Tag: ISS

The decision on manned spaceflight

9:23 am

The rumors are swirling. Today alone the news included three different articles about NASA’s upcoming decision to down-select to either one or two in its manned commercial crew program.

The third article above speculates that the decision will be made shortly after this weekend, maybe as soon as next week. It also outlines in nice detail the companies who are competing for the contract.

I strongly expect NASA to pick two companies, not one, as the agency has repeatedly said it wants to have redundancy and competition in manned space flight. To this I agree whole-heartedly. Right now, if I was a betting man (which I am not), I would pick SpaceX and Sierra Nevada as the two companies to get the nod.

If NASA only picks one company that I don’t think there is much doubt that it will be SpaceX.

And then again, government agencies, because of politics, have sometimes made some incredibly stupid decisions. For example, back in the 1970s the company that proposed the space shuttle was rejected for another big space company that had more political clout, which then turned around and essentially stole the first company’s designs to build the space shuttle from them. It just took longer and cost more.

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Russia to continue on ISS past 2020?

9:03 am

A Russian news story today suggests that they are leaning strongly to continuing their partnership with the United States on ISS beyond 2020.

“The issue of Russia’s participation at the ISS after 2020 remains open, but there is a 90-percent chance that the state’s leadership will agree to participate in the project further,” [Izvestia] wrote, citing a source at Russia’s Federal Space Agency Roscosmos.

This report gives a better overview of the debate going on with Russia’s government and space agency. If they abandon ISS the work they have already done on new modules for the station will have to be written off, and it appears assembling their own station from those modules will be too expensive and take too long.

It also looks like NASA offered them a second year long mission if they stuck around.

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Last ATV launched to ISS

8:34 am

Arianespace today successfully launched the last European cargo ship to ISS.

After doing some flight tests in orbit and in conjunction with ISS, the docking will occur on August 12.

After this flight the Russian Progress freighter will be the only spacecraft with engines capable of changing the station’s orbit. It will also be the only spacecraft capable of refueling the engines on ISS’s Russian modules.

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UrthaCast progress

7:58 am

The competition heats up: UrthaCast has announced the status of the commissioning of its commercial cameras on ISS for viewing the Earth.

The medium resolution camera has been commissioned and is available for commercial imaging. The high resolution camera, however, has a problem with its pointing system which is requiring troubleshooting.

The Bi-axial Pointing Platform (“BPP”), which controls the pointing of the [High Resolution camera (HRC)], is experiencing difficulties in achieving the pointing control precision needed for the HRC to meet image quality specifications. Our engineering team together with RSC Energia believes it has developed a solution to this problem using existing gyroscopes on the HRC to improve the BPP pointing control. This solution has been successfully tested on the ground. The on-orbit implementation of this solution requires software updates and the installation of additional cabling inside the Zvezda module. These new cables need to be delivered to the International Space Station (ISS). As a result, there will be a several month delay in commissioning the HRC.

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Cygnus launch

9:23 am

All is go for a 12:52 pm launch of Cygnus’s second operational cargo flight to ISS.

If you live on the east coast of the U.S. you should be able to see some part of this launch when it happens.

Cygnus has lifted off.

The main engine has cut off and the first stage has successfully separated.

The second stage has ignited successfully. It has now completed its burn and has separated from the spacecraft. Cygnus is in orbit.

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Russia to phase out use of Ukrainian-built Soyuz rockets

9:09 am

As part of a major upgrade of its Soyuz rocket family, Russia is also ending its partnership with Ukraine in building those rockets.

The older Soyuz rockets rely on a Ukrainian control system — a relic of the rocket family’s Soviet heritage that in the aftermath of Russia seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in March looks like a threat to Russia’s space program. The rockets are based on the same core design that launched Sputnik and Yury Gagarin into space at the dawn of the space age. “The Soyuz-U and Soyuz-FG control systems are analog [systems] made in Ukraine,” Alexander Kirilin, CEO of the Progress Rocket and Space Center in the Volga city of Samara told Interfax on Monday.

However, the Soyuz 2 rockets use a Russian-made digital control system. Aside from further moving Russia’s space industry away from its reliance on Ukrainian components, the digital control system allows the rockets to handle a wider variety of payloads — making the tried-and-tested Russian rocket more versatile than ever before.

It is Russia’s plan to complete the transition to the new wholly Russian Soyuz 2 rockets for ISS missions within the next three years.

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Space junk damages ISS coolant radiator?

9:09 am

According to the Russian Interfax news agency, a piece of space junk has hit a coolant radiator on the U.S. portion of ISS.

The source says that no coolant has escaped from the system and that NASA engineers are analyzing images to assess the damage.

Readers should be aware that I have tried without success to find the NASA website the story claims is the source for this information. Moreover, this story is reported nowhere in the U.S. press, and it is strange for a NASA website to report something like this and it not be quickly picked up by the U.S. press.

Thus, I am not entirely convinced yet that this story is accurate.

Update: a commenter below has provided this link to a subsequent post at nasaspaceflight about the impact.

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An contract extension from NASA for SpaceX and Sierra Nevada

3:18 pm

NASA has given SpaceX and Sierra Nevada six additional months, until March 2015, to complete their last contractual milestones for building their manned spacecraft.

An amendment signed by William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, on May 16 gives SpaceX until March 31, 2015, to complete the 14th and final milestone under its $440 million CCiCap agreement — a pad abort test of its Dragon capsule. The test originally was planned for April 2014.

On May 19, Gerstenmaier signed a similar amendment to Sierra Nevada’s $212.5 million CCiCap award to extend work associated with flight tests of the company’s Dream Chaser engineering test article until March 31, 2015.

NASA’s third Commercial Crew partner, Boeing, is on track to complete all its milestones, worth a combined $460 million, by the end of August,

The significance of this extension is that it reveals something about the dates for both SpaceX and Sierra Nevada’s next flight tests. The previously date for the pad abort test for Dragon had most recently been set for this summer. They are obviously not meeting that schedule and need more time. Sierra Nevada meanwhile wants to fly its Dream Chaser test vehicle some more, but apparently needs time to get it flight ready after it sustained damage during landing on its one and only flight test.

In addition, this extension suggests something about NASA’s assessment of the efforts of all three companies. The agency is supposed to down select to two companies by the end of the summer. The extension suggests that they are hoping to keep all three companies funded so that they all build their spacecraft.

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Russia has moved today to exclude access by the U.S. military to any GPS stations in its territory.

9:02 am

Russia has moved today to exclude access by the U.S. military to any GPS stations in its territory.

It appears the Russians have has much empty bluster as the Obama administration. When they first said they were going to block access to these stations, they made it sound like they were going to cut-off all access. Instead we learn that it is only limited to U.S. military authorities. Since the stations are mostly used by scientists for geological research, Russia is therefore not really cutting anyone off from anything.

Reminds me of the Obama administrations sanctions against Russia. A big announcement, but then they exclude everything of importance from the sanctions when it appears those sanctions might actually be irritating to either side.

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Orbital Sciences has delayed its next Cygnus flight to ISS by at least one week in order to complete its investigation of the failure of a Russian-built rocket engine used by the Antares rocket.

10:05 am

Orbital Sciences has delayed its next Cygnus flight to ISS by at least one week in order to complete its investigation of the failure of a Russian-built rocket engine used by the Antares rocket.

Without doubt, this engine failure highlights the urgent need for American rocket companies to develop their own rocket engines.

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Russia signs a preliminary space exploration agreement with China.

9:07 am

The competition heats up: Russia signs a preliminary space exploration agreement with China.

Meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Deputy Prime Minister Wang Yang, in Beijing on Monday, [Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri] Rogozin announced on Twitter that he had signed “a protocol on establishing a control group for the implementation of eight strategic projects.” In a later Facebook post, he said “cooperation in space and in the market for space navigation” were among the projects.

Rogozin and Wang agreed to hold a meeting between the heads of their respective agencies “in the near future,” so that Beijing and Moscow could sow the seeds of a potential space partnership.

Federal Space Agency chief Oleg Ostapanko wants to allow “Chinese colleagues participate in some of the most interesting projects that can replace the ISS,” Rogozin said, adding that they would also discuss “projects such as cooperation in the field of rocket engine development,” and cooperation in the growing market of space applications services — which primarily applies to the development of the Chinese Beidou satellite navigation system and Russia’s Glonass navigation system, both rivals to the U.S.’ GPS.

The article does not give much information about this agreement, but does spend a lot of time discounting it, saying that it really is only a bluff to keep the U.S. from imposing more sanctions against Russia’s profitable commercial space efforts.

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Amid its political kerfuffle with the U.S., Russia has significantly increased the government budget of its space industry.

10:38 am

The competition heats up: Amid its political kerfuffle with the U.S., Russia has significantly increased the government budget of its space industry.

The new space policy, which pledges 1.8 trillion rubles toward modernization and development efforts throughout the Russian space industry, appears to be a step toward ensuring Russia is free to pursue its own interests in space after its ISS obligations are fulfilled in 2020. Rogozin tweeted that Russia will discuss cooperative space projects with China at a summit meeting in Beijing on May 19. [emphasis mine]

A space station partnership with China would make enormous sense, as China’s station designs are based on Russian space station engineering. The two would likely would work together quite well. Moreover, both systems were designed intelligently as prototype interplanetary spaceships, something that was not done for the U.S. part of ISS. Thus, ISS does not function well for testing the engineering for future space projects, something that the Russians are very conscious of.

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Read the full transcript of Tuesday’s briefing in Russia on the subject of the U.S./Russian cooperation in space.

8:39 am

Read the full transcript of Tuesday’s briefing in Russia on the subject of the U.S./Russian cooperation in space.

It is very worthwhile reading the entire thing. The text makes it very clear that Russia is not kicking us out of ISS, as has been wrongly reported by several news agencies. It also makes clear that the Russians consider the Obama administration’s actions childish, thoughtless, and unproductive. They also emphasize how the U.S. government is generally an “unreliable” partner in these matters, something that I have noted before when our government has broken space agreements with Europe.

The text also clarifies the GPS situation. The stations we have in Russia are in connection with scientific research, something they wish to do also in the U.S. If an agreement isn’t reached, that research will cease. Actual use of GPS for navigational purposes will not be effected.

Side note: NASA says that they have not yet received any official notice from Russia concerning the briefing above. This might be because Rogozin’s briefing was meant merely as a shot across the bow, or it could be that the Russians have not yet gotten around to doing it. We shall see.

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The trip of what is essentially a circuit breaker on ISS has reduced the station’s power by about 12.5%.

9:02 am

The trip of what is essentially a circuit breaker on ISS has reduced the station’s power by about 12.5%.

The cause and solution has not yet been isolated. The loss of power at this point is not critical, and has not effected any experiments or the safety of the crew.

The article itself gives a very detailed and informative outline of the system and what has happened, though you have to spend the time to wade through the alphabet soup of NASA terminology — SSU, SAWs, VDC, DCSUs, MBSUs, DDCUs, POR — that NASA uses.

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Building a scale model of the International Space Station — using matchsticks!

9:12 am

Building a scale model of the International Space Station — using matchsticks!

Recently completed by Acton, the wooden ISS is as impressive in size as it is in detail. Comprised of 282,000 matchsticks, the 1/26 scale model required 8 gal (30 L) of glue and took roughly 1,950 hours to complete. Whereas the actual ISS measures out at 108.5 m (356 ft) wide and 72.8 m (239 ft) long, Acton’s scaled down version measures out at an impressive 4.1 m (13.5 ft) and 2.8 m (9.2 ft) wide. Solar arrays, trusses, communication components, and even the Space Shuttle Atlantis, are all there in intricate detail.

With pictures.

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