So the first stage engines shut off … the first stage separates and then the Merlin Vacuum engine starts. It got a little rougher. The space agency is also working with Boeing on the Starliner crew capsule, which is now expected to launch with astronauts for the first time in early on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. The G-force dropped off instantaneously as the Merlin Vacuum engine shut down, according to Hurley. The Merlin Vacuum engine produces around , pounds of thrust at peak performance, while the three shuttle main engines combined to generate more than 1.
But the space shuttle was much larger than the Crew Dragon spacecraft and the Falcon 9 upper stage, placing the astronauts farther away from the engines.
Ground teams played the audio for Hurley and Behnken, giving the astronauts a preview of what they would experience during launch, re-entry and splashdown in the ocean.
The space shuttle was fueled when the astronauts arrived at the launch pad. Doug and I went through the fueling operation on-board Dragon, which was different for us. So hearing the venting and the valve sounds and the little vibrations associated with that operation was a new experience for us.
SpaceX designed the Crew Dragon will to be fully autonomous, without requiring manual inputs from the astronauts on-board. But Dragon crews will have the ability to manually dock with the space station if necessary, and there are buttons to command a launch abort, initiate a deorbit and re-entry, and deploy parachutes if needed. According to Russia's Federal Medical Biology Agency , which has been taking care of Hague and Ovchinin since the landing, recovery teams transported the crewmembers back to Baikonur after the landing, and they are expected to return to the cosmonaut training center in Moscow tomorrow Oct.
Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering space. Follow us on Twitter Spacedotcom and on Facebook. Original article on Space. Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community space. Hanneke Weitering is an editor at Space. Once at a steady cruising speed of about 16,mph 26,kph in orbit, astronauts no more feel their speed than do passengers on a commercial airplane.
The Orion spaceship has to have shielding a foot thick in places because of the danger of minimeteorids Credit: Nasa. To protect the vessel and its crew, Orion has a protective outer layer varying in places from 18 to 30cm thick, plus other shielding and clever equipment placement. To be sure, micrometeoroids are not the only hindrance to future space missions where higher human travel speeds would likely come into play. Shortening travel times, though, would mitigate these issues, making a go-faster approach very desirable.
This need for speed will pose fresh obstacles. But such systems have severe speed limitations because of the low amounts of energy they release per unit of fuel. So, in order to achieve significantly faster travel speeds for humans bound for Mars and beyond, scientists recognise that new approaches will be required. In brief, they are the energy-releasing phenomena of fission, fusion and antimatter annihilation.
The first method is the splitting of atoms, as is done in commercial nuclear reactors. The far-and-away best case for powering fast spacecraft is antimatter, the doppelganger to regular matter.
When the two matters make contact, they obliterate each other as pure energy. Technologies to generate and store admittedly minuscule quantities of antimatter exist today.
Yet production of antimatter in useful amounts would need dedicated, next-generation facilities, and engineering challenges galore would loom for the intended spacecraft. But Davis says plenty of good ideas are on the drawing board. With antimatter-fuelled engines, spacecraft could accelerate over periods of months or years to very high percentages of the speed of light, keeping Gs to a tolerable level for occupants.
These fantastic new speeds, however, would usher in fresh dangers for the human body. He worked with his late father, William Edelstein, a professor of radiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, on a paper exploring the effects of cosmic hydrogen atoms on ultrafast spaceflight.
The hydrogen would shatter into subatomic particles that would pass into the ship, irradiating both crew and equipment. He and his father roughly estimated that barring some sort of conjectural magnetic shielding to divert the lethal hydrogen rain, star ships could go no faster than about half of light speed without killing their human occupants.
Assuming we do learn to swim, so to speak, might we also someday learn how to surf spacetime, to extend the analogy, and travel at faster-than-light superluminal speeds? The Apollo 10 astronauts are probably the fastest humans in history - but for how long?
Called an Alcubierre drive, it involves compressing the normal spacetime described by Einsteinian physics in front of a star ship, while expanding it behind. The ship, however, remains at rest within its pocket of normal spacetime, avoiding any violation of the universal light-speed limit.
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