Tag: spaceflight

The competition heats up: European aerospace companies Airbus and Safran have signed an agreement to merge their rocket divisions.

8:24 am

The competition heats up: European aerospace companies Airbus and Safran have signed an agreement to merge their rocket divisions.

The companies said the joint-venture would combine Airbus Group’s launch systems with Safran’s propulsion systems, but hinted at broader integration of public and private activities in an effort to duplicate the success of planemaker Airbus. Europe’s Ariane 5 space launcher dominates the market for large commercial satellites but faces growing concerns over its future due to competition from Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), run by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.

To respond to the threat, Airbus and Safran aim to lead a drive towards an integrated European launch firm drawing on the lessons of Airbus’s planemaking unit, which was spurred into turning itself from being a consortium into a single company by the merger of transatlantic rivals Boeing and McDonnell Douglas in 1997. [emphasis mine]

The article, like practically every other report about Europe’s space effort in the past two years, singles out the competitive threat being made to their market share by SpaceX. Increasingly, the price reductions being offered by Musk’s company combined with its repeated success in launching payloads into orbit is forcing Europe to cut its own costs and become more efficent, something they have not bothered to do in decades. As result access to space is about to get signigicantly cheaper.

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After successfully completing its standard prelaunch static fire, SpaceX has delayed the Sunday Falcon 9 commercial launch at the request of its customer which wishes to do further tests of the six satellites on board.

5:42 pm

After successfully completing its standard prelaunch static fire, SpaceX has delayed the Sunday Falcon 9 commercial launch at the request of its customer which wishes to do further tests of the six satellites on board.

A new launch date is yet to be determined.

Posted from Durango, Colorado.

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Sierra Nevada has announced that it plans to do additional test flights in 2014 of its prototype Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle

4:51 pm

Sierra Nevada has announced that it plans to do additional test flights in 2014 of its prototype Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle.

This is the same test vehicle that skidded off the runway during its first flight when one of its landing legs did not deploy. The company has never released any images of that smashup, but has said the craft was salvageable. I imagine this announcement is part of the continuing lobbying campaign by all the companies (SpaceX, Boeing, Sierra Nevada) competing in NASA’s commercial manned program. NASA is supposed to down select to two companies, maybe only one, by the end of the summer.

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The test of a new parachute system for Mars landing has been delayed until the end of June due to high winds.

4:47 pm

The test of a new parachute system for Mars landing has been delayed until the end of June due to high winds.

The space agency was forced to scrub six launch attempts over the past two weeks — the latest and last planned for this Saturday (June 14) — as a result of unusually poor wind conditions at the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Missile Range facility in Kauai, Hawaii. The balloon-launched Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) craft is intended to help NASA develop the means to land heavier spacecraft, and eventually humans, on Mars.

“All of the vehicle systems [and] our team were ready and prepared for all of the launch days; we were ready to go,” said Mark Adler, LDSD project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “The only thing that held us up was that none of the launch dates had or will have acceptable weather conditions.”

They have literally run out of their available time at the range, and must let others play through first while they renegotiate for a new slot of time later.

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For half a billion dollars Google has purchased satellite company Skybox Imaging.

10:25 am

The competition heats up: For half a billion dollars Google has purchased satellite company Skybox Imaging.

Google plans to use Skybox’s satellites to make better maps with “up-to-date imagery,” the company said in a statement. “Over time, we also hope that Skybox’s team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief—areas Google has long been interested in.” Skybox has only a single satellite in orbit right now but plans to fly a fleet of them to cover the entire globe at all times. Constantly updated satellite images would be of interest to everyone from agricultural companies and hedge funds to hardware stores. A demonstration earlier this year showed how Skybox satellites could be used to monitor oil reserves from space.

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The investigation into the failure of a Proton launch several weeks ago has been completed.

10:18 am

The investigation into the failure of a Proton launch several weeks ago has been completed.

The May 16 crash of the Proton space rocket was due to a failed bearing in the steering engine’s turbo pump, the chief of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Oleg Ostapenko, told ITAR-TASS. “The final version agrees with the preliminary findings made at the first stage of the inter-departmental probe. Telemetry and analytical information indicate that apparently a bearing in the turbo pump failed.

The information so far released is still a little vague in details. Whether the Russians will be more forthcoming is also not clear.

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Orbital Sciences has announced a further delay to July 1 for the next Antares/Cygnus cargo mission to ISS in order to complete its investigation into the failure of a Russian engine during testing.

8:57 am

Orbital Sciences has announced a further delay to July 1 for the next Antares/Cygnus cargo mission to ISS in order to complete its investigation into the failure of a Russian engine during testing.

The total delay is now about a month. The press release provides no information as to the status of the investigation, so why it is taking longer than originally expected is unexplained.

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Mojave Spaceport temporarily evacuated due to a small scrap metal fire.

8:58 am

Mojave Spaceport temporarily evacuated due to a small scrap metal fire.

The official statement can be read here. As noted by Doug Messier,

There’s a question of why scrap material (or any other flammable material) was anywhere near a tank full of nitrous oxide. In consulting with one expert who uses nitrous oxide, I was told that a blast could have possibly damaged everything within 1,000 feet. That’s basically two complete football fields with end zones plus another 93 yards. There are a lot of irreplaceable people and technologies within 1,000 feet of where that fire took place.

Then again, a fire can occur almost anywhere, and it is often impossible to keep it away from flammable materials.

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Richard Shelby’s poison pill in the Senate NASA budget bill that will double the cost of manned commercial space.

8:46 am

Senator Richard Shelby’s poison pill in the Senate NASA budget bill that will double the cost of manned commercial space.

Essentially Shelby wants to require the commercial companies to follow the older paperwork requirements used by NASA in the past. Presently, the contract arrangements NASA has used for these new companies have been efficient and relatively paperwork free, allowing them to build their cargo freighters (Dragon and Cygnus) and their manned spacecraft (Dragon V2, CST-100, and Dream Chaser) for relatively little.

The older contract rules are what NASA has used for Constellation and SLS as well as all past attempts to replace the shuttle. In every case, the costs were so high the replacement was never finished. In the case of SLS, the costs will be so high it will never accomplish anything.

Why has Shelby (R-Alabama) inserted this language? He wants pork, and SLS is the way to get it. Rather than cut the cost of SLS to make it more competitive (and which will reduce the pork in his state) Shelby instead wants to make the new commercial companies more costly, thus making SLS appear more competitive. It will still cost too much and will not accomplish anything, but this way he will be able to better argue for it in congressional negotiations.

Shelby illustrates clearly that the desire to waste the taxpayers’ money is not confined to the spendthrifts in the Democratic Party. Republicans can do it to!

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Want to own your own Apollo capsule from the 1960s?

8:34 am

Want to own your own Apollo capsule from the 1960s?

Apparently nobody wants to buy a spaceship, at least not for $200,000. St. Louis-based auction company Regency-Superior reported no bids on Wednesday for former Lt. Gov. Lonnie Hammargren’s 1960s Apollo Command Module Block 1 mock-up, which was a fixture in the retired neurosurgeon’s eclectic collection since he acquired it in the mid-1970s.

The capsule remains available still at the minimum price if you go to the auction house’s website.

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Aerojet Rocketdyne says it can replace the Russian rocket engines used by American rockets for $20 to $25 million per engine.

7:43 pm

The competition heats up: Aerojet Rocketdyne says it can replace the Russian rocket engines used by American rockets for $20 to $25 million per engine.

Including legacy systems and various risk-reduction projects, Aerojet Rocketdyne has spent roughly $300 million working on technologies that will feed into the AR-1, Seymour said during a June 3 roundtable with Aviation Week editors. The effort to build a new, 500,000-lb. thrust liquid oxygen/kerosene propulsion system would take about four years from contract award and cost roughly $800 million to $1 billion. Such an engine is eyed for United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Atlas V rocket as well as Orbital’s Antares and, possibly, Space Exploration Technology’s Falcon 9 v1.1.

This is roughly the same price cited for the cost of standing up U.S. co-production of the RD-180 engine, which is manufactured by NPO Energomash of Russia and sold to ULA for the Atlas V through a joint venture with Pratt & Whitney.

Unfortunately, this announcement is part of a lobbying effort to get Congress to fund the new engine rather than a commitment by Aerojet to build it themselves. Thus, I fully expect them to go over budget and for the engine to cost significantly more once in production, facts that will make it less competitive in the future.

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On Monday the Russians announced that they plan to fly two tourists around the Moon by 2017.

9:19 am

The competition heats up: On Monday the Russians announced that they plan to fly two tourists around the Moon by 2017.

This is in conjunction with Space Adventures and the previous tourist flights that have gone to ISS. They say they have two customers willing to pay the $150 million ticket price, but they have also been saying this for years. I am not sure I believe them anymore.

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House and Senate budgets for NASA give almost full funding to manned commercial space while boosting SLS.

9:13 am

House and Senate budgets for NASA give almost full funding to manned commercial space while boosting SLS.

The bill would provide $1.7 billion for the heavy-lift SLS rocket, some $350 million more than the White House requested for 2015, and $100 million more than the House has proposed. SLS is being built at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), ranking member of the Senate Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee, is an ardent defender of the center.

The bill also provides $805 million for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, under which the agency is funding work on three competing astronaut transportation systems with the goal of having at least one delivering crews to and from the international space station by the end of 2017. The White House requested $850 million next year for Commercial Crew, its top human spaceflight development priority. The House proposed $785 million, which would represent a high water mark on a program that has never received the full funding sought by the White House.

That the proposed budgets made only tiny cuts to commercial space indicates that the political clout of this program is growing, since in previous budget years Congress had trimmed this program’s budget much more significantly. That Congress continues to also feed gobs of money to SLS, even though it won’t be able to fly more than 1.5 missions because of a lack of a European service module, indicates that these legislators are really only throwing pork at whatever they think will buy them votes, without any concern for the overall federal budget, instead of using their brains to pick and choose the smartest projects to fund.

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Airbus has begun drop tests of its own suborbital spaceplane.

8:53 am

The competition heats up: Airbus has begun drop tests of a scale-model version of its own suborbital spaceplane.

The video at the link is very disappointing, as it cuts off almost immediately after the spaceplane is released, showing nothing of what happened and how it landed. Nonetheless, that Airbus is testing such technology means that they are considering competing with other suborbital companies like Virgin Galactic and XCOR.

More details here, but they are scanty as well.

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Further details on Google’s proposed 180 satellite constellation for providing internet access worldwide.

9:49 am

Further details on Google’s proposed 180 satellite constellation for providing internet access worldwide.

The more satellites that can be fit on a single rocket, the cheaper it is to send those satellites into space.

For Google’s plan to fit its budget, the company will have to figure out how to pack more capacity into a smaller package. O3b Networks, the satellite start-up backed by Google, is currently working with 1,500-pound satellites that can provide broadband Internet connectivity. O3b’s first four satellites were launched last June from French Guiana atop a Russian-built Soyuz rocket.

Google reportedly wants satellites that weigh just 250 pounds — and is said to be hiring engineers from Space Systems/Loral, a satellite-building company, to work on the project. If Google could use satellites that small for telecommunications, it would be a “radical advance” in the field, Farrar said.

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