China has successfully launched its first rover mission to the Moon.
Touchdown on the Moon is scheduled for December 14. If they succeed, it will be the first softlanding on the Moon since 1976.
Chang’e 3 and Yutu – The tale of a beautiful goddess and her rabbit on the Moon.
In this case, the goddess and rabbit are Chinese robots exploring the Moon for science. The launch is scheduled for 1:30 am Monday in China, which is 12:30 pm Eastern Sunday in the U.S.
Can’t light a Falcon 9 without a spark.
The article is an interesting analysis of why Thursday’s Falcon 9 launch was scrubbed. They are aiming to try again Monday evening.
India’s first Martian orbiter, Mangalyaan, successfully fired its engines today to leave Earth orbit and head to Mars.
The competition heats up: Argentina to begin testing its own rocket for satellite launches before the end of 2013.
A Progress freighter was manually docked with ISS today when its automatic docking system suffered a malfunction 200 feet from the station.
This freighter was using a new rendezvous radar system, and had spent two extra days approaching the station to do rendezvous tests. What failed has not yet been released.
The Falcon 9 rocket had an abort at launch today at 5:39 Eastern.
The rocket is safe on the launchpad. They are assessing the situation. SpaceX has a remarkably good record of launching quickly and successfully after a launch abort, sometimes within an hour.
The countdown has been reset for a 6:44 pm Eastern launch, the latest they can in their launch window, and has resumed. You can watch it live here.
It appears that they have resumed the countdown, even as they continue to assess, so that if all is well they will be able to launch within their window. This means however they are not yet go for launch.
They now say they are go for launch, even as they assess. In addition, their customer, SES, has given them 20 more minutes on their launch window.
I just love how SpaceX seems to always have an abort-at-launch whenever I am free to watch. I think this is the fourth abort-at-launch nail-biter I have seen.
They have aborted the countdown again at T-48 seconds. They have also scrubbed for the day. It appears they had not completed their assessment of the original abort and decided to scrub. The next launch attempt date is not yet known.
The competition heats up: Two brothers, also college students, have formed a company to build cubesats for researchers.
Mark and Eric Becnel are aiming their company Radiobro at providing turnkey cube satellite services to researchers who have experiments they’d like to fly, but who don’t have the resources to build their own satellites to fly them. “There’s an unfilled niche there in supplying a need if a scientist wants to take an experiment and fly it in space,” Eric Becnel said. “The idea is to provide that researcher with an off-the-shelf solution.”
The solution will encompass both the hardware and software necessary for the research to take place and be monitored, the brothers said. “Maybe you’ve got a launch opportunity and a window to launch,” Mark Becnel said. “We can help you by delivering that satellite in as fast as 12 months.”
This is the kind of creative capitalism the American aerospace industry hasn’t seen from its new engineers in years. In my experience giving lectures at student chapters of the AIAA, aerospace students have routinely been focused on looking for a job, either at NASA or with one of the big aerospace companies. These guys are instead trying to create their own. I say, they have the right idea, and have picked the right venue at exactly the right time. If they do it right, they and their company Radiobro stand to be a big success.
Russia has now officially delayed the launch of its next module to ISS by at least a year.
The cause of the delay is because of a number of serious quality control problems by the company that manufactured it.
Uh-oh: It appears that two nitrogen tanks exploded at the SpaceX facility in Texas last night.
Police are investigating. This mishap is not connected with the Falcon 9 launch in Florida, but it is not good when such things happen.
The ingenious plan engineers have devised to do good science with the crippled Kepler space telescope.
They are going to use the spacecraft’s solar panels as a pseudo third reaction wheel. This will allow it to point with acceptable accuracy for short periods.
It appears firefighters saved a half billion dollar NASA satellite from burning up in a truck fire today.
