A Russian rocket successfully lifted off today from Kazakhstan with the next crew for ISS.
The contamination that has delayed SpaceX’s next Dragon cargo mission to ISS was caused by oil from a sewing machine.
The machine sewed the cloth blankets that protect payloads in Dragon’s unpressurized trunk section.
The next Dragon launch to ISS has been delayed for two weeks because of the detection of contamination that could affect some of its research cargo.
[T]he launch was put on hold, sources said, when engineers noticed contamination of some sort on the Dragon’s lower unpressurized trunk section. Two of six electrically powered payloads aboard the Dragon are mounted in the trunk section — a first for this mission — and engineers were concerned the contamination might “outgas” in orbit and cause problems for the station-bound hardware.
Two Russians and an American landed safely in Kazakhstan on Monday, finishing their 166 mission to ISS.
The Americans have not yet been kidnapped by the Russian government over the U.S./Russian conflict because of the invasion of the Crimea. Nor do I expect them to.
On Saturday SpaceX successfully conducted a dress rehearsal countdown and static fire engine test of the Falcon 9 rocket that will loft a Dragon capsule to ISS next week.
The results of the test itself have not been released, but that it was completed suggests all is well for the upcoming launch.
A static fire engine test of the Falcon 9 scheduled to lift Dragon to ISS next week has been delayed one day.
The article gives no explanation for the delay.
Amateur astronomers can help a commercial space start-up by taking pictures of its cubesat SkyCube in orbit.
The cubesate was launched from ISS last week, but has not operated as expected and they want to know why. Images would help.
“What happens if Russia refuses to fly U.S. astronauts?”
The problem: the situation in the Ukraine. If tension between the U.S. and Russia worsens then Russia might suspend carrying American astronauts to and from ISS.
The fault here belongs with Congress and George Bush, who decided in the 2000s to let the shuttle retire before its replacement was ready. In addition we can blame Congress in the 2010s for forcing NASA to spend billions on the unaffordable Space Launch System rather than focus on getting humans into space cheaply and quickly.
An image of North Korea taken from ISS illustrates starkly the failure of a state-run top-down dictatorial society.
As is typical for today’s leftwing political correct journalism, this reality is attributed not to communism but to vague generalities. North Korea is a “rogue state” or “North Korea stands alone as an unusually isolated nation, where residents live under a familial dictatorship,” statements that embarrassingly avoid the truth. The rulers of North Korea, like Cuba, refused to reject communist when the Soviet bloc fell in 1991 and have thus left their countries and the people trapped within them poor and bankrupt.
Aren’t you glad that today’s Democratic Party here in the United States considers leftwing dogma the height of progress and a goal worthy of emulation?
An investigation into the dangerous leak of water into a spacesuit during a spacesuit last July has found that NASA engineers had missed an earlier failure of the same suit.
The leak had first happened in a spacewalk a week earlier, and engineers misdiagnosed the problem. In addition, it appears they didn’t look closely enough at it.
Meanwhile, the investigation has pinpointed the cause of the leak as a clogged filter, but still could not trace what caused that clog.
The competition heats up: NASA is preparing the next round of commercial contracts to supply cargo to ISS.
NASA announced the plan in a request for information released late Feb. 21. Responses from industry are due March 21. The document, which NASA posted online, did not say when the agency would solicit bids, or when it would make an award for the Commercial Resupply Services 2 (CRS) contract. The expected budget for CRS 2 is between $1 billion and $1.4 billion a year from 2017 to 2024, NASA said. NASA envisions four to five flights a year under CRS 2. Back in January, the White House announced it wanted to extend space station operations through 2024. Congress has currently committed to fund the space station through 2020. CRS 2 contract calls for delivery of 14,250 to 16,750 kilograms per year of pressurized cargo, and delivery of 1,500 to 4,000 kilograms per year of unpressurized cargo.
Assuming both SpaceX and Orbital Sciences win new contracts, this will give them a strong cash flow as they pursue new space endeavors.
Cygnus has departed ISS after successfully bring its cargo to the station.
The first four cubesats of a fleet of 28 launched from ISS on Tuesday.
The four “cubesats,” each about the size of a loaf of bread, were deployed from the space station this morning and began zipping freely around Earth. Twenty-four more will join them over the coming days, filling out the “Flock 1” satellite fleet operated by San Francisco-based startup Planet Labs. Planet Labs’ Flock 1 will provide frequent, low-cost, high-resolution imagery of Earth that could serve a variety of purposes, company officials say, from tracking deforestation and natural disasters to monitoring leaks in oil pipelines.
For a variety of reasons, SpaceX and NASA have agreed to delay the next Dragon cargo mission a few weeks to no early than March 16.
It looks like it was a combination of minor issues that, when piled up, called for a delay.
A new harvest of vegetables in space!
Notice that this research is a partnership of the Russians and an American university. NASA is not included. When I wrote about this subject for Air & Space a few years ago, the American researcher explained that there was too much bureaucracy working with NASA. Moreover, the Russians were much more knowledgeable about crop research in space, as they had been doing it for decades already on their Salyut and Mir stations.
In a spacewalk earlier this week, two Russian astronauts on ISS successfully installed the commercial UrtheCast cameras.
The cameras cost $17-million and are capable of beaming down images and high-definition video from the Russian part of the ISS to UrtheCast, a small Vancouver company that struck a deal with the Russian space agency to have its devices blasted into space on a Soyuz rocket and installed in exchange for imagery captured over Russia.
There had been a problem installing these cameras on an earlier spacewalk last month, so this was the second attempt.
Once operational, these cameras will also provide a continuous and free live feed of the Earth for anyone who wishes to view it.
It ain’t an accident, they were brought there by Cygnus as part of an experiment to see how an ant colony adapts to weightlessness.
Cygnus was successfully berthed to ISS today.
This is the first operational station resupply mission carried out by Orbital Sciences under a $1.9 billion contract with NASA calling for at least eight flights and delivery of 40,000 pounds of cargo and supplies.
The Cygnus captured Sunday will remain attached to the space station until mid February. At that point SpaceX will step up with launch of a Dragon cargo ship around Feb. 22. It will be the third operational resupply flight by SpaceX, which holds a $1.6 billion contract to deliver more than 44,000 pounds of supplies over a dozen missions.
Orbital Sciences has successfully launched its Cygnus cargo ferry into orbit.
Another perfect launch for the company.
Consider once again what has happened. While it cost NASA six years and $9 billion to build nothing before its Constellation program was cancelled, two private companies have built and launched two different rockets and unmanned cargo spacecraft in that same time period for about a third of that cost.
The contrast couldn’t be more stark. And that contrast will get even more stark as the flights of the privately built manned spacecraft by SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada unfold in the coming three years, while SLS and Orion sit around and do little but spend money.
NASA and the Obama administration have announced their support for extending ISS’s operations for more years to at least 2024.
Obviously, Congress needs to agree with funds. Moreover, so do the Europeans, Russians, and Japanese, though they all have been pushing to extend ISS for awhile.
Now maybe NASA will finally consider doing some of those year-long plus manned missions on ISS that are essential if humans are eventually going to go to Mars and beyond.
NASA and Orbital Sciences have rescheduled the Cygnus freighter launch to ISS until January 8 because of cold weather.
The company for the high resolution cameras that the Russian astronauts were unable to install on ISS during their spacewalk last week has issued an update.
The installation of the cameras proceeded according to plan and without incident. During a spacewalk, Russian cosmonauts were able to transport the cameras to their mounting position and install them quickly and efficiently. However, soon after installation, the Mission Control Centre (MCC) outside of Moscow was unable to receive any data from either camera (contrary to what was reported during the live transmission of the spacewalk). Without this data, engineers in the MCC were not able to confirm that the cameras were receiving the power necessary to allow them to survive the temperature fluctuations of the space environment. As a consequence, senior technical personnel from UrtheCast and RSC Energia (UrtheCast’s Russian partner) jointly decided that the safest and most prudent course of action was to uninstall the cameras and bring them back inside the ISS to be reinstalled at a later date, once the data transmission problem has been solved.
UrtheCast’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. George Tyc, was present at the MCC throughout the operation, along with the Company’s Chief Engineer for Space Systems, Mr. Greg Giffin. Said Dr. Tyc, “The fact the neither camera could communicate with the MCC strongly suggests that the problem lies inside the ISS and it is not a problem with the cameras or external cables. This kind of issue has been encountered before on the ISS and can be fixed in the near-term. Bringing the cameras back inside to be installed another day was simply the right engineering decision.”
No word on what caused the problem, but as this commercial project is being done in partnership with the Russians and the Russians are whom the company is working to solve the technical problem it was almost certainly on the Russian portion of ISS.
Today’s spacewalk by two Russian astronauts on ISS set a new Russian duration record though one of the two commercial cameras installed was unable to transmit its data to the ground.
For reasons that are unclear, the astronauts were then instructed to disconnect both cameras and bring them back inside ISS. This caused the cancellation of a number of other tasks and was the reason the spacewalk was the longest ever by Russian astronauts.
The Russians on ISS are doing their own spacewalk today, for profit.
They are installing two cameras for a Canadian company that will beam down high resolution commercial images of the Earth’s surface.
Today’s spacewalk on ISS is complete with the successful installation of a replacement coolant pump.
The installation means that a third spacewalk to finish the job is no longer needed.
Preparing for today’s second spacewalk to replace the coolant pump on ISS.
The spacewalk has begun. Realtime coverage can be found here.
This news report, confirmed by no other source, claims that the spacewalk this week was cut short because of water in the astronauts’ spacesuits.
I report this story but am very puzzled. If a water leak was the cause of the shortened spacewalks, I would have expected others to report that fact as well. No one has, however. (See this nasaspaceflight.com article, for example, which outlines the entire engineering situation quite thoroughly but says “both suits performed well during the EVA.”) Moreover, the ABC particular story above is written by someone who is not a space reporter, and contains some incongruities that reflect that, making me even more skeptical.
Yesterday’s spacewalk on ISS, though successful, was cut short because of spacesuit discomfort issues unrelated to the earlier water leak problems.
No story on the spacewalk is entirely clear on the issues. Astronaut Rick Mastracchio was cold, but it seems he also had other problems that have not been outlined clearly. Interestingly he was not using the spacesuit that flooded in July. Michael Hopkins was using that suit and apparently had no problems.
In order to resize the spare suit on the station for Mastracchio they have delayed the next spacesuit for one day.
Today’s spacewalk on ISS to replace a coolant pump is ahead of schedule.
The link gives live updates.
Update: the spacewalk is over and a complete success, with no problems.
Fixing the coolant pump on ISS: A close look at what will happen during the upcoming spacewalks.
According to this report, one astronaut will be wearing the spacesuit that leaked water in July. This fact contradicts a previous story that said there were two other suits on the station and that the suspect suit need not be used.
