A new water supplier has stepped forward to help fill SpaceX’s gigantic water needs at its proposed Texas spaceport.
An earlier news story had noted the insufficient water capacity in Brownsville compared to the amount of water SpaceX would need for its rocket launches. This new report illustrates how competition and the potential for profits always seems to solve these kinds of problems.
With the impending first test launch of its new Angara rocket and the construction of its new spaceport in Vostochny on-going, Russia has begun its withdrawal from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
Zenit-M rocket launching complex will become Kazakhstan’s property on January 1, 2015, Tengrinews correspondent reported from yesterday’s government meeting in the lower chamber of the Parliament. The announcement was made by the Chairman of the National Space Agency KazCosmos Talgat Mussabayev. “We have already approved the list of facilities of Zenit-M launching site that will be excluded from the lease agreement with Russia, and have obtained the technical and administrative documents from Russia that Kazakhstan needs to operate Baiterek complex. Withdrawal of Zenit-M facilities from the Russian lease agreement and their transfer to Kazakhstan is scheduled for January 2015,” Musabayev said.
In order to ensure proper transfer of the facilities and continue their operation afterword, 49 Kazakh experts are undergoing a practical training in maintenance and operation of Zenit-M site facilities. Their training will be completed before the end of the year.
Originally financed and built as an Angara launchpad in a partnership between Russia and Kazakhstan, the Russians backed out, deciding instead to keep Angara launches entirely in Russia at Vostochny while ceasing its participation in the Ukrainian-built Zenit rocket. Moreover, when Angara goes into operation, both the story above as well as this story suggest they will then cease Proton launches at Baikonur as well.
The former bookkeeper at a British suborbital rocket company has been jailed for stealing almost two hundred thousand pounds from the company.
The company presently makes its money flying large size model rockets in educational venues as it works to develop suborbital craft. The embezzlement, which lasted six years, apparently almost bankrupted it.
The competition heats up: The new prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, will watch the next commercial launch of his country’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV)
Modi would be called a tea party candidate in the U.S. He is very pro-capitalism and business. And though he has said he is very pro-space, I do wonder what he thinks of the commercial efforts of India’s space agency ISRO. ISRO is developing its rockets in an effort to capture international market share. It is as if NASA built the Falcon 9 and was trying to make money selling its use to private satellite companies.
I would not be surprised if Modi decides eventually to privatize this operation, taking the rocket development and commercial launches out of the hands of the government.
The competition heats up: Worldview has successfully completed the first unmanned test flight of its stratospheric passenger balloon.
The flight brought a remote-controlled, balloon-borne craft up to a height of 120,000 feet (36.5 kilometers) and back down to 50,000 feet (15 kilometers). Then the craft was cut loose from the balloon and guided to a soft landing using an innovative parafoil.
The test over Roswell, New Mexico, marked a world record for the highest parafoil flight, World View said.
World View’s Tycho prototype is just one-tenth the size of the pressurized capsule that the Arizona-based company plans to build for its Voyager tours. But Tycho’s maiden voyage put the system’s aerodynamics to a valuable initial test, said Taber MacCallum, who is World View’s co-founder and chief technology officer (as well as Poynter’s husband).
While these balloon tourist flights won’t go as high as the suborbital flights planned by Virgin Galactic, XCOR, and others, they will last far far longer and cost a third the price. They have already sold out their first three flights.
Turf war in Russia: The Russian space agency has disavowed any plans to send two tourists around the Moon in a Soyuz capsule.
Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, will not be involved in a plan to send two space tourists on a flight around the Moon and was not consulted about the project, the federal space agency said.
The mission, hatched by U.S.-based space tourism firm Space Adventures and a major Russian spacecraft manufacturer, Energia Rocket and Space Corporation, would see two space tourists travel to the Moon aboard a modified Russian Soyuz spacecraft by 2017. However, Roscosmos was kept out of the loop on the plan.
The organizers “could have consulted with us before making such loud announcements,” said Denis Lyskov, Roscosmos’s deputy chief in charge of piloted flights, Izvestia reported Monday. “We are not participating in the moon project, we are not planning to modernize the Soyuz,” Lyskov was quoted as saying.
Considering the recent power play by the Russian government to grab back full control over Russia’s aerospace industry, this disavowal does not bode well for the private effort. If the government opposes the flight, it will be very difficult for Energia to go forward.
Orbital Sciences has delayed its next Cygnus cargo launch to ISS until July 10 at the earliest.
This delay is in connection with their on-going investigation into the failure of a Russian engine during testing, the same kind of engine used by the Antares rocket.
SpaceX has delayed its Falcon 9 Orbcomm launch until July.
“SpaceX is taking a closer look at a potential issue identified while conducting pre-flight checkouts during (Sunday’s) countdown,” the company said in statement posted on its website on Monday. “SpaceX will stand down Tuesday while our engineering teams evaluate further,” it said.
Taking into account a previously scheduled maintenance period for the Eastern Test Range, which supports launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the earliest SpaceX expects to be able to fly is the first week of July.
The willingness of SpaceX to address technical issues rather than push for launch continues to recommend them to me, especially as the company also has a record of producing what it promises within a remarkably fast schedule.
The history and origin of Russia’s new Angara rocket.
A fascinating read, as it gives some of the office politics and back-fighting that surrounded the decision to pick the builder of this new rocket. For example, when the government picked the company Khrunichev to build the rocket,
[C]ritics charged that traditional Russian nepotism had played a role — at the time, a daughter and the son and law of the Russian president Boris Yeltsin worked for Khrunichev. As a consolation prize, RKK Energia was awarded the development of the second stage for the Angara rocket.
Later, in a move reminiscent to the space shuttle’s history (where the winning contractor eventually ended up using the basic design of their losing competitor), Khrunichev dumped the design they had used to win the contract and switched over to something almost identical to what Energia had proposed. And in the process, they cut Energia out of the deal entirely.
Engineers have now developed techniques to a produce materials as light as aerogel but many times stronger.
Aerogels are incredibly light, so light that the record holder, aerographene, boasts a density of just 0.16 mg/cm3. Currently, aerogels are used for insulation, tennis racquets, as a means of controlling oil spills, and were used on the NASA Stardust mission to collect samples from a comet’s tail. Unfortunately, despite its seemingly ephemeral nature, its very much a solid and will shatter if pressed hard enough, so its use is limited.
The new materials developed by the MIT/LLNL team aren’t aerogels, but are metamaterials. That is, artificial materials with properties that aren’t found in nature. The idea is to structure it, so that it has the lightness of aerogel, but is much stronger. The strength of the new materials comes from their geometric structure, not their chemical composition.
The technique used to make these materials is a variation of 3D printing, but at molecular scales.
If this works, the weight of rockets and spaceships is going to drop significantly, making access to space far less expensive. It will also make it possible for a far less power rocket to put into orbit far bigger payloads.
SpaceX now says that Tuesday will be the earliest it will try again to launch six Orbcomm satellites on its Falcon 9 rocket.
There were attempts to launch both on Saturday and Sunday, with weather scrubbing the first and an unspecified technical problem scrubbing the second.
SpaceX scrubbed its Falcon 9 commercial launch of six Orbcomm satellites tonight because of an issue with the rocket’s second stage.
The next launch opportunity is Saturday evening, and based on other sources it sounds like they hope to fly then.
