The two man partnership isn’t going to be traveling the planets for forlorn females in trouble. Instead, they will use their expertise studying satellite imagery to aid in the investigation of legal disputes.
In an effort to find tenants for its facilities, the Kennedy Space Center is going to rent two former shuttle processing hangers to Boeing for the Air Force’s X-37B program.
NASA built three Orbiter Processing Facilities, or OPFs, to service its space shuttle fleet between missions. All three are located next to the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building at the Florida spaceport where Apollo Saturn 5 moon rockets and space shuttles were “stacked” for launch. Under an agreement with NASA, Boeing will modify OPF bays 1 and 2 for the X-37B program, completing upgrades by the end of the year.
The company already has an agreement with NASA to use OPF-3 and the shuttle engine shop in the VAB to assemble its CST-100 commercial crew craft being built to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The company says up to six capsules can be processed in the facility at the same time.
The most important take-away from this news is that it strongly suggests the Air Force now intends to expand the X-37B program. They will not only be flying both X37B’s again, they might even planning to increase the fleet’s size from two ships.
An evening pause: Live performance 2006.
A just released independent investigation by Arianespace of the Soyuz rocket launch failure that put two European Galileo GPS satellites in the wrong orbits has concluded that the design of the Fregat upper stage, not an assembly error, was at fault for the failure.
The upper stage was not oriented correctly because fuel lines to thrusters had become frozen.
The freezing resulted from the proximity of hydrazine and cold helium feed lines, these lines being connected by the same support structure, which acted as a thermal bridge. Ambiguities in the design documents allowed the installation of this type of thermal “bridge” between the two lines. In fact, such bridges have also been seen on other Fregat stages now under production at NPO Lavochkin. The design ambiguity is the result of not taking into account the relevant thermal transfers during the thermal analyses of the stage system design.
That the Russian investigation found that this arrangement of feed lines happened once in every four stages that were assembled still suggests sloppiness, if not in assembly then in design. The Arianespace investigation, though thorough, thus appears to me to be trying to provide cover for thier Russian partners here.
This NBC story tries very hard to help XCOR sell its Lynx suborbital space plane, but I found myself very unimpressed. To me the images suggested instead that little progress has occurred in recent months, and that the project has stalled.
I hope I am wrong, but this whole story reminded me strongly of many of Richard Branson’s efforts to sell Virgin Galactic, which have so far proven to be vastly overstated.
Two American astronauts today successfully completed the first American spacewalk this year on ISS.
The spacewalk, known as US EVA-27, was originally slated to occur in August, but was postponed due to concerns with the batteries in the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuits, which necessitated a delay while new Long Life Batteries (LLBs) were launched to the ISS aboard the recent CRS-4 Dragon and the Soyuz TMA-14M/40S on September 25, and subsequently installed into the suits.
The work done was mostly clean-up in preparation for a series of future spacewalks to reconfigure the American sections of ISS so that it can allow docking of two private manned capsules as well as two private cargo freighters.
The competition heats up: The next Cygnus cargo mission to ISS has now been scheduled to launch no earlier than October 24.
The date was determined by many factors, including the work schedule on ISS as well as other planned launches to ISS.
An evening pause: Instead of relying on the modern boring use of bathroom humor and obscenities, watch Groucho make everyone laugh by simply reacting to circumstances in exactly right way.
Hat tip Danae.
The competition heats up: They might fly as high, but the balloon company that is aiming to capture some of the space tourism market is a strong rival to Virgin Galactic and XCOR.
An evening pause: From their 2004 reunion.
I post this story about SpaceX winning an award for its safety-in-design work mostly to illustrate again that, except for one lone commenter on my webpage, most of the aerospace industry recognizes the generally good work that SpaceX has been doing. Not only do their recognize it, they have found themselves struggling to meet the competitive challenge that SpaceX now represents, an effort that has been all to the good for everyone in the space industry.
The competition heats up: An inflatable module, built by the private company Bigelow for NASA, will be launched next year to ISS inside a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
Read that sentence again to savor the reality of two private companies both building and launching this addition to ISS.
