Using the spacecraft’s last drops of fuel, engineers are attempting to aim Deep Impact to a 2020 rendezvous with near Earth asteroid 2002 GT.
Virgin Galactic isn’t the only one building a suborbital spaceplane: Europe plans to test fly its own suborbital spaceship in 2014.
Richard Branson talks to the Wall Street Journal about space.
Mr. Branson is still radiating enthusiasm. “We’ve got just short of 500 people now signed up to go, which is actually more people than have been up to space in the history of space travel, and we hope to put those up in our first year of operation,” he says, predicting the first commercial flight by “about next Christmas,” although he acknowledges that there have been many delays.
A Russian Soyuz rocket has completed its second launch from French Guiana, carrying six military satellites into orbit.
Good news: The Fukushima nuclear reactor has reached the state of cold shutdown.
This means that the reactor core has cooled enough that there is no need to recirculate the water to keep the fuel cool. However, because the reactor continues to leak that water recirculation is still necessary, and will be for years.
As is typical of many modern journalists, the article above is also an unstated editorial both hostile to nuclear energy as well as private enterprise, best shown by the article’s concluding paragraph:
Meanwhile, the Japanese public and many of its politicians remained deeply mistrustful of the situation at Fukushima. In this week’s issue of Nature, two members of the Japanese parliament call for nationalization of the Fukushima Plant, to allow scientists and engineers to investigate exactly what happened inside the reactors, and to reassure the public that the decommissioning will be done with their interests at heart. Regardless of whether you agree with the authors, nationalization seems almost inevitable. The lengthy decommissioning process that will follow this cold shutdown, and the enormous cost involved, make it a job for a government, not a corporation. [emphasis mine]
First, he has no idea what the Japanese public thinks of this situation. Second, there is no evidence that the government could do this job better than the company that runs the reactor. Both conclusions are mere opinion, inserted inappropriately in a news article without any supporting proofs.
At approximately 6:00 pm, Lt Col Rankin concluded that his aircraft was unrecoverable and pulled hard on his eject handles. An explosive charge propelled him from the cockpit into the atmosphere with sufficient force to rip his left glove from his hand, scattering his canopy, pilot seat, and other plane-related debris into the sky. Bill Rankin had spent a fair amount of time skydiving in his career—both premeditated and otherwise—but this particular dive would be unlike any that he or any living person had experienced before.
Or since.
Alan Boyle describes the details behind NASA’s decision to go with simpler contracting for future commercial rocket contracts.
If you read the article, you’ll notice that the opposition to this decision comes from a Congressman and the GAO. In both cases they cite safety as an issue, as is by some magic giving NASA a lot of bureaucratic approval rights on every design is going to make the rockets or capsules safer. All this will really do is slow things down, increase costs, and possibly increase risks as the companies will no longer have as many resources to focus on design issues. Instead, they will have to spend a fortune pleasing NASA bureaucrats.
And yes, I call them bureaucrats. Any NASA engineer who spends his or her time looking over the shoulder of another engineer — who is doing the real design work — is nothing more than a bureaucrat. Better to quit NASA and get a job with one of these new companies where you can do some real work.
Good news: NASA has decided to stick with essentially the same contracting arrangement it used for the SpaceX and Orbital Sciences cargo deals to ISS in its future commercial crew and cargo contracts.
This suggests that the NASA bureaucracy, which had wanted more control of the new commercial companies by using a more restrictive contract arrangement, has lost. However, we don’t yet have the details on how the new contracts will be administrated, and as always, the devil is in the details.
FAA tests have found that LightSquared’s broadband system interferes with flight safety systems.
These results are in addition to the tests that found LightSquared interferes with 75% of all GPS units.
China’s Tiangong-1 space station today started its first planned monthly cabin check to test the status of the station’s atmosphere.
LightSquared expresses outrage at leaked GPS test report.
It is interesting that they don’t seem to be complaining about the results, which showed that their system interferes badly with GPS. With the facts and the law against them, it appears instead they are now pounding the table.
R.I.P.: Russian space engineer Boris Chertok has died at 99.
Scientists have built the world’s smallest steam engine, only a few thousandths of a millimeter wide.
Superstars of space: Rutan, Allen, Musk, and Griffin have teamed up to develop an air-launch rocket system to fire hardware and humans into orbit.
Their concept calls for Rutan, a noted aircraft designer, to create a carrier jet with a 385-foot wingspan and six engines to ferry a liquid-fueled, 120-foot-long rocket built by SpaceX and outfitted with five main engines to altitude where the winged booster will be released for launch into orbit.
The European Space Agency will make two more attempts to contact Phobos-Grunt.
Some good news: Southwest Airlines has ordered 208 of Boeing’s 737, a deal valued at $19 billion. Plus this:
Last month, Boeing said Indonesia’s Lion Air committed to pay $21.7 billion for 230 Boeing 737s. Lion Air also has options for 150 more planes, valued at $14 billion, bringing the deal’s total potential value to $35 billion. But the Lion Air deal is not a certainty; it still has to complete the order. Also in November, Emirates Airlines ordered $18 billion worth of 777s.
Maybe Boeing should pump some of those profits into building the CST-100 manned space capsule and thus win more profits in the space tourism industry.
Dawn has now lowered its orbit to an average elevation of 130 miles above the asteroid Vesta.
Expect lots of close-up images in the weeks to come.
Orbital Sciences has renamed its Taurus II rocket the Antares rocket.
To clear up any marketplace confusion and provide clear differentiation between this new launch vehicle and our Taurus XL rocket. Antares is significantly different – it serves the medium-class space launch market and its liquid fuel first stage technology is major departure from previous Orbital space launch vehicles. In addition, a project of this scale and significance deserves its own name like Orbital’s Pegasus®, Taurus® and Minotaur rocket programs that have come before it.
I think they have also realized they needed to distinguish Antares from the Taurus XL rocket’s recent problems, failing twice to put NASA climate satellites into orbit.
Actually, those tests weren’t so good after all: LightSquared’s broadband system actually disrupted 75% of the GPS receivers used during government testing.
Morrissey also notes these disturbing facts, considering the Obama administration’s strong support for Lightsquared:
The Air Forces has awarded contracts to Andrews Space, Boeing and Lockheed Martin to develop a reusable first stage booster.
Your orbital trip on a Boeing spaceship.
NASA has announced a February 7 launch date for SpaceX’s next test flight of Falcon 9 and Dragon to ISS.
They also have approved allowing Dragon to do a test berth with ISS on this flight, assuming the first test approach goes well.
Phobos-Grunt is now predicted to fall back to Earth in early January.
In a press event today, LightSquared announced that just-completed tests prove that its internet service will not interfere with GPS.
According to the company, the three private companies — Javad GNSS, PCTel and Partron — that make GPS equipment have been testing interference solutions and those tests have gone well. “Preliminary results show that GPS devices tested in the lab easily surpass performance standards thanks to these newly developed solutions,” Ahuja said. “We are confident that this independent testing will mirror testing being done by the federal government.”
Here’s another perspective:
Jim Kirkland, vice president of Trimble and a founding member of The Coalition to Save Our GPS, is trying to slow LightSquared’s momentum. “It is obviously extremely premature to claim at this point that these latest tests demonstrate that LightSquared’s proposed repurposing of the mobile satellite band for terrestrial operations is ‘compatible’ with high-precision GPS,” Kirkland says in a statement. “Even if new equipment solutions are fully tested and verified, these existing high-precision receivers will have to be retrofitted or replaced. LightSquared still refuses to accept the financial responsibility for addressing interference to existing devices, and so has not offered a comprehensive solution in any way, shape, or form.”
NASA looks to 3D printing to create spare parts and tools on ISS.
The first female astronaut from Russia in decades might fly a six month mission to ISS in 2013.
The names of China’s second class of astronauts, kept secret by the government there, has been revealed by a stamp collectible.
