Year: 2013

Dragon has been successfully berthed with ISS.

9:05 am

Dragon has successfully berthed with ISS.

The naysayers will focus on the thruster problems on Friday. The yaysayers will focus on the fix and berthing today. The bottom line, however, is that this mission once again proves that SpaceX is a real player in the space business. Every other company has to match its achievements, most especially in price. The result will be the eventually lowering in the cost to low Earth orbit, which will then make all things possible.

And in fact, we are already seeing this, with the appearance of many new private companies or organizations, proposing all sorts of new space efforts, such as mining asteroids or sending people to Mars. The lower cost allows dreamers to consider their wild new ideas more doable. And they then go ahead and try to do it.

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The Obama administration today released more than 700 pages of new regulations to implement parts of Obamacare.

7:46 pm

Finding out what’s in it: The Obama administration today released more than 700 pages of new regulations to implement parts of Obamacare.

Won’t it be nice to have to deal with the equivalent of the Motor Vehicle Administration whenever you have to see your doctor in the future?

To me, the most irritating thing about this might not be the law itself, but having to hear people who voted for Obama complain about it. And they will complain. Everyone will. I guarantee it.

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The Democratically controlled Senate is about to mark up its first budget in four years!

7:20 pm

Gasp! The Democratically controlled Senate is about to mark up its first budget in four years!

It appears that sequestration and the expiration at the end of this month of the most recent continuing resolution is finally forcing the Democrats to act responsibly and actually do their job. If (and that’s a very big word) the Republicans stand firm in the House, they might be able to force the Democrats in the Senate to write a reasonable budget. For one thing, if a real budget is passed instead of the continuing resolutions we’ve been stuck with for the past four years — because of the Senate’s refusal to pass a budget — we might finally be able to stop paying for Obama’s so-called onetime 2009 stimulus bill, year after year after year.

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SpaceX has announced that they now have all of Dragon’s thrusters operating and are go for docking with ISS.

4:21 pm

SpaceX has announced that they now have all of Dragon’s thrusters operating and are go for docking with ISS.

They have not announced when the docking will occur, but with the solar panels operating the capsule can function in orbit for a considerable time, giving them breathing room. And time will be necessary as both NASA and the Russians are nervous about letting any spacecraft approach ISS and will want a good number of tests to make sure all is well. The Russians are especially nervous, since they had the unfortunate experience of several collisions when they operated their space station Mir.

3 comments

Corrupt memory in Curiosity’s A computer system has forced engineers to switch to the rover’s back-up computer.

11:49 am

Corrupt memory in Curiosity’s A computer system has forced engineers to switch to the rover’s back-up computer.

The problem came to light Wednesday morning on Mars when flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., noticed what appeared to be memory corruption in the computer’s solid-state memory system. The flight software was not recording new data or playing back data already recorded. Instead, it was only sending back real-time telemetry. Later in the day, during a communications session using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, telemetry from Curiosity indicated the corrupted memory was still present. In addition, Cook said, flight controllers saw the computer had not completed several pre-planned activities.

At that point, the computer was expected to put itself to sleep for an hour or so and then to wake up for a communications session with NASA’s Odyssey orbiter. “It was after that second overflight that we got some more information saying hey, the memory is still corrupted and oh by the way, I didn’t go to sleep when I was supposed to, I stayed awake,” Cook said.

The next communications session came late Wednesday night Earth time, between 10:30 p.m. and midnight at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The rover’s computer was still awake and engineers decided to switch over to the B-side system.

The engineers suspect the problem was caused by a cosmic ray hit, and can be fixed by rebooting the computer.

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