Tag: spaceflight

The next Proton and Angara launches

9:00 am

The competition heats up: Russia has set September 28 as the next launch date for its troubled Proton rocket.

The most interesting detail gleaned from this article however is this:

The Proton-M carrier rocket previously launched on May 16 from Baikonur space center collided with communications satellite Express ะะœ4R and burned up in the atmosphere above China, leaving Russia without its most powerful telecommunications satellite.

Previous reports had not been very clear about the causes of the May launch failure. All they would say is that “a failed bearing in the steering engineโ€™s turbo pump” had caused the failure about nine minutes into the flight. This report suggests that this failure occurred after separation of the payload and that it then caused the upper stage to collide with the satellite.

Russia is also about to ship its new Angara 5 rocket to the launch site for a planned December launch. This will be the first launch of the Angara configuration that is expected to replace the Proton rocket, and is expected to place a dummy payload into geosynchronous orbit.
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Falcon 9 launch

8:41 am

The competition heats up: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has successfully launched six Orbcomm commercial satellites into orbit.

The six satellites still must be deployed. We will know if this is successful sometime in the next hour or so. Also, no news yet on SpaceX’s effort to recover the rocket’s first stage after a soft splashdown in the ocean.

Update: All 6 Orbcomm satellites have successfully deployed.

Update 2: From Elon Musk as to the first stage recovery: “Rocket booster reentry, landing burn & leg deploy were good, but lost hull integrity right after splashdown (aka kaboom).”

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Cygnus launch

9:23 am

All is go for a 12:52 pm launch of Cygnus’s second operational cargo flight to ISS.

If you live on the east coast of the U.S. you should be able to see some part of this launch when it happens.

Cygnus has lifted off.

The main engine has cut off and the first stage has successfully separated.

The second stage has ignited successfully. It has now completed its burn and has separated from the spacecraft. Cygnus is in orbit.

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Curiosity’s journey continues

9:00 am

After more than a full Martian year, Curiosity has finally traveled beyond the area of its initial landing zone.

The 1-ton Curiosity rover has now cruised out of its landing ellipse, the area โ€” about 4 miles wide by 12 miles long (7 by 20 kilometers) โ€” regarded as safe ground for its August 2012 touchdown within Mars’ huge Gale Crater, NASA officials said.

The interesting factoid from this article is how much smaller this landing zone was for Curiosity compared to all other previous landers, illustrating how the technology has advanced during the last four decades since Viking.

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Venus Express is coming up for less air

11:31 pm

After spending a month dropping down deep into Venus’s atmosphere, engineers are now raising Venus Express’s orbit.

Thus routine science operations concluded on 15 May, and the spacecraftโ€™s altitude was allowed to drop naturally from the effect of gravity, culminating in a month โ€˜surfingโ€™ between 131 km and 135 km above the surface. Additional small thruster burns were used to drop the spacecraft to lower altitudes, reaching 130.2 km earlier this week. Tomorrow, it is expected to dip to 129.1 km.

After eight years orbiting Venus, the mission is finally ending. They will use the spacecraft’s thrusters to lift it back up to almost 500 kilometers, where they will then allow its orbit to naturally decay, eventually ending the mission when it burns up in the atmosphere. There is also the chance they will run out of fuel during these last burns, ending the mission slightly sooner.

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Air Force certifies Falcon 9

11:21 pm

The competition heats up: The Air Force today certified that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket had completed three successful flights.

This certification is a preliminary okay before the official certification. What it means is that the Air Force is agreeing that the Falcon 9 is capable of launching its satellites, which also means that the official certification is almost certain.

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India’s space program gets a huge budget boost

9:16 am

The competition heats up: The new budget of India’s new conservative government under Narendra Modi has given its space program a 50 percent increase.

It appears that there were increases across the board, including a gigantic increase for their GSLV rocket as well as their manned program.

It also appears that Modi is following in the path of George Bush, at least when it comes to space. He might be a conservative, pro private enterprise and anti-big government, but his approach to building a space industry is decidedly Soviet in style, pumping funds into government agencies so that they can build the rockets and spacecraft. For the moment at least, private companies will be the servants to India’s government space program, not the masters.

In the U.S. and Russia this approach worked for the first generation of rockets and spacecraft, but then ended up a lead weight for later generations. I suspect we shall see the same history play out in India.

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Russian Soyuz launches commercial satellites for Arianespace

9:01 am

The competition heats up: A Soyuz rocket successfully launched four communications satellites from French Guiana yesterday.

I know that I repeatedly pound Arianespace for its high costs and lack of profits, but anyone who thinks this European company, in partnership with the Russians, is going to let its competition grab its customers easily is in for a surprise. They are going to fight back, and have the resources to do it.

The battle is on! It should be a lot of fun to watch over the next decade.

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ISEE-3 reboot team has a solution

8:51 am

The private group trying to resurrect ISEE-3 has come up with a plan of action to get its engine working.

We spent all day yesterday with space propulsion experts. We have identified a series of options including hydrazine tank heating and a long series of pulse attempts to (possibly) clear the lines.

They have not yet said when they will try this, but stay tuned.

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ISEE-3 might still be saved

3:39 pm

It ain’t dead yet: The private group trying to resurrect ISEE-3 has not yet given up.

[T]he reboot team, led by editor Keith Cowing and entrepreneur Dennis Wingo, CEO of California-based Skycorp Incorporated, isn’t quite ready to give up. One of the project volunteers has suggested that perhaps the nitrogen isn’t actually gone. It may in fact still be there, but dissolved in with the hydrazine.

If that’s the case, Wingo says, ISEE-3 could potentially repressurize the propellant by powering up the tank heaters, raising the temperature up perhaps 10 degrees from the roughly 25 degrees C where it stands now. “If [the idea] has any merit, then we could turn the heaters on and drive at least some of the nitrogen out of solution. That would give us more pressure that just heating the tanks themselves,” Wingo says. “It’s not desperation,” he adds. “There is some good physics behind this.”

Their big problem is that they need to know more about how the nitrogen was stored on the spacecraft. They are asking for help from anyone who is willing to research the problem.

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