Venus Express was blinded for four days last week after being hit by a coronal mass ejection from the Sun.
The robot rules: Dextre has successfully completed its first round of operations in its satellite refueling demonstration on ISS.
On March 6, film director and deep water diver James Cameron grabbed the record for the deepest solo dive ever, 26791 feet or more than five miles.
Moreover, this dive was only practice for an even deeper dive to come.
Want a job building spaceships? The spaceship companies in Mohave are hiring.
There are several hundred open positions in Mojave as companies such as the Spaceship Company, XCOR and Scaled Composites begin to ramp up operations. “It’s ironic that we’re having a recruitment problem in Mojave,” said Stu Witt, CEO and general manager of the Mojave Air and Space Port. He added that this is a good problem to have.
A look at China’s rocket engine development program.
The detailed look at the robotic satellite refueling demo that is taking place on ISS this week.
From Consumer Reports: “Our Fisker Karma cost us $107,850. It is super sleek, high-tech—and now it’s broken.”
Another wise business choice by the Obama administration, which gave this electric car company just over a half billion dollars in federal subsidies to develop this plug-in hybrid car.
Researchers have completed the first comprehensive map of the entire ocean-floor debris field of the Titanic.
Engineers’ dreams: A proposal to use a thousand mile long magnetic track to accelerate passengers into space.
A robotic refueling demo. designed and built by the same people who ran the Hubble Space Telescope repair missions, begins today on ISS, using Dextre.
This demo is designed to prove that a robot, operated from the ground, can refuel a satellite not designed for refueling. The demo satellite on ISS was built to match the design of several climate satellites already in orbit that will end up defunct in a few years if they can’t be refueled.
The rail gun: a cheap solution for getting payloads into orbit quickly.
The delayed launch of Europe’s cargo freighter to ISS is now targeted for March 23.
The X-37B marks one year in orbit.
More importantly, the Air Force has indicated that a third X-37B mission will launch this fall.
Clouds inside a room. With pictures.
Today the second X-37B celebrates the completion of a full year in orbit, with no indication from the Air Force that the mission is to end soon.
The cracks that have been found on the wings of the new Airbus A380 jumbo jet have now been traced to work done by a company in the United Kingdom.
A senior industry expert told The Times: ‘The issue is around the type of aluminum being used and the fitting which, as a result of the assembly, creates the crack’, with a source close to the problem adding, ‘It is a design and process engineering failure’.
The March 9 launch of Europe’s next cargo freighter to ISS has been delayed two weeks so that engineers can climb inside and tighten two straps holding two cargo containers in place.
I suspect the reasons behind this problem are quite embarrassing, which is probably why the press releases are so vague about why the straps were loose and how the Europeans discovered the problem.
Not my idea of fun: A new roller coaster ride, dubbed “the Swarm,” is so intense it ripped the arms and legs off of its crash dummies during testing.
NASA successfully completed parachute drop tests of its Orion capsule on Wednesday. With pics.
Construction of the Tokyo Sky Tree, the world’s tallest structure, was completed on Wednesday.
Good news: SpaceX’s dress rehearsal countdown and fuel test of the Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral today was a complete success.
Back from the dead? A commercial project to refuel and repair communication satellites with an unmanned robot, recently killed due to lack of interest from the U.S. government, might get the needed additional funding from DARPA.
At a Congressional hearing on Wednesday, NASA’s inspector general outlined more than five thousand security lapses at the agency in 2010 and 2011, including the theft of a laptop with the control codes for ISS.
Using its Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion capsule, NASA is aiming for an unmanned test flight around the Moon in December 2017.
Two important tidbits revealed by this article: First, the first test flight of Orion will use a Delta 4 Heavy rocket. Two, NASA hopes to have its heavy lift SLS rocket ready for the 2017 mission.
Forgive me for being cynical, but I will believe the second tidbit only when it happens.
Fingers crossed: Falcon 9 is on the launchpad in Florida, being prepared for a countdown and fuel test tomorrow.
What is the International Space Station’s weakest link?
Mark Mulqueen, ISS vehicle director for Boeing Co., said keeping the station’s environmental control and life support systems, or ECLSS, functioning over the next decade will likely be engineers’ toughest challenge. “I don’t think it’s sparing or the structure to get to 2020,” Mulqueen said. “It’s probably continued refinement of how we successfuly operate our ECLSS system on-orbit. There has been a lot of effort going into understanding that.”
The article outlines a number of other areas of concern, none of which appear to be serious, for now, but could be a problem as the years pass.
An update on Stratolaunch.
