Words from Mohave.
Friday began bright and sunny, a day full of promise that quickly brought tragedy. As I write this early on Saturday, a cold hard rain is lashing at my windows. That’s a good thing. We need it.
And it feels right. The sky is crying, adding to an ocean of tears shed here today.
An evening pause: Hat tip again to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime. As Phil wrote to me, this scene is “the sensational finale from Martin Brest’s NYU student film, Hot Tomorrows. Brest, who went on to direct Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman, broke all the rules in scrounging every resource he could find to make this 73-minute tragi-comic riff on the subject of death.”
Makes for a perfect Halloween evening pause.
An aside: Long ago, when I was in the movie business, I worked with many of the people who helped Brest make this film, and can say without doubt that he scored the best crew one could imagine finding for a student production.
During a powered flight test today SpaceShipTwo suffered an explosion, destroying the ship.
It is reported that the problem occurred after the ship fired its engines. It is also reported that parachutes were spotted after the explosion, but at this moment the fate of the pilots is unknown.
Update: One report says that one pilot was killed while the other was seriously injured. More info here.
The man formerly in charge of construction at Russia’s new spaceport in Vostochny has been arrested and charged with stealing $43 million dollars from the project.
The corruption might be true, as this kind of thing is culturally typical for the centralized government-run operations that are generally favored in Russia. It is also possible that Putin’s government wanted a scapegoat to blame for the construction delays and cost overruns in building Vostochny.
Either way, Putin gets what he wants. This prosecution will make it very clear to everyone involved in building Vostochny that the government wants it built fast and without further theft, and it is watching what people do there very closely.
Italian officials are suggesting politics or incompetence for the sudden cancellation Wednesday of the November test flight of Europe’s IXV experimental spaceplane.
ESA and CNES officials up to now have either declined to comment or, in the case of ESA, said they were at a loss to explain why a program whose mission profile has not changed in several years is now suddenly stalled for [range] safety issues that in principle should have been aired and resolved long ago.
One official, saying he could not believe that the two agencies simply forgot to evaluate the safety issues, said he preferred to suspect political motives. “Look, we are about to send a spacecraft and lander to Mars, in one year,” this official said. “Europe has rendezvoused with a comet a decade after the [Rosetta comet-chaser] satellite was launched. You want me to believe that somehow the agencies just forgot to evaluate safety? That is too far-fetched. I would rather believe there is some political motive.”
The claim is that no one ever evaluated the range issues in sending the Vega rocket to the east instead of its normal polar orbit trajectory. The Italian officials are suggesting that either the officials who cancelled the mission are incompetent, or that their competition with France within ESA over launch vehicles (Ariane 6 vs Vega) prompted the cancellation.
Europe’s lead launch-vehicle nation is France, which initially balked at participating in the Vega program. A French minister said that in Europe, launch vehicles are French. The French government declined to allow the export, to Italy, of the avionics suite that guides Vega, forcing Italy to develop its own. Italy has since done so and successfully flown it on Vega. As it stands now, one official said, France must accept the idea that with Vega, Italy has led development of a vehicle that at least in principle resembles an intercontinental ballistic missile. “Some people don’t like that,” this official said.
Either way, this cancellation combined with the difficult and extended disagreements within ESA over replacing Ariane 5 suggest that the future of this European partnership is becoming increasingly shaky.
An evening pause:
A close look at the damaged launchpad from Tuesday’s Antares launch failure has confirmed both that it avoided significant damage and that the rocket debris being recovered there will speed up and aid in the failure investigation.
Also, the Ukrainian company that built Antares first stage has opened its own investigation of the launch failure.
ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket today successfully launched an Air Force GPS satellite.
The article is worth reading because it does a nice job of summarizing the launch history of the Atlas 5, first introduced in 2002. The key quote, however, is this:
All of the rocket’s early flights carried commercial communications satellites, with the next few launches orbiting HellasSat-2, Rainbow 1, AMC-16 and Inmarsat-4F1. In August 2005 the sixth Atlas V embarked on the type’s first mission for the US Government, deploying NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on the first leg of its mission to the Red Planet.
In other words, the first six flights were commercial, with every flight since 2005 for either NASA or the military. What this suggests to me is that the Atlas 5 is not competitive in the commercial market. It is too expensive, and commercial customers can’t afford it. In contrast, the federal government hasn’t been interested in saving the taxpayer money for years, and pays for this overpriced rocket in order to keep its builders employed.
An evening pause: Performed live in Japan. Proves beyond doubt that Vivaldi had rhythm.
The investigation into the Antares launch failure has completed its initial assessment of the launchpad.
More here. Overall, the pad’s condition sounds better than expected. To quote the Orbital press release at the first link above,
The overall findings indicate the major elements of the launch complex infrastructure, such as the pad and fuel tanks, avoided serious damage, although some repairs will be necessary. However, until the facility is inspected in greater detail in the coming days, the full extent of necessary repairs or how long they will take to accomplish will not be known.
The image at the second link above shows some of the damage, none of which looks devastating.
This link provides a summary of the post-accident press conference, while this link gives a good overview of the situation.
The value of having more than one cargo supplier has become immediately evident, as the scheduled December 9 launch of Dragon to ISS will go forward, and might have its cargo adjusted because of the Antares failure.
An evening pause: When I was 9 to 11 going to day camp each summer, I had to listen to kids playing this song every day, continually, on the camp piano. I grew to hate it.
This version, however, is absolutely worth listening to and watching, as Ahn adds some percussion, using of all things, chopsticks!
Hat tip to Edward Thelen.
