Tag: spaceflight

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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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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