Tag: spaceflight

Dream Chaser lives on!

8:55 am

The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada reveals that it intends to bid its Dream Chaser mini-shuttle as an ISS cargo vessel in NASA’s next round of cargo contracts.

The company also says that it is continuing development of the shuttle right now, despite the present lack of a contract. If this is true, I would expect them to do, as promised, the additional glide tests they had planned, using their engineering test vehicle. If not, then the claim of further development is merely talk, a lobbying effort to improve their chances of winning the next contract.

Not that I blame them. I just think they would do themselves a lot more good doing an actual glide test.

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Photos of SpaceX’s floating landing barge

9:41 am

The landing barge on which the first stage of the Falcon 9 attempted to land has returned to port.

Photos of the barge show signs of blast and burn damage to cargo containers and possible wreckage from the rocket covered by tarps on the platform’s deck. The rest of the vessel appeared undamaged.

These photos do not show as much wreckage as I would have expected, though my expectations here aren’t based on much knowledge. I would have thought that the first stage remains would have been more substantial.

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Cruz and Rubio to chair important space and science subcommittees

3:40 pm

We are about to find out how conservative and pro-private enterprise senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida) really are. Both have been assigned as chairmen of important subcommittees managing NASA and NOAA.

Cruz will chair the subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, which handles NASA, while Rubio will chair the subcommittee that handles NOAA.

For Cruz especially this position will challenge him to prove his tea party credentials. If he is in favor of private space as much as he claims, we will see him work to trim SLS, a pork project with no hope of achieving anything in space, and favor the commercial space effort, even though SLS brings much more pork into his state.

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Dragon reaches orbit

3:00 am

Another successful Falcon 9 launch for SpaceX this morning, placing a Dragon capsule in the correct orbit for rendezvous and berthing with ISS.

We still await word on the attempt to land the first stage of the rocket on a barge in the Atlantic. From the link above: “SpaceX founder Elon Musk has tweeted an update: ‘Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho.'” More details here.

Based on what they have released, SpaceX has achieved something pretty incredible for its first attempt, actually hitting the floating ship at landing. That the landing itself was not soft or gently is literally only a detail. They will have the opportunity on future launches to get it right.

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Europe reconsiders reusability in its rockets

8:45 am

The competition heats up: Pressured by SpaceX, Europe has restarted a research program into developing a reusable first stage to its rockets.

The headline is actually an overstatement. The European managers quoted in the article actually spend most of their time explaining why trying to reuse a rocket’s first stage makes no sense, but they feel forced to reluctantly look into it anyway because of what SpaceX is doing with its Falcon 9.

This story makes me think of two blacksmiths around 1900. One poo-poos cars, saying that the repair cost is so high no one will ever buy them. He goes back to pounding horseshoes. The other decides that if he learns how to fix cars, he can turn his shop from fixing horseshoes to fixing cars, and make more money. Europe is the first blacksmith, while SpaceX is the second.

Which do you think is going to succeed?

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Some details on the SpaceX’s attempt to land its Falcon 9 first stage

8:38 am

This SpaceX press release gives some good info on the difficulty they face getting the first stage on Tuesday’s Dragon launch to land successfully on its floating sea platform:

To complicate matters further, the landing site is limited in size and not entirely stationary. The autonomous spaceport drone ship is 300 by 100 feet, with wings that extend its width to 170 feet. While that may sound huge at first, to a Falcon 9 first stage coming from space, it seems very small. The legspan of the Falcon 9 first stage is about 70 feet and while the ship is equipped with powerful thrusters to help it stay in place, it is not actually anchored, so finding the bullseye becomes particularly tricky. During previous attempts, we could only expect a landing accuracy of within 10km. For this attempt, we’re targeting a landing accuracy of within 10 meters.

They are going to try however, and they will be filming their attempt all the way. Stay tuned for some very interesting footage.

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A Russia/Brazil partnership for Sea Launch?

9:30 am

The competition heats up: Russia is negotiating a partnership with Brazil to operate Sea Launch.

The Sea Launch rocket is built by Ukraine, which presently has hostile relations with Russia, to say the least. The platform, built with Boeing money, is presently docked on the the U.S. west coast, which is also not what Russia wants. Moving it to Brazil and adapting it for use with a Brazilian rocket solves both problems, though the usability of Brazil’s rocket is at this moment quite questionable.

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India’s Mangalyaan Mars probe working fine

9:22 am

After three months in orbit around Mars, India’s Mangalyaan spacecraft continues to function as designed, and is expected to operate beyond its planned six month mission.

In the last three months, Mangalyaan has captured nearly 300 pictures. On an average the spacecraft takes four pictures in three days. Besides capturing the images of dust storm activities, it has also taken images of comet Siding Spring.

Because of Mangalyaan’s orbit and the wide-angle nature of its camera the pictures are generally global. This output also is not spectacular compared to other probes. Nonetheless, this is an achievement for which India should be proud.

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Loose fibers significantly cuts Gaia’s output

5:24 pm

Europe’s Gaia telescope, designed to precisely measure the motions of a billion stars in the Milky Way, will have its accuracy cut in half because of the presence of loose fibers on the telescope’s sun shield that are allowing too much stray light in.

These fibres were spotted on Gaia before launch, but cutting them off was considered too risky, because that could allow small particles to enter the spacecraft. Another option, taping them down, was also ruled out because the increased stiffness could prevent the sunshield from unfolding.

The stray light shouldn’t affect measurements of the galaxy’s brightest stars, says Gaia science team member Anthony Brown at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, but it will double the expected errors on most of the stars in the Milky Way, which are much fainter.

For astronomers this is a great tragedy. Gaia will still teach us much, just not as much as they had hoped.

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Angara A5 rocket launches successfully

8:55 am

The competition heats up: Russia successfully completed the first test launch of the heavy-lift version of its Angara rocket today.

More background here.

At this moment the dummy payload is in a preliminary orbit and requires additional engine burns by the Briz-M upper stage to reach its planned geosynchronous orbit. Briz-M however is well tested and has been in use for years already on the Proton rocket. Therefore, for Angara this flight has now been a complete success, even if the Briz-M stage fails.

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Successful Falcon 9 static fire

9:25 pm

After unspecified issues on a static fire test last week caused the postponement of the Falcon 9/Dragon launch until January 6, SpaceX followed up with a successful full static fire test of the rocket on Friday.

SpaceX fueled up a Falcon 9 rocket, ran through a mock countdown and fired the booster’s nine Merlin main engines Friday in a successful preflight static fire test officials hope will clear the way for liftoff Jan. 6 on a space station resupply mission. The exercise occurred at approximately 2:55 p.m. EST (1955 GMT) Friday while the Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon supply ship were kept grounded at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 launch pad.

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Kepler reborn

9:54 am

Kepler detects its first exoplanet after its mission was reshaped because of the failure of two of its four gyros.

The newfound planet, HIP 116454b, has a diameter of 20,000 miles, two and a half times the size of Earth. HARPS-N showed that it weighs almost 12 times as much as Earth. This makes HIP 116454b a super-Earth, a class of planets that doesn’t exist in our solar system. The average density suggests that this planet is either a water world (composed of about three-fourths water and one-fourth rock) or a mini-Neptune with an extended, gaseous atmosphere.

This close-in planet circles its star once every 9.1 days at a distance of 8.4 million miles. Its host star is a type K orange dwarf slightly smaller and cooler than our sun. The system is 180 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pisces.

Even more cool, the detection took place during Kepler’s first test run in its new configuration. This bodes well for the space telescope’s ability to make future discoveries.

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