The protective housing for the shuttle prototype Enterprise collapsed yesterday due to Hurricane Sandy.
There are clearly many more serious problems caused by the hurricane than damage to Enterprise. I note this however, because it seems to fit with Enterprise’s sad tale of woe in becoming a museum piece in New York.
More strange patterns have been discovered in the Gobi desert of China using Google Earth.
It appears that NASA is at the moment unconcerned should the investigation into the Falcon 9 engine failure on October 7 cause a delay in the next Dragon supply mission to ISS.
The supply cache delivered to the station in early to mid-2011 by the now-retired space shuttle placed the six-person orbiting science lab on a firm footing well into 2013, according to Mike Suffredini, NASA’s space station program manager. “The launch date itself, in January, is not really critical to the program from a supply standpoint,” Suffredini told an Oct. 26 news briefing. “So we have some flexibility.”
In the short run a delay here would not be critical. A long delay, which is unlikely, would however not be good for operations on the station, and illustrates why it is very important to get the Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus cargo capsule up an running as soon as possible.
A small company, aiming to build a small rocket system for launching nano-sized satellites, has successfully tested its rocket engine. Hat tip Clark Lindsey at NewSpace Watch.
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Dragon has undocked from ISS and is on its way back to Earth.
And here’s a nice description of the “creepy” cargo it is bringing back.
Update: Dragon has successfully splashed down. More here.
Construction workers in space: A spacewalk November 1 will attempt to find and repair a coolant leak that could force a power reduction at the station.
A slight 1.5-pound-per-year leak in the channel 2B cooling system has been present since 2007 and during a shuttle visit last year, two spacewalking astronauts added eight pounds of ammonia to the reservoir to boost it back up to a full 55 pounds. The plan at that time was to top off the system every four years or so to “feed the leak,” replacing the lost ammonia as required.
But over the past few months, engineers saw the leak rate suddenly quadruple, either because something changed at the original leak site or, more likely, because another leak developed somewhere else in the system.
Whether the leakage was caused by space debris or a component failure of some sort is not yet known. But the result is: If the leak continues at its current rate, the coolant will drop below a 40-pound safety limit and the system will shut down by the end of the year or shortly thereafter, taking power channel 2B down with it. While the space station can operate without the full complement of power channels, the loss of channel 2B would force flight controllers to power down equipment, eliminating redundancy and reducing the amount of research the crews could carry out.
Hurricane Sandy has forced Orbital Sciences to suspend the engine tests of the Antares rocket.
Sugru: the story of the invention of this ultimate repair tool.
Firing paintballs at an asteroid to prevent it from hitting the Earth.
The failure last August of the second stage of a Russian Proton rocket is causing more problems: the stage exploded in mid-October and the debris is now a threat to ISS and other satellites.
The competition heats up: The FAA has issued an experimental permit to SpaceX to test fly its Grasshopper reusable rocket booster.
With a successful Soyuz docking today, ISS is back to a full six person crew.
The Air Force has released its investigation into the failure of the August test flight of the X-51a hypersonic scramjet.
As first surmised, the problem was a control fin. Though they haven’t set the date for the next test flight, it appears they do intend to proceed.
The competition heats up: Stratolaunch has officially opened its production facility in Mojave.
On Wednesday Richard Branson told an audience of students in Poland that the first paid tourist flight of SpaceShipTwo is at least 12 to 18 months away.
That seems about right. This gives them about a year of powered flight tests, all manned but with no paying customers, in order to make sure the system is save for customers.
The first mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope has been completed.
This is the first of seven. It is also the largest single mirror ever polished, at 8.4 meters, or 27.5 feet across. When completed the GMT’s segmented mirror will be 25 meters across, or more than 82 feet.
Early today a Soyuz rocket successfully lifted ISS’s next crew into orbit.
The competition heats up: On Friday Blue Origin successfully tested the launch abort system for its New Shepard manned capsule.
The competition heats up: Virgin Galactic has begun the installation of SpaceShipTwo’s engine in preparation for its first powered test flights.
The article also provides some details about the status of XCOR’s Lynx suborbital craft.
Engine problems on a Delta 4 rocket launch two weeks ago could delay the launch of the Atlas 5 rocket scheduled to lift the X-37B on its next mission.
Don’t ask me why the military would delay an Atlas 5 launch because of problems on a Delta 4. It seems to be left over caution from the 1960s, when no rocket was reliable and they were trying to figure out how to do it. Now, it simply seems silly.
