Tag: spaceflight

Curiosity’s wheels handling rough terrain

9:55 am

Good news: The Curiosity engineering team has found that the rough and fractured rocky terrain the rover has been recently traveling across on Naukluft Plateau has not significantly increased the wear & tear on the rover’s wheels.

The rover team closely monitors wear and tear on Curiosity’s six wheels. “We carefully inspect and trend the condition of the wheels,” said Steve Lee, Curiosity’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “Cracks and punctures have been gradually accumulating at the pace we anticipated, based on testing we performed at JPL. Given our longevity projections, I am confident these wheels will get us to the destinations on Mount Sharp that have been in our plans since before landing.”

Inspection of the wheels after crossing most of the Naukluft Plateau has indicated that, while the terrain presented challenges for navigation, driving across it did not accelerate damage to the wheels.

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SpaceX gets its first official Air Force contract

8:52 am

The competition heats up: On April 27 the Air Force made it official and announced that SpaceX has won its first military contract, breaking ULA’s launch monopoly.

This contract award really isn’t a surprise, as SpaceX had been certified by the Air Force as a qualified bidder, and ULA had declined to bid on this particular contract, leaving SpaceX as the Air Force’s only possible contractor.

Update: The Air Force has admitted that SpaceX’s $83 million price is 40% less than what ULA has typically charged for a comparable launch, confirming what Elon Musk and SpaceX (and many others, including myself back in 2005) have claimed all along, that the Air Force’s EELV bulk buy (giving ULA an Air Force launch monopoly) was a bad idea, discouraging innovation, forcing costs up, and guaranteed to force the government to spend a lot of unnecessary extra money.

I must add that it is definitely worthwhile reading my UPI column from 2005 again, now, more than a decade later. I predicted quite accurately what has subsequently happened following the merger of Lockheed Martin and Boeing to form ULA.

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Another successful launch for India

8:47 am

The competition heats up: India has successfully launched its seventh home-built GPS satellite, completing their GPS constellation.

The seven first-generation satellites have been launched over a three-year period, starting with the deployment of IRNSS-1A in July 2013. ISRO has launched all of the satellites itself using the PSLV rocket. The flight number for Thursday’s launch was PSLV C33, which saw the vehicle fly in its most powerful configuration, the PSLV-XL. This version of the PSLV was introduced in October 2008 with the launch of the Chandrayaan-1 lunar probe, and features more powerful solid rocket boosters than the standard PSLV, increasing the amount of payload it can carry into orbit.

Meanwhile, they are gearing up for the first test flight of the engineering prototype of their reusuable spaceplane.

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First launch from Vostochny a success

10:47 pm

The competition heats up: After more than a decade of construction and more than $6 billion, the new Russian spaceport succeeded in its first rocket launch in the early morning hours of April 28, sending three satellites into Earth orbit.

Several news stories have said that Putin was not happy about the one day launch delay due to a computer issue, as well as the one day delay of a Soyuz launch in French Guiana earlier in the week.

Meanwhile, don’t expect any further launches at Vostochny for a long time. The spaceport really isn’t ready for regular operations. This launch was merely a face-saving gesture to disguise the fact that construction is really more than a year behind schedule, not three months.

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Dragon to go to Mars in 2018

9:33 am

The competition heats up: Though no details have yet been released, SpaceX has announced through its twitter feed that they plan to send a Dragon to Mars by 2018.

This is not really a surprise, as rumors have been circulating literally for years of Musk’s Martian goals. Nor am I doubtful they can do it. What is important about this announcement is that it suggests that they are now confident that the delays for the first Falcon Heavy launch are mostly over, and that it will happen in the fall as presently planned. With this rocket they will have the launch capability to do a test flight to Mars.

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Curiosity drills again

9:24 am

The Curiosity science team has paused the rover’s journey up Mt Sharp in order to drill another hole, this time on the fractured rock covering the surface of Naukluft plateau.

The drill effort was a success, and they are now gathering data from the hole and the material from it. At the same time, the drilling process drained the rover’s batteries, which means they are now taking a break from science to let them recharge.

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First Vostochny launch scrubbed at T-1.5

9:15 am

The first launch at Russia’s new Vostochny spaceport yesterday was aborted by its computers at T-1.5 minutes.

The head of Russia’s Roscosmos, Igor Komarov, said the launch was halted automatically due to the glitches of the automated control system. He said the system may be restored in a day. “As usual, the responsibility for what is happening in the space sector rests with those people who are in charge of it and head it,” Komarov added.

I love how governments and their minions always use the word “glitch” when the really haven’t the slightest idea what went wrong.

Regardless, based on their plans to try again tomorrow, I suspect that the problem was relatively simple, related to the computer sensing some parameter that was outside expected tolerances, and easily fixed.

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April 25, 2016 Zimmerman Space Show appearance

10:43 am

My appearance on the Space Show yesterday is now available as a podcast. I strongly recommend people listen to it, especially the first hour. During that section I compared at length the cost and practicality of the Falcon Heavy with SLS/Orion, and noted how badly Congress and Presidents from both parties have served the American people these past twenty years in mismanaging our aerospace industry.

David Livingston called it a rant, and criticized me for it during the show, but I think the time has come for more Americans to rage in horror at the foolishness and possible corruption of our elected leaders in Washington.

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A close look at Falcon 9’s reusable cost savings

10:33 am

Link here.

The analysis is interesting and thoughtful, though some of the negative comments quoted from a former NASA engineer only illustrate why NASA was unable to do this very well. Moreover, these comments from Arianespace’s chief suggest that Arianespace doesn’t understand basic economics.

Arianespace Chief Executive Stephane Israel, in an April 23 briefing at Europe’s Guiana Space Center here on the northeast coast of South America, said Europe’s launch sector can only guess at how much SpaceX will need to spend to refurbish its Falcon 9 first stages. Israel said European assessments of reusability have concluded that, to reap the full cost benefits, a partially reusable rocket would need to launch 35-40 times per year to maintain a sizable production facility while introducing reused hardware into the manifest.

…Israel’s argument, which he has made before, is that even if first stages can be recovered and refurbished in a cost-effective way, the launch rate needed for maximum cost savings – and hence price reductions to customers – is beyond Europe’s reach. The only nations today whose governments are launching sufficiently often to reach those rates are the United States and China, and even these government markets may be insufficient, in and of themselves, to close the business case.

The customer base is not static. If you lower the price, the customer base grows, a fact that Elon Musk understands and which has been driving his effort from day one.

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The methane seas of Titan

10:23 am

Scientists have used the data that Cassini has gathered in more than a hundred fly-bys of Titan to assemble a rough outline of the geology and make-up of Titan’s liquid lakes.

There are three large seas, all close to the north pole, surrounded by dozens of smaller lakes in the northern hemisphere. Just one lake has been found in the southern hemisphere. The exact make-up of these liquid reservoirs remained elusive until recently. A new study using scans from Cassini’s radar during flybys of Titan between 2007 and 2015 confirms that one of the largest seas on the moon, Ligeia Mare, is mostly liquid methane.

“We expected to find that Ligeia Mare would be mostly ethane, which is produced in abundance in the atmosphere when sunlight breaks methane molecules apart,” explains Alice Le Gall from the Laboratoire Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales and Université Versailles Saint-Quentin, France, and lead author of the new study. “Instead, this sea is predominantly made of pure methane.”

The data is also giving them the first understanding of the weather and geology that forms the lakes, including why methane instead of ethane dominates.

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Hubble discovers moon circling Kuiper belt object

10:10 am

Worlds without end: Hubble has spotted a small moon orbiting the distant Kuiper Belt object Makemake.

The moon — provisionally designated S/2015 (136472) 1 and nicknamed MK 2 — is more than 1,300 times fainter than Makemake. MK 2 was seen approximately 13,000 miles from the dwarf planet, and its diameter is estimated to be 100 miles across. Makemake is 870 miles wide. The dwarf planet, discovered in 2005, is named for a creation deity of the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island.

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An extended Dawn mission might go to another asteroid

10:05 am

The Dawn science team is proposing that NASA extend the mission by allowing them to use the remaining fuel on the spacecraft to send it away from Ceres and towards another asteroid.

Originally mission managers had planned to park it in a stable orbit around Ceres later this summer, creating a permanent artificial satellite. They could not crash the spacecraft into Ceres, as is customary with many similar missions, because Dawn has not been sterilized in accord with planetary protection procedures. But the extra xenon has created an additional opportunity.

Scientists involved with the spacecraft say they could visit a third object in the asteroid belt. “Instead, we want to go the other way, away from Ceres, to visit yet another target,” principal investigator Chris Russell told New Scientist. Russell would not name the destination without approval of the plan from NASA, but we should learn about it in a few months.

Up until now they had said that they didn’t have enough remaining fuel to do much more than remain in orbit at Ceres. It appears now that they have saved enough fuel to give them more options.

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New smallsat rocket company obtains financing

9:59 am

The competition heats up: A new rocket company, Vector Space Systems, has announced that it has obtained seed money to begin the development of a new rocket for launch very small satellites.

Vector is designed to provide dedicated launches of very small spacecraft. The vehicle is capable of placing satellites weighing up to 45 kilograms into a basic low Earth orbit, and 25 kilograms into a standard sun synchronous orbit. Those launches will cost $2–3 million each, with the higher price reserved for “first class” launches reserved as little as three months in advance.

This rocket would compete with Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne and Rocket Lab’s Electron for the smallsat and cubesat business.

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Congress micro-manages rocket engineering again

9:56 am

In an effort to funnel money to Aerojet Rocketdyne at the cost of every other rocket company in the nation, the House Armed Services Committee has written a bill that tells the Air Force exactly how it will build its future rockets.

“The Committee shares the concern of many members that reliance on Russian-designed rocket engines is no longer acceptable,” the committee said April 25. “The Chairman’s Proposal, as recommended by Chairman Rogers of the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, denies the Air Force’s request to pursue the development, at taxpayer expense, of new commercial launch systems. It instead focuses on the development of a new American engine to replace the Russian RD-180 by 2019 to protect assured access to space and to end reliance on Russian engines. The Mark also holds the Air Force accountable for its awards of rocket propulsion contracts that violated the FY15 and FY16 NDAAs.”

…“The funds would not be authorized to be obligated or expended to develop or procure a launch vehicle, an upper stage, a strap-on motor, or related infrastructure,” says a draft of the 2017 defense authorization bill.

As presently written, the bill would leave the Air Force only one option: use engines built by Aerojet Rocketdyne.

If anything demonstrates the corruption or foolishness of our elected officials, it is this proposal. Not only are they telling the Air Force how to design rockets, they are limiting the options so much that they are guaranteeing that it will either cost us more than we can afford, or it won’t be doable at all. As I say, either they are corrupt (working to benefit Aerojet Rocketdyne in exchange for money), or they are foolish, (preventing the Air Force from exploring as many inexpensive future options as possible).

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First Long March 5 begins assembly

9:44 am

The competition heats up: China has begun assembly of its first Long March 5 rocket, set for launch in September.

Yang Hujun, vice chief engineer, has spoken about the next steps for the Long March-5 project. “After the assembly is finished in the first half of this year, it will take a little more than a month to test it to ensure that the product is in good shape. The first launch will be made after it is out of the plant in the latter half of the year. “

The rocket will be able to put about 25 tons into orbit, making it one of the most powerful rockets in the world. They plan to use it on its first launch to put their next space station into orbit.

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Problems at Stratolaunch?

9:39 am

In the heat of competition: Vulcan Aerospace, the company building the giant Stratolaunch airplane designed launch orbital rockets from its underbelly, does not yet have a rocket for this purpose.

Originally that rocket was to be built by SpaceX, but that partnership ended in 2012.

Stratolaunch then contracted out its rocket work to Orbital Sciences Corp. (now Orbital ATK). The company also contracted with Aerojet Rocketdyne for six RL10C-1 rocket engines with an option for six more for use in the launch vehicle’s third stage.

The agreement with Orbital ended without the production of a launch vehicle, with Beames saying the rocket was not economical. Stratolaunch officials said they were reassessing the project in light of the shift in the market recently toward smaller satellites.

In 2015, Beames said that Stratolaunch was examining more than 70 launch vehicles for use with the Stratolaunch aircraft. He indicated that the company might use multiple launch vehicles to serve different payload classes. Beames said the company would announce its launch vehicle strategy in fall 2015, but that time came and went with no announcement. [emphasis mine]

It is very worrisome for them to be hunting for a rocket at this point of design. I am reminded of Virgin Galactic and SpaceShipTwo, which changed engine designs midstream, causing them enormous engineering problems and delays.

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New images of failed Beagle 2 on Mars

9:02 am

By carefully improving the resolution of images taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of the landing site of the 2003 European Mars lander Beagle 2, scientists think the lander might have successfully landed but failed to deploy its solar shields completely.

Showing a bright blip in dusty terrain, the new picture is four times the resolution of previous images. The image adds weight to the theory that the diminutive spacecraft – just under a metre in diameter – landed as planned on Mars in 2003, but failed to fully unfurl its solar panels. “Given the size of Beagle 2, even with super-resolution images you are not likely to see more than a series of blobs because it is so small,” said Mark Sims, of the University of Leicester and former mission manager for Beagle 2. “What it does show is that it is on the surface and it is at least partially deployed.”

The technique they have developed for improving image resolution will also be useful to tease out new details about the Martian surface.

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Soyuz rocket launch scrubbed due to faulty IMU

8:51 am

Uh-oh: A Soyuz rocket launch from French Guiana was scrubbed an hour before launch on Sunday because of detected problems with the inertial measurement unit (IMU) in its navigational system.

Arianespace chief executive Stephane Israel tweeted Sunday that the faulty inertial measurement unit, or IMU, will be replaced overnight in time for a launch attempt Monday. The IMU is located on the Soyuz rocket’s third stage and is used to determine the heading and orientation of the vehicle in the first nine minutes of its mission, feeding critical attitude data to the launcher’s guidance computers, which transmit steering commands to the engines.

The venerable Soyuz booster flies more often than any other launcher in the world, and delays due to technical causes are rare. [emphasis mine]

This is not good news for Russia’s aerospace industry, as it suggests that the quality control problems Russia has experienced with the company that manufactures its Proton rocket are now beginning to appear with the different company that manufactures the Soyuz rocket.

If true, this is also very bad news for American astronauts, who must use this rocket to get to and from space.

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Avoiding the period in space

9:37 am

New research has outlined the techniques available to female astronauts to prevent menstruation in space.

Rather than researching the consequences of women having a period in space, the researchers are recommending that women avoid them completely, something that appears to have been the policy of NASA on ISS. This is a big mistake. The whole point of having a space station is to find out the consequences to the human body imposed by weightlessness. Future space explorers will need to reproduce. We need to know now if that will be possible.

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China to launch full space station in 2018

9:26 am

The competition heats up: China has announced that it will launch the first module of its full space station, named Tianhe-1, in 2018.

The article also gives an short summary of China’s space plans in 2016:

2016 will also be a busy and crucial year for China. Assembly of its second space lab, Tiangong-2, has been completed and the space station prototype will launch in September. This is set to be followed a month later by the Shenzhou-11 crewed mission with two Chinese astronauts. It will also debut new launch vehicles, the Long March 5 and 7, which will greatly increase the country’s launch capabilities.

Long March 5 is capable of putting 25 tons in orbit, making it comparable to Boeing’s Delta 4 Heavy, the most powerful rocket presently operational.

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Evidence of water on Ceres?

9:21 am

water on Ceres?

New data from Dawn suggests that there is significant water locked in surface of Ceres’s north polar regions.

These data reflect the concentration of hydrogen in the upper yard (or meter) of regolith, the loose surface material on Ceres. The color information is based on the number of neutrons detected per second by GRaND. Counts decrease with increasing hydrogen concentration. The color scale of the map is from blue (lowest neutron count) to red (highest neutron count). Lower neutron counts near the pole suggest the presence of water ice within about a yard (meter) of the surface at high latitudes.

Note that the data has not detected water. The blue areas on the image to the right suggest an increased amount of hydrogen, which could only be held to the surface if it was locked in some molecule, with water being the most likely candidate. Like the Moon, until we actual capture some samples, it will be difficult to confirm with certainty the presence of water.

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Orbital ATK negotiating lease for part of VAB

9:36 pm

The competition heats up: Orbital ATK has begun negotiations with NASA for possibly leasing part of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for use in connection with a military rocket.

Virginia-based Orbital ATK is one of two rocket companies that launch resupply missions to the International Space Station, but this deal would not involve those missions or that rocket, the company’s Antares. The Antares launches from NASA’s space port at Wallops Island, Va., carrying the Orbital ATK Cygnus capsule.

The new rocket that Orbital ATK hopes to develop and one day assemble in the VAB would be a medium- to heavy-lift rocket.The planned rocket currently referred to by the name the Air Force set for it, the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle-class rocket.

It sounds like Orbital ATK is putting together a bid to compete for the Air Force rocket contract, and needs to get a handle on the costs for using the VAB at Kennedy in order to make the offer credible.

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China grows mouse embryos in space

10:51 am

During a two week unmanned biology satellite mission, Chinese scientists successfully demonstrated that mouse embryos can develop in weightlessness.

The team developed an embryo culture system and placed it within a small enclosed chamber [on the spacecraft] that provides the ideal conditions for the embryos to develop in space. While the chamber was in orbit, a camera attached to the experiment took photographs of the embryos as they developed in microgravity, and sent these images back to Earth. With the aid of their imaging technology, the researchers were able to observe how the mammalian two-cell stage embryos developed into blastocysts under microgravity after four days. Blastocysts are structures formed in the very early development of mammals. In humans blastocysts begin to form five days after fertilization.

The researchers will now compare their space-developed embryos to those cultured in normal laboratory environments on Earth to see what differences there are between the two at both a cellular and molecular level.

None of this proves that life can be conceived and grow in weightlessness. It does however suggest that it might be possible.

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50 year old time capsule in Houston reveals space artifacts

9:40 am

In opening a time capsule from 1966 at a Houston library, workers discovered a flag flown in space by Pete Conrad on Gemini 5, and a model of the Gemini capsule and Titan rocket that launched it.

The capsule unfortunately had gotten water-logged, so that many of the paper items inside were damaged.

I must admit it seems strange to me to open a time capsule when people are still alive (like myself) from the time the capsule was sealed, as the basic purpose of the capsule should be to pass information on to future generations, long after its builders are gone.

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Liver damage from weightlessness?

11:28 pm

The uncertainty of science: Mice flown for almost two weeks on the last space shuttle mission in 2011 have shown evidence of the early symptoms of liver disease.

The mice spent time orbiting the Earth on the final space shuttle flight in 2011. Once they returned home, teams of scientists were allowed to share and study their internal organs.

Jonscher’s team found that spaceflight resulted in increased fat storage in the liver, comparing pair-fed mice on Earth to those on the shuttle. This was accompanied by a loss of retinol, an animal form of Vitamin A, and changes to levels of genes responsible for breaking down fats. As a result, mice showed signs of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and potential early indicators for the beginnings of fibrosis, which can be one of the more progressive consequences of NAFLD. “It generally takes a long time, months to years, to induce fibrosis in mice, even when eating an unhealthy diet,” Jonscher said. “If a mouse is showing nascent signs of fibrosis without a change in diet after 13 ½ days, what is happening to the humans?”

This result doesn’t prove that weightlessness causes liver damage. It only suggests that more research is needed, though the data from six month to year long missions suggest that the liver harm to humans is either non-existent or temporary.

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Largest jet engine ever test fired

9:31 am

The competition heats up: General Electric has completed the first test firing of the largest airplane jet engine ever built.

With a front fan spreading a full 11 ft (3.35 m), the GE9X is a world record holder and generates thrust in the order of 100,000 lb. To accommodate the aeronautical behemoth, the Peebles facility was recently upgraded with a larger air intake, extra fuel tanks to feed the giant engine, and high temperature gear to deal with the hotter, more efficient design.

GE says that the GE9X is currently undergoing its first Full Engine To Test (FETT). This is the next level of the test series, which began in 2011 at the component level, and marks the first test of the complete system, which comes only six months after the engine design was finalized. GE says that this relatively early testing was to ensure that the test data was available as soon as possible for the certification engines, which are scheduled to be installed in GE Aviation’s flying test bed for certification of flight testing in 2018.

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