The return of vinyl records
The sales of vinyl records has been booming, exceeding numbers not seen in decades.
Tag: competition
Battle of the heavy lift rockets
Check out this very detailed and informative look at unstated competiton between NASA’s SLS rocket and SpaceX’s heavy lift rocket plans that are even more powerful than the Falcon Heavy.
Key quote: “It is clear SpaceX envisions a rocket far more powerful than even the fully evolved Block 2 SLS – a NASA rocket that isn’t set to be launched until the 2030s.”
The SpaceX rocket hinges on whether the company can successfully build its new Raptor engine. If they do, they will have their heavy lift rocket in the air and functioning far sooner than NASA, and for far far far less money.
The decision on manned spaceflight
The rumors are swirling. Today alone the news included three different articles about NASA’s upcoming decision to down-select to either one or two in its manned commercial crew program.
- Is this the space vehicle that will be NASA’s alternative to Russia’s ‘taxi service’ to orbit?
- First Class or Economy?—NASA’s countdown in the new space race [subscription required]
- Decision on commercial crew program likely to be made after Labor Day weekend
The third article above speculates that the decision will be made shortly after this weekend, maybe as soon as next week. It also outlines in nice detail the companies who are competing for the contract.
I strongly expect NASA to pick two companies, not one, as the agency has repeatedly said it wants to have redundancy and competition in manned space flight. To this I agree whole-heartedly. Right now, if I was a betting man (which I am not), I would pick SpaceX and Sierra Nevada as the two companies to get the nod.
If NASA only picks one company that I don’t think there is much doubt that it will be SpaceX.
And then again, government agencies, because of politics, have sometimes made some incredibly stupid decisions. For example, back in the 1970s the company that proposed the space shuttle was rejected for another big space company that had more political clout, which then turned around and essentially stole the first company’s designs to build the space shuttle from them. It just took longer and cost more.
Single sensor caused Falcon 9R failure
SpaceX has identified the cause of the failure of last week’s Falcon 9R test flight failure as a single sensor.
On the Falcon 9R, there was no backup for this sensor, so the rocket was required to self-destruct when the sensor failed. On a Falcon 9, other sensors would have picked up the slack and the rocket would have continued in flight.
That the sensor is used by the Falcon 9, however, explains why they have delayed the next commercial flight. They probably want to make sure they understand why the sensor failed so they can reduce the chance of failure on the Falcon 9.
A new SpaceShipTwo glide test flight
SpaceShipTwo successfully completed an unpowered glide test yesterday, testing the dynamics and plumbing of the ship’s new engines.
They pumped inert liquid through the plumbing to make sure it functioned in flight. The flight itself tested the balance and position of the new engine.
Assuming the results from these tests are good, expect powered flights quite soon.
Software error caused Soyuz/Galileo failure
A report today in Russia says that the investigation into the Soyuz launch failure last week that while the Russian Fregat upper stage fired correctly in attempting to place the two Galileo GPS satellites into orbit, its software was programmed for the wrong orbit.
SLS first launch officially delayed one year
In a press conference today to tout the development of the SLS rocket, NASA finally admitted that the rocket’s first flight has been delayed a year until 2018, as had been rumored for months.
The cost? $7 billion more from now until that first launch, a number that does not include the billions already spent. I once again note that the entire commercial program, both manned and cargo, has cost less than that, from start to finish, and includes the entire manifest of actual cargo flights to ISS.
Russian military abandons Rokot
Beginning in 2016, the Russian military will stop using its Rokot launcher, switching to Soyuz and Angara rockets instead.
The reason? Rokot relies on some imported parts, while Soyuz and Angara are build entirely in Russia.
It is interesting how fast the Russians are moving to stop their dependence on foreign parts, compared to the United States. Rather than try to build Russian-built parts for Rokot, they have taken the simplest and fastest approach and simply switched rockets.
In the U.S. Congress is instead demanding that a new rocket engine be build for Atlas 5 to replace the Russian engine, an expensive and time-consuming process. Wouldn’t it make more sense to say buy-buy to Atlas 5 and just switch to the Falcon 9?
A tugboat for satellites
The competition heats up: An Israeli start-up is building a satellite tugboat that could be used to move stranded satellites to their proper orbits.
The planned satellite, once built and deployed, should be able to rendezvous with in-orbit satellites and propel them into new orbits, give them course corrections, or steer them towards what’s known as the “graveyard orbit” – a decommissioned satellite graveyard some 300km above their usual height of 36,000 kilometers over the equator. This fuel saving can extend a communications satellite’s life.
The company says its tugboat design could be a possible solution to two stranded Galileo Project satellites, now in possibly unusable orbits following a launch malfunction over the weekend.
The spacecraft would use an ion engine for propulsion.
Antares to launch polar orbiting satellites?
The competition heats up: Orbital Sciences expects within a year to get government approval to use its Antares rocket to launch sun-synchronous satellites from its launch facility at Wallops Island, Virginia.
Currently Antares is used to launch cargo resupply missions to the international space station, whose orbital inclination — the angle at which it passes over the equator — of 51.6 degrees dictates that the rocket follow a southeasterly flight path over the Atlantic Ocean. To reach high-inclination orbits, the vehicle would presumably need to fly more directly toward the equator.
Among the details to be settled is the exact configuration of the Antares rocket Orbital would use to place satellites into sun-synchronous orbits, which are commonly used for Earth observation missions. The Antares rockets flown to date have been two-stage vehicles, but the company offers three-stage versions for missions with more stringent orbital-insertion accuracy or high-energy requirements.
The issue here is making sure the rocket stays clear of population areas during launch. An almost due south launch path, needed for polar orbit from Wallops Island, would pass this test.
SpaceX scrubs Wednesday commercial launch
SpaceX has scrubbed a commercial launch that had been scheduled for Wednesday.
No explanation was provided, but it is likely that the company and its commercial partners decided to give themselves more time to study the issues that caused the Falcon 9R test rocket to destroy itself on Friday.
A new Falcon 1 to compete against SpaceX
The competition heats up: A rocket launch start-up created by former SpaceX engineers seeks to build their own Falcon 1 rocket for the small satellite market.
Their rocket, called Firefly, will use a number of new and old technological ideas. The highlighted words in this paragraph, however, stood out to me the most:
Just as Firefly is drawing on a lot of government research in its aerospike technology, the company is using a key element of the SpaceX Merlin engine—the pintle injector—in its new engine’s combustion chamber. Markusic, who jumped ship from NASA to SpaceX after the agency sent him to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands to observe the first flight of the Falcon 1, says he started working on the technology—also used on the Apollo program’s lunar-descent engine —at SpaceX and when he was developing a liquid-fuel alternative to the hybrid engine used on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. [emphasis mine]
It only took one trip to see SpaceX in operation for this NASA engineer to become a former NASA engineer.