Former NASA shuttle head outlines a pessimistic future for NASA expensive Space Launch System.
Continuing to develop programs in the same old ways, from my observations, will certainly lead to cancellation as government budgets are stretched thin.”
In a newspaper interview Richard Branson today claimed that Virgin Galactic is “just three months away from having a fully-functioning rocket that is capable of taking passengers into orbit.”
At this moment I am sadly very skeptical. The company has only done two powered flights of SpaceShipTwo, and the highest it has gone is about 70,000 feet. To make it fully-functioning, they need to fly it 70 miles high. And the rumors about their engine problems suggest they won’t be able to do this until next year, at the soonest.
A drone that can fly continuously for five years at 65,000 feet.
The Solara series are designed to be a fraction of the cost of a satellite, but operate many similar tasks, such as surveillance, crop-monitoring, weather and disaster oversight, or any other monitoring that low-altitude satellites track. The Solara aircraft could cost less than $2 million, according to Forbes, which quotes Dustin Sanders, Titan’s chief electrical engineer, as saying, “We’re trying to do a single-million-dollar-per-aircraft platform. And the operation cost is almost nothing — you’re paying some dude to watch the payload and make sure the aircraft doesn’t do anything stupid.”
As with any new invention, the use of this drone carries with it both good and bad possibilities.
The world that works vs the world that doesn’t.
In Washington, penalties for failure are few: Has anyone been fired over the Obamacare launch debacle? Problems are always the fault of circumstances, or the Evil Opposition, or are simply swept under the rug. Of course, that means there’s not much learning from mistakes, and “more of the same, only we’ll try harder!” is a common response. As in The Hunger Games, life is always posh in Capital City; suffering is for the poor schlubs out in the provinces.
In the world that works, on the other hand, mistakes are painful: They cost people jobs, they cost investors money, they result in bad publicity that’s harder to explain away. Thus, people learn from them. Unsurprisingly, the world that works is where the money that Washington spends ultimately comes from.
The problem is that the bigger Washington gets, the less room is left for the world that works. As more and more of American life is taken over by the world of politics — in which wealth is not generated, but taken from one’s opponents and distributed to one’s supporters — a smaller share is left for the world that works.
Stratolaunch has now released some preliminary details about its commercial rocket, including images.
Work has also begun on assembling the giant carrier airplane that will be used to take the rocket aloft.
Posted from lovely Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Tomorrow I will be busy visiting old friends as well as poking around an old Pennsylvania ghost town, so posting should be light.
Virgin Galactic has signed a television deal for a reality show where the winner would get a flight into space on SpaceShipTwo.
This sounds great, but the company first has to solve the very serious engineering problems it has with SpaceShipTwo’s engine, which apparently is going to cause a delay of at least one year in the ship’s development. Thus, this announcement is really nothing more than a publicity stunt designed to distract the public from those problems.
Orbital Sciences is suing the government agency that operates the Wallops Island spaceport, saying it is refusing to pay a $16.5 million bill.
I am not surprised. One of the prime reasons the launch of Antares and Cygnus was delayed by more than a year was because this same government agency had failed to upgrade the launchpad as promised, and Orbital Sciences was eventually forced to step in, take over, and spend millions to do the work itself.
Elon Musk lays out SpaceX’s planned program for developing a reusable first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket.
The article also gives some additional details about the company’s first effort to control the reentry of the first stage after launch last week.
Burials in space: Cheaper by far than on Earth!
The failure of the Falcon 9 upper stage prior to a final engine test on Sunday’s launch may delay the rocket’s next commercial launch.
SpaceX officials said after the Sept. 29 launch that the nonignition of the upper stage did not appear to be of a sort to delay the SES flight for very long. Feltes said SES is will hoping for a launch as soon as October, but added that if it slipped to November the company was willing to wait. The fact that SES will be awaiting details from SpaceX “does not mean that we reject the flight as a qualification flight,” Feltes said. “We still plan to be on the next Falcon flight, once SpaceX has solved the problem. But we need a technical explanation. We do need reignition of the stage for our satellite.”
The government shutdown also means that the Florida spaceport is presently unavailable for this launch (which is hardly a way to run a commercial operation). This fact makes it even more likely that SpaceX will eventually move all its commercial launches to its own spaceport, probably in Texas.
SpaceX is denying rumors that the upper stage of its Falcon 9 rocket exploded after completing its mission.
The speculation was spawned in part by the fact that the U.S. Space Surveillance Network is currently tracking more orbital objects associated with the launch than expected. … “Regarding the rumors you may have heard about the Falcon 9 second stage, in short, our data confirms there was no rupture of any kind on the second stage,” SpaceX spokeswoman Emily Shanklin wrote in an Oct. 1 email. “Following separation of the satellites to their correct orbit, the Falcon 9 second stage underwent a controlled venting of propellants … and the stage was successfully safed. During this process, it is possible insulation came off the fuel dome on the second stage and is the source of what some observers incorrectly interpreted as a rupture in the second stage.” SpaceX attempted to reignite the upper stage after payload separation in a demonstration of a capability it will need to place satellites into the proper geostationary transfer orbit. However, the reignition sequence was aborted after a problem was detected, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk told reporters in a postlaunch teleconference.
Anything is possible, but I am inclined to believe SpaceX in this case. Moreover, even if true, the bottom line is that the rocket launch was still a complete success, putting its payloads in orbit as promised.
Russia’s Proton rocket returned to flight today with a successful launch of a commercial satellite.
This launch only occurred about two hours ago and all appears at this time to be going well. For the Russians this is a crucial flight, as they need to demonstrate that they are cleaning up their quality control problems following the spectacular Proton launch failure in July in order to compete in the increasingly competitive launch market.
