Orion went further away from Earth than any other manned (or to be manned) space craft.

We had magnificient pictures of the Apollo capsule taken from the Lunar modules 54 years ago (here Apollo 15- Call sign Endeavour)

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The Orion was put on an elliptical orbit. and not a low lunar orbit like the Apollo CSM´s. For one good reason...It can´t achieve that orbit. It cannot because the engine on the service module of the Orion spacecraft has only one third of the power of the SPS engine that the Apollo capsule had. In fact, the engine on the service module is (just like in the SLS launcher) a remnant of the space shuttle: it is the OMS engine that was used for final orbital insertion of the shuttle as well as orbit changes.

The engine on Apollo was so powerful it could slow a huge mass (itself plus the lunar module) to lunar orbit and get out of lunar orbit. The Orion cannot even put itself in orbit. Of course one can argue that it is much cheaper to use the old engines that were dismounted from the grounded shuttles than designing a completely new engine...And anyways the power of the SLS launch system is also struggling in capacity...because it also relies on the engines of the space shuttle that just don´t have the sheer power of the Saturn V engines.

Void engines have oversized nozzles. The size of the nozzle on an Apollo CSM compared to the nozzle on the Orion´s ESM says its all.

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So without gateway, without a lunar module that arrives on its own at moon orbit to meet the Orion, the Orion missions don´t have any outcome.

Maybe someone has more info than me or can contradict me but that is how I understood it.
 
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Today NASA announced a second human landing system provider for Artemis, that will develop the transportation system to take astronauts from Gateway station to the lunar surface on the Artemis V mission.

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Blue Origin's Blue Moon Lander wins the second Human Landing System (HLS) contract to land on the Moon during Artemis V.
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.......

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Okay, we all going to die.

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