The competition heats up: The hotfire engine test of the first stage of Orbital Sciences’ Antares rocket has now been scheduled for February 12.
The leaders of Russia and Kazakhstan have announced that an agreement has been reached regarding Russia’s lease for the Baikonur spaceport.
No details were released but I suspect that Kazakhstan has probably backed down from some of its demands, fearful of losing the Russians when the new Russian spaceport in Vostochny opens in 2015.
An image mismatch raises questions about Iran’s monkey in space.
An engine shutdown shortly after the lift off of a Sea Launch rocket destroyed an Intelsat satellite on Friday.
This is very bad news for Sea Launch and its Russian Zenit rocket.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has signed a contract to launch an Israeli communications satellite.
The competition heats up: South Korea successfully launched its first satellite, using its own rocket, on Wednesday.
The first stage was built by Russia, but everything else was produced in South Korea.
Virgin Galactic has begun paying rent — under protest — for its use of a New Mexico spaceport.
Iran today claimed it has successfully flown a monkey on a suborbital rocket flight.
The only sources for this story come from Iranian sources, so I remain unsure whether it actually happened.
More Antarctica news: An American team has successfully obtained samples from Lake Whillans, buried half a mile under the Antarctic icecap.
The robotic refueling demo on ISS successfully did a simulated refueling of a satellite on Friday.
The first nighttime photos from Mars.
Salvage in space: DARPA’s project to harvest parts from abandoned geosynchronous satellites.
Back to the future: NASA engineers today test fired a major component of a refurbished Saturn 5 engine.
Engineers at Lockheed Martin are adding structural braces to fix the cracks found in the first Orion capsule.
Engineers have designed a “doubler” to place over the cracks to ensure the craft can sustain loads from pressure, launch and landing. Geyer said two of the structural aids, similar to devices regularly used on airplanes, could be added to the spacecraft. “We’ve come up with a great plan to basically bridge over those cracks to distribute the load so we don’t see any issues on orbit,” Geyer said.
How reassuring.
Happy 9th anniversary to the Opportunity rover on Mars!
Talk about getting your money’s worth: The rover was planned as a 90 day mission.
Russia is now threatening to abandon its Baikonur launch site due to restrictions demanded by the Kazakhstan government.
The restrictions include a limitation in the number of Proton launches, which Russia claims will cost them half a million dollars in sales. The problem is that the new Russia launch site in Vostochny will not be ready until 2015. If Russia pulls out of Baikonur before then, there will be no way to launch humans to ISS for at least the next two years.
An update on the Chinese manned program.
The original script called for [the space station] Tiangong 1 to be followed by Tiangong 2, which would have been a module of the same basic design as Tiangong 1. Tiangong 2 was expected to have tested more advanced life-support systems than Tiangong 1, but there would be no major changes to the spacecraft. It was expected that two or three crews would be launched to this module.
Towards the end of the decade, China would then launch Tiangong 3, which was slated to be an entirely different class of spacecraft. It would be larger and more capable. Tiangong 3 was expected by some analysts to be a precursor to the types of modules to be used in China’s future space station, slated for launch around 2020.
According to Yang’s presentation, we can forget about Tiangong 2. Or at least, we can forget about Tiangong 2 as it was originally planned. China still plans to launch a mission with this name, but it would seem that the large laboratory module originally known as “Tiangong 3” has now been designated as the new Tiangong 2.
In other words, China is accelerating the admittedly slow pace of their manned program.
The competition heats up: Planetary Resources has released a video showing off the prototype of their Arkyd-100 space telescope.
As I noted when this company first appeared, for the foreseeable future they are going to be a manufacturer of space telescopes, not an asteroid mining company. At the same time, they, like Deep Space Industries, are going to drive satellite development towards lower cost and smarter design, which in the long run will make asteroid mining practical and profitable.
After a short delay due to software issues, the satellite servicing demo on ISS has begun.
The actual refueling is scheduled to take place late Thursday.
