Tag: spaceflight

A new map of Mimas

9:36 am

Global map of Mimas

The Cassini science team has released what will be the best map of Saturn’s moon Mimas for many decades to come. A reduced resolution version is above, and was updated after the most recent fly-bys in November 2016 and February 2017.

The moon’s large, distinguishing crater, Herschel, is seen on the map at left. The map is an equidistant (simple cylindrical) projection and has a scale of 710 feet (216 meters) per pixel at the equator. The mean radius of Mimas used for projection of this map is 123.2 miles (198.2 kilometers). The resolution of the map is 16 pixels per degree.

Since Cassini is in its final orbits and will crash into Saturn in September, and no other Saturn mission is even being planned, do not expect a better map for a very long time.

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China to attempt to grow potatoes on Moon

9:22 am

China’s Chang’e-4 lunar rover/lander, set to launch in 2018, will include a small experiment that will attempt to grow potatoes from seeds.

Note that I have just realized that I have been confusing Chang’e-5 with Chang’e-4. Chang’e-5 is a sample return mission that they hope to launch this year. It does not include a rover. Chang’e-4 is a lander/rover mission that is planned for 2018.

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Boeing cuts management, streamlines its operations

9:14 am

Capitalism in space: In an effort to better compete, Boeing is eliminating a layer of management and cutting 50 jobs in its defense and aerospace division.

The changes split management into smaller units so they can make faster decisions in their specific fields. This includes separating their space and missile division from other activities. This quote however says it all about the accelerating competition in the space business.

The changes are designed to speed decision-making, [defense division head Leanne Caret] said in an interview. “Everything is moving faster,” she said of the competitive environment for defense contractors.

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Russians successfully launch Progress to ISS

8:43 am

A Russian Soyuz rocket successfully launched a Progress freighter to ISS early today.

That’s the second Russian launch in less than a week, after a very long pause caused by the discovery of corruption in one of their major engine factories. Though the Russians presently only have two launches scheduled for July, and none scheduled for August, I suspect that this will change in their effort to clear their launch backlog.

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KFC pays to put chicken sandwich on four day World View shakedown flight

5:41 pm

Capitalism in space: A publicity stunt by Kentucky Fried Chicken to sell a new chicken sandwich will help pay for the the first long shakedown of World View’s Stratollite balloon.

For World View Enterprises, the flight is expected to serve as a four-day shakedown cruise for its “Stratollite” system, which could eventually send military and commercial imaging payloads to the edge of the atmosphere for months at a time. “When KFC first brought this to us, we had a good chuckle,” World View CEO Jane Poynter told reporters during a teleconference today. But then the Arizona-based company realized there could be a serious point behind the project. “If you can fly a chicken sandwich to the edge of space … you can fly really just about anything,” Poynter said.

Besides, the payment that KFC is providing for the publicity will cover the cost of the test flight, including the expense of beaming down live HD video from a height of 60,000 to 75,000 feet, Poynter said.

Neither she nor KFC brand communications director George Felix would say precisely how much the fast-food chain is paying, but Felix said “we’re fully confident that this is going to be worth every penny.” For reference, NASA has paid World View as much as $440,000 for balloon test flights.

What is interesting to me is how World View appears to have significantly backed off its effort to sell and fly tourists on a balloon.

When World View was founded in 2013, the company’s main objective was to provide hours-long tours to the stratosphere in a pressurized Voyager capsule for $75,000 a ticket. Since then, World View has pivoted to the Stratollite concept, but it still intends to fly people someday. “We’re actually making huge progress,” Poynter said.

Poynter is no longer giving out a timetable for the start of Voyager tours, but she said two more Stratollite missions are scheduled for this summer. MacCallum, who is Poynter’s husband, said a full-scale mass simulator for the Voyager capsule is due to be flown by the end of the year.

All in all, the suborbital space tourism business appears, at least for now, to be fading, overwhelmed by the new and growing orbital launch industry.

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Worm grows 2 heads on ISS

5:29 pm

The uncertainty of science: For reasons that are not yet understood, a flatworm fragment flown to ISS in a microgravity experiment regenerated with two heads.

But the most dramatic difference was a type of regeneration observed in one of the 15 worm fragments sent to the ISS. That worm returned to the scientists with two heads (one on each end of its body), a type of regeneration so rare as to be practically unheard of — “normal flatworms in water never do this,” Levin told Live Science. When the researchers snipped both heads off back on Earth, the middle portion regenerated into a two-headed worm again.

“And these differences persist well over a year after return to Earth!” Levin said. “Those could have been caused by loss of the geomagnetic field, loss of gravity, and the stress of takeoff and landing — all components of any space-travel experience for living systems going to space in the future,” he said.

The flatworms that flew in space showed other significant differences from the control group that stayed on Earth, further suggesting that for flatworms at least the environment of weightlessness causes more problems that were expected.

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A dust-off broom for Mars

9:22 am

Romanian engineers have developed a small plasma jet capable of blowing Martian dust from solar panels and other equipment that can be used by future missions.

The “plasma broom” solution developed by Ticoş and colleagues uses bursts of plasma jet produced by a simple plasma accelerator. When a large current is passed through two electrode plates separated by a field of rarefied gas, the voltage difference between the two electrodes ionizes the gas, creating the plasma. In the broom, this is done with a coaxial gun – the two metal electrodes are arranged as an inner rod within a hollow cylindrical shell. The discharge current flowing through the central rod electrode produces a magnetic field, which, together with the electric field, exerts a Lorentz force on the ionized gas that expels it. “The trick is that you need a quite high current in order to produce a reasonable magnetic field and this can be achieved more conveniently in a pulsed operation,” Ticoş explains. “For a fraction of a second (100 µs) the current is very high (several kiloamps) and the force pushing the plasma is quite strong.” During a pulse, the plasma is expelled at a very high speed – several kilometres per second – and so can simply blow dust away from an area two to four times bigger than the diameter of the jet.

An advantage of the plasma broom is that it uses low-pressure CO2 as the gas between the electrodes. This is particularly ideal for operation on Mars as the atmospheric pressure there is 150 times lower than on Earth and the atmosphere is 96% CO2. This means the gun will be able to function in “open” Martian atmosphere without the need for a pump or gas bottle. Ticoş and colleagues have also considered the energy required for the cleaner to function on Mars. This depends on the voltage the gun operates at and can vary between a few hundred to a few thousand Joules per pulse. “We did an energy budget estimate taking into account the solar irradiance on Mars,” says Ticoş, “and it appears perfectly feasible to fire a few shots even on a daily basis for cleaning the solar panels, which will boost considerably the energy production rate.”

Essentially, they are using ion engine concepts to create a can of dust-off, using the Martian atmosphere itself as the can.

Hat tip Mike Buford.

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House committee passes new commercial space bill

5:09 pm

Last week the House Science committee passed a new commercial space bill designed to streamline the licensing system that presently exists for getting private space missions certified as required under the Outer Space Treaty.

The bill reforms the existing licensing system for commercial remote sensing satellites, streamlining a process that many companies in that sector said results in lengthy delays. It also establishes a “certification” process for commercial spaceflight not otherwise licensed today in order to eliminate any regulatory uncertainty and ensure compliance with the Outer Space Treaty.

“The goal of this bill is not to regulate space broadly,” [Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas)] said in a statement at the markup. “Instead, the bill takes a commonsense approach by establishing a legal foundation upon which U.S. industry can flourish.”

I am in the process of reviewing the proposed law, and hope to write something detailed about it in the next few days. I should say here that in general this law seems to be trying to address the same issues relating to the Outer Space Treaty that have been discussed during the Senate hearings organized recently by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas). And while to me the resulting bill seems generally good, it still leaves hanging the Outer Space Treaty’s fundamental problems relating to property rights.

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What ISRO charges for a launch

12:40 am

Capitalism in space: This article, outlining the overall expenditures and earnings of India’s space agency, ISRO included this tidbit about the price it charges for launches:

Several companies like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, Russia’s Proton ULA, and Arianespace are big names in the space but ISRO’s Antrix provides competitive rates for commercial launches. ISRO, that has now become a specialist in launching satellites, cost a third of SpaceX launches. The low rates are probably because of ISRO’s location while its Indian engineers earn a fraction of the salaries that engineers would command in foreign countries. [emphasis mine]

If India does charge in the range of $20 to $30 million per launch they are in a strong position to compete with SpaceX, even after it reduces its prices because of the use of used first stages.

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Russia lowers its Proton launch plans for 2017

8:52 am

Though they are about to resume Proton launches, Russia today revealed that they only intend to launch the rocket five times in 2017, not seven as announced earlier.

Russia plans five Proton-M carrier rocket launches this year, including three commercial launches, Khrunichev Space Center CEO Andrei Kalinovsky told TASS on Wednesday. “Our plans for this year also additionally include four Proton-M carrier rocket launches. These are two commercial launches with Amazonas 5 and AsiaSat 9 satellites, and also two federal launches,” the chief executive said.

Even more interesting, the article notes that Russia only has contracts to launch 15 commercial satellites through 2023. That’s a launch rate of only about 2.5 to 3 commercial Proton launches per year, a rate that seems much less than in the past. Moreover, while they say they haven’t lost any customers in the past year, it also appears they haven’t gotten any either.

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China to ramp up manned missions to build space station

5:10 pm

In order to build its space station, beginning in 2019, China will increase its manned mission rate, completing four missions in five years.

This is still a somewhat glacial pace, compared to other nations. It will seem even slower based on what I expect will start happening once a number of competitive private American rockets begin hauling tourists into space.

The article notes one additional tidbit about China’s station. They plan to run 3 to 6 month long missions there.

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Air Force awards SpaceX contract to launch next X-37B mission

4:47 pm

Capitalism in space: The Air Force has awarded SpaceX the contract to launch the next X-37B mission, presently scheduled to launch in August.

The contract amount was not announced, but it certainly is going to be less than ULA charged for its own launches of the X-37B. Also, this launch is scheduled only two months hence, which means SpaceX has to somehow wedge it into its already crowded schedule.

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The atomic rocket that never was

11:19 am

Link here. The article is filled with overstatements and even a few outright errors, such as in the second paragraph when it makes the false assertion that SLS will be “the largest booster ever built.” (The Saturn 5 was more powerful. So was the Soviet Union’s Energia.)

Furthermore, the key to understanding how minor and inconsequencial Project Orion was is to note the total amount of money spent: only $10.5 million. This was merely a design study, something that NASA did (and still does) routinely, most of which never get beyond power-point presentations. Project Orion was similar, never reaching project stage. If it had been done today it would have also been nothing more than a power point presentation.

I also remember when this whole concept got cancelled and was revealed. No one took it seriously, since everyone understood that the technology available in the 1960s was simply not ready for such a project.

Nonetheless, it is interesting reading, especially since the technology today is significantly advanced. We might actually be approaching a time where this concept can finally move to design and construction.

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Jupiter’s cloud-tops, up close

4:16 pm

Jupiter's cloud tops

Cool image time! On the right is a cropped and reduced resolution section from this image from Juno. It shows the top of some of Jupiter’s clouds, swirling about chaotically.

What I find most fascinating is how this image reveals the different elevations of some of these cloud belts. The swirling clouds on the left and bottom of the image are clearly higher than the dark areas to the top and right. They are in fact casting their shadows on those lower cloud-tops.

To really understand the interactions taking place here, however, will require satellites capable of continually tracking these clouds over time. Unfortunately, Juno cannot do this. Though it will provide us periodic snapshots of specific areas, its long 53-day orbit means that it will not return to view the same areas very frequently. Making movies of the evolution of these clouds will be difficult, if not impossible.

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NASA considering using used first stages for Dragon cargo launches

11:15 am

Capitalism in space: With SpaceX’s successful launch on June 3 of a used Dragon cargo capsule to ISS, NASA is now considering using used Falcon 9 first stages for later cargo missions.

“That question has been posed,” Ven Feng, manager of the ISS Transportation Integration Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said during a post-launch press conference Saturday. “We are looking at it,” he added. “We’re evaluating every aspect of it very carefully, and there is no schedule yet when we might go down that path.”

NASA officials made the same kind of cautious statements several years ago when SpaceX proposed flying a used Dragon capsule. In other words, they are going to do it, it just takes the bureaucracy time to mull the idea over and finally accept it.

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Turkish company announces plans to build commercial rocket

11:09 am

Capitalism in space: A Turkish company, Roketsan, has announced its plans to build a rocket capable of launching both commercial and Turkish government satellites.

A Rocketsan press release that came out right before the Turkish International Defence Industry Fair held May 9-12, 2017, revealed the company’s plan to develop an independently funded satellite launch vehicle (SLV). The SLV will be Turkey’s first domestically produced rocket and it will be capable of launching low-Earth-orbiting satellites to an altitude of 500–700 km.

The SLV development is still in the conceptual design phase, but is planned to have a liquid propulsion system and falls in line with the SLS project. The SLS project involves a three-fold plan, the first step of which is to develop an SLV for the Turkish government.

Even though the SLV development is a fully private venture by Rocketsan, it will be Turkey’s own vehicle to use for government missions. That being said, the SLS project has much bigger and ambitious goals that require two additional phases. The next steps of the project will be the establishment of both a Satellite Launch Centre and Remote Earth Stations.

There is a video animation at the link showing the launch of their imagined rocket. It is worth watching because its almost cartoon quality indicates how far they probably have to travel to make this project happen.

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Proton rolled to launchpad for June 8 launch

11:01 am

After a pause in launches lasting one day short of a full year, Russia has rolled its Proton rocket to the launchpad for a hoped-for June 8 launch of a commercial communications satellite.

The article provides a nice overview of Russia’s struggles during the past year, attempting to track down the reasons why their rockets were having problems (corruption at the rocket engine factory) and their repeated attempts to get this rocket off the ground.

They hope, if all goes well, to complete seven Proton launches through the end of 2017 in order to clean up their backlog while also demonstrating that they have solved their quality control problems.

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India successfully launches its first GSLV Mark 3 rocket

8:59 am

India today successfully launched its most powerful rocket, the GSLV Mark 3, for the first time.

The first orbital launch of India’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III (GSLV Mk.III) marked a milestone in India’s space program, with the more powerful rocket allowing the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to begin launching heavier payloads aboard its own vehicles – both for spaceflight applications such as communications and in support of the country’s nascent manned space program.

Monday’s launch came two and a half years after the GSLV Mark III’s maiden flight, a successful suborbital test for which only the rocket’s lower stages were live. The test flight, conducted on 18 December 2014, carried a prototype crew capsule and also served to validate the rocket’s design and demonstrate the stage performance and operation of the rocket’s solid-fuel first stage and liquid-fuelled second stage.

This is India’s third launch this year, which amazingly ties them at this moment with Russia. This will change, as Russia hopes to resume Proton launches this week, but the fact both speaks well of India’s growing success in space and Russia’s continuing problems.

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Another proposal for dealing with the Outer Space Treaty

10:02 pm

Link here. The author has made an interesting analysis of my earlier essay on this subject, and come up with what I think is a very intriguing and most encouraging idea:

Government establishes a legal framework for enforcing law. So, rather than allow nations to make claims of territory, let us instead allow private enterprises to go to the Moon or elsewhere, stake a claim, and then, to establish a legal framework for resolving any disputes that arise, choose the government under whose legal jurisdiction their claim will reside. No governments would appropriate territory. They would merely be lending their courts to render judgments on legal disputes arising outside their territories. That would seem to satisfy Article 2. This scheme would not require a new Treaty but could probably be implemented via United Nations resolutions. [emphasis in original]

I actually like this, as it puts the power in the hands of the citizens or companies, allowing them to pick the nation to which they wish to align.

What I find most encouraging however is that the subject of the Outer Space Treaty is now becoming a major issue worth discussing, by many others. I have my ideas, others have theirs. Either way, the issues and weaknesses of the treaty are now being debated, and people are proposing solutions. In the fifty years since the treaty was signed it has previously been impossible to generate this much discussion on this issue. (Believe me, I have tried.) That others are now responding and proposing alternative approaches means that maybe the time has finally arrived where this problem will be dealt with.

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Arianespace successfully launches two commercial satellites

11:16 pm

Capitalism in space: Arianespace tonight successfully launched two commercial communications satellite with its Ariane 5 rocket.

This is the third launch by the company since it settled its labor problems in French Guiana in late April. Since then they have managed a launch ever two weeks, and at the moment Arianespace and SpaceX are tied for the most launches in 2017 at six. This tie should only last until Saturday when SpaceX hopes to launch a reused Dragon to ISS.

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VSS Unity completes fifth glide flight

4:30 pm

Virgin Galactic’s new suborbital ship, VSS Unity, successfully made its fifth unpowered glide test flight today.

VSS Unity’s glide flights have gone well, and as a result, Virgin Galactic is getting ready to transition to the next part of the test campaign, company representatives said. “To that end, as we analyze the data from today’s flight, we will be moving into a period of ground-based activity focused on preparation for fueled, and then powered, flights,” they wrote in the description.

They provided no indication of exactly when those next flights will occur, which considering the company’s past record of failed predictions, is definitely a good thing.

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Rat sperm exposed to weightlessness still produces healthy rats

8:46 am

An experiment that flew on ISS has found that rat sperm exposed to weightlessness and space radiation and then used on Earth to fertilize eggs still produce healthy rats.

The first issue for the researchers was how best to get the sperm up there. They decided to have the samples freeze-dried, just like instant coffee. This meant the sperm weighed almost nothing and could be kept at room temperature, ideal for travel on a rocket, or on a distant planet. The mouse sperm then spent 288 days on the ISS before coming back to Earth to be compared with fresh sperm from the same mice.

First, the scientists analysed how space travel affected the integrity of the DNA within the sperm. We know that high levels of fragmentation of sperm DNA are associated with male infertility. As expected, the scientists discovered that the space sperm had higher amounts of fragmented DNA than the sperm which had stayed on Earth. However, when used to fertilise a mouse egg, the space sperm resulted in a similar number of healthy embryos being generated – and these offspring had the ability to develop into normal, fertile adult mice. A final test the researchers did was to compare the patterns of genes being expressed within the brains of the adult mice. Here, the researchers saw no overall differences and concluded the space sperm was equally capable of generating offspring.

Obviously, this result is encouraging, but we are still a long way from nonchalantly letting women get pregnant and give birth in space. The risks on the child remain too great and are unknown.

In fact, I suspect the first time a child is born and raised in space will be an event that is unplanned.

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Russia moves to reduce launch costs with new rocket

8:37 am

The head of Roscosmos said today that they are pushing to accelerate the development of a new rocket, dubbed Phoenix, that will reduce launch costs by 20%, lowering the launch price per launch to $55 million.

I have been reading stories like this, about a new wonderful Russian rocket or spacecraft, for decades. First there was Clipper. Then there was Angara, repeatedly. Recently they have been talking up a new manned capsule and cargo ship. Along the way were a number of other forgotten proposals that would revolutionize space travel. None of these proposals however have ever seen the light of day, though Angara has completed two test flights.

In the past, Russia was not under any competitive pressure. They could undercut the launch price of every other rocket company in the world, without doing anything. Now, they face stiff competition that is only going to get stiffer. They need to produce, or they will be out of the game entirely.

The big question is whether they can, as a nationalized space industry run by a government that is rampant with corruption.

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