The first free flying glide test of the Dream Chaser test vehicle is only days away.
The test had been delayed because of the government shutdown.
Want a rocket to launch your satellite into orbit. Orbital Sciences has one.
The article essentially outlines the marketing push Orbital is doing to get additional commercial contracts for its Antares rocket.
The Twitter comment of the day: “More people have applied to live on Mars than have signed up for Obamacare.”
I almost never look at Twitter comments, but this one was too good to pass up.
The next test flight of a version of SpaceX’s Grasshopper could occur in New Mexico in December.
The story says this test will be with Grasshopper, but I think that is a mistake. Unless SpaceX is using this name for all its vertical landing test vehicles, the company had said the test vehicle to fly in New Mexico would be a full scale Falcon 9 first stage, with nine Merlin engines, not one as has Grasshopper.
Cygnus will be de-orbited one day early, on October 23.
At the same time, preparations move forward for the second Cygnus flight in December, which will be the first operational flight. This quote is interesting:
Neither Orbital nor the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority got locked out of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport as a result of the shutdown, meaning that preparations for the tentative December launch continued while more than 95 percent of NASA’s roughly 18,000 civil servants were on furlough.
Suggests again how unessential a good percentage of NASA’s employees really are. They might be great engineers, but they are apparently wasting their talents at NASA doing unnecessary make-work.
The winners of the “What would you send to ISS?” contest have been announced.
The contest was asking for proposals from the public for science research. Though the winner’s proposal, imaging the auroras in real time, is interesting, I think the runner-up who proposed building a nanosat factory on ISS to be far more exciting.
A new woman’s land speed record was set this week.
Back in 1965, Lee Breedlove set the women’s land speed record on Utah’s Salt Lake Flats with an average speed of 308.51 mph (496.49 km/h) over four runs. That record stood for 48 years until this month, when Jessi Combs smashed it in her 52,000 hp North American Eagle Supersonic Speed Challenger with a speed of 392.954 mph (632.39 km/h).
I am puzzled why the gender matters in driving these high speed vehicles.
The government shutdown has put flight testing of Dream Chaser on hold.
It appears that the decision to do these flight tests at Dryden is the problem. As a NASA facility, it has been shut down. If the flight tests had instead been arranged at a private facility, Dream Chaser could still be flying.
The test pilots who have been flying SpaceShipTwo report on their work at a test pilot symposium.
Lots of interesting engineering details about the ship’s flight capabilities, including one near disaster that was saved by SpaceShipTwo’s robust design. No details, however, on the state of the ship’s engine, or when further test flights at higher and higher altitudes will be attempted.
Posted from home, Tucson, Arizona.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has revised the schedule for its next three launches, pushing back two weeks so engineers can review issues with the Falcon 9 upper stage engine.
The debut launch of the upgraded Falcon 9 successfully deployed Canada’s Cassiope spacecraft into orbit on September 29. However, after safely deploying its payloads, the upper stage was then set to restart its Merlin VacD engine for a second burn related to SpaceX’s ambitions to create a fully reusable launch system. An anomaly with the restart held no mission impact, but the company’s CEO and chief designer, Elon Musk, did note they expected to implement corrective actions ahead of the next launch. “In the case of the upper stage relight, we initiated relight and the system encountered an anomaly and did not complete the relight. We believe understand what that issue is and should have it addressed in time for the next flight of Falcon 9,” he noted. “We essentially saw the engine initiate ignition. get up to about 400 psi and then it encountered a condition that it didn’t like. We have all of the data from the restart, so I am confident that we will be able to sort it out and address it before the next flight. We just have to iron out some slight differences of it operating in vacuum.”
I find Musk’s vague terminology about the engine issue to be interesting. I wonder if the “condition” the engine “didn’t like” was when the engine exploded, as some have suggested. (I personally am skeptical the engine exploded, however, as such a failure would probably require a much longer delay to deal with.)
Either way, the next few months should be a busy time for commercial space. Not only does SpaceX have two major commercial launches and a Dragon mission to ISS, Orbital Sciences has its next Cygnus cargo mission and Virgin Galactic claims it will be ready to fly SpaceShipTwo with passengers.
Posted on the road heading into the empty wilds of west Texas.
The competition heats up: Jeff Bezos reveals some details about the goals of his space company, Blue Origin.
Blue Origin is now working on its third version of the New Shepard, which is designed to take everyday people on suborbital journeys. Bezos said that he’s hopeful that this will be the last iteration, and he wants to see the next vehicle ready for commercial operation. “I’m very optimistic about that,” he said. Bezos didn’t give any specific timetables. However, he did say that Blue Origin’s orbital vehicle, designed to send astronauts to the International Space Station and elsewhere, will be tested by 2018. Eventually, the goal is to let anyone fly up into space safely at reasonable prices.
Not a lot of details, but previously we knew practically nothing. That the present ship is being designed for suborbital tourist flights makes it a direct competitor of Virgin Galactic and XCOR. And considering the problems that Virgin Galactic has with SpaceShipTwo, and that XCOR doesn’t have the big bucks of Bezos, Blue Origin might actually be in the lead in the race to put the first tourists in space.
Except for a troublesome fan, the first Cygnus cargo capsule to dock with ISS is performing perfectly.
The fan has been a minor issue. The astronauts have simply turned it off periodically when it started to act up. What is really important is this:
The next Cygnus – along with its Antares launch vehicle – is already being processed at Orbital’s Wallops facility, with a target launch date of December 15, with an available launch window through to December 21.
The Russian government today replaced the head of its space agency.
This is part of the continuing shake-up of the Russian space industry following a series of launch failures over the past three years.
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.
The shake-up in the Russian space bureaucracy continues.
The government is consolidating the different aerospace companies created after the fall of the Soviet Union as well as replacing the head of Roskomos, the Russian space agency.
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.
SpaceX successfully launched its upgraded Falcon 9 rocket today, putting its first commercial payload into orbit.
They also attempted to restart both the first and second stages after separation to test the possibility of eventually getting them back to Earth undamaged.
Two post-mission burns of the boost stage were attempted. The first, involving three of the rocket’s nine first-stage Merlin 1D engines, was successful in slowing its descent into the atmosphere. But SpaceX was unable to carry out a second burn of a single engine after the stage went into a spin and ran out of fuel due to what Musk described as a centrifuge effect. The second burn was intended to further slow the first stage’s descent, and because it did not take place as planned, the stage hit the ocean hard, Musk said. Parts of the first stage had been recovered, he added.
The restart of the second stage never occurred due to what Elon Musk called “minor” issues.
The successes today of both Falcon 9 and Cygnus once again demonstrate the advantages of allowing private companies the freedom to design and build rockets they then own and can sell on the open market. The cost to get these space vehicles built was far lower than anything NASA has built in decades, and both got finished much faster as well.
Getting into space can only get cheaper and faster from here.
Cygnus was successfully berthed with ISS early Sunday morning.
I just got back from a long day hike, so I am now catching up on what was apparently a very good day for commercial space.
The competition heats up: Japan’s H-2A rocket, built by Mitsubishi, has won its first commercial contract.
This is a surprise, as Japan has tried for years to sell the H-2A to commercial satellite carriers, with no success. That they have finally succeeded suggests to me that the demand for launch services is increasing, and there is room for more companies to provide the service.
