The competition heats up: 2014 saw the highest number of rocket launches in two decades.
Russia led the way with the most launches, as has been typical.
An evening pause: I like how they had recorded it over a period of months, and had an element of silliness in how they taped different sections. And the music is grand as well!
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
The competition heats up: In an interview today Russia’s deputy prime minister said that the construction of Vostochny is back on schedule and should be completed as planned in July.
The Proton rocket which had its launch delayed several weeks in order to repair a faulty gyroscope successfully placed a commercial satellite in orbit today.
Earlier this week there were also two successful Soyuz rockets. For Russia’s aerospace industry, 2014 has definitely ended the year on an up note.
An evening pause: Performed live November 13, 2010 in Springfield, Virginia. The aria might be one of Bach’s most beautiful, but the playing here is astonishing. Watch his fingers.
I also like the deeper meaning of the title: It is what we all should strive for: allowing people to live their lives in peace and joy.
The competition heats up: Russia is negotiating a partnership with Brazil to operate Sea Launch.
The Sea Launch rocket is built by Ukraine, which presently has hostile relations with Russia, to say the least. The platform, built with Boeing money, is presently docked on the the U.S. west coast, which is also not what Russia wants. Moving it to Brazil and adapting it for use with a Brazilian rocket solves both problems, though the usability of Brazil’s rocket is at this moment quite questionable.
In a largely symbolic act, Nicaragua broke ground on Monday on the Chinese-backed construction of a new canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
The project is being pushed by Nicaraguan President (and former Marxist guerrilla leader) Daniel Ortega and financed by Wang Jing, “a little-known Chinese telecom mogul well connected to China’s political elite.” And as much as normally support any ambitious effort to create business opportunities for people in poor countries, this quote from the article raised some red flags about the project I hadn’t thought of previously:
The proposed canal is set to intersect Lake Nicaragua, known locally as Lake Cocibolca, sending cargo ships and tankers straight through the largest source of freshwater in Central America. Further, the canal is expected to displace tens of thousands of mostly rural and indigenous landholders and would likely devastate over 400,000 acres of rainforests and wetlands, which scientists say are critical to local and regional biodiversity conservation efforts.
I am usually very skeptical of environmental protests since their motives are almost always to promote socialism or communism and not to protect the environment. Here however the protests are against a project being promoted by a Marxist ruler and the communist Chinese. Moreover, it does seem a reasonable question to worry about the possible introduction of ocean saltwater into “the largest source of freshwater in Central America.”
The competition heats up: Russia successfully completed the first test launch of the heavy-lift version of its Angara rocket today.
More background here.
At this moment the dummy payload is in a preliminary orbit and requires additional engine burns by the Briz-M upper stage to reach its planned geosynchronous orbit. Briz-M however is well tested and has been in use for years already on the Proton rocket. Therefore, for Angara this flight has now been a complete success, even if the Briz-M stage fails.
After unspecified issues on a static fire test last week caused the postponement of the Falcon 9/Dragon launch until January 6, SpaceX followed up with a successful full static fire test of the rocket on Friday.
SpaceX fueled up a Falcon 9 rocket, ran through a mock countdown and fired the booster’s nine Merlin main engines Friday in a successful preflight static fire test officials hope will clear the way for liftoff Jan. 6 on a space station resupply mission. The exercise occurred at approximately 2:55 p.m. EST (1955 GMT) Friday while the Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon supply ship were kept grounded at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 launch pad.
An evening pause: From Broadway Melody of 1940. This is probably one of the best tap dance duet scenes ever filmed.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.
SpaceX has rescheduled the launch of Dragon from Friday to no earlier than January 6.
The link notes that though SpaceX doubled its launch rate from 3 in 2013 to 6 in 2014, this was still half of what the company had planned. I suspect however that the launch rate will grow once again in 2015, and SpaceX continues to ramp up its operations.
The competition heats up: India has successfully completed both a test launch of the first stage of its upgraded GSLV rocket as well as the suborbital deployment and splashdown of a test manned capsule.
More details are sure to follow, but at the moment it appears that everything went exactly as planned.
Because of a scrubbed static fire test on Tuesday, it is now likely that Friday’s Falcon 9/Dragon launch will be delayed until January.
Attempts during the four hour test window on Tuesday did not result in a successfully conducted Static Fire. Several requests for further information, sent to SpaceX during and after the test window, resulted in the company saying they had no information to provide. SpaceX normally provide confirmation after a successful conclusion to the test.
Source information noted at least one full countdown towards the firing was attempted, which was classed as aborted at the very end of the count. At least one NASA-based outlet claimed the Static Fire had taken place, potentially pointing to ignition of the Merlin 1D engines, before an abort – due to an issue – was likely called. No confirmed information on the issue has been forthcoming from SpaceX. However, the company has promised to provide more information to this site when “they have something to share.”
It was, however, understood that the next Static Fire attempt is likely to take place no sooner than Thursday. That too appears to have been cancelled following review.
If tomorrow’s static fire test has been canceled then Friday’s launch will definitely be canceled as well. None of this has been confirmed yet, however, so it is possible that all is well and the launch will go forward as planned.
Update: The launch delay has now been confirmed. A new launch has not yet been announced however.
An evening pause: The first piece is an incredible acoustical guitar performance. And the second piece is as good.
Hat tip to Danae.
Link here. The launch is scheduled for 11 pm Eastern tonight.
Thursday’s test launch will check the performance of the GSLV Mk. 3’s first stage and strap-on boosters, which will carry the rocket out of the atmosphere beyond the boundary of space. The launcher’s cryogenic upper stage, which will be active and fueled by liquid hydrogen on future missions, will be dormant on Thursday’s flight.
…After the rocket’s propulsion shuts down, a gumdrop-shaped capsule will separate from the GSLV Mk. 3’s dummy upper segment about five-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, according to the Times of India, another English-language paper in India. The capsule weighs about 8,000 pounds — about 3.6 metric tons. Indian engineers from Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. fabricated the car-sized module, and ISRO added sensors, strain gauges, a guidance and control system and a heat shield for the suborbital flight, which is called the Crew Module Atmospheric Re-entry Experiment, or CARE.
Google has extended the deadline for its Lunar X-Prize, giving the 18 contestants until the end of 2016 to launch a rover to the Moon. One company immediately delayed its planned launch.
Meanwhile, the Kickstarter campaign of one of the contestants has reached its fund-raising goal of $1 million, well ahead of its deadline.
Thar’s black gold up thar! Data from Cassini has confirmed the presence of ocean waves on Titan’s seas, while also providing suggesting that they are made mostly of liquid methane, not ethane as had been predicted.
The maximum depth of Kraken Mare appears to be 160 meters, and Ligeia Mare could be as much as 200 meters deep, reported Marco Mastrogiuseppe of Sapienza University of Rome. The fact that the radar signals could bounce off the sea bottom suggests that the seas were more transparent than expected and thus must contain mostly methane, not ethane. Hayes says his best estimate is about 90% methane. Essam Marouf, a planetary scientist at San José State University in California, reported on the first results from a separate radar experiment that sent radar reflections to Earth instead of back to the spacecraft. Those tests provide independent evidence that the seas are dominated by methane, Marouf says, and it implies that the lakes are kept filled by precipitating methane.
As the article also notes, this methane is “55 times Earth’s oil reserves.”
The competition heats up: The barge that SpaceX has modified to provide an ocean platform for the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket to land on is ready to leave port for Friday’s Dragon launch.
I think this Friday’s launch should be far more interesting and exciting that the Orion test flight a little over a week ago. Unlike the Orion flight, SpaceX will be attempting something that has never been done before. And should they succeed, they will rock the aerospace industry as much as Sputnik did in 1957.
Update: SpaceX put out a press release late on Tuesday detailing precisely what they hope to do, with videos from previous atttempts.
The heat of competition: In its effort to replace the old Cold War Soviet-era refurbished Russian engines for the first stage of its Antares rocket, Orbital Sciences today announced that it will instead buy a different modern-built Russian engine.
Designated the RD-181, the new engine will be used on Antares in shipsets of two to accommodate as closely as possible the two-engine configuration built around the AJ-26 engines supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne, Orbital Sciences managers said Dec. 16. A descendant of the RD-171 that powers the Ukrainian-built Zenit launch vehicle, the RD-181 will be manufactured in the same Khimki factory that builds the RD-180 used on the United Launch Alliance Atlas V. It closely resembles the RD-191 on Russia’s new Angara launcher and the RD-151 that powers South Korea’s Naro-1 launch vehicle.
It appears that this is the only engine presently available that can do the job. In the long run however it puts Antares and Orbital Sciences at a competitive disadvantage. Even though the sanctions against using Russian engines, passed by Congress, only apply to military launches, Orbital’s continuing reliance on Russian engines will limit their customer base.
The competition heats up: Boeing has submitted a bid for the next round of ISS cargo missions, proposing to use its CST-100 manned craft as an unmanned freighter.
The cargo version of Boeing’s CST-100 spacecraft will be based on the crewed version the company is developing for NASA, said John Mulholland, Boeing commercial crew program manager. Boeing will remove spacecraft components not needed for crew missions, like its launch abort system and environmental controls, to free up room in the spacecraft for cargo. The cargo version of CST-100 would, like the crewed version, launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. The cargo version will also be able to return cargo to Earth, landing in the western U.S. like the crewed version.
This makes sense to me.
The science team of the orbiter Messenger want your suggestions!
Link here. The article gives a good overview not only of the NASA budget in the just passed continuing resolution but of the budgetary history of the commercial space effort, which is increasingly getting what it needs from Congress.
SLS marches on! Though Obama cancelled the Constellation rocket program in 2010, NASA continued to build a $349 million engine test stand for that rocket, finishing the tower in June 2014.
The test stand was also significantly over budget. It now sits useless, since the SLS rocket will use a different untested engine in its upper stage during its first manned flight.
It is every important to underline the chronology here. The rocket was cancelled in 2010. Construction on the test stand continued however for four more years, partly because of decisions by NASA management and partly because of mandates forced on them by Congress.
Stories like this illustrate why I think the political clout of SLS is weak. The program is too expensive, is riddled with waste, and it can’t accomplish anything anyway, making it a perfect target for both muckraking journalists and elected officials who want to make a name for themselves saving the taxpayer’s money. And both have a perfect inexpensive and successful alternative to turn to: private space.
