The competition heats up: In a launch today a Russian Dnepr rocket sent 32 satellites into orbit, breaking the record of 29 set less than a week ago by a Minotaur rocket.
This is the future. Satellites are going to get smaller, and thus cheaper to launch.
The new head of the Russian Space Agency has requested that the government impose a ban on the sale in Russia of any foreign made satellites.
The idea is that Russian industries should build these satellites instead, and that this ban will encourage the rebirth of the Russian satellite business.
I doubt it. If the Russian satellite business could do it better, they would get the business anyway, especially since their labor costs are generally much lower.
Two Russian workers were killed and several injured last week while cleaning out a rocket tank at a Russian spaceport.
The article says that the accident occurred because of a failure to follow safety regulations, which suggests that the quality control issues in Russia’s space industry still exist.
The competition heats up: A Proton rocket successfully launched a Russian military satellite today.
This is Proton’s the third successful launch in a row since July’s spectacular launch crash. It seems they have straightened out their quality control problems, for the moment.
A Soyuz capsule safely returned three astronauts to Earth Sunday.
The returning crew from ISS has undocked from the station.
During a five hour EVA yesterday that had lots of minor technical difficulties, two Russian cosmonauts took the Olympic torch on a spacewalk.
Most of the press is focusing on the PR stunt with the Olympic torch, but I think these issues are more interesting:
Working around the Service Module, Kotov and Ryazanski worked on cables at the RK21 site before attempting to fold up the panels on the hardware into its original configuration. The EVA tasks were mainly related to the preparations on the Urthecast pointing platform for installation of the HD camera in December. However, only the removal of the launch restraint from VRM EVA workstation and the disconnection of the RK-21 experiment were completed. The duo struggled with the relocation of the Yakor foot restraint β which they opted to take back to the airlock instead β while also failing to fold and lock RK-21 experiment antenna panels. While the spacewalkers managed to take a large quantity of photos for engineers on the ground to examine, the spacewalk was concluded after the failure to fold up the RK-21 panels, resulting in outstanding tasks for the next EVA.
The competition heats up? According to People magazine, Lady Gaga will take a Virgin Galactic suborbital flight in 2015 and thus beat Sarah Brightman into space.
A Russian Soyuz rocket successfully launched a new crew to ISS today.
As a Russian publicity stunt, they are carrying the Olympic torch up to ISS, which will be brought back by the returning crew on Sunday.
The accumulated evidence from the Chelyabinsk meteorite now suggests the risk of large asteroid impacts might be ten times greater than previously estimated.
The Chelyabinsk asteroid had approached Earth from a region of the sky that is inaccessible to ground-based telescopes. In the 6 weeks before the impact, it would have been visible above the horizon only during the daytime, when the sky is too bright to see objects of its size, says BoroviΔka.
βThe residual impact risk β from asteroids with yet-unknown orbits β is shifting to small-sized objects,β says Peter Brown, a planetary scientist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and an author on the Nature papers.
Of the millions of estimated near-Earth asteroids 10β20 metres in diameter, only about 500 have been catalogued. Models suggest that an object the size of the Chelyabinsk asteroid hits Earth once every 150 years on average, Brown says. But the number of observed impacts exceeding 1 kiloton of TNT over the past 20 years alone hints at an actual impact risk that may be an order of magnitude larger than previously assumed,
The data also now suggests that the Chelyabinsk asteroid was twice as big as previously thought, and that it had an almost identical orbit to a much larger already known asteroid.
New quality control problems that have popped up in Russia might delay its next module to ISS by more than a year.
The company building the new module is the same one that builds the Proton rocket that has had serious problems in the last few years.
The competition heats up: Russian owned International Launch Services (ILS) today successfully used its Proton rocket to launch a commercial satellite.
This is the second successfully Proton launch since July’s spectacular failure. The company seems to be recovering, which of course means that the competition for launch services will get hotter in 2014.
Which is excellent news. The competition will keep these companies on their toes, and force them to innovate in order to stay in business. In the long run this will lower the cost to orbit and make space more accessible to everyone.
