Tag: competition

NASA schedules commercial manned demo missions to ISS

6:45 pm

The competition heats up: NASA has now added to its ISS schedule the planned launch dates for the first demo missions of SpaceX’s and Boeing’s privately built manned capsules.

For Boeing, its CST-100 will first launch on an uncrewed test flight to the Station via the “Boe-OFT” mission in Apr, 2017 – on a 30 days mission, ending with a parachute assisted return. Should all go to place, the second mission will involve a crew – yet to be selected – on a mission designated “Boe-CFT”, launching in July, 2017, on a 14 day mission to the ISS.

The [planning] dates show SpaceX to be the most advanced in the Commercial Crew path, with their projected test flight dates currently set to win the honor of being the first Commercial Crew vehicle to arrive at the orbital outpost. That first Dragon 2 mission, designated “SpX-DM1″, has a December, 2016 launch date, ahead of a 30 day mission – most of which will be docked to the ISS – ending with a parachute assisted landing in the Pacific ocean. This would be followed by “SpX-DM2″, a crewed flight, launching in April of 2017, on a 14 day mission. This would mark the first time astronauts have launched from American soil on a US built spacecraft since Atlantis’ STS-135 mission in 2011.

American manned space exploration should begin to get very exciting in the next two years, with multiple companies now capable of putting humans in space.

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India announces scheduled to test a prototype space plane

9:48 am

The competition heats up: India’s space agency ISRO has announced that they will test fly a prototype space plane sometime between April and June this year.

The test and prototype both sound very similar to Europe’s IXV prototype space plane, test flown only a few weeks ago.

“Technology Demonstrator winged body vehicle weighing 1.5T will be lofted to a height of 70 km using solid booster, thus attaining five times the speed of sound. Thereafter, it will descend by gliding and splashing down into the sea”, said an official statement. This test flight would demonstrate the Hypersonic aerodynamics characteristics, Avionics system, Thermal protection system, Control system and Mission management.

Both programs also remind me of many similar NASA engineering test programs, most of which ended up as dead ends, with the new technology never applied to actual real world missions. Whether that happens in Europe and India remains the main question. The increasing competition in space should help prevent it, but these are also government-run programs, so their goal has less to do with profit and competition than pork and political maneuvering.

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NASA considering ion engines for next Mars orbiter

9:40 am

Rather than using conventional chemical thrusters for a Mars orbiter planned for the 2020s, NASA managers are considering using ion engines instead.

Worried its fleet of Mars orbiter is aging, NASA intends to dispatch the spacecraft to the red planet in September 2022 to link ground controllers with rovers and extend mapping capabilities expected to be lost when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter stops functioning.

Engineers also want to add ion engines to the orbiter and fly the efficient electrically-powered thruster system to Mars for the first time, testing out a solar-electric propulsion package that officials say will be needed when astronauts visit the red planet. Ion engines produce just a whisper of thrust, using electric power to ionize atoms of a neutral gas and spit out the particles at high speed. While the drive given by the thrusters is barely noticeable in one instant, they can operate for months or years, burning scant fuel compared to traditional chemical rockets.

That this decision requires long-winded and extended high level negotiations at NASA illustrates the slow and lumbering nature of government. Private enterprise is embracing ion engines now, and NASA itself is seeing its own spectacular ion engine success with Dawn. The decision should be a no-brainer, especially because the benefits of ion engines (low weight, more power, greater flexibility) are so obvious.

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Britain narrows its competition for spaceport

9:17 am

The competition heats up: The British government has down-selected its choices for a future spaceport in Great Britain to six airports, two of which have already said they are not interested in taking on the job.

The remaining four sites include two in Scotland, and one each in Wales and southwestern England. If I had to choose just based on orbital mechanics, the English site would win, as it is farther south thereby capable of putting more payload in orbit for the same fuel. However, politics and pork will certainly be a factor in any final decision, as this spaceport location is being decided not by private companies but by the British government.

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Yutu lives!

8:33 am

Despite an engineering failure that has prevented it from roving after only a few days on the Moon, the Chinese lunar rover Yutu continues to reawaken after each long lunar night, surviving now far longer than its planned three month lifespan.

Since the rover arrived in late 2013, it has now functioned in the hostile lunar environment for more than a year. This, along with other successful long missions, suggests that Chinese space engineering has matured to a point that it has the ability to achieve some significant long term goals.

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SpaceX has another successful commercial launch

9:26 am

The competition heats up: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched its first two-satellite payload to geosynchronouse orbit on Sunday.

The satellites were unusual in that they both have replaced all their chemical engines with ion engines, thus saving weight and cost.

While the satellites will need six to seven times longer to reach the desired orbit, the cost savings is enormous. “The advantage of that, of course, is you don’t carry liquid chemical fuel, which is very heavy,” Betaharon said. “This particular satellite, each of them weigh around 2,000 kilograms. Typically, if you get a satellite like that from other manufacturers, or even from Boeing using chemical propulsion, they would weigh something around 3,500 to 4,000 kilograms, or in some cases maybe more. That’s why, because it’s lower mass, we managed to put two of them on one rocket, which right away reduces your launch costs in half.”

When ABS and Eutelsat signed up for Falcon 9 launch services several years ago, the rocket cost about $60 million. “We paid under $30 million for each satellite, which is almost unheard of,” Betaharon said.

More information about the new satellite designs can be found here.

Nonetheless, the combined weight of the two satellites plus the need to get them to geosynchronous orbit forced SpaceX to forgo another attempt to land its first stage vertical. The rocket needed the fuel to get the satellites where they had to go.

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Small satellite industry predicted to blossom

2:07 pm

The competition heats up: An industry study now predicts that more than 500 small satellites, including nanosats, cubesats, microsats, and minisats, will be launched in the next five years.

Note however this important detail, highlighted below:

75% of the 510 satellites to be launched during the next five years will be for government civil and defense agencies. Growth in government demand will be stronger than in the commercial world where a total of 130 satellites are expected. “Large constellation projects such as those announced in 2014 by OneWeb and by SpaceX in association with Google have not been included in our forecasts/scenarios for launch by 2019,” said Rachel Villain, Principal Advisor at Euroconsult and Editor of the report. “Large constellation projects could, however, represent a very significant component of launches over the following five year period (2020-2024).” [emphasis mine]

Even though the predicted launches represent a two-thirds increase per year compared to the previous decade, this launch rate does not include the big private constellations that appear almost certain to fly. In other words, all signs point to the possibility that we are about to see a real boom in the space industry.

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Russians confirm plan to leave ISS in 2024

8:59 am

The competition heats up: Russian space managers have confirmed that they have endorsed a plan to leave ISS in 2024, when they will assemble their own space station using new modules as well as a significant number of the modules attached to ISS.

On February 24, 2015, the Scientific and Technical Council, NTS, at Roskosmos, the main planning body at the agency led by a newly appointed chairman and the former head of the agency Yuri Koptev, formally endorsed the Russian participation in the ISS program until 2024. It would be followed by the separation of Russia’s newest modules from the ISS to form the new national space station. As previously reported on this site, the initial configuration of the station would include the Multi-purpose Module, MLM, the Node Module, UM, and the Science and Power Module, NEM. Notably, the original Russian ISS component — the Zvezda Service Module, SM — was not included in the plan, thus ensuring that its propulsion capabilities would be available for deorbiting of the outpost at the end of its operational life.

Whether ISS will be functional with just the Russian Zvezda module is not clear. NASA engineers now have about a decade to figure this out and to fix it.

In general the break up of the partnership running ISS will be good for space exploration. The competition between nations will spur development and innovation. It will also free each nation from the shackles of the partnership. The Russians in particular have wanted to utilize ISS for more daring and longer expeditions to research interplanetary travel, and were stymied by NASA’s bureaucracy. Once they start doing this sort of thing on their own station NASA will feel obliged to follow.

Obviously, competition between nations carries risk. As long as there is some agreed to framework for claiming territory on other planets (something that the U.N. treaty does not allow), the nations will be able to compete peacefully. Without that framework, however, will leave room for disagreement and conflict.

It is thus essential that the space-faring nations sit down and work out this framework, and do it as soon as possible before each nation has vested interests in space that are already in conflict with each other. Above all, this new framework has got to abandon the U.N. space treaty with its rules that forbid the claiming and controlling of territory by nations in space. Those rules were never realistic, and literally guarantee that nations will eventually end up at war with each other as they fight to determine who owns what in space.

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Next Angara launch delayed

4:08 pm

The competition heats up? Industry sources in Russia noted today that the next launch of Angara will be delayed until 2016.

Previously the next Angara launch was scheduled for late 2015. This delay is not a disaster for Russia, as Angara is designed to work in conjunction with the country’s new spaceport in Vostochny, and that facility won’t really be operational until 2016 either.

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X-Prize contestants team-up to create head-to-head lunar race

8:52 am

The competition heats up: Two Google Lunar X-Prize contestants have teamed up to use the same rocket to get to the Moon together, where they will literally race head to head to see who travels the 500 meter distance first to win the prize.

At a press conference in Tokyo on Monday, the leaders of two Lunar X PRIZE teams—Astrobotic and HAKUTO—announced a plan in which the two teams’ robotic rovers will travel to the moon together and touch down on the lunar surface at the same time. They will then race each other to cover the 500 meters required to win the first place prize of $20 million.

John Thornton, head of Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic (a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off), said in a call with reporters that the partnership with HAKUTO (a spin-off from Tokyo University) represented the first step in realizing his team’s goal of turning robotic moon missions into a viable business. That mission won’t stop with this single partnership. He said the team was in talks with more than half of the other 16 GLXP competitors to carry their rovers to the moon, too, in exchange for sharing the cost of getting there and splitting prize money.

If this happens as they propose, we could be watching as many as ten rovers line up for the race.

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Why Isn’t Batman in the public domain?

11:24 am

Link here. As a writer who makes my living partly on the royalties I earn, I have still opposed every change to the copyright laws since 1978, as each change has extended the length of copyright far longer than was necessary to protect my rights. The result has been a concentration of power, in this case among a few corporations, something that should always be avoided.

Instead, the Congresses we have had in the past forty years have willingly corrupted the law in the worst possible way.

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New Mexico legislature advances spaceport sale bill

9:11 am

A state bill to sell Spaceport America, New Mexico’s spaceport built to service Virgin Galactic’s oft-delayed space tourism business, has advanced out of its first committee.

The bill still needs to clear two more committees before it gets a floor vote, but considering the lack of progress at Virgin Galactic, I would not be surprised if it passes. The high hopes that created this spaceport a decade ago have now faded into a boondoggle that New Mexico probably can no longer afford.

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A dozen launches for Arianespace in 2015?

8:39 am

The competition heats up: Arianespace’s launch manifest for 2015 predicts a busy year, with a hoped for pace of one launch per month.

What I like most in the article however is what this paragraph says:

The launch provider won nine contracts for geostationary satellites in 2014, and eight of them are the right size to ride in the Ariane 5’s lower berth, [said Stephane Israel, Arianespace’s chairman and CEO] in an interview with Spaceflight Now.

SpaceX has emerged as the chief rival to the veteran French-based launch company, which started the commercial launch business when it was founded in 1980. SpaceX and Arianespace cinched the same number of commercial launch contracts last year. Partly in response to SpaceX’s bargain prices and partly as an initiative to ensure the Ariane 5 has a steady balance of heavier and lighter payloads, Arianespace cut prices for customers with smaller satellites. [emphasis mine]

I love how competition has lowered costs while simultaneously increasing the launch rate for multiple companies. Before SpaceX arrived to challenge established companies like Arianespace the accepted wisdom in the launch industry was that it was foolish to have more rockets capable of launching at lower costs, because there simply wasn’t enough business to justify it. You’d supposedly end up with idle facilities costing money with no payloads to launch. I always thought that theory was hogwash. Elon Musk and SpaceX have definitely proven it so.

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Work stalls on Mars One robotic missions

7:03 pm

Mars One, the company that just this week announced the 100 finalists in its competition to send 24 people on a one-way trip to Mars, has quietly suspended all work on two robotic missions heralded as precursors to that manned mission.

These facts just add weight to my conviction that the Mars One competition is at the moment nothing more than a reality television show. It is a cool idea for a television show, but journalists should stop selling it as anything more than that.

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Stratolaunch airplane 40% complete

9:28 am

The competition heats up: Stratolaunch has revealed that construction of the gigantic airplane — the largest ever to fly — that will take its rockets into the air is now about 40% complete.

The first flight is still scheduled for 2016. The article also includes some good analysis which indicates the competitive problems Stratolaunch faces:

Its Orbital Sciences-supplied solid-fuel rocket will be able to carry 15,000 pounds to low Earth orbit. But this is about half the lift of the competing SpaceX Falcon 9 and just 30 percent that of a Boeing-built Delta IV. Stratolaunch will be able to orbit only smaller satellites.

Nonetheless, watching this mother-ship take off will be quite breath-taking.

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South Korea unveils its own lunar rover

8:57 am

The competition heats up: South Korea has revealed its preliminary design for a lunar rover, set to launch in 2020 on a Korean-built rocket.

The article does not indicate whether this project has actually been approved or is merely being touted by Korea Institute of Science and Technology, which made the announcement. The cost to build it is estimated to be more than $7 billion, which seems quite exorbitant and over-priced.

Update: I had misread the conversion in the article from U.S. to Korean currency and thought the proposed cost for this mission was way more than it really is, which is about $7 million, a much more reasonable number. Thanks to Edward for the correction.

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A television reality show to pick 24 candidates to go to Mars — one way

10:01 am

The competition heats up? The private effort to choose 24 people to make a one-way flight to Mars has narrowed its candidates down from more than two hundred thousand to 100 finalists.

More here.

As interesting as this effort is, it is very important to remember that it is not an effort to fly these people to Mars. They don’t have the money and no one yet has the technical ability to make the flight. What they are actually doing is putting together a television reality show, where these 100 individuals will compete to be the final 24. If they do it right, which I am somewhat doubtful, the show will be entertaining and scientifically educational.

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