You could pay 10K for a fighter jet pilot to take you up to the stratosphere, where you can see the curvature of the Earth and the darkness of space. It's probably the closest us normal folks can get to space for now.
I think its because its a perspective ill never gain, to actually see the vastness of space and earth from that view I feel would fundamentally changes your views on things. I could be wrong but I don't see how you come back from space and not be changed in some way.
I hear you on this. I often think that when watching space documentaries. I heard an astronaut talking about how much it changes your perspective on life. Not so much the looking down but when you are in space you really comprehend the vast nothingness that is all around us. So much of our view is earth, up there it’s dwarfed by the nothingness. We’re a fragile existence to be sure.
Think of it this way, humans have been around for tens of thousands of years, and most of them probably wondered what it was like from a bird’s perspective. It wasn’t until about 100 years ago that people started to actually experience it.
I’ve often thought if you could get the world leaders in a shuttle to see the their world together from space, could it help them come together to save it rather than destroy each other.
I mean they are just looking at it through a screen, but instead of a screen it's it's a window but they're still looking through something to see it, you're just looking at a representation that originated as photons hitting a sensor, which converted that to digital data, which then got shot through space, got decrypted through a tiny computer in your pocket and represented onto your screen as red blue and green pixels, and I think that's almost cooler in some ways
Obviously seeing it from space would be cool too, but you would have to eat shitty food the whole time and it's probably not super comfortable and you can't really sit anywhere and you would just be breathing in people's recycled farts the whole time and honestly it's probably a lot more enjoyable to see it from the comfort of your own toilet at home
Why is this the first time we’re orbiting over the poles? We (USA) fly over the North Pole all the time on commercial airline flights. What’s the big deal when in orbit?
PLEASE NOTE: I understand there are a few fundamental differences between commercial airline flight and low earth orbit.
We have satellites that orbit the poles, this is just the first time humans have. There just isn't a lot of reason for humans specifically, and it's less cost-efficient to do so.
It takes a lot more energy to put something into polar orbit compared to equatorial orbit due to the spin of the earth. The further you move from the equator, your ground speed decreases, which contributes to the launch velocity.
So unless there's a particular scientific or operational requirement for orbiting the poles, launches generally gravitate (no pun intended) around an equatorial orbit.
Couldn't you just "turn" either left or right, relative to the forward direction of a spacecraft already in orbit, eventually you'd hit an orbit going 90° of the equator, right? Maybe I'm wrong though.
Why haven't we done this before now? Is it just because it's kinda useless?
There's no "turning" in space. You have to apply opposite force to counter your current velocity and direction. All the fuel expended during launch is what is required to get you to orbital speed.
It would take less fuel to change once you're in space, largely due to the lack of atmospheric resistance, but still requires a pretty big burn to get from effective 0 polar velocity to polar orbital velocity, while performing a reverse burn to get from equatorial orbital velocity to 0 equatorial velocity.
If you don't stop your equatorial velocity, you'd just fly off into space if you're increasing your polar velocity, but you also have to change the velocities simultaneously, because if you completely stop equatorial first then you'll deorbit and fall to earth.
It would take about 6% more energy to launch equatorially and then change to polar, than it would to just launch straight into polar orbit. Not huge, but also why waste it if you don't need to.
Radiation is a little bit stranger over the poles, so it's more hazardous for humans to fly in a polar orbit. May as well use scientific instruments for that.
This human orbit will last 5 days, and they are observing the STEVE phenomenon (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), which is kind of like an aurora. I still don't know why they chose humans for this over other instruments, but hey.. I'm not writing the checks.
I suppose another consideration is recovery. If they're in polar orbit and they have an unexpected de-orbit, or an emergency requiring deorbiting, you pose a higher risk of a return landing you at the poles, making recovery harder, rather than the equator which should generally mean a nice warm ocean landing.
It would take about 6% more energy to launch equatorially and then change to polar, than it would to just launch straight into polar orbit. Not huge, but also why waste it if you don't need to.
Not sure if you mixed up something there but that 6% sounds plausible as the increased energy it takes to launch directly to an low Earth polar orbit vs launching directly into equatorial orbit. Large plane change maneuvers in low orbit are much more expensive than that, and a 90 degree plane change is the worst case.
There's no "turning" in space. You have to apply opposite force to counter your current velocity and direction. All the fuel expended during launch is what is required to get you to orbital speed.
This is correct. So think of the required orbital velocities as vectors on a coordinate plane. In a circular equatorial orbit you have your orbital velocity, all in the x component. In a polar orbit, you have the same velocity v, but all in the y component. To change from one to the other, you need to entirely cancel out the x component of your velocity (basically undoing all the work done during launch) and add an velocity equal to that amount in the y axis. The theoretical minimal change in velocity needed to do this is sqrt(2) times or ~1.4x the orbital speed (diagonal on an isosceles right triangle). Which is more than you needed to get to orbit in the first place, more energy than you'd need to escape Earth's orbit entirely.
I'm ceratinly relying on what I'm reading more than doing the math myself, but I'd imagine there's a ton more fuel used getting the launch vehicles into orbit with boosters/stages whatever, and overcoming atmospheric drag, than it would take to accelerate / decelerate a small orbital vehicle once it's up there. I'm sure there's a lot of variables based on the size of the vehicle and the altitude or orbit that would change the figures significantly. I'd be curious to see the actual figures of an example.
The vast majority of energy used in getting to orbit is actually about reaching orbital speed, not so much about overcoming atmospheric drag, which is not really relevant past the very early stages of launch. For a concrete example, orbital speed at a 400 km circular Earth orbit (ISS height) is about 7.7 km/s. Rockets in practice use about 9.6km/s to get there. ~20% loss. And most of those losses are gravity drag (energy used to keep yourself from falling down before established in orbit). This is not really comparable to the energy it would take to do a 90 degree plane change in low orbit. It can get more complicated when talking about higher or highly elliptical orbits, but in the context of LEO, every mission will try to launch as directly into the needed orbital inclination as they can and minimize the on-orbit plane changes needed.
You might be misunderstanding why the lower stages of rockets are so big, which is really due to the way the rocket equation makes mass scale exponentially for a linear increase in delta V. If you want to add range, you need to add fuel, + more fuel to carry the weight of that fuel, etc.
It would take about 6% more energy to launch equatorially and then change to polar, than it would to just launch straight into polar orbit. Not huge, but also why waste it if you don't need to.
Everything else you said is right, but this figure is way off (or I'm just misunderstanding). Are you comparing launching into a 0º inclination orbit from the equator and then doing the inclination change in orbit, versus launching North right away? In that case you're looking at like 16 Km/s for the inclination change vs about 0.5 Km/s on ascent if you launch towards the North right away.
Is that what you were talking about or am I way off?
An inclination change like this is nearly as expensive as getting off the ground in terms of dV. You can't just point in the right direction for a polar orbit, you also have to make sure that your orbit remains circular. Doing an inclination change without adjusting for this will make your orbit eccentric enough to drop out of orbit.
You know how a car becomes harder to turn the faster it’s going? Now imagine the car is going at 17500mph and you want to do a 90 degree turn.
(Not exactly how it works but you get my point)
Now, there are some satellites that do need to make such a big “turn”. They do it by going super far away from Earth so that they can do the “turn” while flying super slow. Sometimes, it’s more efficient to fly all the way to the moon than to do the “turn” at low altitudes.
Good question! Getting into a polar orbit is a bit challenging because you need to launch directly north or south, which isn't easily done from Florida since it'd require the rocket to fly over populated areas (which is something we don't do). Historically, the only US launch site for polar orbits was Vandenberg in California. Space Shuttle was originally scheduled to launch a polar mission from there, but after the Challenger disaster, all launches from that site were canceled. SpaceX is able to launch polar from Florida by performing a dogleg maneuver. Instead of launching directly south, the rocket first flies east and then shifts its trajectory south to avoid flying over land, allowing it to reach a polar orbit while staying over the ocean.
Think about launching a rocket from the equator. The earth is already spinning eastwards, so when a rocket launches it essentially gets "thrown" east as well.
If you were to launch the rocket directly upwards, the trajectory path would arc eastwards. This make it much easier to orbit the earth in the direction of rotation, as the earth is doing some of the work for you. Orbiting in any other direction is a lot more effort, and burns a surprising amount more of fuel.
Because it's highly dangerous to do so. All of that energy from the sun pours through our poles. These guys got blasted. It'll be interesting to see how their health is in the coming years.
A couple plane flights between Australia and South America do, but it's not done much because it's risky if there's an accident. Ocean crashes can be survivable if the pilot has enough control, and there are inflatable rafts to stay in until rescue arrives. But a crash in Antarctica would result in a rough landing and most people freezing.
There are a lot more airports with decent runways that can accommodate commercial jets within the Arctic circle than within the Antarctic circle, so you can relatively safely divert to one of them after mechanical difficulties.
Wait I saw this in a movie documentsry once! Apparently his workshop is below the ice. That same documentary also explained how Santa had to fight off a toy clone of himself.
Yes. Not exclusively a tourist flight as they're doing some interesting research on auroras and other similar phenomena up there, but Chun Wang, the mission commander, is paying for it himself.
Wait, couldn't we (as aliens), in theory, harness the centrifugal force at the center of the poles/spinning from outside of earth? That movement is centralized at the pole, it would make.capturing the kinetic energy of a planets movement a lot easier, one might think
Depends on your idea of "cold". Temperature is a measure of energy. The surface of the poles have atmospheric pressures of air, all of which are relatively 'cold', i.e. less energetic. Space is largely a vacuum, there are far fewer particles to even measure. Those that exist are actually decently energetic, but there's mostly nothing there. If you consider heat transfer, there is no conduction or convection in space, because those heat transfer processes require particles to interact and there isn't enough particles in the first place. You feel cold at the poles because the air touches your skin, takes energy from your surface and then blows away, creating a negative heat flux. The only way to lose heat in space is radiating it away.
So if you were in shorts and a t shirt in space instantly would it feel cold? There's no gas molecules to touch your skin and make it feel cold? But there's also no gas molecules to make it feel warm.
There's more pressure inside your body than in space, so would you instantly freeze and then explode?
Radiation is largely much slower than conduction/convection. Ignoring the fact that you'd instantly die from pressure, the pieces of you that remain wouldn't instantly freeze, there is nowhere for the thermal energy to go until you emit it as EM radiation through Stefan-Boltzmann's Law.
Energy is neither created nor destroyed, so where would it go that would cause you to freeze?
You know that feeling when the temperature is so perfect you dont even feel the air at all? That's what it would feel like initially, with no way to transfer your temperature anywhere. If pressure wasn't a problem and you lived long enough, the heat produced by your body, with nowhere to go, would start pooling up and cooking you alive faster than the meager amount of radiation you emit can shed it.
Oh. Nice. For some reason the equatorial orbit pictures and videos I kind of always look at like, meh, can't see much anyway, probably like going to a sports game vs watching it on tv - but this is cool. I'd like to do that
I felt excited and emotional watching this - I love the fact that you've got such expert astronauts up there who have gone through intense training etc. and they still don't know exactly what they're looking at, the awe and beauty trying to decipher what is cloud, water, ice etc. its a view no human in history has ever had to take in from such a scale or distance (that we know of).
Polar orbits are probably the most scary orbits. The chance of getting hit with debris from another orbit is much high and velocity difference is going to be huge.
I hate that elon is involved in this, its such a cool project.
They're asking aurora chasers to take pics as fram2 flies overhead so they can compare the ground images to the ones from space and use them to calculate the auroras height etc. I was really excited about helping but we're completly clouded over and Im super sad about it.
Didnt you hear? Tds isnt a thing anymore since the guy that wanted to make it offical tried to hire a child to have sex with him to celebrate and got busted in a sting.
No we want your tax dollars to go to your education dept so people like you can learn basic math and reading comprehension. so we don't have to discuss adult things with grown ass toddlers anymore.
No, it went around the equator (almost it was skewed a little) think like Saturn's rings
This one is going north to south with a 90 degree turn to its inclination meaning it is going straight up and down, perpendicular to Saturn's rings or the moons orbit.
In really broad terms...
This is a much harder orbit to reach in terms of the amount of energy you have to spend to get there. Things want to orbit like the moon for a multitude of reasons and you have to put some work in to do anything else
The ISS is nowhere near equatorial. It orbits at an inclination of 52º, which puts it about half way between equatorial and polar, largely so the Russians can access it from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which is a good bit further North than Cape Canaveral.
And for someone thinking it goes over the poles my explanation is no good?
I said it had an offset. Maybe I exaggerated (or under exaggerated) the amount but the gist of what I said is still true and good info for someone just learning this stuff.
The ISS is no where near the inclination needed to go over the poles, therefore, relatively flat compared to this (the most eccentric possible) of orbits
Someone claiming the ISS's orbit is polar would be closer to the real answer than you claiming it's equatorial. Not by a lot, but still. It gives someone with no prior knowledge a very false notion of where the ISS actually goes.
The Soviet Soyuz 13 mission, launched on December 18, 1973, was the first confirmed crewed polar orbit around Earth.
Mission Details
• Crew: Pyotr Klimuk (Commander) and Valentin Lebedev (Flight Engineer)
• Launch Site: Baikonur Cosmodrome, USSR
• Orbit: Polar, meaning it passed over both the North and South Poles
• Orbital Parameters:
• Inclination: About 97.6° (a true polar orbit)
• Altitude: Approx. 220 km – 275 km (137–171 miles)
• Duration: 7 days, 20 hours, 55 minutes
• Purpose:
• Conducted astrophysical and Earth observation experiments
• Used the Orion-2 space telescope to study stars and nebulae in ultraviolet light
• Took high-resolution images of Earth’s polar regions
FEs have some good experiments that challenge the accepted diameter of Earth. Sadly enough they jump to the conclusion “iTs fLAt!” And miss out on the actual discovery.
Sure. But they have a couple of experiments that warrant a second look.
Like trigonometric calculations that say that a building should be hidden. But you can see HALF of it. (Thus obviously there is a (potentially wider) curve) but they say FLAT!
Also another with a tangential laser. The laser DOES go up. But they expected to not see it, so curved. But they say flat. The diameter is questionable.
See the "since ancient Greece" part. You can't possibly believe that we've sent satellites up for over half a century and nobody's done the high school math to figure out how wide the earth is. Hell I bet you didn't even know it's not ACTUALLY sphere, but an OBLATE spheroid(it's a ball that wider across the middle than top to bottom because it's spinning). Kindly sit down with the other dribbling conspiracy believers and science deniers and be quiet.
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u/EmphasisSignificant3 1d ago
You see how flat the poles are?