The competition heats up: The first test flight of India’s prototype scaled-down version of a reusable spaceplane is expected by late July or early August at the latest.
It appears the Modi government is accelerating development of this mini-shuttle, which is essentially India’s version of Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser. If they build it first, it will mean they will have the chance to grab the business that Sierra Nevada has been hoping to grab.
In the heat of competition: A variety of unnamed sources are saying that Virgin Galactic’s new SpaceShipTwo will will likely not fly for years.
This quote is especially telling:
As to when that commercial service might actually be ready, one former Virgin Galactic employee told Newsnight: “I can’t say whether it will be two years or whether it will be five… They have a huge, huge, way to go.”
So is this quote from Doug Messier, quoted in the article:
“This program’s claimed four lives already and it’s had four powered flights and they haven’t gotten anywhere near space in 10 years.”
When summed up, as Messier does, Virgin Galactic’s effort sure sounds disappointing, doesn’t it?
The competition heats up: Airbus Safran have come to an agreement with the European Space Agency on building Ariane 6, Europe’s next commercial rocket.
The key part of the deal is that ESA and Arianespace will be ceding ownership of the rocket to Airbus Safran.
The French government is likely to approve the sale of CNES’s 34-percent stake in the Evry, France-based Arianespace launch service provider to Airbus Safran Launchers at about the same time as the Ariane 6 development contract is signed.
With that sale, Airbus Safran will control Arianespace, which means they will also own the rocket they are building for Arianespace. This is fundamentally different than the situation with Ariane 5, which Airbus built for an Arianespace owned and run by the many-headed ESA. The result was a bloated government-run operation that never made a profit.
Now Airbus will own it instead. They have already indicated that they will trim the costs at Arianespace. More importantly, with ownership will come the freedom to compete effectively in the much more competitive launch market created by the arrival of SpaceX. No need to get permission from ESA to do things.
The Russian investigation into the latest Proton rocket has concluded that the failure was caused by a design failure in the rocket’s third stage.
While it is always possible for new design issues to be discovered, I wonder why this problem hadn’t been noticed in the decades prior to 2010, when the Proton began to have repeated failures.
The competition heats up? Virgin Galactic’s replacement SpaceShipTwo has successfully lowered its landing gear for the first time.
I wish them luck, but they will have to do a lot more before I will believe them when they say they are making progress.
The competition heats up: An engine that Russia has developed for its Angara rocket has now been tested and is ready for shipment to the U.S. for use in the first stage of Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket.
This new engine will replace the refurbished Soviet-era engines Antares had been using previously that had caused the October launch failure. Note also that since Antares is not a military rocket, it does not fall under the Congressional ban for Russian engines that limits their use on ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket. As the article notes,
On Jan. 16, 2015, RKK Energia, parent company of NPO Energomash, announced that it had reached an agreement with the American company Orbital Sciences Corporation, OSC, on the export of RD-181 engines for the first stage of the Antares rocket, thus replacing the NK-33 engines previously used on the launcher. The contract, worth around $1 billion, was actually signed and ratified by the Russian government in December 2014. According to the document, a total of 60 RD-181 engines would be delivered to OSC beginning in June 2015.
This deal means that Antares will likely be back in business soon, though it will still be dependent on Russian-built equipment, which carries its own risks. It also means that Orbital ATK will not be able to sell Antares to the U.S. military, limiting its marketability.
A British businessman has purchased a discarded Russian rocket and installed it in his garden as decoration.
Almost 40ft long and weighing five tonne, the rocket was first flown in 1991 after being built by the Russians in collaboration with NASA at a cost $10 million. For ten years it held the record for the fastest ever made-made machine before it was jettisoned as archaic.
Somehow it ended up at a car auction at South Marston where it was spotted by Mr Sweet while checking out vintage motors. Mr Sweet, who runs the Cirencester-based computer company Zycko, said: “I saw it for sale at a car auction and decided to buy it, not really knowing what I was going to do with it.”
I am curious how the rocket had ended up being owned and offered for sale by a UK company that “specializes in car restorations.” I also wonder if this might be a major new profit center for the struggling Russian rocket industry.
The three Russian technicians and their supervisor whose sloppy work caused the spectacular 2013 crash of a Proton rocket immediately after launch have now been indicted on criminal charges and will face trial.
According to investigators, Grishin, Nikolayev and Gudkova in 2011 were tasked with installing the angular rate sensors on the Proton rocket that are responsible for yaw control. “As a result of their violation of technical discipline envisaged by engineering and technological documentation, these sensors were installed incorrectly / at 180 degrees from their correct position/,” Markin said.
The installation error accounted for the vehicle’s wild trajectory, causing its crash and destruction. During the investigation, Grishin and Nikolayev partly admitted their guilt in committing the crime, he said.
In his turn, Nasibulin guided by the fact that over a long time no violations had been found during the installation process and also amid the job cuts withdrew the control operation from a respective list. He did not monitor the process and the sensors were installed without the due control.
Note that they didn’t sabotage anything intentionally. They only did bad work. In the U.S. such incompetence would certainly get them fired, but no one would dream of prosecuting them under these circumstances. It appears that Putin’s government has decided to make them scapegoats and an example to everyone else: Do your work right or else!
Along these lines, Russian government officials have also indicated they are considering imposing fines on manufacturers for any future failures or delays.
Both the criminal indictments and the fines would surely work to prevent further disasters. They will also work very effectively in preventing any risk-taking or innovation from anyone. Who wants to build something new and untested if there is a strong possibility its failure will get you in prison?
Do not expect much creativity from the Russian aerospace industry in the coming years.
Astronauts and ground controllers today successfully used the space station’s robot arm to relocate one of the station’s modules to a different port in order to facilitate the future arrival of two American cargo freighters and two American manned ferries.
The link provides a very detailed explanation of what was done and why.
The Planetary Society’s LightSail solar sail test mission, launched as a secondary payload on last week’s Atlas 5 X-37B launch, has fallen silent because of a software problem.
The communications problem occurred before the mission could achieve its main engineering goal of testing the deployment of the solar sail. They still hope to regain communications, but time is limited as the cubesat is in a low orbit that will decade relatively quickly.
The competition heats up: The Air Force on Tuesday certified SpaceX to permit it to bid and launch military payloads.
This puts big pressure on ULA, which no longer has a monopoly on all military launches. In order to gain contracts they are going to have to compete, lowering their prices to match SpaceX’s.
The inventor of a hoverboard designed to be flown by an individual standing on the board has set a new world record, flying more than 900 feet.
Canadian inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru traveled a distance of 275.9 m (905.2 ft) on a propeller-based hoverboard he created himself. The machine was reportedly designed and built over the course of 12 months. “I wanted to showcase that a stable flight can be achieved on a hoverboard and a human could stand and control with their feet,” Duru is quoted as saying to Guinness World Records, which has recognized the feat.
Video of the flight is below the fold. It appears he essentially scaled up a drone to carry human weight.
» Read more
In anticipation of the arrival of privately-built manned capsules, NASA will continue the rearrangement of its modules on ISS on Wednesday.
NASA intends to televise the event, if you wish to watch.
Internal disagreements appear to be hampering the investigation into the Progress launch failure in late April.
The investigation had been leaning to pinning the failure on the disintegration of the Soyuz third stage oxygen tank. Others, however, are now claiming that the disintegration itself was caused by an improper separation of Progress from the rocket. The result is that the investigation has delayed the release of its findings.
The competition heats up: The United Arab Emirates (UAE), in conjunction with its goal to send an unmanned probe to Mars, has announced the formation of its own NASA-like space agency.
Reading the long official press announcement at the link above will make you realize that a lot of this is public relations fluff being pushed by the UAE’s sheiks. Stripping that away, what I find left is mostly a program to educate students.
This political report on the annual Southern Republican Leadership Conference and its response to the speeches of a large number of the Republican presidential candidates provides a very good overview of the state of the campaign, and who is really in front.
Not surprising to me, Walker is considered the front runner, with Cruz and Paul in the second tier (best indicated by how often both were attacked by the other candidates).
A slew of stories in the Russian press today illustrate again the deeply ingrained problems that country has, both in corruption and in its ability to produce a quality product.
The last story describes the overall scale of the corruption, which is not confined just to the space sector, but can be found in many industries. The aerospace industry just happens to be the most visible outside Russia, and thus the most embarrassing. Yet,
» Read more
Hat tip Tom Wilson.
The competition heats up: The suborbital space tourism company XCOR has received an influx of capital from a Chinese venture capital firm.
The amount was not disclosed, but the infusion of cash can only help the company move forward on its effort to build a suborbital reusable space plane for carrying tourists.
The competition heats up: Japan has decided to upgrade its HTV cargo freighter to ISS by cutting its weight by 30% and reducing the cost to build it by half.
Without doubt the success of the U.S. in quickly building two private and relatively inexpensive freighters, Dragon and Cygnus, has influenced this decision. The managers in Japan have realized that the HTV is not efficient and could be streamlined, and they are trying now to do it.
Isn’t competition a wonderful thing?
