A Russian plane carrying a European commercial satellite was forced to make an emergency landing today when one of its engines failed.
The plane landed safely without mishap. The incident does once again raise questions about the quality control standards within the Russian aerospace industry.
Stupid: More than a month after publicly awarding commercial crew contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, NASA has yet to brief Congress on the reasons for its decision.
“To date, the Committee has not been briefed on the source selection, nor has it received the source selection statement, despite the fact that the offerors have been briefed, details were released to the press, the [Government Accountability Office] is now involved; and NASA has decided to proceed with the contracts,” Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.) wrote in a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden dated Oct. 21. Smith and Palazzo chair the House Science Committee and House Science space subcommittee, respectively.
“We hope that NASA will not expect taxpayers to blindly fund billion-dollar programs absent any information related to the procurement or contract,” wrote Smith and Palazzo, who are ardent supporters of the Space Launch System, major contractual details of which were only finalized this year and have not yet been made public.
These elected officials are not NASA’s allies when it comes to commercial space, so giving them too much information is probably dangerous. At the same time, the choice of Boeing was certainly done to ease their concerns, and keeping them out of the loop is only going to turn them against the commercial space contracts. It serves no purpose. NASA should instead be trying to show them why picking SpaceX and Boeing made sense, and how these two multi-billion dollar contracts will bring many jobs to their districts.
If NASA doesn’t do this basic political massaging, these guys are simply going to try to cut commercial space out when it comes time to negotiate the budget, as they have already tried to do several times in the past.
But then, when it comes to politics this behavior by the Obama administration is par for the course. They might have the right idea, farming out space exploration to the private sector, but their political implementation has often left much to be desired.
The competition heats up: China today launched its third spacecraft in a week with the launch Monday of a military satellite.
Monday’s mission was the third Chinese space launch in a week, coming after the Oct. 20 liftoff of the Chinese military’s Yaogan 22 reconnaissance satellite and the Oct. 23 launch of a demonstrator probe on a looping flight around the moon and back to Earth to verify technologies for use on a planned mission to retrieve and return lunar samples. Overall, the launch of Shijian 11-08 marked the ninth Chinese space launch of 2014.
By timing things perfectly, scientists have used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a very cool image of Jupiter, with the shadow of its largest moon Ganymede cast into the planet’s Giant Red Spot.
The science from this image is somewhat limited, but damn, it sure is a neat demonstration of our modern ability to do amazing things with technology.
Click on the link for the full image.
Monday’s Antares launch of the Cygnus freighter to ISS was scrubbed because a boat entered the restricted area surrounding the launchpad.
They will try again tomorrow at 6:22 pm Eastern.
A vote for Obama: Every single one of the most vulnerable Democrats running for the Senate voted with Obama more than 96 percent of the time.
As senior writer Shawn Zeller writes in this week’s CQ Weekly cover story, Democrats … have been distancing themselves from Obama on the campaign trail not in votes on the Senate floor — whether it be Mark Udall of Colorado, Mark Pryor of Arkansas or Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana: “Udall disagreed just once, on a Pennsylvania state judge’s nomination to a federal district court. Pryor parted with Obama three times, and Landrieu four, but only one of those votes was on a policy matter. In July, Landrieu voted against Obama’s request for $2.7 billion to deal with the surge of Latin American children entering the U.S. illegally.” Indeed, all of the most vulnerable Democrats voted with President Obama at least 96 percent of the time on the 120 votes on which Obama has urged a “yes” or “no” vote.
There are many take-aways you could get from this story, but I want to emphasis one: These Democratic candidates are all liars and consider the voters stupid. By claiming in their campaigns and debates that they are independent of Obama they are telling us that they think you are too stupid to see through their lies and will vote for them anyway.
Bottom line: a vote for a Democrat this election is a vote for the policies that Barack Obama has foisted on this country the past six years. Is that what we really want?
Note: Sorry for the lack of posts today, but up until now I have honestly not seen anything in the news that I consider worth posting.
A detailed viewing guide for watching Monday’s scheduled Antares launch of Cygnus from Wallops Island, Virginia.
The launch is scheduled for 6:45 pm (Eastern), which means this is a nighttime launch and will be spectacular to view all along the East Coast.
The Dragon freighter that had been berthed at ISS since September has left the station and will return to Earth today.
This departure now frees up the docking port for Cygnus, due to launch on Monday.
Update: Dragon splashed down in the ocean and has been successfully recovered.
Good news: Data collected on ISS for the past decade now suggests that the human body does a better job of shielding its internal organs from space radiation than previously believed.
For an astronaut working inside the space station, the overestimate was about 15 percent — a fairly close correlation given that the station’s exterior shell provides much of the protection needed.
But for astronauts working outside the station, the radiation absorption measured was substantially less than what had been registered by the personal dosimeters worn by astronauts. “Measurements of a personal dosimeter dramatically overstate the exposure of an astronaut, in the worst case by a factor of three,” according to a summary of the results by a Euro-Russian team. “[I]n an outside exposure the self-shielding of the human body is very effective. … [T]he effective dose equivalent is less than 30 percent higher than in an inside exposure.”
In other words, humans could fly 30 percent longer in space with the present shielding and suffer far less exposure than expected. Though this data is for operations in low Earth orbit, it still provides a strong counter to the bad news recently released about the high amounts of dangerous radiation expected in interplanetary space due to the Sun’s recent low sunspot activity. Even if radiation levels are higher, the human body is more resilient than expected. Interplanetary space travel is still possible.
A lawsuit between Orbital Sciences and one of its subcontractors threatens to delay the planned April launch of Antares/Cygnus to ISS.
The lawsuit, filed Oct. 21 with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, centers around a roughly $2 million contract Orbital Sciences awarded in 2013 to defendants Integrated Systems and Machinery of Smithtown, New York, and its owner, Kevin Huber. The contract called for Huber’s company to build new gimbals and cylinders for the hydraulic system used by the slow-moving, truck-like Transporter Erector vehicle that hauls Orbital’s Antares cargo rocket and Cygnus space freighter out of their Wallops Island, Virginia, hangar and raises them vertical at their Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport launch pad over a kilometer away.
Orbital’s third cargo run to the ISS — which at press time was still slated to launch Oct. 27 — can proceed without the withheld hardware. However, Orbital is obligated under an agreement with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport’s host state to upgrade the Transporter Erector before launching its fourth contracted cargo run, the debut of a bigger, heavier Cygnus cargo tug.
I don’t really expect this dispute to delay the April launch. What we have here is a case of hardball negotiations, with the subcontractor using the situation to try to squeeze more money out of Orbital Sciences. In the end they will come to an agreement and the upgrade will be installed.
The competition heats up: During an event at MIT on Friday Elon Musk revealed that SpaceX will to try to land first stage of the next Falcon 9 launch on a floating platform.
“We actually have a huge platform that’s being constructed in a shipyard in Louisiana right now,” Musk said in the interview, which was webcast live. He described the platform as about 90 meters long by 50 meters wide. “We’re going to try and land on that on the next flight.”
If the stage successfully lands on the platform, Musk said, it could potentially fly again. He put the odds of success at no greater than 50 percent for this particular attempt, but was more optimistic about the company’s chances of landing on the platform on a future mission. “There’s at least a dozen launches that will occur over the next 12 months,” Musk said. “I think it’s quite likely — probably 80 to 90 percent likely — that one of those flights will be able to land and refly.”
Based on everything this company has promised and later actually delivered, I would be willing to bet that they will do exactly as Musk says, and that sometime in the next year they will successfully recover the first stage of their rocket, an achievement that will shake the entire launch industry to its foundations.
The competition heats up: A Google executive successfully set a new sky-diving record on Friday, diving from 135 thousand feet as part of an engineering effort to build “a self-contained commercial spacesuit that would allow people to explore some 20 miles above the Earth’s surface.”
After nearly three years of intense planning, development and training, Eustace began his ascent via a high-altitude, helium-filled balloon just as the sun was rising. It took more than two hours to hit a record altitude of 135,908 feet, from which he separated himself from the balloon and started plummeting back to Earth.
Wearing his specially designed spacesuit, Eustace hit a top velocity of 822 mph during a freefall that lasted 4 1/2 minutes. Jim Hayhurst, director of competition at the United States Parachute Association, was the jump’s official observer. He said Eustace deployed a drogue parachute that gave him incredible stability and control despite the massive Mach 1.23 speed reached during the freefall. Eustace didn’t feel it when he broke the sound barrier, but the ground crew certainly heard the resulting sonic boom, Hayhurst said.
This flight suggests that the technology for doing these kinds of sky-dives from the very edge of space is beginning to mature, and might even be available soon for passengers on tourist flights.
