Tag: spaceflight

SpaceX’s next commercial launch set for tomorrow

9:44 am

The competition heats up: Just three weeks after its previous commercial launch SpaceX is scheduled to put AsiaSat 8 into orbit at 1:25 am tomorrow.

If Tuesday morning’s launch goes well, SpaceX will follow it with another commercial launch just three weeks later, also for Asiasat.

The article above notes how this will be the first launch for Asiasat from the U.S. in more than a decade. They had switched to Russian launchers because of cost and the difficulties of working under U.S. security requirements. The security problems still remain, but might be solved if SpaceX builds its own private spaceport.

William Wade, AsiaSat president and CEO, is excited for the upcoming launches, but confirmed the company’s experience here has not been as easy as at other launch sites. Access to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for roughly 60 employees, shareholders and customers now in town — most not U.S. citizens and many who are Chinese nationals – has been difficult. “That is proving to be somewhat cumbersome,” Wade said. “We have to go through all the security clearances, which is expected, but we are finding as a foreign company that it is a bit more difficult conducting our launches there.”

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67P from less than 200 miles

9:15 am

67P on August 3

Today’s Rosetta image of Comet 67P, shown above, gives us a different angle of the comet. The spacecraft was only 186 miles (300 kilometers) away when it snapped the picture, and this side view emphasizes the nucleus’s jagged shape.

I am reminded of what happens to a block of ice when you spray warm water on it. It begins to melt away, but very randomly and unevenly, producing very weird shapes and the surface evaporates off. In the case of Comet 67P, the nucleus is a dirty ball of ice, and the Sun’s rays have been causing its surface to evaporate off every time it approaches the Sun. Thus, we get a very weird shape.

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Russia outlines its space exploration plans for the next two decades

9:21 am

At a science conference in Moscow on Saturday the director of Russia’s Space Research Institute described in detail the future exploration plans for the Russian space program.

According to the story, Russia plans to return to the Moon and Mars with unmanned probes. He also described how the first missions will be in partnership with Europe, followed by Russian missions designed to test and prove the technologies. If these flights go well, in 2024 Russia will consider trying again with a repeat of the Phobos-Grunt mission that failed in 2012

This last detail is a change from previous reports that said Russia would launch Phobos-Grunt 2 in 2018. It is also consistent with much of the Russian program for the last two decades (as well as most of NASA’s own ambitious manned exploration program), where the agency makes bold announcements of future plans but somehow with each new announcement the dates for the actual launch have always been pushed back. The actual flight never seems to happen.

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The Putin government moves to take control of Energia

11:21 pm

Vitaly Lopota, the president of Russia’s largest space company Energia, was suspended Friday by the company’s board of directors.

The move appears to be part of an effort by Russia’s government to obtain majority control over Energia, of which it owns a 38-percent share. The directors elected Igor Komarov as its new chairman of the board. Komarov is chief of the Russian United Rocket and Space Corporation (URSC), the government-owned company tasked with consolidating Russia’s sprawling space sector.

The government is also conducting a criminal investigation of Lopota, which might be justified but to me nonetheless appears to be a power play designed to both eliminate him from the game as well as make sure everyone else toes the line so that URSC can take complete control.

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Comet 67P from 1000 k

11:06 pm

67P from 1000 kilometers

Above is a new image of Comet 67P as seen from about 1000 kilometers, or about 620 miles, released by the Rosetta science team today. The image was taken on August 1 and has been processed somewhat to bring out the details. The black spot near the junction between the nucleus’s two sections is not real but an artifact of the camera’s CCD.

This image is the first real clear and sharp look at the nucleus, and what it shows us is a surface quite different from the many other asteroids that science probes have imaged close-up in the past. From this angle there are far few craters visible then is normally seen on asteroids, and the surface has complex roughness and pitted look that I suspect the planetary geologists are right now scratching their heads about and waving their arms trying to explain. My first guess, which no one should take too seriously, is that as material vents off the comet when it gets close to the Sun it leaves behind these scars.

One more thing: If you go here you can see a number of additional image releases in the last 24 hours, all fascinating. This link explains that the features that looked like craters in earlier images were actually artifacts from the camera’s CCD.

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Don’t buy stock yet in that “impossible” space drive

7:46 pm

The uncertainty of science and engineering: A physicist takes a close and skeptical look at the “impossible” space drive that NASA engineers discovered seemed to work. Key quote:

“All in all,” Lee concluded, “it will take a lot more information before we can judge whether the thrust is really a thrust or not.”

Read the whole article. They point out the areas of doubt and weakness, as well as the possibilities.

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NASA confirms “impossible” drive

10:30 pm

Life imitates science fiction: NASA engineers have confirmed the functionality of an “impossible” space thruster drive.

British scientist Roger Shawyer has been trying to interest people in his EmDrive for some years through his company SPR Ltd. Shawyer claims the EmDrive converts electric power into thrust, without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves around in a closed container. He has built a number of demonstration systems, but critics reject his relativity-based theory and insist that, according to the law of conservation of momentum, it cannot work.

According to good scientific practice, an independent third party needed to replicate Shawyer’s results. As Wired.co.uk reported, this happened last year when a Chinese team built its own EmDrive and confirmed that it produced 720 mN (about 72 grams) of thrust, enough for a practical satellite thruster. Such a thruster could be powered by solar electricity, eliminating the need for the supply of propellant that occupies up to half the launch mass of many satellites. The Chinese work attracted little attention; it seems that nobody in the West believed in it.

However, a US scientist, Guido Fetta, has built his own propellant-less microwave thruster, and managed to persuade Nasa to test it out. The test results were presented on July 30 at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. Astonishingly enough, they are positive.

Since no one understands the physics that are producing the thrust, it is wise at this point to be very skeptical of these results. A lot more testing and experimentation will be necessary before this can be made practical.

However, if it is what they think it is, it will make it possible to turn sunlight into thrust, meaning that spacecraft will no longer need fuel, and will be able to go places much faster using the constant thrust this drive will provide.

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Dream Chaser air frame unveiled

10:16 pm

The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada and Lockheed Martin today unveiled the composite airframe that will be used for the Dream Chaser spacecraft.

Essentially this is the first major structural component of the actual spacecraft. Lockheed was chosen by Sierra Nevada as the subcontractor to build it because of that company’s extensive experience with composites. It also gets them bonus points in Congress by using this powerful well placed company with many employees in important Congressional districts.

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Russia to conduct its very first cosmonaut rescue drills at sea

6:30 pm

The Eastern division of the Russian Air Force, Pacific fleet, and space agency Roscosmos will hold joint exercises the first week in August to practice for the first time ever the water rescue of Russian cosmonauts and a Soyuz capsule.

It is obvious these exercises are in conjunction with the construction of the Vostochny spaceport in Eastern Russia. Any aborted manned launch from this site will end up landing in the Pacific, not on land as has happened twice from Baikonur. And since the Russians have never had a manned capsule splashdown in the ocean, they better practice this stuff now.

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Another new launch company completes flight test

8:50 am

The competition heats up: Generation Orbit this week completed a test flight of its air launch rocket system for putting small payloads into space.

The flight was to test the handling and flight characteristics of the aircraft to be used to release the launchers.

The company is planning two different air-launched systems, one to put small payloads into suborbital space, another to put 100 pound payloads into orbit. In both cases they are targeting the science and educational community that builds cubesats and has been in desperate need of its own launch services for decades.

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Vostochny Soyuz 2 launchpad nears completion

8:37 am

The competition heats up: The massive concrete launchpad structure for Russia’s Soyuz rockets at its new spaceport in Vostochny is now almost finished.

Nor is that the only thing getting built.

Also, official Russian TV showed the installation of giant cisterns for kerosene fuel, liquid oxygen and nitrogen gas at a nearly completed storage facility of the launch complex. The active construction of 12 residential buildings, of a kindergarden, of a boiler facility and of a water treatment plant was also continuing at the future space center. A new concrete-production plant, a power conversion station and a car park were reported approaching completion. During the summer, regular workforce was reinforced with 400 members of 22 student teams assembled at the site from 15 regions of the Russia, the local government said.

The head of Russia’s space agency also visited the site this week, demonstrating the government’s continuing strong commitment to get this new spaceport finished on time.

Update: In related news, sources in Russia’s Finance Ministry say that by 2016 the budget for Baikonur will be zeroed out, the money shifted entirely to running Vostochny. This is the first solid indication that Russia plans to abandon its historic Kazakhstan spaceport when the new spaceport is finished. Previously officials insisted that Russia was going to continue its partnership with Kazakhstan.

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Getting closer

8:29 am

Comet 67P on July 31

This image of Comet 67P from Rosetta was taken yesterday. Though it has not been processed like the image I posted yesterday, more details continue to come out as the spacecraft each day gets closer to the comet. This image was taken from a distance of 825 miles, 375 miles closer than the previous day.

Very soon these close-up images will become too large to show the entire nucleus in one image. Rosetta will instead begin to snap images of specific features.

Meanwhile, the Rosetta science team released its first temperature readings of the comet.
» Read more

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A Hubble Space Telescope status report

4:48 pm

Five years after the last shuttle repair mission, the Hubble Space Telescope continues to operate almost perfectly.

Jeletic said other than a single gyro failure, the observatory is operating in near-flawless fashion five years after the final shuttle crew departed. “Batteries are fine, solar arrays are fine, all the communications equipment is fine, we don’t see any glitches with the computers, the instruments are all fine,” he said. “In fact, an interesting statistic, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which was repaired by the astronauts during the last servicing mission, that’s actually now run longer on the repair than it did originally for the Wide Field Camera part of it.”

The ACS, like the repaired Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, no longer has any internal redundancy. “It’s amazing. It truly is,” Jeletic said. “Given all the things that can fail, a lot of people were hoping for one or two years of continued work with it. Now we’ve gotten over five.” Likewise, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which also is operating in “single-string” mode, is still going strong.

When they completed the 2009 servicing mission, the goal was to give Hubble five more years of operation. They’ve done that, and are now looking to keep the telescope going till at least 2020, marking 30 years in orbit.

The only issue, not surprisingly, is the failure of one of the six gyros on board. These have traditionally been the telescope’s biggest problem, and have been replaced twice over during shuttle missions. Three of today’s six however are using a new design which will hopefully extend their life significantly.

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The first lunar close-up

9:28 am

Fifty years ago tomorrow Ranger 7 took the first close-up images of the Moon, just before the spacecraft crashed onto the surface.

“It was like looking at a soft quilt or something, no jagged edges on anything,” muses Jim Burke, as if he’s describing something every school kid hasn’t seen a hundred times. “It looked like fresh snow in a way, except it was grey instead of white.”

At the time—50 years ago tomorrow—Burke was one of the first people on Earth to see what the surface of the Moon looks like up close. Early on the morning of July 31, 1964, he joined his colleagues in poring over a series of printed photographs, the pockmarked Moon getting closer and closer until one final blurred image marked the moment when Ranger 7 impacted the surface, making its own brand-new crater. A stripe of static along one side of that last photo indicated the interruption of the final transmission.

The article details the frustrating history of the Ranger program, with the first six attempts all failing. Ranger 7 succeeded, however, working so well that the last image actually got truncated at impact. The full set of images revealed the surprising cratered history of the Moon, with the impact rate of large to small craters far more complex than expected.

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Chinese anti-satellite test?

3:28 pm

The U.S. State department is claiming that China completed a “non-destructive” anti-satellite test last week.

The State department also demanded that China refrain from further such actions.

China in turn said that the test was for a a ballistic missile defense system. According to these Chinese reports, the test was of a land-based missile designed to intercept an incoming rocket, much like Israel’s Iron Dome and the U.S. SDI systems. Such a system, however, is in many ways indistinguishable from an anti-sat system. In fact, the U.S. military proved that by firing a missile that successfully destroyed an orbiting satellite several years ago.

In the case of last week’s Chinese test, the interceptor did not apparently impact anything but instead demonstrated its ability to hit a prearranged simulated point in space.

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ExoMars will likely miss 2018 launch date

9:06 am

Because of technical and financial issues the European/Russian ExoMars rover mission is expected to miss its 2018 launch window.

The main reason for the delay would be the ExoMars’ brand-new landing system, which is designed to safely take the rover through a fiery descent in the Martian atmosphere and then softly land it on the surface of the Red Planet.

In addition to its late development start, the landing system has a complicated share of responsibilities between Russia and Europe, which greatly slows down the work. For example, the overall landing system is being developed by NPO Lavochkin in Moscow, while its parachute system will be provided by Europe. Many other aspects of the mission are similarly intertwined.

To further complicate matters, NPO Lavochkin, which traditionally builds all Russian planetary probes, but also some of the highly classified military satellites, is notorious for its Soviet-style secrecy. As a result, it is harder for the two sides to coordinate the work, Europeans sources said. Finally, the translation of documents between Russian and English further delays the work on the project.

The program is also significantly over budget.

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A new cheap rocket company

8:43 am

The competition heats up: A New Zealand company says it is building a rocket capable of launching cubesats into orbit for only $5 million.

Rocket Lab says it is building a carbon-composited launch vehicle –named Electron—which will send small satellites into earth’s orbit for five million U.S. dollars. The U.S. company, which is building the vehicle in New Zealand, expects the first to be ready next year and already has committed to its first 30 launch slots.

Though their low cost will once again increase the space launch customer base, they are not really in competition with any of the big players, who don’t really make their money launching cubesats. Instead, by focusing on the cubesat market, Rocket Lab is aimed at providing launch services to a niche that has, up until now, had no real launch services. If a university or small company wanted to launch a cubesat., they had to piggyback on a large launch.

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Last ATV launched to ISS

8:34 am

Arianespace today successfully launched the last European cargo ship to ISS.

After doing some flight tests in orbit and in conjunction with ISS, the docking will occur on August 12.

After this flight the Russian Progress freighter will be the only spacecraft with engines capable of changing the station’s orbit. It will also be the only spacecraft capable of refueling the engines on ISS’s Russian modules.

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SpaceShipTwo flies again

9:44 pm

The competition heats up: For the first time in six months SpaceShipTwo completed a test flight today.

The article above is from NBC, which also has a deal with Virgin Galactic to televise the first commercial flight. It is thus in their interest to promote the spacecraft and company. The following two sentences from the article however clearly confirm every rumor we have heard about the ship in the past year, that they needed to replace or completely refit the engine and that the resulting thrust might not be enough to get the ship to 100 kilometers or 62 miles:

In January, SpaceShipTwo blasted off for a powered test and sailed through a follow-up glide flight, but then it went into the shop for rocket refitting. It’s expected to go through a series of glide flights and powered flights that eventually rise beyond the boundary of outer space (50 miles or 100 kilometers in altitude, depending on who’s counting).

Hopefully this test flight indicates that they have installed the new engine and are now beginning flight tests with equipment that will actually get the ship into space.

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ISEE-3 engine restart fails but the private effort continues

11:57 am

After numerous tries, the private effort to put ISEE-3 back into its original orbit has failed.

We have completely accomplished all of our original goals except for one: firing the ISEE-3 propulsion system in a sufficient fashion to alter its trajectory. We did operate the propulsion system briefly so as to correct the spin of the spacecraft, and to start the trajectory correction maneuver. The propulsion system works fine. The problem is that there is no longer any Nitrogen pressurant left in its tanks to allow it to work.

36 years and more than 30 billion miles have taken its toll on the spacecraft’s propulsion system. We have exhausted every option to bring the engines online so as to conduct the correction maneuver required to place it in its planned orbit. Without the pressurant it just won’t work.

Have they given up? No! Though the spacecraft will remain in a solar orbit where maintaining communications will be difficult if not impossible, they are going to try anyway, and are even going to run another crowd-sourcing campaign to finance it.

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Amazon’s 3D printshop opens

9:20 am

The competition heats up: Amazon has opened its first 3D-print shop, where customers can buy 3D printed products.

The store has launched with more than 200 print-on-demand designs. Users can customize items like earrings, pendants, rings and bobble head dolls using a special widget, before having the item 3D-printed and delivered. …

Although users of the store cannot upload and print their own designs, it is, as mentioned, possible to customize some of the available designs. Amazon has built a customization engine into the store, allowing for very simple changes to an item’s design, or more wholesale changes. Interactive 3D preview functionality is also provided, with which users can rotate an object and view it from any angle.

What does this story have to do with space exploration? Well, it marks the beginning of a major revolution in manufacturing that will change everything. And since 3D printing is going to be an essential need for future space explorers, having this new industry prosper and grow can only speed up the exploration and settlement of the solar system.

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Will Russia’s most powerful rocket engine be reborn?

10:13 am

The competition heats up? The original builders of the hydrogen-oxygen engine that launched the Soviet Union’s most powerful rocket, Energia, are pushing to restart production of that engine.

By 2013, the KBKhA design bureau, which developed the original RD-0120 engine, declared its restoration as one of several high-priority projects. According to a schedule developed by KBKhA in coordination with its manufacturing arm — the Voronezh Mechanical Plant — the RD-0120 could be brought back to production in six years, given adequate funding.

The final decision on the restoration of the RD-0120 would depend on the approved architecture of the super-heavy rocket, whose development was included into the latest draft of the Federal Space Program from 2016 to 2025. Plans to restore RD-0120 had its critics, who believed that a new investment into the hydrogen propulsion technology would be too costly and risky for the Russian rocket industry. A recent analysis of prospective super-heavy rocket designs by RKTs Progress, the developer of the Soyuz rocket, favored methane and solid propellants over the liquid hydrogen. At the same time, an alternative proposal from RKK Energia, the Russia’s chief manned space flight contractor, featured the RD-0120 engine on the third stage of the super-heavy Energia-KV rocket, industry sources said.

I’m not sure if it will be economically wise for Russia to focus their energies on this engine, or on a super-heavy rocket. Like NASA’s SLS, such projects look great for politicians and provide a lot of pork, but they generally are too expensive to accomplish very much.

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SpaceX launch schedule heats up

9:48 am

A close look at SpaceX’s launch schedule through the rest of 2014 calls for six Falcon 9 launches, including two before the end of August.

If the company is successfully in maintaining this schedule, they will end any doubts about their ability to transform the launch industry. Every other launch company will have to match their prices, or lose their customers.

One paragraph in the article does tell us that there are limits to the re-usability of the Falcon 9 first stage, even if they do succeed in bringing it back safely to a vertical landing on land.
» Read more

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Commercial communications satellites for Mars?

8:03 am

The competition heats up? NASA is considering a different commercial approach for providing communications to and from its Mars probes.

The purpose of NASA’s request for information, or RFI, released July 23 “is to explore new business models for how NASA might sustain Mars relay infrastructure, consisting of orbiters capable of providing standardized telecommunication services for rovers and landers on the Martian surface, in the Martian atmosphere, or in Mars orbit,” according to a posting on the Federal Business Opportunities website.

According to the post, NASA will use information it receives from respondents to inform its future Mars exploration strategies, but the agency has not decided to pursue a commercial interplanetary telecom initiative. “We are looking to broaden participation in the exploration of Mars to include new models for government and commercial partnerships,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, in a statement. “Depending on the outcome, the new model could be a vital component in future science missions and the path for humans to Mars.” [emphasis mine]

It is important to highlight the fact that NASA has not yet made a decision on this issue. The best thing the agency could do, in my opinion, would be to step back, design nothing, but let private companies bid on providing the service. The expertise at many of the private satellite companies providing communications efficiently and inexpensively to private customers worldwide would easily provide NASA better communications at Mars for less money.

In other words, like manned flight and cargo delivery to ISS, NASA should simply become a customer, and let private companies build and own the products that NASA buys.

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