The competition heats up: Orbital Sciences has now set April 16-18 as the launch window for its first test launch of its new Antares rocket.
Building a lunar base by baking lunar dust and shaping it with a 3D printer.
A fuel line for the Titan missile.
Last week my oldest friend Lloyd and his wife Denise came to visit Diane and I here in Tucson. One of Lloyd’s requests was to visit the Tucson Missile Museum. This museum is built at the site of one of the now disabled missile silos built in the 1960s as a means for launching nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. Fifty-four silos total had been built and operated, with eighteen of those silos scattered around the Tucson, Arizona area. When the U.S. signed a nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union in the 1980s these silos were then shut down and sold. Some became private residences. Others remain buried and abandoned.
One silo, however, was kept as intact as allowed by treaty and made into a museum in order to preserve this artifact of history. Because Diane and I happen to know Chuck Penson, the archivist at the museum, we were able to arrange an augmented tour of the facility. Below are some of my pictures as Chuck took us down into the deepest bowels of the silo.
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The return today of three astronauts from ISS has been delayed due to an ice storm in Russia.
For the first time in 25 years the U.S. has begun producing plutonium, to be used as a power source for future planetary space missions.
Europe today inked a partnership deal with Russia for its two spacecraft ExoMars mission, planned to launch in 2016 and 2018.
Russia essentially replaces the United States, which backed out of the deal last year when the Obama administration eliminated the funding for most of NASA’s planetary program.
Astronomers today celebrate the official turning-on of ALMA, the world’s largest telescope.
ALMA is an array of 66 dishes tuned to wavelengths in the millimeter to submillimeter range of the electromagnetic spectrum, between the infrared and radio frequencies.
The competition heats up: China says it will by 2015 do a re-entry test of the spacecraft it will use to return a lunar sample from the Moon by 2020..
The competition heats up: Boeing is considering building a civilian version of the X-37B mini-shuttle.
The radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power plant failure in Japan has turned out to be less of a problem than predicted.
[O]utside the immediate area of Fukushima, this is hardly a problem at all. Although the crippled nuclear reactors themselves still pose a danger, no one, including personnel who worked in the buildings, died from radiation exposure. Most experts agree that future health risks from the released radiation, notably radioactive iodine-131 and cesiums-134 and – 137, are extremely small and likely to be undetectable. Even considering the upper boundary of estimated effects, there is unlikely to be any detectable increase in cancers in Japan, Asia or the world except close to the facility, according to a World Health Organization report. There will almost certainly be no increase in birth defects or genetic abnormalities from radiation.
Even in the most contaminated areas, any increase in cancer risk will be small. For example, a male exposed at age 1 has his lifetime cancer risk increase from 43 percent to 44 percent. Those exposed at 10 or 20 face even smaller increases in risk — similar to what comes from having a whole-body computer tomography scan or living for 12 to 25 years in Denver amid background radiation in the Rocky Mountains.
The entire article is worth reading, as it outlines in detail the less than deadly consequences of both Fukushima and Chernobyl. This is the kind of information we should use to rationally decide whether we want to build more nuclear power planets.
Seven sound recordings made before Thomas Edison.
The competition heats up: Grasshopper flies again, but even higher.
SpaceX’s Grasshopper doubled its highest leap to date to rise 24 stories or 80.1 meters (262.8 feet) today, hovering for approximately 34 seconds and landing safely using closed loop thrust vector and throttle control. Grasshopper touched down with its most accurate precision thus far on the centermost part of the launch pad. At touchdown, the thrust to weight ratio of the vehicle was greater than one, proving a key landing algorithm for Falcon 9.
A small Russian satellite has been struck and damaged by space junk created from a 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test.
An evening pause: As Arthur Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
As a precaution engineers have temporarily shut Curiosity down to protect it from an oncoming solar flare.
They have done this in conjunction with the rover’s recent computer memory problem.
For the past two years NASA and JPL have been under heavy hacker attack from China, according to NASA’s inspector general.
The competition heats up: Scaled Composites has done its first test firing of SpaceShipTwo’s engine.
No word yet on the test result, unfortunately.
Curiosity is easing out of safe mode as engineers switch computers.
New research concludes that it was a static electric spark that set fire to the Hindenberg in 1937.
Dragon has successfully berthed with ISS.
The naysayers will focus on the thruster problems on Friday. The yaysayers will focus on the fix and berthing today. The bottom line, however, is that this mission once again proves that SpaceX is a real player in the space business. Every other company has to match its achievements, most especially in price. The result will be the eventually lowering in the cost to low Earth orbit, which will then make all things possible.
And in fact, we are already seeing this, with the appearance of many new private companies or organizations, proposing all sorts of new space efforts, such as mining asteroids or sending people to Mars. The lower cost allows dreamers to consider their wild new ideas more doable. And they then go ahead and try to do it.
The competition heats up: After reviewing the results from the Antares hot fire on February 22, Orbital Sciences is now planning the first launch of the Antares rocket in April.
SpaceX has been given the go-ahead to have the Dragon capsule rendezvous with ISS on Sunday.
SpaceX has announced that they now have all of Dragon’s thrusters operating and are go for docking with ISS.
They have not announced when the docking will occur, but with the solar panels operating the capsule can function in orbit for a considerable time, giving them breathing room. And time will be necessary as both NASA and the Russians are nervous about letting any spacecraft approach ISS and will want a good number of tests to make sure all is well. The Russians are especially nervous, since they had the unfortunate experience of several collisions when they operated their space station Mir.
Dragon’s docking with ISS will not happen on Saturday as originally scheduled due to the problems with the capsule’s thrusters.
Corrupt memory in Curiosity’s A computer system has forced engineers to switch to the rover’s back-up computer.
The problem came to light Wednesday morning on Mars when flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., noticed what appeared to be memory corruption in the computer’s solid-state memory system. The flight software was not recording new data or playing back data already recorded. Instead, it was only sending back real-time telemetry. Later in the day, during a communications session using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, telemetry from Curiosity indicated the corrupted memory was still present. In addition, Cook said, flight controllers saw the computer had not completed several pre-planned activities.
At that point, the computer was expected to put itself to sleep for an hour or so and then to wake up for a communications session with NASA’s Odyssey orbiter. “It was after that second overflight that we got some more information saying hey, the memory is still corrupted and oh by the way, I didn’t go to sleep when I was supposed to, I stayed awake,” Cook said.
The next communications session came late Wednesday night Earth time, between 10:30 p.m. and midnight at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The rover’s computer was still awake and engineers decided to switch over to the B-side system.
The engineers suspect the problem was caused by a cosmic ray hit, and can be fixed by rebooting the computer.
Bad news: After successfully reaching orbit, there appears to be a problem with the Dragon capsule.
They have not yet released any information about what happened. The link above says that it appears to be related with the communications link, but NASA and SpaceX have as yet released no information other than to say they will hold a press conference in a few hours.
UPDATE: it appears the problem is with Dragon’s thrusters. Engineers have delayed the deployment the capsule’s solar panels while they try to get the thrusters activated. See the second link above.
The competition heats up: China’s next manned mission is now set for this summer.
The Shenzhou 10 spacecraft will take flight sometime between June and August, the program said in a statement. It will deliver its crew to the Tiangong 1, where it will spend two weeks conducting tests of the station’s docking system and its systems for supporting life and carrying out scientific work.
The competition heats up: Dennis Tito, the world’s first space tourist, today announced a private effort to fly the first-ever manned flight around Mars and do it by 2018.
The mission would send a married couple on the 501 day mission to do a fly-by of the red planet and then return to Earth.
An investigation of the Sea Launch launch failure on February 2 has pinpointed the failure to faulty parts made in the Ukraine.
The article is interesting in that it seems to reveal some friction between Russia and Ukraine, with the investigators making it a point to blame the Ukrainian components while specifically saying that “there was nothing wrong with the Russian-made equipment.”
