This NBC story tries very hard to help XCOR sell its Lynx suborbital space plane, but I found myself very unimpressed. To me the images suggested instead that little progress has occurred in recent months, and that the project has stalled.
I hope I am wrong, but this whole story reminded me strongly of many of Richard Branson’s efforts to sell Virgin Galactic, which have so far proven to be vastly overstated.
Two American astronauts today successfully completed the first American spacewalk this year on ISS.
The spacewalk, known as US EVA-27, was originally slated to occur in August, but was postponed due to concerns with the batteries in the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuits, which necessitated a delay while new Long Life Batteries (LLBs) were launched to the ISS aboard the recent CRS-4 Dragon and the Soyuz TMA-14M/40S on September 25, and subsequently installed into the suits.
The work done was mostly clean-up in preparation for a series of future spacewalks to reconfigure the American sections of ISS so that it can allow docking of two private manned capsules as well as two private cargo freighters.
The competition heats up: The next Cygnus cargo mission to ISS has now been scheduled to launch no earlier than October 24.
The date was determined by many factors, including the work schedule on ISS as well as other planned launches to ISS.
The competition heats up: They might fly as high, but the balloon company that is aiming to capture some of the space tourism market is a strong rival to Virgin Galactic and XCOR.
I post this story about SpaceX winning an award for its safety-in-design work mostly to illustrate again that, except for one lone commenter on my webpage, most of the aerospace industry recognizes the generally good work that SpaceX has been doing. Not only do their recognize it, they have found themselves struggling to meet the competitive challenge that SpaceX now represents, an effort that has been all to the good for everyone in the space industry.
The competition heats up: An inflatable module, built by the private company Bigelow for NASA, will be launched next year to ISS inside a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
Read that sentence again to savor the reality of two private companies both building and launching this addition to ISS.
The competition heats up: Because of the Russian situation in the Ukraine, Canada has rejected a launch contract with Russia and signed India to do the launch instead.
No word on the rocket Canda will use, but I suspect it will be India’s smaller rocket, tested and more dependable. Their geosynchronous rocket, GSLV, is still in the testing stage.
Scientists have now chosen four candidate landing sites for the European/Russian ExoMars rover set to be launched in 2018.
India and NASA have agreed to work together on several future science projects, including the construction of an Earth resources satellite and future Mars missions.
The space agencies of the two countries are going to set up a working group to plan this joint work.
The Japanese space agency has now promised to make sure that future launches of its new low cost Epsilon rocket will not leave its upper stages in orbit as space junk.
Epsilon’s first flight, which was a success, left two large objects — the rocket’s upper stage and a smaller post-boost stage — in an orbit with a perigee of some 800 kilometers, meaning neither will fall into the atmosphere for a century or longer. In the meantime, they will add to the population of orbiting garbage that poses a threat to active satellites traversing this orbit.
Japan has signed international agreements requiring them to not create space junk, so on future launches they are promising to make sure the upper stages are released in low enough orbits that they will quickly decay and burn up in the atmosphere.
The competition heats up: Orbital Sciences has announced that it will make a decision in November on replacing the Russian rocket engine that it uses in its Antares commercial rocket.
In a presentation at the 65th International Astronautical Congress here, Orbital Executive Vice President Frank Culbertson said the engine decision is linked to the company’s proposal for NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS)2 competition. NASA issued the request for proposals for CRS2 on Sept. 26, with responses due Nov. 14. “We’ll make sure we’ll have a decision on that before we submit the proposal,” Culbertson said when asked about the status of the engine decision.
Orbital has been weighing for several months a replacement for the AJ-26 engines that Antares currently uses. Those engines, provided by Aerojet Rocketdyne, are refurbished versions of Soviet-era NK-33 engines originally designed for the N-1 lunar rocket developed in the 1960s.
The company is considering several proposals, including one from ATK, which is in the process of merging with Orbital at this very moment.
The article also notes that Orbital recognizes that the use of Russian engines will likely work against them in the competition to win the next ISS cargo contract, and that if they don’t have a plan to replace those engines it is quite possible that NASA will go with a different company, such as Sierra Nevada, when it awards that contract.
As I said already, oh how I love competition.
The investigation into the failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket to place two European Galileo GPS satellites into the correct orbit has found that it was caused by the faulty installation of fuel lines on the Fregat upper stage.
The failure was as simple as clamping together a cold helium line with the hydrazine fuel line, causing the hydrazine to freeze long enough to upset the Fregat stage’s orientation and cause the two satellites’ release into an orbit that is both too low and in the wrong inclination, officials said. One official said the Euro-Russian board of inquiry into the failure discovered that one in four Fregat upper stages at prime contractor Moscow-based NPO Lavochkin had the same faulty installation. ,,,,
Government and officials said the commission is debating how to proceed now that it knows that, as expected, the Fregat failure was not one of design, but of assembly and quality control. [emphasis mine]
In other words, 1 in 4 Fregat upper stations were routinely assembled improperly and no one noticed. The investigation also found that this assembly problem had existed on several past launches but because of the orbital requirements it had fortunately not caused any problems.
I want to emphasize that these kind of sloppy assembly issues have been occurring at a number of different Russian factories and different Russian companies. It seems to be systemic to the entire Russian aerospace industry, and it also appears to be getting worse.
