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Tory has his Engines!

#1
Yazata Offline
A great meme has to be retired I guess. (I liked the one where Jeff Bezos is riding his space capsule in outer space, when comes 'knock,knock,knock' the window from outside, and there's Tory "Jeff, where are my engines??")

Well, Tory finally has his engines and he appears to be very pleased with them. Their arrival means that ULA's new Vulcan rocket can proceed.

https://twitter.com/torybruno/status/159...2314764288

(ULA photo showing the first Vulcan with its shiny new BE-4's fitted.)


[Image: FhTUXDiUcAADrqf?format=jpg&name=medium]
[Image: FhTUXDiUcAADrqf?format=jpg&name=medium]

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#2
Yazata Offline
Tory announced today that Vulcan's first flight is tentatively for May 4. Vulcan's first flight will be carrying Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander, so they are pretty confident that it will work first time out, like SLS.

The first flight was originally planned for March, but was pushed back due to a minor problem with Blue Origin's BE-4 engines. Then they wanted to launch in April, but Astrobotic's trajectory requirements couldn't be met until early May.

https://twitter.com/StephenClark1/status...2225963012
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#3
Yazata Offline
Looks like Vulcan isn't going to be flying on May 4.

It seems that Vulcan's Centaur second stage was undergoing a test at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville AL, when it underwent what space professionals call an "anomaly" (and normal people call an "explosion").

As is his custom, Tory has been very open about it. In the tweet below he provides video of the 'anomaly' and explains what went wrong:

The hydrogen-fueled stage appears to experienced a large hydrogen leak that filled the test cell with H2 gas, which then ignited very energetically and proceeded to blow up part of the test cell and crushed Centaur's top dome.

So I expect that Vulcan's first flight will be delayed while they go through an accident investigation.

I should probably point out that this 'anomaly' didn't have anything to do with the first stage's BE4 engines.

(This explains why they were so diligent tracking down hydrogen leaks on SLS!)

https://twitter.com/torybruno/status/164...9193625600
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#4
Yazata Offline
Vulcan finally flew last night! And it performed perfectly on its very first flight! First stage was perfect, stage separation happened as planned, and the Centaur upper stage lit to place the payload in orbit, then relit to push it into a very high looping translunar injection orbit around the Moon. (This is a very powerful rocket in the Falcon Heavy class.) Everything went as planned and orbital parameters were on the money.

Tory did say that there was one serious anomaly: the coffee maker in the launch control center broke down! But a ULA rocket engineer managed to get it working again and all was good!

What's more, the Blue Origin BE-4 engines worked perfectly!

Congratulations all around!! Well deserved.

Unfortunately, news was not nearly as good for Astrobotics' Peregrine lunar lander. After successful separation from the Vulcan Centaur, it seems to have sprung a propellant leak and lost the fuel it needed to settle into lunar orbit and then conduct its landing.


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/_eCvxPieA84

Astrobotic updates:


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[Image: GDVqz4OWEAAQ6Sv?format=png&name=medium]




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[Image: GDXdLKcXIAAPGFR?format=png&name=900x900]

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#5
Yazata Offline
Peregrine got out as far as the Moon, but unfortunately the Moon wasn't there when Peregine got there. The plan had been to do several big looping orbits of the Earth timed so that the last of them would deliver Peregrine to lunar distance right when the Moon went by. But Peregrine's fuel leak cut its lifespan short. So its controllers made a last adjustment to its orbit so that it would burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Which it just did northeast of Australia.


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[Image: GEEjEJGWwAAcD3z?format=jpg&name=small]

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