Skip to main content

NASA Astronauts are Trying Out the Starship Lunar Elevator

As NASA continues to ramp up efforts for its Artemis program, which has the goal of landing the first woman and person of color on the lunar surface, two NASA astronauts recently conducted training with a replica of SpaceX’s Starship human landing system (HLS), albeit on a much smaller scale. Given that Starship is 50 meters (160 feet) tall, and the crew quarters are located near the top of Starship, the HLS will need an elevator with a basket to transport crew and supplies from the crew quarters down to the surface. The purpose of this training is to familiarize astronauts with all aspects of this system, including elevator and gate controls and latches, along with how the astronauts perform these tasks in their bulky astronaut suits, which both astronauts wore during the training. 

The two NASA astronauts who participated in the recent training are Nicole Mann and Doug “Wheels” Wheelock. NASA Astronaut Mann is a Colonel in the United States Marine Corps who was selected as a NASA astronaut in the 2013 NASA Group 21. Her spaceflight experience includes 157 days in space as part of Expedition 68 onboard the International Space Station (ISS) and being launched aboard the SpaceX Crew-5 mission. NASA Astronaut Wheelock is a Colonel in the United States Army who was selected as a NASA astronaut in the 1998 NASA Group. His spaceflight experience includes 178 days in space as part of STS-120 and later as part of Expedition 24/25 on the ISS and being launched aboard the Soyuz TMA-19.

As noted, Starship is 50 meters (160 feet) tall and 9 meters (30 feet) in diameter and capable of landing 100 tons (99,790 kilograms/220,000 pounds) on the lunar surface, which is in stark contrast to the Apollo lunar module that landed 12 men on the lunar surface during the Apollo program, which was only 5.5 meters (17.9 feet) tall and approximately 4.3 meters (14 feet) in diameter and a mass of 15,103 kilograms (33,296 pounds) with fuel.

Ironically, the original plan for landing astronauts on the Moon during the Apollo program was known as direct ascent that involved a single, large vehicle with a payload of 74,000 kilograms (163,000 pounds) landing on the lunar surface. While NASA was in favor of using the direct ascent method in early 1961 since spacecraft rendezvous and docking had not been performed in Earth orbit yet, this was later scrapped in favor of the lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) mission mode that was advocated by NASA aerospace engineer, John Houbolt, who estimated this would significantly reduce the weight involved in such a landing approach. LOR not only successfully landed six Apollo missions on the Moon, but it was also responsible for saving the Apollo 13 crew when one of their oxygen tanks ruptured and the crew was able to use the lunar module as a lifeboat as they flew around the Moon and came back to Earth.

As NASA astronauts train for using the Starship HLS elevator someday, Starship has already conducted two flight tests—Ship 24 in April 2023 and Ship 25 in November 2023, respectively. While both flights ended in failure, Ship 25 officially passed the Karman Line, which is the traditional boundary of outer space. A third Starship test flight is currently scheduled to occur sometime in the first quarter of 2024, which also comes as the crewed Artemis II mission is gearing up for their 10-day mission orbiting the Moon in November 2024 and Artemis III currently scheduled to land astronauts near the lunar south pole sometime in 2025.

How will Starship HLS help future Artemis astronauts on the lunar surface in the next few years? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

The post NASA Astronauts are Trying Out the Starship Lunar Elevator appeared first on Universe Today.



from Universe Today https://ift.tt/PTNurbq
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Researchers Match Up 12 Meteorites with the Near-Earth Asteroids They Came From

Every day meteoroids blast through our planet’s atmosphere to hit the ground as meteorites. A team of researchers in Italy traced twelve of them to progenitor asteroids that orbit in near-Earth space. Scientists treasure meteorites because they reveal information about their parent bodies. In an arXiv paper, two Italian researchers—Albino Carbognani and Marco Fenucci—analyze the characteristics of the parent bodies of 20 selected meteorites. They were able to track all but eight back to their parent asteroids. Based on their work, the pair says at least a quarter of meteorites come from collisions that happened in near-Earth space and not in the Main Belt. Meteorites from Near-Earth Asteroids: How They Got Here Many meteorites are chondritic, similar to asteroids in the Main Belt (or came from it). In their paper, the authors point out that progenitor meteoroids (including many that fall to Earth and become meteorites) formed millions of years ago following collisions between main-...
Post a Comment
Read more

JWST Takes a Detailed Look at Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede

Nature doesn’t conform to our ideas of neatly-contained categories. Many things in nature blur the lines we try to draw around them. That’s true of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System. The JWST took a closer look at Ganymede, the moon that’s kind of like a planet, to understand its surface better. Ganymede is basically a planet, except it doesn’t orbit the Sun. If it did orbit the Sun instead of Jupiter, it would be indistinguishable from a planet. It has a differentiated internal structure with a molten core that produces a magnetic field. It has a silicon mantle much like Earth’s, and has a complex icy crust with a deep ocean submerged beneath it. It has an atmosphere, though it’s thin. It’s also larger than Mercury, and almost as large as Mars. According to the authors of a new study, it’s an archetype of a water world. But even with all this knowledge of the huge moon, there are details yet to be revealed. This is especially true of its complex surface...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Ultraviolet Habitable Zone Sets a Time Limit on the Formation of Life

The field of extrasolar planet studies has grown exponentially in the past twenty years. Thanks to missions like Kepler, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and other dedicated observatories, astronomers have confirmed 5,690 exoplanets in 4,243 star systems . With so many planets and systems available for study, scientists have been forced to reconsider many previously-held notions about planet formation and evolution and what conditions are necessary for life. In the latter case, scientists have been rethinking the concept of the Circumsolar Habitable Zone (CHZ). By definition, a CHZ is the region around a star where an orbiting planet would be warm enough to maintain liquid water on its surface. As stars evolve with time, their radiance and heat will increase or decrease depending on their mass , altering the boundaries of the CHZ. In a recent study , a team of astronomers from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) considered how the evolution of star...
Post a Comment
Read more