Doug Messier has done some research and has found the numbers might be less than advertised.
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.
The competition heats up: World View, which hopes to send space tourists to the edge of space in a balloon, set a world record last week for the highest flight of a parafoil.
The flight ascended to more than 100,000 feet, about 19 miles altitude.
An evening pause: I haven’t posted a wingsuit video since 2012, so this clip is overdue, especially since the scenery is quite beautiful. My only complaint is that they cut just as one flyer releases his chute for landing. I would have preferred to see the whole flight, including its gentle end.
Hat tip tdub.
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.
Saturday’s first spacewalk in a yearlong project to reconfigure ISS so that it can accomodate two commercial cargo capsules and two commercial ferries, all at the same time, completed all tasks with no problems.
The article also provides a very clear explanation of the entire planned reconfiguration of ISS, including the reasons why these changes are necessary.
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.
The competition heats up? As part of an exhibition in Houston a man has built a scale model version of the International Space Station, made entirely of matchsticks.
Orbital ATK announced on Thursday that it plans to make the first launch of its redesigned Antares rocket in March 2016.
It will carry a Cygnus capsule to ISS.
The first of a series of spacewalks to reconfigure ISS for the future arrival of commercial manned ferries was delayed by one day on Thursday to give engineers extra time to prepare.
The spacewalk is now set for Saturday.
The competition heats up: Design and construction of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is picking up in advance of the rocket’s first test flight, now tentatively scheduled sometime this summer.
It will not surprise me if that summer launch does not happen on time. Nonetheless, I expect that before 2015 is over we will see a Falcon Heavy on the launchpad being prepped for launch.
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.
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.
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.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has signed leases at both Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Air Force Base to use abandoned launchpads as landing pads for its Falcon 9 first stage.
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.
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.
The competition heats up: Virgin Galactic announced today the establishment of a new facility to design and build the company’s LauncherOne rocket, aimed at putting into orbit very small cubesats at a very low price.
LauncherOne is an air-launch system for satellites weighing up to 225 kilograms. The system will use the same aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, as the company’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle, but replaces SpaceShipTwo with a two-stage launch vehicle using engines fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene.
At the Federal Aviation Administration Commercial Space Transportation Conference Feb. 4, William Pomerantz, vice president of special projects for Virgin Galactic, said the company has already tested engines and other “core infrastructure” of LauncherOne. “We are a fairly vertically-integrated team,” he said. “We really do control a lot of the production in house.”
As the article notes, Virgin Galactic is investing in OneWeb, which hopes to launch a constellation of 650 cubesats to provide broadband communications worldwide. It is likely that a partnership between the two companies exists to put many of those cubesats into orbit with LauncherOne.
This announcement also suggests to me that Virgin Galactic is beginning to shift its gaze from suborbital space tourism to orbital launch services, and in doing so is looking for new ways to make its investment in WhiteKnightTwo pay off.
The competition heats up: A Falcon 9 rocket today successfully put a NASA solar observation satellite into orbit.
They have also said that they have achieved splashdown of the first stage, though no details yet on how soft that splashdown was.
Update: SpaceX reports that “the first stage successfully soft landed in the Atlantic Ocean within 10 meters of its target. The vehicle was nicely vertical and the data captured during this test suggests a high probability of being able to land the stage on the drone ship in better weather.”
Because of high seas SpaceX will not attempt to land its Falcon 9 first stage on its floating barge today.
The drone ship was designed to operate in all but the most extreme weather. We are experiencing just such weather in the Atlantic with waves reaching up to three stories in height crashing over the decks. Also, only three of the drone ship’s four engines are functioning, making station-keeping in the face of such wave action extremely difficult.
They will still attempt a soft splashdown of the first stage in the ocean.
Though this kind of repeated soft splashdown test is essential to prove their ability to bring the first stage down safely, it certainly isn’t as exciting as landing the first stage on a barge. Nonetheless, in previous attempts they have been unable to get really good video of the soft splashdown. Maybe they will do better this time, though the high seas suggest it won’t be easy.
In January the last two satellites in Russia’s ballistic missile warning system shut down, with the first of the next generation replacement constellation not scheduled to launch until June.
“Oko-1 was part of Russia’s missile warning system. The system employed six satellites on geostationary and highly elliptical orbits. The last geostationary satellite got out of order in April last year. The two remaining satellites on highly elliptical orbits could operate only several hours a day. In the beginning of January, they also went out of order,” Kommersant said.
The new generation early warning satellite Tundra was planned to be launched in 2013. However, the launch was postponed several times as the apparatus was not ready to be put into operation, sources in the aerospace industry told the daily.
Increasingly I am reminded of the Cold War, when our competition was the bloated, inefficient, and poorly managed Soviet Union. The communist nation was definitely a threat, as they got a lot accomplished through sheer brute force and determination. Their long term problem was that it was an amazingly inefficient system, guaranteed to eventually fall apart.
The competition heats up: Europe today successfully launched and landed its Intermediate Experimental Vehicle (IXV) space plane.
As of 9 pm (Eastern) Wednesday the recovery ship was still “hurrying” to reach the ship, which was being held afloat with “balloons.” Update: The spacecraft has been retrieved.
This prototype is not full scale. It is only about 16 feet long, and was built as a testbed. Whether Europe follows up with a full scale version remains completely unknown. I am skeptical, as this program reminds me of many deadend NASA experimental programs like it, used to try out cool engineering technologies as well as provide pork to Congressional districts without any plans to proceed to the real thing. In the case of IXV, the Italians got most of the pork.
After 29 days in space, Dragon returned safely to Earth today, splashing down in the Pacific.
At about T- 13 minutes today’s Falcon 9 launch was scrubbed because of high winds.
They will try again tomorrow at 6:03 pm (eastern).
The competition heats up: A privately developed drone called Gimball that flies inside a protective cage so that it is not harmed by obstacles and is also not a threat to nearby humans was named the first prize winner, worth $1 million, in a United Arab Emirates (UAE) dorne competition.
Amazing video of the working Gimball drone prototype below the fold. It is a brilliant concept, and is without doubt going to revolutionize the use of drones in numerous ways. Expect all drones to soon have similar protective cages as well.
» Read more
The competition heats up: A Wednesday test flight of Europe’s Intermediate Experimental Vehicle (IXV) is right now on schedule.
IXV, a test of gliding space plane engineering, was originally going to fly last year but got scrubbed because of political maneuverings within the European Space Agency.
Today will be a busy day for SpaceX, as the commercial space company will have to handle the return of Dragon, the launch of soalr satellite DSCOVR on a Falcon 9, and the hoped for vertical landing of that rocket’s first stage on a floating barge.
Because of poor weather predictions NASA and SpaceX have rescheduled the next launch attempt of DSCOVR and the Falcon 9 for Tuesday, 6:05 pm (eastern).
Due to a variety of unresolved but apparently relatively minor issues SpaceX has decided to scrub today’s Falcon 9 launch.
They will try again tomorrow.
More details about the scrub here. The main problem was apparently a failure at an Air Force radar facility for tracking the rocket during launch.
The weather looks almost perfect for tonight’s Falcon 9 launch.
The Falcon 9 will put a solar observation satellite into orbit. While many left wing media outlets will wax poetic about this is Al Gore’s satellite, it is hardly that. It might have been built initially under his misguided idea of creating a propaganda satellite to take daily images of the Earth (images that are essentially of little use for climate studies), DSCOVR has been very carefully redesigned to give it a real purpose, monitoring the solar activity of the Sun and providing a replacement/back-up for ACE, which is now more than a decade overdue for replacement.
The Falcon 9 launch will also attempt again to land intact its first stage on a floating barge. If this attempt succeeds the entire future of space travel will be reshaped.
