The competition heats up: Japan has decided to develop its first new rocket in two decades and use the private-sector to reduce costs.
The article is very vague about how Japan will shift design and construction to the private sector. They need to do this, however, if they want to compete, as their space agency has been very inefficient at accomplishing anything cheaply or quickly.
When government is bankrupt and freedom takes over — in Detroit.
The future? A Maine doctor has stopped accepting any insurance, posts his prices online, and is doing fine.
the decision to do away with insurance allows Ciampi to practice medicine the way he sees fit, he said. Insurance companies no longer dictate how much he charges. He can offer discounts to patients struggling with their medical bills. He can make house calls. “I’m freed up to do what I think is right for the patients,” Ciampi said. “If I’m providing them a service that they value, they can pay me, and we cut the insurance out as the middleman and cut out a lot of the expense.” Ciampi expects more doctors will follow suit. Some may choose to run “concierge practices” in which patients pay to keep a doctor on retainer, he said.
Solar Impulse has completed the second leg of its journey to fly across the United States powered only by the sun.
The Solar Impulse has broken its own record for the longest distance flight of a solar-powered aircraft following the second leg of its journey across the USA. Solar Impulse touched down in Texas at 1:08 a.m. local time after a flight of 18 hours 21 minutes having covered at least 868 miles (1,397 km). Two different distances have been reported for the flight. The Solar Impulse website says the flight “amounted” to 868 miles (1,397 km). However, according to a Phys.org report, Solar Impulse covered a distance of 1,541 km (which it rounds to 950 miles, though this is not the precise conversion).
It is thought the two distances exist because the plane actually lost ground during part of its flight due to headwinds.
The competition heats up: The Russian deputy prime minister told students at the Moscow Aviation Institute on Thursday that they expect their first launch from their new spaceport in Vostochny to occur in November 2015.
He also said that they want to name the new town they are building at the site after Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
Sea Launch announced today it plans four launches in 2014.
The article gives a nice thumbnail summary of the history of the company, including the launch failures that put it into bankruptcy and forced Boeing, the U.S. partner, to get out, leaving the company mostly in the hands of the Russian company Energia.
A Russian paid 1.2 million euros to fly on SpaceShipTwo with actor Leonardo DiCaprio at a charity auction at the Cannes film festival on Thursday.
The competition heats up: The Russians announced today that they plan nine more Proton rocket launches in 2013, for a total of twelve.
I note this to give some context to what SpaceX will do with Falcon 9 this year. SpaceX has just updated its launch manifest schedule, and if the American company does what it says, it should have at least six more Falcon 9 flights this year, for a total of seven.
Should these predicted launches all take place, it will clearly demonstrate that SpaceX has grabbed a significant share of the launch market, but that the Russians are also holding their own.
Note also that the updated launch manifest still includes the first test flight of Falcon Heavy in 2013. Very interesting.
Update: The Russians are also preparing to launch their new Angara rocket family, which will replace their older rockets and allow them to launch from their new spaceport.
The competiton heats up: In a speech in Dubai last week Richard Branson revealed that his company is aiming for a 2013 Christmas day inaugural space tourism flight of SpaceShipTwo.
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.
The Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle has been unwrapped at Dryden.
This is not the actual flight vehicle, but a prototype built to do drop tests with. They will build the spacecraft based on the data obtained in these tests.
A first look at the Saturn 5’s F1 engines that were recovered from the ocean floor and are being restored for museum display.
The competition heats up: In new and apparently successfully ground tests of the SpaceShipTwo engine, Scaled Composites even destroyed one this week to test the operation of different components.
The competition heats up: Richard Branson recently told an audience in Dubai that the first commercial flight of SpaceShipTwo will occur before the end of 2013, and that commercial flights from Dubai will occur two years later.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
The competition heats up: Europe’s new Vega rocket made its second successful commercial launch today, placing three satellites in orbit.
