Orbital ATK announced on Thursday that it plans to make the first launch of its redesigned Antares rocket in March 2016.
It will carry a Cygnus capsule to ISS.
The first of a series of spacewalks to reconfigure ISS for the future arrival of commercial manned ferries was delayed by one day on Thursday to give engineers extra time to prepare.
The spacewalk is now set for Saturday.
An evening pause: Most people, when asked to describe Will Rogers, usually focus on his witty political commentary. What we have forgotten however is that he initially made his fame as a cowboy with an amazing ability to do rope tricks. The film excerpt below, narrated by Rogers’ son Will Rogers Jr., was made in 1922 to highlight these tricks.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
The competition heats up: Design and construction of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is picking up in advance of the rocket’s first test flight, now tentatively scheduled sometime this summer.
It will not surprise me if that summer launch does not happen on time. Nonetheless, I expect that before 2015 is over we will see a Falcon Heavy on the launchpad being prepped for launch.
The competition heats up: Arianespace’s launch manifest for 2015 predicts a busy year, with a hoped for pace of one launch per month.
What I like most in the article however is what this paragraph says:
The launch provider won nine contracts for geostationary satellites in 2014, and eight of them are the right size to ride in the Ariane 5’s lower berth, [said Stephane Israel, Arianespace’s chairman and CEO] in an interview with Spaceflight Now.
SpaceX has emerged as the chief rival to the veteran French-based launch company, which started the commercial launch business when it was founded in 1980. SpaceX and Arianespace cinched the same number of commercial launch contracts last year. Partly in response to SpaceX’s bargain prices and partly as an initiative to ensure the Ariane 5 has a steady balance of heavier and lighter payloads, Arianespace cut prices for customers with smaller satellites. [emphasis mine]
I love how competition has lowered costs while simultaneously increasing the launch rate for multiple companies. Before SpaceX arrived to challenge established companies like Arianespace the accepted wisdom in the launch industry was that it was foolish to have more rockets capable of launching at lower costs, because there simply wasn’t enough business to justify it. You’d supposedly end up with idle facilities costing money with no payloads to launch. I always thought that theory was hogwash. Elon Musk and SpaceX have definitely proven it so.
Mars One, the company that just this week announced the 100 finalists in its competition to send 24 people on a one-way trip to Mars, has quietly suspended all work on two robotic missions heralded as precursors to that manned mission.
These facts just add weight to my conviction that the Mars One competition is at the moment nothing more than a reality television show. It is a cool idea for a television show, but journalists should stop selling it as anything more than that.
The competition heats up: Stratolaunch has revealed that construction of the gigantic airplane — the largest ever to fly — that will take its rockets into the air is now about 40% complete.
The first flight is still scheduled for 2016. The article also includes some good analysis which indicates the competitive problems Stratolaunch faces:
Its Orbital Sciences-supplied solid-fuel rocket will be able to carry 15,000 pounds to low Earth orbit. But this is about half the lift of the competing SpaceX Falcon 9 and just 30 percent that of a Boeing-built Delta IV. Stratolaunch will be able to orbit only smaller satellites.
Nonetheless, watching this mother-ship take off will be quite breath-taking.
An evening pause: I love songs that tell great stories. This is a classic.
Note: As always, I am always looking for evening pauses and am very open to suggestions. If you want to suggest something, comment here, though please don’t post the actual suggestion. I will email you direct so you can forward it to me.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has signed leases at both Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Air Force Base to use abandoned launchpads as landing pads for its Falcon 9 first stage.
The competition heats up? The private effort to choose 24 people to make a one-way flight to Mars has narrowed its candidates down from more than two hundred thousand to 100 finalists.
More here.
As interesting as this effort is, it is very important to remember that it is not an effort to fly these people to Mars. They don’t have the money and no one yet has the technical ability to make the flight. What they are actually doing is putting together a television reality show, where these 100 individuals will compete to be the final 24. If they do it right, which I am somewhat doubtful, the show will be entertaining and scientifically educational.
An evening pause: I had doubts about posting this initially, not because I’m a prude but because, as I wrote to Phil when he sent me this suggestion, “What is the point? Watching three minutes of 1930s girls taking off their robes to reveal their underwear? I’m not sure that is my goal with my evening pauses.”
But then I thought, why not? The compilation definitely illustrates the differences and similarities between then and now. What was risque then is almost innocent today. And at the same time, what is interesting in terms of sex then is not much different than what is interesting today. Sex still sells. Humans remain human. And Valentine’s Day is tomorrow.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.
The competition heats up: Virgin Galactic announced today the establishment of a new facility to design and build the company’s LauncherOne rocket, aimed at putting into orbit very small cubesats at a very low price.
LauncherOne is an air-launch system for satellites weighing up to 225 kilograms. The system will use the same aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, as the company’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle, but replaces SpaceShipTwo with a two-stage launch vehicle using engines fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene.
At the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 4, William Pomerantz, vice president of special projects for Virgin Galactic, said the company has already tested engines and other “core infrastructure” of LauncherOne. “We are a fairly vertically-integrated team,” he said. “We really do control a lot of the production in house.”
As the article notes, Virgin Galactic is investing in OneWeb, which hopes to launch a constellation of 650 cubesats to provide broadband communications worldwide. It is likely that a partnership between the two companies exists to put many of those cubesats into orbit with LauncherOne.
This announcement also suggests to me that Virgin Galactic is beginning to shift its gaze from suborbital space tourism to orbital launch services, and in doing so is looking for new ways to make its investment in WhiteKnightTwo pay off.
The competition heats up: A Falcon 9 rocket today successfully put a NASA solar observation satellite into orbit.
They have also said that they have achieved splashdown of the first stage, though no details yet on how soft that splashdown was.
Update: SpaceX reports that “the first stage successfully soft landed in the Atlantic Ocean within 10 meters of its target. The vehicle was nicely vertical and the data captured during this test suggests a high probability of being able to land the stage on the drone ship in better weather.”
Because of high seas SpaceX will not attempt to land its Falcon 9 first stage on its floating barge today.
The drone ship was designed to operate in all but the most extreme weather. We are experiencing just such weather in the Atlantic with waves reaching up to three stories in height crashing over the decks. Also, only three of the drone ship’s four engines are functioning, making station-keeping in the face of such wave action extremely difficult.
They will still attempt a soft splashdown of the first stage in the ocean.
Though this kind of repeated soft splashdown test is essential to prove their ability to bring the first stage down safely, it certainly isn’t as exciting as landing the first stage on a barge. Nonetheless, in previous attempts they have been unable to get really good video of the soft splashdown. Maybe they will do better this time, though the high seas suggest it won’t be easy.
After 29 days in space, Dragon returned safely to Earth today, splashing down in the Pacific.
At about T- 13 minutes today’s Falcon 9 launch was scrubbed because of high winds.
They will try again tomorrow at 6:03 pm (eastern).
The competition heats up: A privately developed drone called Gimball that flies inside a protective cage so that it is not harmed by obstacles and is also not a threat to nearby humans was named the first prize winner, worth $1 million, in a United Arab Emirates (UAE) dorne competition.
Amazing video of the working Gimball drone prototype below the fold. It is a brilliant concept, and is without doubt going to revolutionize the use of drones in numerous ways. Expect all drones to soon have similar protective cages as well.
» Read more
The competition heats up: A Wednesday test flight of Europe’s Intermediate Experimental Vehicle (IXV) is right now on schedule.
IXV, a test of gliding space plane engineering, was originally going to fly last year but got scrubbed because of political maneuverings within the European Space Agency.
Today will be a busy day for SpaceX, as the commercial space company will have to handle the return of Dragon, the launch of soalr satellite DSCOVR on a Falcon 9, and the hoped for vertical landing of that rocket’s first stage on a floating barge.
An evening pause: From Honolulu (1939). What I like about this is that everyone involved has no worries about offending anyone. They are free to take the native cultural music of Hawaii and embellish it as the whim takes them. They were free (to repeat that forgotten word) to be as creative as they like. The result is a pretty hot dance number.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Because of poor weather predictions NASA and SpaceX have rescheduled the next launch attempt of DSCOVR and the Falcon 9 for Tuesday, 6:05 pm (eastern).
Due to a variety of unresolved but apparently relatively minor issues SpaceX has decided to scrub today’s Falcon 9 launch.
They will try again tomorrow.
More details about the scrub here. The main problem was apparently a failure at an Air Force radar facility for tracking the rocket during launch.
The weather looks almost perfect for tonight’s Falcon 9 launch.
The Falcon 9 will put a solar observation satellite into orbit. While many left wing media outlets will wax poetic about this is Al Gore’s satellite, it is hardly that. It might have been built initially under his misguided idea of creating a propaganda satellite to take daily images of the Earth (images that are essentially of little use for climate studies), DSCOVR has been very carefully redesigned to give it a real purpose, monitoring the solar activity of the Sun and providing a replacement/back-up for ACE, which is now more than a decade overdue for replacement.
The Falcon 9 launch will also attempt again to land intact its first stage on a floating barge. If this attempt succeeds the entire future of space travel will be reshaped.
NASA’s safety panel has issued a report questioning the safety of the early launches of the Space Launch System (SLS), partly due to the very low launch rate and the lack of any planned unmanned test flights for the rocket’s upper stage engine.
“The ASAP and the Agency remain concerned about risks introduced in the currently scheduled frequency of SLS/Orion launches, ” according to ASAP’s 2014 Annual Report. “The plan indicates a launch about every 2 to 4 years. This would challenge ground crew competency. The skills, procedures, and knowledge of conducting the launch, mission, and recovery are perish-able. The ASAP believes that an extended interval requires the relearning of many lessons and skills, in contrast to Apollo and Shuttle, which had a relatively steady cadence.”
No space project can accomplish anything with launch rate this slow. Not only does this increase the risk that inexperience will cause errors, the long time gaps make it difficult for the project to get anything done.
And then there is NASA’s idea that it can put humans on this rocket without any previous launch testing of the rocket’s upper stage or the capsule’s life support systems. Why should NASA’s rocket get a pass on this kind of testing when the agency is demanding that the private companies do it?
Chicken Little report: A propellent tank from an as-yet unidentified rocket landed near a house on a Brazilian farm on December 28.
The pictures at the link are neat, especially since the man in the selfie showing the farmer’s family and the tank in the background looks so much like New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
