Tag: spaceflight

Russia to build new satellite communications cluster

10:06 am

The competition heats up: The Putin government’s newly released draft plan for Russia’s space industry includes the development of a new communications satellite constellation.

In addition to encrypted mobile communications, the Ellips satellites will support air-traffic control and traditional fixed communications. Reflecting its dual (civilian and military) application, the Ellips project would be funded jointly by the Russian space agency, Roskosmos, and by the Russian Ministry of Defense at a price tag of 65.6 billion rubles to develop and deploy the constellation.

The article then goes on to detail at length the problems the Russian communications satellite industry has had for the past two decades, including their inability to build satellites that will last in orbit as long as their competitors.

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Another look at why ULA’s CEO stepped down

9:52 am

Why did ULA’s CEO step down, and did SpaceX or the Atlas 5’s dependence on Russian engines play a part?

Very worthwhile reading, as it suggests that not only is the competition from SpaceX a major factor, so was ULA’s effort to monopolize the military launch industry as well as monopolize its access to the Russian engines, denying their use by Orbital Sciences.

And to this I say, thank god for competition. It always shakes things up in a good way.

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Worldview-3 in orbit

9:30 am

The competition heats up: Worldview-3, launched yesterday, has been successfully activated and can now provide commercial and private customers images of the Earth with resolution comparable to military intelligence satellites.

The sensor package on WorldView-3 will be able to image objects with a ground sample distance of 31 cm (12 in.). “So we can tell you if it’s a truck, SUV or a regular car,” says Kumar Navulur, director of next-generation products at DigitalGlobe. “If there’s a high contrast we can identify features of fine scale,” he adds, giving examples of markings in a parking lot or “a tomato plant in a backyard in Asia.”

Obviously, this has both good and bad possibilities. Nonetheless, its availability increases the value of the space-based industry.

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The flight of gifted engineers from NASA

5:43 pm

Rather than work in NASA, the best young engineers today are increasingly heading to get jobs at private companies like SpaceX and XCOR.

It is a long article, worth reading in its entirety, but this quote will give the essence:

As a NASA engineering co-op student at Johnson Space Center, Hoffman trained in various divisions of the federal space agency to sign on eventually as a civil servant. She graduated from college this year after receiving a generous offer from NASA, doubly prestigious considering the substantial reductions in force hitting Johnson Space Center in recent months. She did have every intention of joining that force — had actually accepted the offer, in fact — when she received an invitation to visit a friend at his new job with rising commercial launch company SpaceX.

Hoffman took him up on the offer, flying out to Los Angeles in the spring for a private tour. Driving up to the SpaceX headquarters, she was struck by how unassuming it was, how small compared to NASA, how plain on the outside and rather like a warehouse.

As she walked through the complex, she was also surprised to find open work areas where NASA would have had endless hallways, offices and desks. Hoffman described SpaceX as resembling a giant workshop, a hive of activity in which employees stood working on nitty-gritty mechanical and electrical engineering. Everything in the shop was bound for space or was related to space. No one sat around talking to friends in the morning, “another level from what you see at NASA,” she said. “They’re very purpose-driven. It looked like every project was getting the attention it deserved.”

Seeing SpaceX in production forced Hoffman to acknowledge NASA might not be the best fit for her. The tour reminded her of the many mentors who had gone into the commercial sector of the space industry in search of better pay and more say in the direction their employers take. She thought back to the attrition she saw firsthand at Johnson Space Center and how understaffed divisions struggled to maintain operations.

At NASA young engineers find that they spend a lot of time with bureaucracy, the pace is slow, their projects often get canceled or delayed, and the creative job satisfaction is poor. At private companies like SpaceX, things are getting built now. With that choice, no wonder the decision to go private is increasingly easy.

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It ain’t gravity holding this asteroid together

1:14 pm

Astronomers have discovered that near Earth asteroid 1950DA is spinning so fast that gravity can’t hold it together. Instead, it is kept whole by cohesive forces called van der Waals forces, predicted but never detected before on an asteroid.

This is the coolest factoid from the article, however:

“We found that 1950 DA is rotating faster than the breakup limit for its density,” said Rozitis. “So if just gravity were holding this rubble pile together, as is generally assumed, it would fly apart. Therefore, interparticle cohesive forces must be holding it together.”

In fact, the rotation is so fast that at its equator, 1950 DA effectively experiences negative gravity. If an astronaut were to attempt to stand on this surface, he or she would fly off into space unless he or she were somehow anchored.

The important take away from this discovery is that it will be very easy to break this kind of asteroid up, turning a large and big threat into a collection of small but harmless rocks.

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Another former SpaceX employee sues

9:09 am

SpaceX has been hit by its second lawsuit in a week from a former employee.

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleges that SpaceX supervisors impose schedules on their employees that make it impossible for them to take statutorily required rest periods every four hours or first or second meal breaks as required by California law.

I consider this suit a bigger threat to the company than the first. The first suit merely claimed that the company didn’t give its fired employees the 60 day warning as required by law. If they win, they will get some payments, but the company will be able to continue as before.

This second suit, if successfully, could force the company to change its aggressive culture, where employees are expected to work very hard, sometimes 60-80 hour weeks, to make things happen quickly. While those work hours might seem abusive to some, to most of the people working there it is what they want to do. A successful lawsuit here could force the company to literally stop them from working. The conditions then might be more relaxed, but the ability to make progress will be stymied, and the costs for making that progress will go up considerably.

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ULA CEO steps down

4:24 pm

Faced with stiff competition from SpaceX, United Launch Alliance (ULA) announced today a change in leadership.

United Launch Alliance has named a new president and chief executive to replace Michael Gass, who led the Atlas and Delta rocket company since its inception in 2006. Gass will be replaced effective immediately as president and CEO by Tory Bruno, an executive at Lockheed Martin Corp., which formed ULA in December 2006 in a 50-50 joint venture with Boeing Co., ULA said in a statement Tuesday. Gass is retiring at the end of the year, according to ULA.

Despite Gass’s planned retirement, the abrupt nature of his departure has everything to do with the competition from SpaceX, something that every single article about this change at ULA noted.

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NASA admits that it is struggling to meet the 2017 launch date for SLS

11:13 pm

Delays in the construction of Orion’s European-built service module as well as cracks in the spacecraft’s heat shield are threatening the planned 2017 launch date for Orion’s first test flight, unmanned, beyond Earth orbit.

Note that this program, costing anywhere from $10 to $20 billion, is only building a handful of capsules for flying three or four test flights. Beyond that, there is no money.

I have predicted this before, and I will predict it again: SLS will never take any humans anywhere. The cost is too high, the bureaucracy too complex, and the schedule is too slow. It will vanish when the new private companies begin flying humans into space in the next three years.

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Another Rosetta closeup of 67P/C-G

4:15 pm

67P on August 8

The above image is not the most recent daily image from Rosetta, but it is the most interesting of the last three.

It shows the side of the comet nucleus that has not been featured in most images, as the topographical differences between its two sections is not as distinctly highlighted. What is highlighted is the neck that connects the two sections, lighter colored and thus likely made up of less dusty ice.

Also of interest here is the circular features on the larger bottom section. These certainly resemble craters, and are likely remnants of early impacts that are now been corroded away as the nucleus’s ice particles evaporate off the surface. The scientific question here is this: Why are crater features more evident on this side and section of the comet nucleus than on other areas of its surface?

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Test results from NASA saucer Mars landing test

8:09 pm

NASA has released video and test results from the first test flight of its Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD), referred by many press outlets as a “flying saucer” because of its shape.

The purpose of the test was to see if the saucer and its parachute would work to slow a vessel down sufficiently in the Martian atmosphere. The parachute tore and failed. The video describes the flight and the failure and how the data from this failure can now be used to modify the parachute for the next two test flights.

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The Dream Chaser test vehicle to fly again

10:08 am

The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has announced that its Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle has been refurbished and will complete a number of manned and unmanned flight tests in the fall, with their schedule on track for a November 2016 orbital test flight.

“We will do between two and five additional flights. A couple will be crewed. As a result of the vehicle being upgraded, we will be flying our orbital flight software, which will give us about a year’s worth of advancement on the vehicle.” Flights are expected to last over a six- to nine-month period, he adds.

Sierra Nevada has also continued to expand its partnerships, both in the aerospace industry as well as with other countries. The first action is likely part of a lobbying effort to help convince NASA to choose it when it down selects its commercial manned program from three manned spacecraft to two later this year. The second action indicates that even if Sierra Nevada is not chosen by NASA, they plan to proceed to construction anyway to serve other customers.

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Orion first test flight scheduled

10:00 am

NASA has set December 4 for the first test flight of Orion.

In related news, the Navy has successfully completed a splashdown recovery test of Orion.

I haven’t labeled these stories “The competition heats up” because I have serous doubts Orion or SLS will survive the next Presidential election, even if this test flight on a Delta 4 Heavy rocket is a complete success. And if you want to know why, just read the first article above. It lists the long troubled ten-year long history of this capsule, with the following punchline describing the schedule for further launches with the actual SLS rocket:

While the first SLS/Orion mission, known as EM-1, is still officially manifested for December 15, 2017 – internally that date has all-but been ruled out. Internal schedules shows EM-1 launch date as September 30, 2018, followed by the Ascent Abort (AA-2) test – required for crew launches – on December 15, 2019, followed by EM-2 on December 31, 2020.

I find also find it interesting that in describing the many problems Orion has had in development, the article fails to mention the cracks that appeared in the capsule that required a major structural fix. Nor does the article mention the ungodly cost of this program, which easily exceeds $10 billion and is at least four times what NASA is spending for its entire program to get three different privately built spaceships built in the commercial program.

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Dragon launch abort tests scheduled

9:45 am

The competition heats up: SpaceX has scheduled its Dragon launch abort tests for November and January.

The Hawthorne, California-based company plans to conduct a pad abort test at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, in November, followed by an in-flight abort test from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in January, Garrett Reisman, SpaceX Dragon Rider program manager, said here Aug. 6 at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Space 2014 conference.

In the pad-abort test, Dragon will be mounted to a mocked-up SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and use its hydrazine-fueled SuperDraco thrusters to boost itself up and away from the pad, as it might need to do in the event of a major problem just before or during liftoff. The in-flight test will attempt to repeat the feat at altitude.

In related news, two former SpaceX employees who were terminated in July when the company laid off about 400 people in an annual restructuring of its workforce have sued the company for not giving them ample notice as required by California law.

The California law is pretty clear, which means these employees will likely win, which also sounds to me like a good reason to shift SpaceX’s entire operation to Texas and its new spaceport in Brownsville.

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67P from 52 miles

9:32 am

67P from 52 miles, August 7, 2014

The image above was taken on August 7 from only 52 miles. For the first time I had to scale it down slightly so that it would fit on the webpage.

My impression with this image is that there actually might be hints of some very ancient craters at several of the vaguely circular pitted features. For example, look at the large feature on the end of the nucleus’s smaller component on the right. This might be a crater that now is significantly eroded as the comet’s surface evaporated away each time it approached the Sun every 6.5 years.

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Congress applies pressure to ULA and the Air Force

8:58 am

Two congressional committees are holding up approval of a budget revision for the Air Force’s launch program because of concerns about cost overruns and the program’s dependency on a Russian rocket engine.

Such requests must be approved by each of the four congressional defense committees, and so far, the EELV proposal has won the support of only two. The Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee and the House Appropriations Defense subcommittee have green-lighted the plan, while the House and Senate Armed Services committees have deferred approval, according to budget documents dated July 25 and July 31, obtained by Defense News.

[The Senate Armed Services Committee] (SASC) asked the Air Force to draw up a plan, by Sept. 30, “that leads to the production of a liquid rocket engine by 2019,” according to one of the documents, sent to Pentagon Comptroller Michael McCord by SASC Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich.

Meanwhile, others legislators are questioning the program’s cost overruns. Though only hinted at in the article, this hold up is also related to SpaceX’s demand that the bidding for Air Force launches be opened up to competition.

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Comet 67P on the day of rendezvous

8:39 am

67P/C-G on August 6

The image above was taken at a distance of 60 miles by Rosetta’s navigation camera on August 6, the day the spacecraft rendezvoused and began flying in tandem with it. It looks at the “backside” of the comet, the side where the distinction between its two components is less pronounced. Once again, no obvious craters, and the surface is pockmarked and corroded.

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Rosetta arrives

10:14 am

Rosetta has successfully achieved orbit around Comet 67P/C-G and has transmitted its first close up images. More information here and here about the rendezvous and what science the mission scientists plan to do as they orbit the comet.

The image below is looking down and past the comet’s smaller component as it casts a shadow on the neck and the larger component beyond. As with the earlier images, the comet’s pitted and corroded surface, lacking any obvious craters, is reminiscent to me of a pile of dirty snow that has been dissolving away. In fact, when I lived in New York I would see this kind of look every winter. When the city would get a big snowfall snowplows would push it into large mounds on the side of the road. As time passed these piles would get dirty from the city’s soot and grime, and also slowly melt away. After several weeks it would look almost exactly like the surface of Comet 67P/C-G.

The images and data that will come down from Rosetta over the next year and half as it orbits the comet in its journey around the Sun will be most fascinating. Stay tuned!

67P/C-G up close

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Video of the Falcon 9 first stage doing a soft splashdown

9:08 am

Video taken from a chase plane during the July 14 Falcon 9 launch shows the first stage appearing from out of the low clouds, engines firing, vertical and ready for landing. The video, below the fold, also shows the stage slowing just before it hits the water, much like the test vehicles Grasshopper and Falcon 9R do.

Though SpaceX has already claimed their first stage had done this during the July 14 launch, this video proves it. All they need to do now to recover their first stage is to direct it to a land-based landing site.

Hat tip to Doug Messier and Parabolic Arc for this story.
» Read more

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Comet 67P/C-G at 126 miles

8:57 am

Comet 67P/C-G at 126 miles

The image above was taken by Rosetta on August 4 from only 126 miles (234 kilometers). Unlike earlier images, this image is raw, uncropped and unprocessed. All I have done is rescale it to fit on my webpage. As they explain at the link,

As you can see, the comet is not centred in the full-frame image. This is a result of the rendezvous burn conducted the previous day, which adjusted Rosetta’s trajectory towards the comet. This effect is corrected for in the commands sent to the spacecraft after the new orbit has been determined.

The science team also notes that beginning tomorrow, the comet will be close enough that they will no longer have to provide a cropped close-up using the navigation camera and that this uncropped raw version will be sufficient.

Rendezvous and orbital insertion on Wednesday!

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U.S./Russian owned launch company ILS cuts workforce by 25%

7:44 pm

The competition heats up: Business loses because of its recent Proton launch failures, combined with strong market competition from SpaceX, today forced International Launch Services (ILS) to cut its work force by 25%.

The company is anticipating a launch rate drop from an average of 7 to 8 missions a year down to 3 to 4. The article also noted one more additional detail that will affect the future market value of Proton:

So far in 2014, the commercial satellites ordered have been mainly at the lighter end of the market for geostationary-orbiting telecommunications spacecraft. This follows a couple of years in which heavier satellites dominated.

Commercial Proton rockets are typically used to launch heavier satellites one at a time. The market’s move to lighter spacecraft has benefited Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, California, whose Falcon 9 rocket has accumulated commercial orders; and also benefited Arianespace, whose Ariane 5 heavy-lift vehicle’s lower position is reserved for smaller satellites.

The weight of commercial satellites is almost certainly going to continue to drop in the coming years as technology improves and satellite companies work to reduce the cost to launch. In that climate, the Proton’s ability to put big commercial payloads into orbit will become a liability, not an asset. Ariane 5 has the same problem, in that it still needs a big payload for its upper position in order to make a launch cost effective.

Both Falcon 9, with its very low launch costs, and Russia’s new Angara rocket, with its modular design to handle all kinds of payload sizes, are better suited to this new competitive market.

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The next U.S. Mars rover will try to make and store oxygen

9:59 am

Of the seven science instruments proposed for the next U.S. Mars rover, scheduled for a 2020 launch date, MOXIE test the engineering to produce and store oxygen, pulled from the Martian atmosphere.

Developed in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it’s based on the fact that the Martian atmosphere, though extremely thin, is composed of 96 percent carbon dioxide, which means its a vast potential source of oxygen for future explorers and settlers. Essentially, MOXIE is a fuel cell in reverse. Instead of generating electricity by using oxygen to burn a fuel, it uses a process called solid oxide electrolysis , where electricity is employed to split carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide.

This process would see Martian air pumped into the unit through a dust filter and pressurized before being passed into a fuel cell. At high temperatures, some ceramic oxides act as oxygen ion conductors. In the fuel cell, a thin, non-porous disc of this ceramic separates two porous electrodes. One electrode acts as the cathode and the other as the anode. Carbon dioxide passes through the cathode and when it comes into contact with the ceramic, the interaction of electricity and the ceramic causes the carbon dioxide to split into oxygen and carbon monoxide. The oxygen and the carbon monoxide are then separated and the oxygen stored.

What makes this unusual is that NASA has actually dedicated one science instrument to engineering research, not pure science. The agency does not do this much anymore, but such research is essential if the U.S. is going to someday send humans to other planets.

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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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