Russian rocket now garden furniture in England

A British businessman has purchased a discarded Russian rocket and installed it in his garden as decoration.

Almost 40ft long and weighing five tonne, the rocket was first flown in 1991 after being built by the Russians in collaboration with NASA at a cost $10 million. For ten years it held the record for the fastest ever made-made machine before it was jettisoned as archaic.

Somehow it ended up at a car auction at South Marston where it was spotted by Mr Sweet while checking out vintage motors. Mr Sweet, who runs the Cirencester-based computer company Zycko, said: “I saw it for sale at a car auction and decided to buy it, not really knowing what I was going to do with it.”

I am curious how the rocket had ended up being owned and offered for sale by a UK company that “specializes in car restorations.” I also wonder if this might be a major new profit center for the struggling Russian rocket industry.

NSF to help fund the development of implantable antennas

What could possibly go wrong? The National Science Foundation (NSF) is providing funding for the development of an implantable antenna for health care, including the possibility for “long-term patient monitoring.”

The project is being financed in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Korea to create a high frequency antenna that can be permanently implanted under a person’s skin. “Antennas operating near or inside the human body are important for a number of applications, including healthcare,” a grant for the project said. “Implantable medical devices such as cardiac pacemakers and retinal implants are a growing feature of modern healthcare, and implantable antennas for these devices are necessary to monitor battery level and device health, to upload and download data used in patient monitoring, and more.”

The grant said that an implantable device could be used for “long-term patient monitoring” and “biometric tracking,” or using technology to verify a person’s identity.

Without any doubt there are many very useful applications for such an implantable device. Monitoring battery life on pacemakers is an obvious one. There will be a problem, however, if anyone but the patient can do the monitoring. I can see too many possible misuses occurring should it be in anyone else’s hands. At a minimum, there are big privacy concerns.

Solar sail experiment stymied by software crash

The Planetary Society’s LightSail solar sail test mission, launched as a secondary payload on last week’s Atlas 5 X-37B launch, has fallen silent because of a software problem.

The communications problem occurred before the mission could achieve its main engineering goal of testing the deployment of the solar sail. They still hope to regain communications, but time is limited as the cubesat is in a low orbit that will decade relatively quickly.

New world record for longest hoverboard flight

The inventor of a hoverboard designed to be flown by an individual standing on the board has set a new world record, flying more than 900 feet.

Canadian inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru traveled a distance of 275.9 m (905.2 ft) on a propeller-based hoverboard he created himself. The machine was reportedly designed and built over the course of 12 months. “I wanted to showcase that a stable flight can be achieved on a hoverboard and a human could stand and control with their feet,” Duru is quoted as saying to Guinness World Records, which has recognized the feat.

Video of the flight is below the fold. It appears he essentially scaled up a drone to carry human weight.
» Read more

UAE establishes space agency

The competition heats up: The United Arab Emirates (UAE), in conjunction with its goal to send an unmanned probe to Mars, has announced the formation of its own NASA-like space agency.

Reading the long official press announcement at the link above will make you realize that a lot of this is public relations fluff being pushed by the UAE’s sheiks. Stripping that away, what I find left is mostly a program to educate students.

Corruption in the Russian space industry

A slew of stories in the Russian press today illustrate again the deeply ingrained problems that country has, both in corruption and in its ability to produce a quality product.

The last story describes the overall scale of the corruption, which is not confined just to the space sector, but can be found in many industries. The aerospace industry just happens to be the most visible outside Russia, and thus the most embarrassing. Yet,
» Read more

Japan to upgrade its ISS cargo freighter

The competition heats up: Japan has decided to upgrade its HTV cargo freighter to ISS by cutting its weight by 30% and reducing the cost to build it by half.

Without doubt the success of the U.S. in quickly building two private and relatively inexpensive freighters, Dragon and Cygnus, has influenced this decision. The managers in Japan have realized that the HTV is not efficient and could be streamlined, and they are trying now to do it.

Isn’t competition a wonderful thing?

Russian executive acknowledges SpaceX is beating them

The competition heats up: The chief executive of one of Russia’s largest aerospace centers admitted during a television appearance on Friday that their country is losing market share to SpaceX.

“The commercial launch market has changed over the past few years. New players have emerged, for example the American company SpaceX. Few people believed that a commercial project would be able to break into the market and create a competitive product, create a carrier [rocket] that’s competitive in terms of price and quality. But this has happened and we have to reckon with it,” he said. “It’s true that we have reduced our presence in the commercial launch market in recent years.

The irony here is that all of the decisions by Putin and the Russian government since SpaceX’s arrival — most especially the decision to consolidate the entire aerospace industry into a single corporation controlled by the government — have actually worked to limit Russia’s ability to compete.

House passes revisions to space law

The competition heats up: The House yesterday passed a major revision to the 2004 space law in an effort to encourage commercial private development in space.

Most of the revisions were requested by the industry itself, and generally eased government interference. As usual, the opposition came from Democrats who wished to maintain as much power for government as possible.

The bill still needs to be approved by the Senate and signed by the President. The Obama administration has expressed “concerns” but has also not opposed the bill.

Russians delay next Angara launch to replace Briz upper stage

The competition heats up? The Russians have delayed until late 2016 the first test flight of the heavy-lift version of their new Angara rocket so that they can fly it with its own new upper stage, rather than using the trouble-plagued Briz upper stage used on Proton.

In other words, they want to dump all the components of the Proton as soon as possible. Whether this will solve the quality control problems that seem to be systemic to their aerospace industry however remains questionable. If I was a commercial satellite company I would have as little faith in Angara, until it has proven itself through a number of launches.

House Science Committee approves changes to space law

In a series of party line votes, the House Science Committee has approved a number of changes to the laws that govern the private commercial space industry.

Almost all of the changes were advocated by the industry itself, so in general they move to ease the regulatory and liability burdens that has been hampering the industry since the 2004 revisions to space law. While it is very unlikely commercial space can ever get free of strong federal regulation, these changes indicate that they can eventually get some of the worst regulations eased.

I should note also that, as expected, the Democrats opposed any easing of federal power. To them, all things must be controlled by the government, and to ease any regulations is to commit the most horrific of crimes. Note also that the Democratic lead in this opposition came mostly from Congresswoman Donna Edwards (D-Maryland), who has announced her intention to run for the Barbara Mikulski’s senate seat. This mark-up hearing thus gives us an idea of the future impact of Edwards should she win.

Arianespace admits it is in a head-to-head competition with SpaceX

In testimony at a hearing in the French parliament the head of Arianespace admitted that the company has been in a head-to-head competition with SpaceX for the past two years, with SpaceX grabbing half the business.

He also claimed that they think they will be able to compete with SpaceX, even if it succeeds in recovering and reusing its first stage.

Israel said Arianespace fully expects SpaceX to succeed in its attempt to recover its Falcon 9 first stage.

But that’s just the start of the challenge, he said. It remains unknown what the refurbishment costs will be compared to the cost of churning out a fresh stage from an existing production line. He said it is also unclear whether commercial fleet operators will immediately accept placing $200 million telecommunications satellites on a rocket with a refurbished stage.

Finally, he said, flying a reusable stage means sacrificing first-stage performance so that enough energy is available to power it back to its recovery point. That power is thus unavailable for the mission, which is one reason why Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX thus far has attempted to recover its stages only on low-orbit missions, not for missions to geostationary transfer orbit, where most commercial satellites operate.

All true, but if Arianespace sits on its hands because of these facts it will eventually lose. It needs to rise to the challenge that SpaceX poses, not poo-poo the challenge.

Sarah Brightman pulls out of her flight to ISS later this year

Citing family issues, Sarah Brightman has suddenly canceled her plans to fly to ISS later this year as a space tourist.

All the press announcements of this decision emphasize that she was doing quite well in the training program, but one wonders. There had been rumors of being replaced in recent weeks, and the “family issues” cited in today’s announcement could be a cover for anything.

Either way, this is unfortunate, because her flight would have been quite entertaining and would have done a great deal to promote the space tourism industry.

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