The first of a series of spacewalks to reconfigure ISS for the future arrival of commercial manned ferries was delayed by one day on Thursday to give engineers extra time to prepare.
The spacewalk is now set for Saturday.
The competition heats up: Design and construction of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is picking up in advance of the rocket’s first test flight, now tentatively scheduled sometime this summer.
It will not surprise me if that summer launch does not happen on time. Nonetheless, I expect that before 2015 is over we will see a Falcon Heavy on the launchpad being prepped for launch.
The competition heats up: Arianespace’s launch manifest for 2015 predicts a busy year, with a hoped for pace of one launch per month.
What I like most in the article however is what this paragraph says:
The launch provider won nine contracts for geostationary satellites in 2014, and eight of them are the right size to ride in the Ariane 5’s lower berth, [said Stephane Israel, Arianespace’s chairman and CEO] in an interview with Spaceflight Now.
SpaceX has emerged as the chief rival to the veteran French-based launch company, which started the commercial launch business when it was founded in 1980. SpaceX and Arianespace cinched the same number of commercial launch contracts last year. Partly in response to SpaceX’s bargain prices and partly as an initiative to ensure the Ariane 5 has a steady balance of heavier and lighter payloads, Arianespace cut prices for customers with smaller satellites. [emphasis mine]
I love how competition has lowered costs while simultaneously increasing the launch rate for multiple companies. Before SpaceX arrived to challenge established companies like Arianespace the accepted wisdom in the launch industry was that it was foolish to have more rockets capable of launching at lower costs, because there simply wasn’t enough business to justify it. You’d supposedly end up with idle facilities costing money with no payloads to launch. I always thought that theory was hogwash. Elon Musk and SpaceX have definitely proven it so.
Mars One, the company that just this week announced the 100 finalists in its competition to send 24 people on a one-way trip to Mars, has quietly suspended all work on two robotic missions heralded as precursors to that manned mission.
These facts just add weight to my conviction that the Mars One competition is at the moment nothing more than a reality television show. It is a cool idea for a television show, but journalists should stop selling it as anything more than that.
Getting closer! As it zooms to its July fly-by, New Horizons has now been able to image some of the smaller moons that orbit Pluto.
The competition heats up: Stratolaunch has revealed that construction of the gigantic airplane — the largest ever to fly — that will take its rockets into the air is now about 40% complete.
The first flight is still scheduled for 2016. The article also includes some good analysis which indicates the competitive problems Stratolaunch faces:
Its Orbital Sciences-supplied solid-fuel rocket will be able to carry 15,000 pounds to low Earth orbit. But this is about half the lift of the competing SpaceX Falcon 9 and just 30 percent that of a Boeing-built Delta IV. Stratolaunch will be able to orbit only smaller satellites.
Nonetheless, watching this mother-ship take off will be quite breath-taking.
Cool images! The Dawn science team has released new even sharper images of the giant asteroid Ceres, taken by Dawn on February 12 at a distance of 52,000 miles.
Though the surface appears to have many of the typical craters, scientists continue to be puzzled by the bright spots. This newest image suggests that they are ice-filled craters, but don’t hold me to that guess. For one thing, why are only a handful of craters filled with ice, and none of the others?
The competition heats up: SpaceX has signed leases at both Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Air Force Base to use abandoned launchpads as landing pads for its Falcon 9 first stage.
The competition heats up: South Korea has revealed its preliminary design for a lunar rover, set to launch in 2020 on a Korean-built rocket.
The article does not indicate whether this project has actually been approved or is merely being touted by Korea Institute of Science and Technology, which made the announcement. The cost to build it is estimated to be more than $7 billion, which seems quite exorbitant and over-priced.
Update: I had misread the conversion in the article from U.S. to Korean currency and thought the proposed cost for this mission was way more than it really is, which is about $7 million, a much more reasonable number. Thanks to Edward for the correction.
Link here.
The images are only from the spacecraft’s navigational camera, and while cool, are thus to me not that interesting. What the high resolution camera saw they are once again keeping under wraps, for release later as part of a paper by the scientists involved.
The competition heats up? The private effort to choose 24 people to make a one-way flight to Mars has narrowed its candidates down from more than two hundred thousand to 100 finalists.
More here.
As interesting as this effort is, it is very important to remember that it is not an effort to fly these people to Mars. They don’t have the money and no one yet has the technical ability to make the flight. What they are actually doing is putting together a television reality show, where these 100 individuals will compete to be the final 24. If they do it right, which I am somewhat doubtful, the show will be entertaining and scientifically educational.
Europe’s last ATV cargo freighter for ISS left the station and burned up over the Pacific Ocean this past weekend.
Because of a technical problem on the ATV, a camera designed to record what happened inside the freighter as it burned up during re-entry was removed prior to undocking so that it could be used instead during a later re-entry.
Meanwhile, instead of supplying ISS with cargo, Europe has decided to meet its contribution to ISS by building the service module for NASA’s Orion/SLS program, which has no plans to ever go to ISS. Note, however, that Europe has also not committed to building more than two service modules, so how Orion/SLS will go beyond Earth orbit after these two modules have been launched remains a mystery.
If you are scratching your head at all this, you are not alone. To me, this one decision alone illustrates quite neatly the utter stupidity of big government-run programs.
