Tag: commercial

A new Defense Department report says that China is aggressively ramping up its space program.

8:39 am

The competition heats up: A new Defense Department report says that China is aggressively ramping up its space program.

China will continue to augment its orbiting assets, with the planned launch of 100 more satellites through 2015. These launches include imaging, remote sensing, navigation, communication and scientific satellites, as well as manned spacecraft.

China is pursuing a variety of air, sea, undersea, space, counterspace and information warfare systems, as well as operational concepts, moving toward an array of overlapping, multilayered offensive capabilities extending from China’s coast into the western Pacific. China’s 2008 Defense White Paper asserts that one of the priorities for the development of China’s armed forces is to “increase the country’s capabilities to maintain maritime, space and electromagnetic space security.”

Further, China continues to develop the Long March 5 rocket, which is intended to lift heavy payloads into space. LM-5 will more than double the size of the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) payloads China is capable of placing into orbit. To support these rockets, China began constructing the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in 2008. Located on Hainan Island, this launch facility is expected to be complete sometime this year 2013, with the initial LM-5 launch scheduled for 2014.

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Russia’s Proton rocket successfully put a commercial communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit on Wednesday

9:13 am

The competition heats up: Russia’s Proton rocket successfully put a commercial communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit on Wednesday.

This is the third successful Proton launch this year and the third since a December launch failure. It appears the Russians have ironed out the kinks in the Briz-M upper stage, and are ready to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. In fact, at the moment they are the only ones who can compete with the Falcon 9, at least when it comes to price.

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SpaceX is about to finalize a deal with the Air Force to launch satellites on both its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

11:18 am

SpaceX is about to finalize a deal with the Air Force to launch satellites on both its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

For the Dscovr mission, scheduled for late 2014, a Falcon 9 will be used to launch an Earth and space weather satellite to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L1, a location approximately 930,000 mi. from Earth. The Dscovr program, which will provide warning of space weather events, is a joint effort between the Air Force, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The STP-2 mission, which is targeted for launch on a Falcon Heavy in mid-2015, includes two space vehicles: the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate-2 (Cosmic-2), designed to monitor climate behaviors; and the Demonstration and Science Experiments (DSX), which will conduct radiation research. [emphasis mine]

The big story here is that even before it has flown the Falcon Heavy once SpaceX already has a customer for it.

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SpaceX is moving its Grasshopper test program to New Mexico’s spaceport.

1:04 am

SpaceX is moving its Grasshopper test program to New Mexico’s spaceport.

The move confirms big plans for the test bed. Flights to date have been conducted at SpaceX’s engine test site in McGregor, Texas. SpaceX received a waiver from the FAA to fly Grasshopper up to 11,500ft from McGregor, but Spaceport America is an FAA-certified spaceport where no where no waivers are required. “Spaceport America offers us the physical and regulatory landscape needed to complete the next phase of Grasshopper testing,” says SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell.

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Japan’s entire space program faces a major overhaul.

12:59 am

Feeling the heat of competition: Japan’s entire space program faces a major overhaul.

In the last few decades Japan has not done very well in space when compared to other Asian countries like China and India. Thus, this overhaul. Yet, based on this article, it doesn’t seem to me that they are making the real changes they need to do to successfully compete. If anything, it sounds instead like the actions of a bureaucracy that is merely rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship, in the hope that this will somehow save it.

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A new research study finds that every time someone imagines the economic system of Socialism working, it does so as much as 98 percent of the time!

1:57 pm

Heh: A new research study finds that every time someone imagines socialism working, it does so, as much as 98 percent of the time!

“There’s no ambiguity about our findings,” said Dr. Halbert Thursday, “we have proved beyond a doubt: every time someone imagines the economic system of Socialism working, it does. Regardless of what time in history, too,” continued Halbert, “if someone imagined that Socialism has worked in the past, it did. If someone imagined it working currently, it does. And if a person imagined it will work in the future, it will. It’s the most amazing thing…Truly remarkable.”

The study consisted of interviewing 5000 economists and ordinary citizens around the world, from socialist and non-socialist countries alike. No matter where in the world, people realized the repeatedly attempted 200-plus-year-old social and economic system operated fairly, efficiently, and humanely nearly every time they fantasized it would. Said Dr. Halbert, “The people in North Korea we were allowed to interview were the most enthusiastic. They not only declared their economic system the best in the world, but the best ever in the solar system.”

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Video of a successful test firing of Liberator, the first working 3D printed gun.

8:37 am

Video of a successful test firing of Liberator, the first working 3D printed gun.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats in Congress are rushing to outlaw this weapon, as is their typical approach to anything they don’t like: outlaw it, ban it, prohibit it, control it, restrict it.

In other related news, a news paper editor in Colorado has decided that the only fair way to debate the NRA is to send every member of the organization to prison.

No more due process in the clear-cut case of insidious terrorism. When the facts are so clearly before all Americans, for the whole world to see, why bother with this country’s odious and cumbersome system of justice? Send the guilty monsters directly to Guantanamo Bay for all eternity and let them rot in their own mental squalor.

No, no, no. Not the wannabe sick kid who blew up the Boston marathon or the freak that’s mailing ricin-laced letters to the president. I’m talking about the real terrorist threat here in America: the National Rifle Association. [emphasis mine]

Our modern liberal community: Restrict freedom, dump due process, imprison your opponents.

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The three phonesats launched piggyback on Antares several weeks ago beamed down images of Earth that have now been released.

5:39 pm

The three phonesats launched piggyback on Antares several weeks ago beamed down images of Earth that have now been released.

The three cube-shaped satellites were launched on Sunday, April 21, 2013 atop Orbital Science Corporation’s Antares rocket from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. The three satellites were all built around a standard cubesat frame about four inches (10 cm) square, with a larger, external lithium-ion battery and a radio powerful enough to reach Earth. The smartphone components not only provided cameras for snapping pictures of the Earth, but also acted as the spacecrafts’ avionics for maintaining attitude control.

In keeping with the PhoneSat’s mission’s goal of getting into space on a budget, the images were transmitted back to Earth in the form of image-data packets that were received not just by NASA’s Ames Research Center but also by amateur radio operators around the world, who volunteered their services to collect 200 of these packets.

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A solar-powered airplane landed safely in Phoenix today on its first leg of an attempt to fly across the United States.

12:17 am

A solar-powered airplane landed safely in Phoenix today on its first leg of an attempt to fly across the United States.

I totally support this effort to develop new technology, but must note that the capabilities of this solar-powered plane, as described in this article, are woefully limited. Nonetheless, I can see many applications where these liabilities will not be an issue, so all power to them. I hope they succeed.

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Private space is winning

11:50 pm

Today I attended an space industry conference here in Orange County, California, sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Unlike the Space Hackers conference which also occurred today and to which I was also invited, this was not a New Space get-together, but a standard aerospace event which included a lot of old time engineers from the big old-time companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Most of the talks today were engineering related. For example, one described in detail the engineering advantages of building ion engines and solar sails at the molecular level, nanotechnology to the max. Another talk, which I found astonishing and exciting, was an analysis of the orbital mechanics of getting to Mars. This analysis found that using constant acceleration as low as .01 G it would be possible to get to Mars in weeks, not years, and without the necessity of waiting for the perfect launch window. You could launch almost anytime. Though we don’t have engines that as yet can provide this much constant low acceleration, these numbers are not so high as to make it impossible. With some clever refinements, it might be possible to come up with propulsion systems capable of these constant Gs, and to do it in the near future. If so, it will open up the entire solar system to manned exploration very quickly. Not only will we be able to travel to the planets in a reasonable time, the constant Gs would overcome the medical problems caused by prolonged weightlessness.

It wasn’t these interesting engineering presentations that got my juices flowing however. Instead, it was presentation on public policy issues that completely surprised me and made me think the future of the American aerospace industry is really going in the right direction. This significant take-away was further reinforced by the audience’s reaction to my lecture in the evening.
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In a NASA contest, a nine-year-old has named asteroid 1999 RQ36 after the Egyptian god Bennu.

10:44 am

A rose by any other name: In a NASA contest, a nine-year-old has named asteroid 1999 RQ36 after the Egyptian god Bennu.

1999 RQ36, or Bennu, is an important asteroid for two reasons. First, NASA is sending an unmanned sample return mission to it in 2016. Second, some calculations suggest the asteroid has a 1 in a 1000 chance of hitting the Earth in 2182.

In other naming news, the private space company Uwingu has launched its “Adopt-a-Planet” campaign.

This open-ended campaign gives anyone in the public—worldwide—the opportunity to adopt exoplanets in astronomical databases via Uwingu’s web site at www.uwingu.com. Proceeds from the naming and voting will continue to help fuel new Uwingu grants to fund space exploration, research, and education.

As noted earlier, they are ignoring the IAU’s stuffy insistence that only the IAU can name things in space.

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In NASA’s new contract with Russia to launch astronauts to ISS Russia has raised the ticket price from $63 million to $70.6 million per seat.

1:23 pm

The competition heats up: In NASA’s new contract with Russia to launch astronauts to ISS, announced today, Russia has raised the ticket price from $63 million to $70.6 million per seat.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union the Russians have become very good capitalists indeed. Consider: the price the Russians were charging for a single ticket on Soyuz was about $33 million in 2004, when George Bush announced the planned retirement of the shuttle. Since then they have repeatedly jacked up the price, knowing that we have no where else to go.

In the end, these price increases are actually a good thing, as they will make it easier for the new American companies to undercut them while simultaneously making a bigger profit.

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The meteoric rise in Texas oil production since 2010.

10:05 am

The meteoric rise in Texas oil production since 2010.

Amazingly, oil production in the Lone Star State has more than doubled in less than three years, from 1.142 million bpd in July 2010 to 2.295 million bpd in February 2013, which has to be one of the most significant increases in oil output ever recorded in the history of the US over such a short period of time. A million bpd increase in oil output in less than three years in one state is remarkable, and would have never been possible without the revolutionary drilling techniques that just recently started accessing vast oceans of Texas shale oil.

The article does not going into any detail about why this boom suddenly started in 2010. They indicate that it is linked to the development of new drilling techniques, but I’d like to know more.

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It appears the Progress freighter has successfully docked with ISS.

8:59 am

It appears the Progress freighter has successfully docked with ISS.

The story is not entirely clear on whether this was a successful hard dock, or only a soft dock. However, I’ve done a search on the web and it sounds like the docking was good. This story says the astronauts on ISS will conducting leak tests (a normal procedure) and then begin unloading, which suggests that all is well.

A hard docking is confirmed.

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An antenna used to orient a Progress freighter during docking, launched today to ISS, has failed to deploy.

11:14 am

An antenna used to orient a Progress freighter during docking, launched today to ISS, has failed to deploy.

Though astronauts can manually dock the spacecraft, they still need proper radar data to gauge its location, spin, orientation, speed, and distance. If the remaining four antennas cannot provide all this information, it will be very dangerous to try a docking.

A problem like this has not happened on a Progress freighter in literally decades. When I consider the spate of other recent failures experienced by the Russian space industry, I can’t help wondering whether they have developed an overall quality control problem.

Update: Russian mission control said today that even if they cannot solve the deployment failure and get the antenna working it will not prevent a docking with ISS on Friday.

I tend to believe them. With four other antennas plus additional radar equipment on ISS it does seems reasonable that there is sufficient redundancy to allow the docking to proceed. Also, considering the Russians past problems with collisions on Mir, I would expect them to be very careful about proceeding if they had any doubts.

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In a web interview today, Richard Branson said that the first supersonic powered flight of SpaceShipTwo is now set for this coming Monday.

2:49 pm

The competition heats up: In a web interview today, Richard Branson said that the first supersonic powered flight of SpaceShipTwo is now set for this coming Monday.

We’re hoping to break the sound barrier. That’s planned Monday. It will be a historic day. This is going to be Virgin Galactic’s year. We’ll break the sound barrier Monday and from there, we build up through the rest of the year, finally going into space near the end of the year. I’ll be on the first official flight, which we look to have in the first quarter of next year. We’re doing a number of test flights into space first.

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