Space is big. Space is dark. It's hard to find. A place to park.
May 29, 2015 3:36 PM   Subscribe

Soyuz docking with the ISS. A dashcam view from TMA-16M. Blue Danube waltz not included. (SLYT)
posted by bitmage (22 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Space is big. Space is dark. It's hard to find. A place to park.

Burma Shave.
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:40 PM on May 29, 2015 [15 favorites]


Forget Strauss. I was humming along to the background theme to ten minutes of refueling in The Starfighters.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 3:44 PM on May 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


Space is big. Space is dark. It's hard to find. A place to park.

Hawkwind lyrics.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 3:45 PM on May 29, 2015 [3 favorites]


At 9:38 there's a brief flash and then at 9:40 something small in the upper left of the frame shoots past Soyuz and ISS. Any idea what that is? Space junk?
posted by JohnFredra at 4:03 PM on May 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


Tell it VMPV - Hawkwind's "Space Is Deep" : www.youtube.com/watch?v=cULwlnEok1c
posted by King Sky Prawn at 4:05 PM on May 29, 2015


Only one piece of background music for this - John Barry's "Capsule in Space" from You Only Live Twice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFSnUzqp12g
posted by Major Clanger at 4:09 PM on May 29, 2015 [4 favorites]


A dashcam view from TMA-16M

Daaamn. I knew Russians were hardcore, but I didn't think they had problems with cosmonauts committing insurance fraud in LEO.
posted by indubitable at 4:14 PM on May 29, 2015 [9 favorites]


Looking forward to SpaceX taking away their business... !

They're getting sooo close to being a gamechanger.
posted by markkraft at 4:19 PM on May 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


That's pretty insipid. NASA and Roscosmos aren't businesses.
posted by invitapriore at 4:33 PM on May 29, 2015 [2 favorites]


At 9:38 there's a brief flash...

I think those are thruster firings to decelerate the Soyuz as it approaches dock. This video has a brief clip of how they look from the outside.
posted by bitmage at 4:41 PM on May 29, 2015


John Barry's "Capsule in Space" from You Only Live Twice

'You Only Live Twice' had the best intro scene of any old-school Bond film. Blew my mind when I first saw it. Houston, WTF?
posted by ovvl at 5:23 PM on May 29, 2015


I saw space junk, too, zipping by in the corner. I can't be the only one. Right?
posted by swift at 5:40 PM on May 29, 2015


I was wondering if the impact between the two spacecraft was enough to very slightly change the orbit of the ISS, or if its mass is large enough that it basically doesn't make a difference. I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about here.
posted by teponaztli at 5:57 PM on May 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


What's the fluttery thing?
It looks windy up there.
posted by MtDewd at 7:30 PM on May 29, 2015


Perfect timing -- this gets posted just as I've been reading Neal Stephenson's new book, Seveneves, which involves a lot of this sort of thing. I can picture the big asteroid mounted on the front of "Izzy"...

Teponaztli, I don't know what I'm talking about either, but my understanding is that the ISS (and all orbiting satellites in LEO) are constantly being slowed down, and thus pulled into a lower orbit, by the meager but non-negligible atmosphere at that level, so they need to periodically burn their engines to lift them back up to a higher orbit. So I imagine any disturbance caused by the docking is dealt with in the same way.
posted by TheCowGod at 7:34 PM on May 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


I made a thing that's on the ISS! It's a complicated bracket that holds, among other things, a gyroscopic sensor. But my shop made it! (We fucked it up the first time and had to start over from scratch. We lost money on the job). We machined it out of a giant chunk of expensive aluminum, and at the very end of the program the CNC mill decided to go back and just gouge a big chunk out of the part for funsies. But when we finally produced the finished part, everyone was pretty excited about touching a thing that's about to go into space.

What is the spinny thing on the right?
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 8:58 PM on May 29, 2015 [13 favorites]


The big expensive piece of metal before we did anything.

One side of the bracket (defect over on the right).

The opposite side of the bracket.

By the way, if you want to dork out on seeing the ISS fly over, sign up for text messages at Spot the Station. You'll get a notification saying something like "look in the northwest sky at 6:37am tomorrow, station will be visible for 2 minutes, disappears in southwest sky, peak altitude at 64 degrees" and like magic........there it is. It flies over us for about 3 days in a row every couple of weeks (has to be right around sunrise or sunset for the light to reflect off the solar panels). It's the brightest thing in the sky other than the moon, and it's hauling ass. It's hard to miss.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 9:06 PM on May 29, 2015 [11 favorites]


yeah, what's that spinning thing that retracts before docking. and most importantly, what are those things that shoot by after the flashes of light around the 10:00:00-ish mark? are they reflections in the glass or actual objects?
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 9:15 PM on May 29, 2015


I think the rotating antenna (spinning so fast it looks fluttery at first) is part of the kurs rendezvous radar that lets it automatically maneuver into docking alignment with the station.
posted by traveler_ at 10:19 PM on May 29, 2015


Now all I need to do is show this to my Kerbals.
posted by ckape at 10:43 PM on May 29, 2015 [2 favorites]


Fascinating.
posted by carping demon at 10:53 PM on May 29, 2015


This just came to my phone today:

FRM:HQ-spotthestation@mail.nasa.gov
SUBJ:SpotTheStation
MSG:Time: Sat May 30 9:46 PM, Visible: 6 min, Max Height: 55 degrees, Appears: SSW, Disappears: NE
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 11:00 AM on May 30, 2015


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