Operations Summary – Week of 4/2/18

Ascension Initial Flight Plans

Last month we debuted the final plans for the Ascension Mk1 lifter but did not really explain what we plan to do with it other than say it would initially be launching with a test weight. Since then Flight Director Lanalye and her team of controllers have been working with the Ascension project managers to lock in our initial flight plans. For this first series of flight we will be assembling as many as 5 Ascension Mk1s, though whether all of them will be used for testing or not will be dependent upon how the rocket performs. The first launch will carry a 1t test weight that will be integrated with comms, electrical power, a flight computer and data recording instruments. Radial parachutes will be attached to the upper sides of the fuel tank to attempt to recover the entire rocket after the flight.

We’ve said multiple times before that these initial flights will not put the rocket into orbit, but that’s not technically true – it probably would have been better for us to say we will not be putting the rocket into a stable orbit. We do in fact hope to achieve orbit on the first launch, but the flight computer will cut off the engine when the perikee exceeds 60km, placing the rocket in a decaying orbit. This will be done for three reasons, the most important being the fact that our lifter engine, for the sake of simplicity, cannot be re-lit, so if we achieved a stable orbit we would be unable to bring it back down. A second and related reason is even if we could re-light the engine the rocket has no means of re-orienting to face backwards for a de-orbit burn. The third and final reason is we plan to use the orbital decay to further study aerobraking through Kerbin’s atmosphere.

Depending on how the test flights go, we may also be able to integrate some cold gas Reaction Thruster Control into the test weight as well as increase its mass to check out different ascent profiles. Ultimately things will culminate with the launch of Kerbin I, which will be the first payload to be placed into a stable orbit. We’ll have more details on Kerbin I over the next two months.

KSC Shutdown Update

Frustratingly no word was heard out of the Assembly regarding our amendments submitted late last week. It seems the slow crawl of legislature has managed to affect us, although we thought we had assurances that things would be reviewed sometime this week. Operations Director Drew Kerman has remained in Sheltered Rock to keep close tabs on the proceedings but has been unable to get any definitive answer from anyone as to what happened. Right now we can only sit back and hope that next week brings better news.

Alaba Remains on Track, New Predictions Made

This past weekend Alaba encountered Mun’s SOI on the day that was predicted back at the end of 2017 as well as to the minute that was predicted back at the end of February. This is great news to astronomers, who have had trouble in the past calculating where our various moonlets (not just Alaba) would wander over the course of weeks and months, let alone years. After spending two days observing its new orbit and calculating the next SOI encounter everyone was pleased to see it was the same day predicted back at the end of 2017, July 24th. This time around the SOI encounter was timed down to the second, coming at 19:51:08 UTC. If this prediction turns out to remain accurate then astronomers will attempt (as they tried before) to propagate Alaba’s orbit years into the future to see if it will be crashing into Mun, into Kerbin, or being ejected back out of the system.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,779 asteroids and 9 updated with new observation data.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman