Tag: competition

DARPA awards contracts for XS-1 spaceplane

9:31 am

The competition heats up: DARPA has announced contract awards to three companies for the construction of its experimental XS-1 spaceplane, designed to take off and land like a airplane.

The contracts go to Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Masten Space Systems, and have them each respectively partnered with Blue Origin, XCOR, and Virgin Galactic. More details on the Boeing contract can be found here.

The description of the XS program is quite exciting:
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Great Britain’s proposed suborbital spaceport locations

9:07 am

The competition heats up: More information was released today describing Great Britain’s suggested spaceport locations.

These spaceports are specifically aimed at the suborbital space tourism market, for American companies like Virgin Galactic or XCOR, or for the developing British company Skylon.

It is interesting that 6 of 8 are located in Scotland, which might very well not be part of the United Kingdom after a vote on separation this fall.

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The next Proton and Angara launches

9:00 am

The competition heats up: Russia has set September 28 as the next launch date for its troubled Proton rocket.

The most interesting detail gleaned from this article however is this:

The Proton-M carrier rocket previously launched on May 16 from Baikonur space center collided with communications satellite Express АМ4R and burned up in the atmosphere above China, leaving Russia without its most powerful telecommunications satellite.

Previous reports had not been very clear about the causes of the May launch failure. All they would say is that “a failed bearing in the steering engine’s turbo pump” had caused the failure about nine minutes into the flight. This report suggests that this failure occurred after separation of the payload and that it then caused the upper stage to collide with the satellite.

Russia is also about to ship its new Angara 5 rocket to the launch site for a planned December launch. This will be the first launch of the Angara configuration that is expected to replace the Proton rocket, and is expected to place a dummy payload into geosynchronous orbit.
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Falcon 9 launch

8:41 am

The competition heats up: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has successfully launched six Orbcomm commercial satellites into orbit.

The six satellites still must be deployed. We will know if this is successful sometime in the next hour or so. Also, no news yet on SpaceX’s effort to recover the rocket’s first stage after a soft splashdown in the ocean.

Update: All 6 Orbcomm satellites have successfully deployed.

Update 2: From Elon Musk as to the first stage recovery: “Rocket booster reentry, landing burn & leg deploy were good, but lost hull integrity right after splashdown (aka kaboom).”

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A spaceport for Great Britain?

8:38 am

The competition heats up: The government of the United Kingdom today outlined its intention to build its first spaceport by 2018.

The announcement listed eight potential sites, six of which were in Scotland, which is presently threatening to break away from the United Kingdom. This announcement I suspect is less a call for British space exploration and instead a political effort to encourage Scotland to remain in the UK.

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Cygnus launch

9:23 am

All is go for a 12:52 pm launch of Cygnus’s second operational cargo flight to ISS.

If you live on the east coast of the U.S. you should be able to see some part of this launch when it happens.

Cygnus has lifted off.

The main engine has cut off and the first stage has successfully separated.

The second stage has ignited successfully. It has now completed its burn and has separated from the spacecraft. Cygnus is in orbit.

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Air Force certifies Falcon 9

11:21 pm

The competition heats up: The Air Force today certified that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket had completed three successful flights.

This certification is a preliminary okay before the official certification. What it means is that the Air Force is agreeing that the Falcon 9 is capable of launching its satellites, which also means that the official certification is almost certain.

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India’s space program gets a huge budget boost

9:16 am

The competition heats up: The new budget of India’s new conservative government under Narendra Modi has given its space program a 50 percent increase.

It appears that there were increases across the board, including a gigantic increase for their GSLV rocket as well as their manned program.

It also appears that Modi is following in the path of George Bush, at least when it comes to space. He might be a conservative, pro private enterprise and anti-big government, but his approach to building a space industry is decidedly Soviet in style, pumping funds into government agencies so that they can build the rockets and spacecraft. For the moment at least, private companies will be the servants to India’s government space program, not the masters.

In the U.S. and Russia this approach worked for the first generation of rockets and spacecraft, but then ended up a lead weight for later generations. I suspect we shall see the same history play out in India.

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Russian Soyuz launches commercial satellites for Arianespace

9:01 am

The competition heats up: A Soyuz rocket successfully launched four communications satellites from French Guiana yesterday.

I know that I repeatedly pound Arianespace for its high costs and lack of profits, but anyone who thinks this European company, in partnership with the Russians, is going to let its competition grab its customers easily is in for a surprise. They are going to fight back, and have the resources to do it.

The battle is on! It should be a lot of fun to watch over the next decade.

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ISEE-3 might still be saved

3:39 pm

It ain’t dead yet: The private group trying to resurrect ISEE-3 has not yet given up.

[T]he reboot team, led by editor Keith Cowing and entrepreneur Dennis Wingo, CEO of California-based Skycorp Incorporated, isn’t quite ready to give up. One of the project volunteers has suggested that perhaps the nitrogen isn’t actually gone. It may in fact still be there, but dissolved in with the hydrazine.

If that’s the case, Wingo says, ISEE-3 could potentially repressurize the propellant by powering up the tank heaters, raising the temperature up perhaps 10 degrees from the roughly 25 degrees C where it stands now. “If [the idea] has any merit, then we could turn the heaters on and drive at least some of the nitrogen out of solution. That would give us more pressure that just heating the tanks themselves,” Wingo says. “It’s not desperation,” he adds. “There is some good physics behind this.”

Their big problem is that they need to know more about how the nitrogen was stored on the spacecraft. They are asking for help from anyone who is willing to research the problem.

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The effort to resurrect ISEE-3’s is over

9:42 am

The private effort to resurrect the 1980s research probe ISEE-3 has been stymied by a non-working propulsion system.

Before the July 9 attempt, the ISEE-3 Reboot Project thought it had a chance of completing its planned trajectory correction maneuver. The spacecraft’s small hydrazine thrusters were spun up July 3, and systems appeared nominal, Cowing said. On July 8, the spacecraft even managed to perform one of the six multipulse burns that would have set it up for a return to the orbit into which it was launched in 1978.

But further attempts to activate the thrusters July 8 proved unsuccessful, as were all attempts the following day. After eliminating a malfunctioning valve as the cause of the problem, the ISEE-3 Reboot Project was forced to conclude that the satellite’s hydrazine fuel simply was not being pushed through its plumbing at the right pressure to conduct a burn.

The spacecraft is in science mode and will gather data as long as it is in communication range, which will only be for another three months.

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Bigelow Aerospace hiring

7:48 pm

The competition heats up: Bigelow Aerospace hired two former NASA astronauts today as part of a broader expansion of the company in anticipation of .the completion of its first two private space modules in 2017.

Bigelow said the smallest space station his company plans to fly will require two BA330 modules, each of which has 330 cubic meters of internal space. The company expects to finish building the first two BA330s by 2017, Bigelow said.

Ham and Zamka are former military aviators who have piloted and commanded space shuttle missions. Their NASA and military credentials are part of the appeal for Bigelow, who plans to put both former space fliers to work as recruiters. “I would like to see us have half a dozen astronauts onboard by the end of the year,” Bigelow said.

Each Bigelow Aerospace space station would require about a dozen astronauts, including orbital, ground and backup personnel. The 660-cubic-foot stations would host four paying clients, who would be assisted by three company astronauts responsible for day-to-day maintenance, Bigelow said. Initially, clients and crews would cycle in and out of the stations in 90-day shifts, Bigelow said. Eventually, the company hopes to shorten that cycle to 60 days.

The company had laid off many of its workers several years ago and was essential dormant, waiting for the development of some sort of affordable commercial manned spacecraft capability. It now appears they are expecting SpaceX, Boeing, or Sierra Nevada to succeed in providing this service in the next few years.

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An update on ISEE-3’s resurrection

9:45 am

The engineers trying to resurrect the 1980s ISEE-3 spacecraft have posted an update describing what happened with yesterday’s partly successful engine burn.

The bottom line:

Thruster firings were planned to done in groupings – or “segments” – of 63 firings per segment. The first chart is annotated to show the three firing attempts. The first segment was full duration but only partially successful. The second and third attempts failed. Possible causes (under investigation) include valve malfunction and fuel supply issues.

This doesn’t sound hopeful, but stay tuned as they continue to assess the situation.

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Angara launches

9:20 am

The competition heats up: The first test launch today of Russia’s new Angara rocket was a success, according to Russian reports.

According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the first stage of the rocket separated four minutes after the liftoff, while the vehicle was flying in the projected area over the southern Barents Sea and in the range of the Russian ground control network. The main engine of the second stage was shut down as planned at 16:08 Moscow Time and the stage along with a payload mockup fell in the projected area of the Kura impact range on the Kamchatka Peninsula 5,700 kilometers from the launch site, 21 minutes after liftoff.

Russia will obviously have to conduct further test launches, including the first orbital test, before it declares Angara operational. Nonetheless, this success gets them closer to replacing the Proton and Zenit rockets and allowing them to decrease their reliance on rockets, spaceports, and components under the control of independent countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.

More details about the Angara rocket family can also be found here.

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Russia to phase out use of Ukrainian-built Soyuz rockets

9:09 am

As part of a major upgrade of its Soyuz rocket family, Russia is also ending its partnership with Ukraine in building those rockets.

The older Soyuz rockets rely on a Ukrainian control system — a relic of the rocket family’s Soviet heritage that in the aftermath of Russia seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in March looks like a threat to Russia’s space program. The rockets are based on the same core design that launched Sputnik and Yury Gagarin into space at the dawn of the space age. “The Soyuz-U and Soyuz-FG control systems are analog [systems] made in Ukraine,” Alexander Kirilin, CEO of the Progress Rocket and Space Center in the Volga city of Samara told Interfax on Monday.

However, the Soyuz 2 rockets use a Russian-made digital control system. Aside from further moving Russia’s space industry away from its reliance on Ukrainian components, the digital control system allows the rockets to handle a wider variety of payloads — making the tried-and-tested Russian rocket more versatile than ever before.

It is Russia’s plan to complete the transition to the new wholly Russian Soyuz 2 rockets for ISS missions within the next three years.

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ISEE-3 engine burn tomorrow

3:46 pm

The private effort to resurrect the 1970’s sun-observing space probe ISEE-3’s will attempt its first full engine burn on July 8.

They hope to get the spacecraft back into one of the Earth-Sun Lagrangian points where it can be controlled reliably from Earth and can thus resume its study the solar wind, as originally designed. They have most of July to make the burn that will shift the orbit appropriately, so if this first attempt fails they can still make it happen.

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Angara to fly July 9?

7:32 pm

The first test flight of Russia’s new Angara rocket is now tentatively scheduled for July 9.

The story confirms that the problem was a faulty valve, which it appears they can replace at the spaceport, rather than return the rocket to the manufacturer. The story also had this line, which tells us that Russia is still struggling with quality control problems: “The valve’s malfunctioning was a result of sloppy assembly.”

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Corvette Museum preserves sinkhole

10:28 pm

Turning lemons into lemonade: The sinkhole that swallowed eight prized cars at the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky in February has become such an attraction that the museum intends to preserve it.

Attendance was up nearly 60 percent from March to the start of this week, compared to the year-ago period, museum officials said. Sign-ups for museum memberships are up sharply, as are merchandise and cafe sales at the museum. The museum sells sinkhole-related shirts, post cards and prints.

Museum board members considered three options for the sinkhole: fill it in, preserve the entire sinkhole or keep a portion of it. They opted to maintain about half the 40-foot-wide, 60-foot-deep sinkhole, Strode said. There’s a “strong probability” that one or two of the damaged cars will be put back in the hole, he said.

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Gigantic underground trampoline about to open

9:52 am

Want to have some fun? An amusement park in Northern Wales is about to open a gigantic underground trampoline ride to the public..

Battle Below is located deep within a 100 ft (30.5 m) deep and 60 ft (18.3 m) wide disused mine. The new site features three large trampolines stretching across the cave-like mine walls and are positioned at varying heights. The trampolines are linked together by 60 ft (18.3 m) slides and a spiraling staircase. Adding to the atmosphere, multi-colored LED lights have been installed throughout the mine, which project onto the walls of the cavern.

It took over a kilometer of nett and 4,500 man hours to complete the underground trampolines, which can accommodate 100 bouncing visitors at a time. Patrons are required to wear protective gear, including overalls and a helmet before gaining access to the site via an old mining train. They’re also encouraged to bounce as high as they dare, potentially reaching a maximum height of 80 ft (24 m).

Bounce Below opens on July 4, with tickets starting from £15 (about US$25) per person.

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