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.
Bolden and Mikulski hold a press conference to lobby for continuing funding for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Before JWST entered development, around the turn of the century, program officials projected it would cost $1 billion to $3.5 billion and launch between 2007 to 2011, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Jan. 8. Now, after lengthy delays [seven years] and billions in added costs [a real budget of $8.8 billion], JWST is entering its peak development years, in which major subsystems will be put together, tested, integrated with one another, and tested again. It will be, according to Bolden, one of the most difficult parts of JWST’s construction.
“This is our tough budget year,” Bolden said. It is also the most expensive, according to projections the White House released last April with its 2014 budget proposal. Bolden spoke to the press here after he and Mikulski, JWST’s biggest ally in Congress, held a town hall meeting at Goddard, the center in charge of building the massive infrared observatory. Both NASA employees and executives from some of JWST’s major industry contractors attended.
Mikulski told reporters that automatic budget cuts known as sequestration, which reduced NASA’s 2013 appropriation to about $16.9 billion, “resulted in furloughs, shutdowns, slowdowns [and] slamdown politics [which] are exactly what could derail or cause enormous cost overruns to the James Webb.”
I am especially entertained by the disasters Mikulski lists in the last paragraph, all of which she blames on sequestration. They are identical to the lies Democratic politicians like her told before sequestration took effect, none of which happened. That she now makes believe as if these disasters did happen and expects us to believe her new lies about the future illustrates how much in contempt she holds the general public. Does she really believe people are that stupid?
Someone else has noticed: Multiple U.S. science agencies have been accused of fudging data to fake the existence of global warming.
The “adjustment” schemes in the official U.S. dataset are so drastic, according to Goddard’s analysis, that they managed to “turn a 90 year cooling trend into a warming trend,” he said, suggesting that there may be a “software bug” at work. “Bottom line is that the [NOAA National Climatic Data Center] U.S. temperature record is completely broken, and meaningless,” Goddard concluded. “Adjustments that used to go flat after 1990 now go up exponentially. Adjustments which are documented as positive are implemented as negative.”
Respected climatologist and NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer actually showed evidence of what Goddard described as early as April of 2012, saying that “virtually all of the USHCN warming since 1973 appears to be the result of adjustments NOAA has made to the data.” Commenting on the latest findings, Dr. Spencer said that his own examination of the data and corrections to account for urban heat island (UHI) effects “support Steve’s contention that there’s something funny going on in the USHCN data.” He also called the NOAA methodology for adjusting the data “opaque” and said he believes it is prone to serious errors.
This article is essentially covering what I have already noted, that much of the data coming from NASA and NOAA has been seriously compromised, with past temperatures adjusted downward without any clear justification in order to make it appear as if the climate has warmed in recent decades.
I will be talking about this very issue tonight on Coast to Coast.
New NASA data has confirmed that the flat climate temperatures that started around 1998 has continued in 2013.
The link above catches the real story that most mainstream news organizations missed, focusing instead on NASA’s weak claim that last year was one of the warmest on record.
If you want to see the inside of NASA’s gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), you better hurry. Tours cease in February.
Tours into the VAB have only occurred during gaps in the American space effort. I was lucky to visit Florida back in 1977, after the end of the Apollo program and before the start of the shuttle program, so my tour went inside the VAB. For the last few years, since the shuttle’s retirement, interior tours resumed.
The tour is worth it. If you can find the time and money, get down there now!
An outline of Dream Chaser’s test flight schedule for the next three years, leading to its first crewed flight in 2017.
The article makes a big deal about Sierra Nevada’s completion of a NASA paperwork milestone, but to me the aggressive flight schedule is more interesting, including news that the engineering vehicle used in the test flight in October was not damaged in landing so badly it could no longer be used.
The Dream Chaser Engineering Test Article (ETA) has since arrived back in her home port in Colorado, following her eventful exploits in California. Despite a red-faced landing for the baby orbiter, she earned her wings during an automated free flight over the famous Edwards Air Force Base, a flight that was perfectly executed, per the objectives of the Commercial Crew check list. The vehicle will now enjoy a period of outfitting and upgrading, preparing her for one or two more flights – listed as ALT-1 and ALT-2 – beginning later this year. Both will once again be conducted at the Dryden Flight Research Center in California.
The ETA will never taste the coldness of space, with her role not unlike that of Shuttle Enterprise, a pathfinder vehicle used to safely refine the final part of the mission for the vehicles that will follow in her footsteps. The Dream Chaser that will launch into orbit will be called the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), which is currently undergoing construction at the Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF). Debuting atop of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V, the OFT-1 (Orbital Test Flight -1) is scheduled to take place in late 2016. This flight will be automated, testing the entire Dream Chaser system, prior to the crewed OFT-2 mission in early 2017. [emphasis mine]
I think I will up my bet from yesterday. I am now willing to bet that all of the commercial crew spacecraft chosen by NASA to complete construction will fly their privately built manned spacecraft with crew before NASA flies its first unmanned test flight of Orion/SLS.
I am shocked, shocked! NASA’s first test flight of both the Orion capsule and the heavy-lift SLS rocket in 2017 might be delayed because of design problems with the European-built service module.
Overweight and struggling with design delays, the European-built service module for the Orion crew exploration vehicle may not be ready for a much-anticipated test flight by the end of 2017. The preliminary design review for the Orion spacecraft’s critical engine and power element is now on track for May after a six-month delay to contend with weight issues, according to Thomas Reiter, director of the European Space Agency’s human spaceflight and operations programs.
I am willing to bet that SpaceX will put astronauts in space on Dragonrider before this unmanned SLS flight occurs.
A detailed look at how the budget deal effects the NASA budget.
As Messier notes, the budget is generally flat, with little significant change either up or down.
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.
The recently reactivated WISE space telescope has discovered its first new asteroid.
2013 YP139 is about 27 million miles (43 million kilometers) from Earth. Based on its infrared brightness, scientists estimate it to be roughly 0.4 miles (650 meters) in diameter and extremely dark, like a piece of coal. The asteroid circles the sun in an elliptical orbit tilted to the plane of our solar system and is classified as potentially hazardous. It is possible for its orbit to bring it as close as 300,000 miles from Earth, a little more than the distance to the moon. However, it will not come that close within the next century.
WISE, renamed NEOWISE by NASA, is expected to come up with a lot more of these in the coming years.
The companies building manned spacecraft for the United States all appear to be on track.
The report gives a nice overview of the recent achievements of all three companies, and suggests that the U.S. will once again have a manned spacecraft capability before the decade has ended coming from more than one design.
Back from the dead: WISE sent back its first images in almost three years this week.
The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft, or NEOWISE, has taken its first set of test images since being reactivated in September after a 31-month-long hibernation, NASA officials announced today (Dec. 19). The space agency wants NEOWISE to resume its hunt for potentially dangerous asteroids, some of which could be promising targets for future human exploration.
We should note that NASA had shut down this functional space telescope even though the cost to use it to hunt asteroids would be relatively little. Cost was cited as the reason, but I suspect it was a combination of the vast overruns for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Obama administration’s puzzling hostility to science at NASA.
