A detailed look at the questions and rumors that continue to swirl around the engineering status of SpaceShipTwo.
If you want to get an idea why Virgin Galactic has not done any powered flights of SpaceShipTwo so far this summer you must read this article.
Japan’s fourth unmanned cargo freighter to ISS was successfully berthed to the station today.
Virgin Galactic did another glide test of SpaceShipTwo today.
I wonder, however, why there have been no powered flight tests so far this summer. After their first powered flight in May, it was expected they would begin a series of such flights, leading up to the first passenger flights at the end of the year. Instead, nothing.
This lack of flights feeds the long standing rumors that there are problems with SpaceShipTwo’s engine.
An update on Dawn in its journey from the asteroids Vesta to Ceres. Bottom line:
Dawn is 18 million kilometers (11 million miles) from Vesta and 50 million kilometers (31 million miles) from Ceres. It is also 3.47 AU (519 million kilometers or 322 million miles) from Earth, or 1,310 times as far as the moon and 3.42 times as far as the sun today. Radio signals, traveling at the universal limit of the speed of light, take 58 minutes to make the round trip.
Russia has announced that they will resume Proton rocket launches in September.
Though they have pinpointed the specific cause of the most recent launch failure, they have not yet announced any remedial actions. Note also the expected number of launches for the rest of the year, 4 to 5, is down from earlier expectations.
Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, an official in that country’s space program has been arrested for taking bribes.
An update on the effort to bring Kepler back to life.
Japan today successfully launched its fourth unmanned cargo freighter to ISS.
The rendezvous and berthing is scheduled for August 9. Besides supplies, the HTV-4 carries more equipment for NASA’s robotic refueling demonstration project on ISS.
The competition cools down: Armadillo Aerospace closes down.
It is important to recognize that developing a new private industry is not easy, and that many more companies will fail than succeed. That reality, however, does not prove that freedom and private enterprise are bad ideas, merely that they carry great risks.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has confirmed that it plans to begin vertical take-off and landing tests of a full scale Falcon 9 first stage.
The tests would be in New Mexico’s spaceport, and are essentially a scaled up version of the Grasshopper tests the company has been doing in Texas. It appears they are going to do these ground-up tests in conjunction with attempts on each future Falcon 9 launch to land the first stage.
The state of SLS construction.
The article is mostly focused on the engineering challenges of building a new rocket out of old pieces of the space shuttle. Kind of reminds me of Frankenstein. Nonetheless, I do get the impression for the first time that this heavy lift rocket will be built, and will fly at least once.
After that, however, I expect it to die from lack of funds. In fact, its history will probably parallel that of the Soviet Union’s Energia rocket, which flew twice, once to launch their shuttle copycat Buran and once to lift a failed payload whose purpose has never been clearly revealed. Soon thereafter came bankruptcy and the end of the Soviet Union, which couldn’t afford such a monstrosity. SLS will likely see a similar fate.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has signed a contract with MDA to launch all three of Canada’s next generation Radarsat satellites.
MDA’s willingness to go with SpaceX prior to the September 5 launch of its Cassiope satellite on the Falcon 9 illustrates again the confidence they have in SpaceX. At the same time, this contract is for launches expected to occur around 2018, which is a long way away. Much can happen till then, including the possibility that SpaceX will go bust.
In other words, right now it is the successful launch of Falcon 9 that is of significance, not these new contracts. Only if those launches succeed will these contracts then become really significant.
On Friday an astronaut on ISS controlled and steered a rover on Earth.
While zipping around Earth several hundred miles above the planet’s surface, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano drove a 220-pound (100 kilograms) rover across a moon-mimicking landscape here at NASA’s Ames Research Center, even ordering the robot to deploy a simulated film-based radio telescope antenna.
