Minutes of October 14 Oklahoma Space Alliance Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met October 14, 2023, at the Cyber Hall and Gaming Lounge at Norman Computers in Norman, Oklahoma. Attending in person were Clifford McMurray., Mark Deaver, Kevin?, Steve Marino, Dave Sheely, and Syd Henderson. OSA President Clifford (Kip) McMurray presided over the meeting He did an Update discussing links to material covered in the meeting and this is online at https://osa.nss.org/Update2310.pdf so I’ll cover the details that aren’t covered there.
OSIRIS-REx returned more material from asteroid Bennu than expected. This was the third sample return mission to an asteroid after the two Japanese Hayabusa mission. OSIRIS-REx, under its new name OSIRIS-APEX is now off to the near-earth asteroid Apophis, which tends to come extremely close to Earth and may collide with us someday. However, although it will analyze it, it won’t return samples because it only had the one container.
The recently returned astronauts were the sixth through eighth to spend a full year in space on one flight. All the first five were aboard Mir. The record stay in space is 437 days by Valery Polyakov. [Second longest is 379 days by Sergey Avdeev. Third are the 371 days just completed by Frank Rubio, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, who are obviously in a three-way tie. Their achievement was enabled by a coolant leak in the Soyuz spacecraft that was supposed to return them. The other two cosmonauts to spend a year in space (by a few hours) are Vladimit Titov and Musa Manarov.]
The Pakistani who flew aboard Virgin Galactic was also the first Pakistani to visit the North and South Poles.
The FAA has made a list of five possible methods of disposing of upper stages. These include controlled reentry, and insertion into solar orbit.
The asteroid 16 Psyche is 140 by 133 in its long directions, making it one of the larger asteroids. It is of interest as the largest mostly metallic asteroid. [Since it is dense as well, it has about 1% of the mass of the entire asteroid belt. Still, it is puny compared with Ceres, which has 40% of the mass of the asteroid belt.] We watched a video of the launch of the Psyche spacecraft and the landing of the boosters, and a video of the deployment of the spacecraft.
We watched the launch of SLIM to the Moon and XRISM, an X-ray telescope that will stay in Earth orbit. If SLIM is successful, it will make Japan the fifth nation to make a soft landing on the Moon.
New Glenn was going to use Cygnus to launch their own space station, but now are going to use it to supply a consolidate space station with Voyage Space.
The goal of Varda Space is to launch a capsule each month, but they are not being allowed to land by the FAA.
We viewed an article on how the SLS is not affordable.
Under current funding, the Mars Sample Return mission will cost 8 – 11 billion and not launch until after 2030. Kip commented that by then Starship will be launching to Mars and it could carry a vehicle that can directly return the samples.
We watched a video of Chinese astronauts lighting a candle aboard Tiangong as part of a demonstration for children on how fire burns differently in space due to hot air not being able to rise. [If I remember, a similar demonstration was done aboard Skylab back in the 1970s.]
We watched a video of an egg drop from the edge of space. The idea is to find a way to keep the egg from breaking when it lands.
This week @ NASA: Water and hydrocarbons were found in the OSIRIS-REx samples from Bennu.
The Psyche probe is the first time Hall effect thrusters have been used in space. This is a version of the ion drive and relies on a small thrust over a long period of time.
We watched a video on “Is Starship Doomed to Repeat History?” which compared it with the Soviet Union’s N1 program. They’re similar in that they use a large number of engines (about 30 in both cases) and have a problem getting them all to light. The N1 was to launch cosmonauts to the Moon, so was basically their equivalent of the Saturn 5. It was abandoned about the time Apollo made it to the Moon. N1 had five stages, while Starship uses only two. SpaceX already uses up to 27 in its Falcon Heavy rockets, but they are configured differently than in Starship.
--Minutes by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Claire McMurray.
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