The competition heats up: SpaceX on Monday successfully launched its second geosynchronous commercial satellite.
I expect the company to now step up the pace of its launches.
The competition heats up: After more than a decade of failed attempts, India has finally successfully launched its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV).
Moreover, this rocket was entirely built in India. It now gives that country a rocket competitive in the international communications satellite launch market.
NASA and Orbital Sciences have rescheduled the Cygnus freighter launch to ISS until January 8 because of cold weather.
The second commercial launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has been delayed three days until January 6 because an unspecified issue with the rocket’s fairing.
It appears the company wants to do some additional inspections of the rocket, just to be sure all is well. They haven’t been more specific then this,
“Unfortunately, it’s easier for our franchisees to open a restaurant in Siberia than in California.”
Kind of sums everything up, doesn’t it? And unless the American public starts to vote aggressively for freedom and less government — even if that means their favorite programs or benefits might be cut — it ain’t gonna get better.
A leftist politician speaks! New York mayor Bill de Blasio: “We are going to get rid of the horse carriages. Period.”
I highlight this story because it illustrates perfectly the priorities of the left. de Blasio wants to shut down the horse carriage industry that takes tourists on rides through Central Park because he and his ilk think it inhumane to the horses. Meanwhile, they don’t seem to care at all what this action will do to the humans who ride, care for, and make a living from those horses.
Virgin Galactic has released video of SpaceShipTwo’s second powered flight.
Messier notes how strained the pilot’s voices are, indicating that this test flight was “one wild ride.” I have put the video below the fold.
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Mars One narrows its applicant pool of would-be Martian colonists from 200,000 to just over a 1000.
People started applying for a voyage to the red planet in April 2013 through Mars One, a Netherlands-based private venture that wants to land humans there by 2025. By the time the company stopped taking applications, more than 200,000 people had submitted one. Today, Mars One announced that it’s made a short(er) list of 1,058 applicants.
These are individuals willing to make a one way trip.
The company for the high resolution cameras that the Russian astronauts were unable to install on ISS during their spacewalk last week has issued an update.
The installation of the cameras proceeded according to plan and without incident. During a spacewalk, Russian cosmonauts were able to transport the cameras to their mounting position and install them quickly and efficiently. However, soon after installation, the Mission Control Centre (MCC) outside of Moscow was unable to receive any data from either camera (contrary to what was reported during the live transmission of the spacewalk). Without this data, engineers in the MCC were not able to confirm that the cameras were receiving the power necessary to allow them to survive the temperature fluctuations of the space environment. As a consequence, senior technical personnel from UrtheCast and RSC Energia (UrtheCast’s Russian partner) jointly decided that the safest and most prudent course of action was to uninstall the cameras and bring them back inside the ISS to be reinstalled at a later date, once the data transmission problem has been solved.
UrtheCast’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. George Tyc, was present at the MCC throughout the operation, along with the Company’s Chief Engineer for Space Systems, Mr. Greg Giffin. Said Dr. Tyc, “The fact the neither camera could communicate with the MCC strongly suggests that the problem lies inside the ISS and it is not a problem with the cameras or external cables. This kind of issue has been encountered before on the ISS and can be fixed in the near-term. Bringing the cameras back inside to be installed another day was simply the right engineering decision.”
No word on what caused the problem, but as this commercial project is being done in partnership with the Russians and the Russians are whom the company is working to solve the technical problem it was almost certainly on the Russian portion of ISS.
The first person to cycle to the South Pole.
Leijerstam used a modified version of the commercially-available Sprint trike, made by recumbent tricycle manufacturer Inspired Cycle Engineering (ICE). She chose to go with a recumbent trike because it would allow her to maintain stability in the often very-high winds. This allowed her to concentrate simply on moving forward, instead of having to waste time and effort keeping her balance. The strategy paid off, as she not only made it, but also beat two other cyclists who had set out for the Pole on two-wheelers, days before her Dec. 17th start date.
The competition heats up: SpaceX successfully completed a static fire engine test Saturday in preparation for its next commercial satellite launch on January 3.
It will be a busy next two months for commercial space. Cygnus is scheduled to launch on January 7, while Dragon makes its next flight on February 22. During that same time period a Russian Progress freighter will be launched. Also, there will be two Ariane 5 launches and one Proton launch, plus one commercial launch by India along with that country’s first launch of its home-built GSLV rocket.
As I say, the competition is heating up.
The competition heats up: India has now set January 5 as the date for the test launch of its homebuilt powerful GSLV rocket.
India’s needs this more powerful rocket if they are going to be a serious player in the new colonial movement in space. They have had many problems over the past decade trying to get it operational. Maybe now they will finally succeed.
Today’s spacewalk by two Russian astronauts on ISS set a new Russian duration record though one of the two commercial cameras installed was unable to transmit its data to the ground.
For reasons that are unclear, the astronauts were then instructed to disconnect both cameras and bring them back inside ISS. This caused the cancellation of a number of other tasks and was the reason the spacewalk was the longest ever by Russian astronauts.
The Russians on ISS are doing their own spacewalk today, for profit.
They are installing two cameras for a Canadian company that will beam down high resolution commercial images of the Earth’s surface.
Another successful Proton rocket launch took place today in Russia, putting a Russian communications satellite into orbit.
This is the fourth successful Proton launch since July’s spectacular failure, suggesting that the Russians have gotten the rocket’s manufacturing process back on track.
The competition heats up: The Russians have delayed the first launch of a new Soyuz rocket for at least a week.
No reason for the delay was announced. The rocket is an entirely new design, with an upper stage expected to cost less to make.
The companies building manned spacecraft for the United States all appear to be on track.
The report gives a nice overview of the recent achievements of all three companies, and suggests that the U.S. will once again have a manned spacecraft capability before the decade has ended coming from more than one design.
The top ten states for job growth.
There isn’t a clear common political thread here, but it is worth noting that all of the top five and seven of the ten have all-Republican governments.
It isn’t the party that matters, it is the philosophy of the members of that party that matters. And you are more likely to find politicians who support freedom, competition, and capitalism in the Republican Party.
NASA and Orbital Sciences have set January 7 as the launch date for the Cygnus cargo mission to ISS.
They did some rescheduling at Wallops Island to allow the Cygnus launch to happen earlier.
India has set January 5 as the launch date for its next attempt to launch is home-built GSLV rocket.
An update on the Google Lunar X-Prize competition.
A number of teams have dropped out, narrowing the competition to eighteen teams.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has set December 31 as the launch date for its next Falcon 9 commercial launch.
They are picking up the pace. This will be SpaceX’s second commercial launch in December and its second geosynchronous launch. If they prove they can keep this pace through 2014 they will not only clear away a large amount of the launch backlog, they will establish themselves as a solid player in the launch market, a company that the competition must fear due to its low prices.
Bad weather scrubbed a SpaceShipTwo test flight yesterday.
It was unclear whether this would have been a powered flight. The scrub also ends any chance of another test flight before the end of the year.
Madness: A company fires an employee because he put out a fire.
Bowers knew that his actions were going against company policy, but he believed that in this instance the customers urgent need came first. “When the guy came in and said his dashboard was on fire I grabbed the fire extinguisher and I followed him outside and sure enough his dashboard was on fire,” Bowers said. They quickly put out the fire and Bowers returned to his post.
He was later called into the store director’s office where he was suspended for his actions. “The one supervisor told me that my heart was in the right place, but my brain wasn’t,” Bowers said. Later that week, he was fired from his job for not following company policy.
The company is Meijer’s, which is going to discover this is a major public relations disaster. Just read the comments at the link.
NASA engineers have decided to go ahead with a series of spacewalks to repair the ISS cooling system, thereby delaying the Cygnus cargo mission until January.
The EVAs will take place on December 21, 23 and 25 followed by a Russian Spacewalk on the 27th and a Beta-Angle Cut-out beginning on December 29. That means that the earliest launch opportunity for Cygnus is January 9, 2014 (local time) – pending the successful execution of the contingency EVAs.
Update: The Orbital Sciences press announcement says their launch can happen no earlier than January 13.
Arianespace has ordered the construction of an additional 18 Ariane 5 rockets.
This construction order, if it reflects actual launch contracts, gives Arianespace some margin while it works to find ways to compete in the launch business, as expressed by the last sentence of the above article: “Astrium managers recently called for a thorough overhaul of the Ariane contractor mix with a view to reducing prices to stay viable in the competitive world commercial launch market.”
Aerojet has successfully completed engine tests for the launch abort system on Boeing’s CST-100 manned capsule.
“In the past several weeks, the Aerojet Rocketdyne team conducted a series of eight tests on two Launch Abort Engines meeting or exceeding all test parameters,” said Aerojet Rocketdyne Program Manager, Terry Lorier. “The tests demonstrated engine performance for multiple mission duty cycles and proved operation and durability under extreme operating conditions. The success of this most recent test series clears the way for our team to proceed into qualification and production of the engine in the next phase of the program.”
The competition heats up: Germany has funded a study to look into using Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser for its space operations.
Named DC4EU (Dream Chaser for European Utilization), the project is to explore ways in which the Dream Chasercan be used to cover German and European requirements for the transportation of payloads and astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) and for deployment as a manned or unmanned space vehicle allowing German and European scientists to conduct research under weightless conditions over extended periods of time. Given the capability which the Dream Chaser has for reaching orbits at a substantially greater altitude than the ISS, the study will determine the extent to which it is able to supply satellites or remove decommissioned satellites from their orbits.
All hail competition and private enterprise! Sierra Nevada designed it. Sierra Nevada built it. Sierra Nevada owns it. If NASA decides it doesn’t want to buy it, there is no reason the company can’t sell it to someone else, for profit.
