Tag: spaceflight

WISE completes another year of asteroid hunting

9:08 am

After being mothballed in space and then reactivated, NASA’s WISE infrared telescope (renamed NEOWISE for no good reason) has now completed its second year of observations, looking for near-Earth objects (NEOs).

NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its second year of survey data. The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 439 NEOs since the mission was re-started in December 2013. Of these, 72 were new discoveries. Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of the giant planets in our solar system into orbits that allow them to enter Earth’s neighborhood. Eight of the objects discovered in the past year have been classified as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), based on their size and how closely their orbits approach Earth. [emphasis mine]

Unfortunately, the press release does not provide any details about those eight potentially hazardous asteroids.

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India to test reusable mini-shuttle in May

8:56 am

The competition heats up: ISRO, India’s space agency, this week announced plans to conduct its first test flight of its half-scale prototype reusable launch vehicle in May.

The RLV, is a scaled-down prototype (some 21.3 feet in length or 6.5 meters) of a future uncrewed single-stage reusable spaceplane, known as Avatar, that is being designed by the ISRO. The May mission will be a technology demonstrator (RLV-TD) to test powered cruise flight, autonomous landing and hypersonic flight using an air-breathing propulsion system. The spacecraft, which resembles a small winged aircraft, will be launched from the first launchpad of the Satish Dhawan Space Centre to an altitude of 43 miles (70 km) atop a two-stage Rohini sounding rocket and then released. It will re-enter the atmosphere and travel back to Earth in a controlled descent, to be recovered from the Bay of Bengal. [emphasis mine]

This vehicle is kind of Inida’s version of the Air Force’s X-37B, except that it is also testing a hypersonic scramjet engine, a cutting edge design that the U.S. has barely been able to fly successfully. Should they succeed, it will place them smack dab in the middle of the elite club of space-faring nations.

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Boeing moves to block Russians from selling Sea Launch

9:21 pm

In a reaction to news that the Russians have a potential buyer for Sea Launch, Boeing has sued to block the sale.

In a motion for a preliminary injunction filed with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California April 2, Boeing argued that a sale of Sea Launch could hinder its ability to collect on a summary judgment issued last year against Energia of at least $300 million. “If Energia succeeds in selling these assets and moving all of the proceeds thereof to Russia, without paying the hundreds of millions of dollars that it owes, it would unquestionably complicate Boeing’s collection efforts,” the company’s lawyers stated in the court filing.

Energia has refused to pay that $300 million. However, since Sea Launch’s floating launch platform remains docked in California, Boeing retains a great deal of leverage in this legal dispute. I expect the court will eventually put a lock on those assets until the Russians pay up.

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Russia denies that Proton upper stage failed after launching ExoMars

9:16 pm

At a press conference today the head of Roscosmos today countered claims that some failure had occurred after ExoMars was placed on its course to Mars.

Briefing reporters in Moscow, Igor A. Komarov reiterated statements made by Proton prime contractor Khrunichev Space Center of Moscow, saying the Breeze-M upper stage separated ExoMars without incident and then proceeded with the standard passivation and collision-avoidance maneuvers.

Komarov said he had seen photos taken from a Brazilian ground telescope that appeared to show small objects in the vicinity of the Breeze-M stage and ExoMars. “I do have these pictures, provided by the Brazilian observatory, showing the ExoMars spacecraft surrounded by some dimly illuminated objects reportedly related to the upper stage,” Komarov said.

“Telemetry and other objectively verifiable data available to us, covering the entire time from the separation and the contamination and collision avoidance maneuvers to the passivation of the upper stage, show that all these steps have been performed successfully, without any anomalies,” Komarov said. “There is absolutely no indication of an upper-stage explosion or breakup.”

The uncertainty will only be settled in the next few weeks, when engineers activate all of ExoMars instruments. Should they all be working as expected, then it will likely be that nothing had happened to the Briz-M upper stage, as Roscosmos claims. If not, then Russia has a problem, since it depends on that stage for future Proton commercial launches and will not know what went wrong here.

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Close encounter with a dust devil

10:14 am

dust devil near Opportunity

Cool image time! On March 31st, as the Mars rover Opportunity took an image of the tracks it left behind as it attempted to climb the steepest slope it has yet attempted, it unexpectedly captured a nearby dust devil. The image to the right is a cropped version of that image

Be sure and take a look at the original image. Not only is the dust devil clearly imaged, showing it to be intense enough that it casts a shadow, the image gives a very good sense of the steepness of that slope. It is not surprising that Opportunity had problems getting up that hill, and eventually had to retreat because it couldn’t get to its target rock formation.

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Using ICBMs to lower launch costs

10:02 am

The competition heats up: Orbital ATK is lobbying Congress to lift a ban on the use of decommissioned ICBM missiles for commercial launches.

Orbital ATK is pressing U.S. lawmakers to end a 20-year ban on using decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) for launching commercial satellites and the effort has raised concern among companies that have invested millions of dollars in potential rival rockets. Orbital Vice President Barron Beneski said in an interview on Friday that the company was pushing Washington to get the ban lifted as part of the National Defense Authorization Act that sets defense policy for fiscal 2017, which begins Oct. 1. The missiles were idled by nuclear disarmament treaties between the United States and Russia in the 1990s.

The company wants to use the solid rocket motors in the surplus missiles to increase the capability of their Minotaur 4 rocket, designed for the small satellite market. Interestingly, Virgin Galactic, who is aiming for this same smallsat market with its LaunchOne rocket, is protesting, and has even garnered the lobbying support of the industry’s trade organization..

“It’s a dangerous precedent when the government tries to inject itself in the commercial marketplace. It can be disruptive, and not for the right reasons,” Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a Washington DC-based trade organization, said in an interview on Thursday.

Orbital ATK is not asking for exclusive use, so other companies could also obtain surplus missiles for their own use. However, the ATK in Orbital ATK’s name comes from the half of the company that before the merger was an expert in using solid rockets for space. This gives Orbital an advantage here that the other companies do not have, and explains their protests.

Nonetheless, I say tough. The government should surplus these rockets, and let the competitive chips fall where they may. Anything that lowers the cost to put payloads in orbit cannot be a bad thing for the launch industry, as it will serve to increase the number of customers that industry will have and thus help to increase everyone’s sales figures.

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Misuse revealed of vomit comet at NASA

7:16 pm

It appears that, stuck with the “vomit comet” airplane that they no longer had much use for, NASA managers tried to justify its existence and budget by assigning it tasks for which it and its crew were not designed or trained to do.

The unorthodox use of the C-9 aircraft was driven, according to the complaints, by a desire at the high levels of the agency to prove the Vomit Comet was of practical use. Apparently, it didn’t work—the C-9 aircraft program was defunded and shut down in 2014.

Since 1959, NASA has used a variety of aircraft to simulate the weightlessness of space in order to train astronauts and perform basic experiments in zero gravity. From 2005 to 2014, the C-9, built in 1970, became one of NASA’s primary Vomet Comets. According to documents uncovered by Motherboard using the Freedom of Information Act (embedded at the bottom of this article) show that the Vomit Comet was used on at least two occasions for purposes other than simulating space flight, while still labeling the missions “crew training.” In 2013, the agency officially looked into having the plane reclassified to run these types of missions.

In one of these cases, the plane was flown to Greenland without the proper equipment or training for the crew, and experienced what was described by crew as “a near fatal crash.” It didn’t crash, but the crew apparently feared for their lives.

The program was shut down in 2014 with the operations handed over to private companies. Now if NASA needs to train astronauts, they simply hire these companies, which make the bulk of their money flying private missions, something NASA wasn’t allowed to do.

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Russia schedules first Vostochny launch

7:08 pm

The competition heats up: Roscosmos has scheduled April 27 as the date for the first launch from its new spaceport in Vostochny.

I do wish them luck. I don’t think the Russians will be very successful at competing in the new private launch industry that is beginning to emerge, centered as they are on Soviet-style, top-down, giant government-run organizations, but I still hope they succeed at whatever they attempt in space. As far as I am concerned, the more the merrier.

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Russia insures first Vostochny launch

8:40 am

In the heat of competition: Russia’s space agency Roscosmos has obtained insurance for the first launch from Vostochny, covering the rocket and the launch facilities it will use.

This story tells us more about Russia’s present circumstances than the situation at Vostochny. Normally, government space agencies self-insure. Russia, however, is having serious economic problems, and I suspect that the managers there have recognized that if this launch fails and the launchpad is damaged badly, they don’t have the cash to quickly rebuild it. Granted, the insurance itself will probably cost them a lot of money they also don’t have, but considering the significant quality control problems the Russian aerospace industry has had in recent years, combined with the corruption that has surrounded the construction at Vostochny, they are probably wise to cover themselves in the not unlikely chance that something goes wrong.

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Video of Saturday’s New Shepard flight

7:36 pm

Blue Origin has released video of its New Shepard test flight on Saturday, once again in a slick edited presentation rather than raw video of the flight itself. I have embedded this video below the fold.

As promised, the propulsion module came down at full speed until only a few seconds before impact, then fired its engines and gently slowed, then hovered, then touched down without harm. The long shot of it coming down is especially breathtaking.
» Read more

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New Shepard flies again, for the third time

1:23 pm

The competition heats up: On Saturday Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its reusable New Shepard suborbital capsule/rocket spacecraft

The vehicle lifted off from the company’s test site shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern time, according to a series of tweets by company founder Jeff Bezos. The vehicle’s propulsion module, the same one that flew earlier test flights in November and January, made a successful powered landing, he said. Its crew capsule, flying without people on board, parachuted to a safe landing. … The vehicle reached a peak altitude of nearly 103.4 kilometers, slightly above the “von Karman line” frequently used as the boundary of space and similar to previous test flights.

This flight also carried some science experiments, demonstrating that Blue Origin’s customers will not be limited merely to space tourists.

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New Shepard to fly this weekend

4:39 pm

The competition heats up: Jeff Bezos indicated today on Twitter that the next New Shepard flight will be this weekend.

“Working to fly again tomorrow,” Blue Origin founder and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos tweeted on Friday. “Same vehicle. Third time.” Adding to the intrigue, Bezos said there was a higher chance of a crash on the upcoming unmanned test flight. During its descent, the booster’s hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine will re-light closer to the ground — just 3,600 feet up — and at higher thrust than before.

“Pushing the envelope,” said Bezos. “Impact in 6 sec if engine doesn’t restart & ramp fast.”

I will be out caving this weekend, so my reactions will have to wait until I return on Sunday night. Should be quite exciting however, especially as this will be third flight into space for this ship/rocket, a first as far as I know in space travel. There have been some vehicles reused, but I don’t remember any that reached space and were reused more than once.

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Sierra Nevada favors Alabama for Dream Chaser’s commercial port

9:50 am

The competition heats up: At a workshop in Alabama this week Sierra Nevada’s vice president indicated that though the company has not yet finalized its decision, it is strongly leaning to picking Huntsville as the commercial spaceport for its Dream Chaser mini-shuttle, being built to ferry cargo to ISS.

“There was a leap of faith on the Huntsville side that we would be a company that could get this vehicle built and start servicing the space station…,” Sierra Nevada Vice President John Roth said Thursday. “Yes, we have been approached by other airports for ventures. We’re not moving forward at this time with any of those. Right now, Huntsville is the only community we’re moving forward with a (landing) license on.”

A preliminary local study identified four hurdles to landing Dream Chaser at the Huntsville International Airport: required licenses for the craft and airport, environmental impact approval, Federal Aviation Administration approval of the landing path and possible runway damage.

Why do I sense the unseen hand of porkmeister Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) in this story? Could it be that one of the reasons NASA finally included Dream Chaser in its cargo contract was that the company had not only chosen the Alabama-based Atlas 5 rocket for its launch vehicle but was also courting Alabama for its commercial base, and Shelby had made it clear behind the scenes that he wanted that business? Could it be that Sierra Nevada is now returning the favor, having gotten the contract?

Don’t get me wrong. I think it was a good choice for NASA to give that contract to Sierra Nevada. I just think it important to note how giving some of our power away to politicians allows them to wield that power over us, sometimes to our benefit, sometimes against it, but always to make themselves more powerful. In the end, giving that power away is never a good option.

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Opportunity takes a spin

9:36 am

In attempting several times this past week to climb the steepest ever tried by a rover on Mars and failing, Opportunity has moved on to a new less challenging target.

The rover’s tilt hit 32 degrees on March 10 while Opportunity was making its closest approach to an intended target near the crest of “Knudsen Ridge.”

Engineers anticipated that Opportunity’s six aluminum wheels would slip quite a bit during the uphill push, so they commanded many more wheel rotations than would usually be needed to travel the intended distance. Results from the drive were received in the next relayed radio report from the rover: The wheels did turn enough to have carried the rover about 66 feet (20 meters) if there had been no slippage, but slippage was so great the vehicle progressed only about 3.5 inches (9 centimeters). This was the third attempt to reach the target and came up a few inches short.

The rover team reached a tough decision to skip that target and move on.

Having operated thirteen years longer than originally planned, the science and engineering team that operates the Mars rover Opportunity are increasingly willing to try more risky things. For example, the valley the rover is in, called Marathon Valley, is actually an east-west slice through the rim of 14-mile-wide Endeavour Crater. Traveling into that slice towards the crater’s interior is a far riskier trip than ever dreamed of by Opportunity’s designs more than a decade ago.

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Looking back at Comet 67P/C-G

9:27 am

Comet 67P/C-G backlit

Cool image time! As part of its research plan, Rosetta has been moved outward from Comet 67P/C-G for the next few weeks in order to better study its coma and tail. In this new position, engineers were able to maneuver the spacecraft so that it was flying about 600 miles farther from the Sun and could look back and see the Sun being eclipsed by the comet.

Thanks to the combination of a long, four-second exposure, no attenuation filter and a low-gain setting on the analogue signal processor of NAVCAM (a setting that is used to image bright targets), the image reveals the bright environment of the comet, displaying beautiful outflows of activity streaming away from the nucleus in various directions. It is interesting to note hints of the shadow cast by the nucleus on the coma below it, as well as a number of background stars sprinkled across the image.

In the next week the spacecraft will move back in close to the comet.

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OneWeb begins hiring in Florida

10:03 am

The competition heats up: The new satellite company OneWeb, with plans to launch a constellation of 900 satellites beginning next year, has begun hiring engineers for a manufacturing plant it intends to locate in Florida.

The article also notes the construction start of a new building that is suspected but not confirmed as the location of that manufacturing plant.

OneWeb’s existence is visible proof of my contention that if the launch business can lower the cost to orbit it will create new customers who can afford to buy the product. OneWeb is partly lowering the cost on its own by using small cubesat-like satellites, but it is also taking advantage of the renewed competition in the launch industry to get better deals on buying the rockets it needs to launch those satellites.

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Russia selling Sea Launch?

12:12 am

The competition heats up? Though he couldn’t reveal any details, the director of Russian space agency Roscosmos today said that they have found a buyer for Sea Launch.

“I cannot tell you who the investor is, or the value of the contract, due to certain obligations. I hope that we will have something to say about it by the end of April,” Komarov said. He did, however, say that investors from the U.S., Australia, China and Europe have expressed interest in the project.

Because Sea Launch is a floating launch platform, there really is no reason the company can’t be taken over by anyone in the world. And should the buyer use the Ukrainian Zenit rocket that the platform was designed to use, the technical problems might be reduced as well.

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Using lasers to travel to the stars

9:44 am

The competition really heats up! A research team at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) has proposed that an array of space-based lasers can be used to accelerate a solar sail to speeds as much as 26% the speed of light, thus making interstellar travel possible.

[The] key breakthrough was the development of modular arrays of synchronized high-power lasers, fed by a common “seed laser.” The modularity removes the need for building powerful lasers as a single device, splitting them instead into manageable parts and powering the seed laser with relatively little energy. Lockheed Martin has recently exploited this advance to manufacture powerful new weapons for the US Army. In March last year, the aerospace and defense giant demonstrated a 30 kW laser weapon (and its devastating effect on a truck). By October, the laser’s power had already doubled to 60 kW and offered the option to reach 120 kW by linking two modules using off-the-shelf components.

The UCSB researchers refer to their own planned arrays as DE-STAR (Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and ExploRation), with a trailing number to denote their size. A DE-STAR-1 would be a square array 10 meters (33 ft) per side and about as powerful as Lockheed’s latest; at the other end of the spectrum, a DE-STAR-4 would be a 70 GW array covering a massive area of 100 square kilometers (39 square miles).

…Lubin stresses that even a relatively modest orbital array could offer interesting propulsion capabilities to CubeSats and nanosatellites headed beyond Earth orbit, and that useful initial tests would still be conducted on the ground first on one-meter (3-ft) arrays, gradually ramping up toward assembling small arrays in orbit. While even a small laser array could accelerate probes of all sizes, the larger 70-GW system would of course be the most powerful, capable of generating enough thrust to send a CubeSat probe to Mars in eight hours – or a much larger 10,000-kg (22,000-lb) craft to the same destination in a single month, down from a typical six to eight.

Further upgrades would make it possible to send a cubesate and its lightsail to Alpha Centuri in about fifteen years.

The important point here is that it appears that all the technology for building this already exists, or is relatively straightforward to develop.

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Federal law outlaws launches on foreign rockets

5:37 pm

Killing competition: The American launch industry as well as the FAA regulators are in agreement that a 2005 law that limits American small satellite companies from using foreign launch companies should remain in place.

The CSLA, dating from 2005, is the U.S. government’s way of protecting the seemingly forever-nascent U.S. small-satellite launch industry from competing with government-controlled foreign launchers for U.S. business. It seeks to oblige non-U.S. rocket providers to sign a CSLA that, for all intents and purposes, sets U.S. commercial launch prices as the world minimum for government-owned non-U.S. launch providers.

The rationale is that these non-U.S. launchers, not bound by the constraints of profit and loss – but hungry for hard-currency export earnings – will undercut commercial U.S. companies’ launch prices and keep them from gaining market traction.

India’s launch rockets, for example, are designed and built by India’s space agency ISRO, and are backed not by private funds but by government money. The fear is that India could subsidize its rockets so that the price could always be kept below what any American company could charge.

The truth, however, is that competition and innovation, here in the U.S., has so successful undercut foreign prices that no amount of subsidies can hope to compete. Those foreign companies are now scrambling to actually redesign their rockets to lower their costs and thus their prices, rather than asking for more handouts from their governments. This law should be repealed.

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Combined Earth-Space radio array discovers superhot quasar interior

11:01 am

The uncertainty of science: Data obtained by combining four ground-based radio telescopes with the Russian orbiting RadioAstron 10-meter radio telescope have detected temperatures of 10 trillion degrees in the quasar 3C 273, a hundred times hotter than predicted possible by theory.

Supermassive black holes, containing millions to billions times the mass of our Sun, reside at the centers of all massive galaxies. These black holes can drive powerful jets that emit prodigiously, often outshining all the stars in their host galaxies. But there is a limit to how bright these jets can be – when electrons get hotter than about 100 billion degrees, they interact with their own emission to produce X-rays and Gamma-rays and quickly cool down.

Astronomers have just reported a startling violation of this long-standing theoretical limit in the quasar 3C 273. “We measure the effective temperature of the quasar core to be hotter than 10 trillion degrees!” comments Yuri Kovalev (Astro Space Center, Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow, Russia), the RadioAstron project scientist. “This result is very challenging to explain with our current understanding of how relativistic jets of quasars radiate.”

In addition, the higher resolution of the radio images produced by this space/ground-based array was good enough to see the effect produced by the structure of the interstellar material between here and the quasar.

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Video suggests Hitomi tumbling in orbit

9:17 am

Video taken by an amateur astronomer of Hitomi shows it spinning out of control, another indication that something catastrophic occurred to the newly launched X-ray telescope.

The video shows an object that looks like Hitomi, which lost contact Saturday with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), shining and then turning extremely dark in short intervals. The wild changes in brightness might mean its sunlight-reflecting side is moving turbulently. “The fact that it is rotating with extreme variations in brightness indicates that it is not controlled and that some event caused it to begin its rotation,” Paul Maley, a former NASA flight controller who observed Hitomi from the ground in Arizona, was quoted as saying.

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Computer chip company sues SpaceX

9:07 am

The competition heats up: A computer chip manufacturer has sued SpaceX, accusing it of stealing both its engineers and the computer chips they were designing.

Broadcom’s co-founder and chief technology officer Henry Samueli met with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in October 2015 in attempts to solidify an agreement, at which time Musk insisted Broadcom keep its “A-team” on the project, according to the complaint.

But even as Samueli and Musk were meeting, other SpaceX representatives were attempting to uncover the identities of the “A-team” engineers working on the Space X project, Broadcom says in its complaint. Five Broadcom engineers – all of whom worked on the SpaceX project – resigned their positions with the company effective March 11, and refused to disclose their new employer, according to the complaint. Broadcom says SpaceX confirmed they hired the five engineers on March 9, saying nothing prevented them from hiring other Broadcom engineers.

For its part, SpaceX says the Broadcom engineers – all named as defendants in Broadcom’s complaint – approached them. “SpaceX did not pursue or lure engineers from Broadcom,” a SpaceX spokesman said. “On the contrary, these engineers reached out to SpaceX anticipating significant layoffs at the Broadcom Irvine location.”

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Debris spotted near Hitomi

8:31 am

U.S. military observations have detected debris near the Japanese X-ray telescope Hitomi that has failed to respond to communication signals.

The U.S. Joint Space Operations Center on Sunday said it has spotted five objects floating near Japan’s brand new Hitomi X-ray astronomy satellite that lost communication with Earth the previous day. In a Twitter post, the center, which tracks objects in orbit, said it identified five pieces of “break up” debris in the vicinity of the satellite.

None of this sounds encouraging.

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No communications with new Japanese X-ray telescope

8:25 am

Bad news: Engineers have not been able to establish communications with Japan’s new X-ray telescope, Hitomi, since it was launched last month.

The JAXA announcement is very terse, and somewhat unclear, as its wording suggests that communications were not scheduled to begin until yesterday, even though the spacecraft was launched February 17. To me that does not sound right. Regardless, failure to establish communications at the beginning of a flight is usually a very bad thing, as it usually means something fundamental failed at launch and is thus difficult to fix or overcome.

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