Tag: spaceflight

Venus Express gone?

10:06 am

Engineers have been struggling to maintain contact with Venus Express, and have only been able to establish contact for intermittent periods.

Europe’s Venus Express was launched in November 2005 and got to the second planet from the Sun in April 2006, on what was originally a two-year mission. Since then it has sent data streaming back from its polar orbit.

But the probe’s days are numbered, and last month the flight control team at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) at Darmstadt, Germany, reported loss of contact with it. According to ESA’s Venus Express blog, it is possible that the remaining fuel on board the spacecraft was exhausted during recent manoeuvres and that the spacecraft is no longer in a stable attitude (the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna must be kept pointed toward Earth to ensure reliable radio contact).

They have been able to get bits of telemetry from the craft, but since its fuel supply is almost gone the possibility of keeping it operating much longer is limited.

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New Horizons awakes

9:55 am

After almost nine years of travel the American New Horizons probe has been successfully awakened in preparation for its July fly-by of Pluto.

Since launching on January 19, 2006, New Horizons has spent 1,873 days — about two-thirds of its flight time — in hibernation. Its 18 separate hibernation periods, from mid-2007 to late 2014, ranged from 36 days to 202 days in length. The team used hibernation to save wear and tear on spacecraft components and reduce the risk of system failures. “Technically, this was routine, since the wake-up was a procedure that we’d done many times before,” said Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager at APL. “Symbolically, however, this is a big deal. It means the start of our pre-encounter operations.”

By mid-May we will begin to see images of Pluto and its moons that are better than any images ever before taken.

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New joint venture to build Ariane 6

9:42 am

Faced with stiff competition from SpaceX, Europe has handed the construction its next generation rocket, Ariane 6, from Arianespace to a joint venture between the European companies Airbus and Safran.

The new venture will be dubbed Airbus Safran Launchers, and will take over as Europe’s launch company.

I had known that Airbus and Safran had proposed this venture to build Ariane 6, but until I read this press release I hadn’t realized that the agreed-to deal to build Ariane 6 means that Arianespace has essentially been fired by Europe as the company running Europe’s rocket operations. Arianespace, a partnership of the European Space Agency’s many partners, was never able to make a profit, while its Ariane 5 rocket costs a fortune to launch. They have now given the job to two private companies who have promised to rein in the costs. We shall see what happens.

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Orion launch on Thursday given go-ahead

1:30 pm

The Thursday test launch of an Orion capsule has been given the go-ahead.

Many of the news reports this week about this test flight have referred to Orion as “the spacecraft that will take humans to Mars.” I must note again that this is hogwash. No humans will ever go to Mars using Orion. It is too small and does not have the capacity to keep humans healthy and alive for the year-plus-long flight time necessary to get to and from Mars.

The most Orion can ever be is the ascent and descent module for a much larger interplanetary space vessel, used just for getting humans up and down from the surface of the Earth. The spacecraft that will really take people to Mars will have to be something more akin to Mir or ISS, a large assembly of modules put together in low Earth orbit.

One other tidbit everyone should know about tomorrow’s test flight: Though it is being touted as a test of Orion’s heat shield, the company that makes this heat shield has already abandoned this design, so the test itself is for a heat shield that will never be launched again on another Orion capsule. In addition, the flight won’t test the rocket to be used, as the SLS rocket isn’t ready. Nor will it test the capsule’s life support systems, which are not on board.

Which immediately raises the question: Why in hell is NASA even bothering with this test flight?

Sadly, I can answer that question. This is all public relations, an effort to lobby for funding. That’s it.

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Postgraduate plug-n-play cubesat manufacturers ship their first product

9:07 am

The company for cheaply mass-producing cubesats and their components — formed by two brothers while attending college last year — has shipped its first product.

RadioBro, the company founded by Mark and Eric Becnel, reached its first product milestone with a mini-satellite communications transceiver. “We prototyped it in June and did a production run,” says Mark Becnel, company president, who is also finishing up his aerospace engineering master’s degree at UAH. His brother, Eric, who is RadioBro vice president and chief engineer, graduated in 2013. “We accomplished some pre-sales and then did a full run of 100 units,” Becnel says. The MiniSatCom is offered in a variety of kits.

They now are developing a cubesat core that

will save cubesat developers the six months to two years of development time that’s normally required to make a disparate stack of various products work together to serve the same function, Becnel says. If the cubesat is built to generally accepted standards, the core will be plug and play, he says.

These guys have the right idea for space development. Instead of looking for jobs with other companies or NASA, they found a need in the aerospace industry and are filling it, cheaply and efficiently and thus saving everybody time and money. The result: They make money themselves selling their product.

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Europe agrees to build Ariane 6

8:01 am

The heat of competition: Faced with a stiff challenge from SpaceX, the European partners in Arianespace have worked out a deal to replace the Ariane 5 rocket with Ariane 6.

The official announcement will be made in next few days, but with Germany agreeing to the French proposal, the partnership can now proceed.

The result will be a government rocket which will likely only launch government payloads, since it will likely also cost too much to compete with SpaceX and the other new lower cost commercial companies like Stratolaunch, now developing in the U.S.

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Chinese spacecraft reaches L2

10:13 am

The service module for China’s test lunar probe, that circled the Moon before returning to Earth, has reached L2 as planned.

As of Friday, the service module had been flying for 28 days, and was 421,000 kilometers away from Earth and 63,000 km from the moon. All experiments are going well. The service module was separated from the return capsule of China’s test lunar orbiter, which returned to Earth on Nov. 1 after circling the moon in its eight-day mission launched on Oct. 24.

…After two orbital transfers, the service module re-entered the elliptical orbit with an apogee of 540,000 km and a perigee of 600 km. During the flight, the service module again performed orbital transfer actions twice, and flew along the pre-set Earth-moon transfer orbit. On Nov. 23, it reached the perilune and with the lunar gravity it was able to undertake the orbit maneuver to fly to the L2 point.

This is brilliant management. They not only test return-to-Earth capability, they practice flying a robot ship in deep space, doing complex orbital maneuvers. In addition, depending on the equipment on the service module, they get a cheap unmanned probe for observing the near lunar environment.

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Hayabusa-2 scheduled for launch

10:07 am

Delayed due to weather twice, the launch of Japan’s Hayabusa-2 asteroid probe has now been scheduled for Wednesday.

This probe comes with four mini-rovers and an impactor!

Hayabusa 2’s target is a 1km-wide asteroid labelled 1999 JU3, after the year when it was discovered. It is a C-type asteroid, thought to contain more organic material than other asteroids, and so might again help scientists understand how the Solar System evolved.

The Japanese space agency JAXA intend for Hayabusa 2 to catch up with asteroid 1999 JU3 in 2018. It will land a small cube-shaped probe called MASCOT (Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout) developed by the German Space Agency (DLR) together with French space partners the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). The lander is able to move its centre of gravity so that it can tip itself over in order to move across the asteroid’s surface. The three small rovers, called Minerva-II, will also roam the asteroid, gathering data. Hayabusa 2 also carries an impactor that will blast a 2-metre-wide crater in the asteroid’s surface, which will allow the spacecraft to collect fragments and bring them home for study in the laboratory. The spacecraft itself is designed to touch down briefly three times to gather samples.

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A scrambled SLS/Orion flight schedule

12:40 am

It ain’t gonna happen: In trying to figure out what to do with SLS/Orion, NASA has admitted that the earliest any crew mission to an asteroid can occur is now 2024.

I could quote from the article, but then I’d have to quote the entire article and comment on the absurdity of practically every sentence. NASA hasn’t the faintest idea what to do with SLS, it isn’t designed to do much of anything, and it doesn’t have the funding to anything even if they knew what they wanted to do with it. Hence, the constant scheduling rearrangements, all designed to push the actual manned flights farther and farther into the future.

The article does point out how NASA is now planning to fly its first crewed mission on SLS/Orion using an untested upper stage, since the rocket costs so much to launch they can’t afford to spend the money on an unmanned test flight beforehand. Meanwhile, they are demanding that SpaceX and Boeing do all kinds of unmanned test flights with their manned capsules at great cost to these companies, before allowing any astronauts on board.

As I’ve said repeatedly, this rocket is never going to fly anyone anywhere. By 2020 several private companies will be sending humans into space regularly at far less cost and with far greater capabilities. Congress will finally realize that they can spread their pork around more effectively by funding these companies instead, and they will cancel this bloated and wasteful program.

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Philae’s bouncing, tumbling landing sequence

7:31 am

Scientists and engineers have pieced together the bouncing and tumbling land sequence that Philae went through before it came to rest on Comet 67P/C-G, including the possibility that the second touch down was actually the spacecraft grazing a crater rim.

After the first touchdown, the spin rate started increasing. As the lander bounced off the surface, the control electronics of the flywheel were turned off and during the following 40 minutes of flight, the flywheel transferred its angular momentum to Philae. After this time, the lander was now spinning at a rate of about 1 rotation per 13 seconds;

At 16:20 GMT spacecraft time the lander is thought to have collided with a surface feature, a crater rim, for example. “It was not a touchdown like the first one, because there was no signature of a vertical deceleration due to a slight dipping of our magnetometer boom as measured during the first and also the final touchdown,” says Hans-Ulrich. “We think that Philae probably touched a surface with one leg only – perhaps grazing a crater rim – and after that the lander was tumbling. We did not see a simple rotation about the lander’s z-axis anymore, it was a much more complex motion with a strong signal in the magnetic field measurement.”

Following this event, the main rotation period had decreased slightly to 1 rotation per 24 seconds. At 17:25:26 GMT Philae touched the surface again, initially with just one foot but then all three, giving the characteristic touchdown signal. At 17:31:17 GMT, after travelling probably a few more metres, Philae found its final parking position on three feet.

The search for the spacecraft itself, sitting on the surface, continues.

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Safely landing the Falcon 9 first stage on the next launch

8:58 pm

The competition heats up: The website SpaceFlightNow takes a close look at SpaceX’s effort on the next Falcon 9 launch on December 16 to recover the rocket’s first stage.

Musk estimates a 50% chance of success on this launch. Though I think his estimate is reasonable, I also think that this number is a testament to the skill and success of his company. Imagine: in less than three years, since Musk first proposed the idea of landing the first stage vertically, they have come so close to doing it! NASA certainly couldn’t have moved that fast. Neither could most of the experienced launch companies like Arianespace, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, or Russia.

Instead, it takes a new company, a fresh outlook, and freedom to change the world. Who would have guessed?

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Proton launch postponed

8:49 pm

The heat of competition: Russian engineers have scrubbed Friday’s commercial Proton launch due to a gyro issue with the rocket’s Briz upper stage.

They have begun to destack the rocket to get at the upper stage in order to repair the problem, with the new launch date expected to be no earlier than mid-December.

The problem once again raises questions about the quality control generally within the Russian aerospace industry and specifically in the companies that build Proton and its upper stage. At the same time, it is a good thing they spotted the problem before launch, allowing them to correct it. That is what a company with good quality control does.

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Billion-dollar-plus NASA medical research contract under dispute

11:24 pm

A bidding dispute has forced NASA to again put up for bid a $1.5 billion contract for space medicine.

The dispute has to do with two dueling contractors, Wyle and SAIC, both of whom want the big bucks.

After Wyle won the Human Health and Performance contract in March 2013, SAIC filed a protest with the GAO, ultimately prompting NASA to reopen the competition.

When NASA reawarded the contract in August 2013, it chose SAIC. The following month, the McLean, Virginia-based firm — which had announced plans the previous summer to split into two companies — rebranded itself as Leidos and spun off its $4 billion government information technology and technical services unit as a publicly traded firm that kept the name SAIC and was slated to get the Human Health and Performance contract.

But Wyle filed its own protest with GAO in September 2013, arguing that NASA should discount SAIC’s lower bid — at $975 million, nearly 10 percent lower than Wyle’s — because it was submitted when the unit was still part of a much larger company with deeper pockets. This time, the GAO sided with Wyle.

The article says practically nothing about what all this money buys me, the taxpayer. And it is an awful lot of money. Is it for medical research on ISS? Is it for monitoring the health of the astronauts? Is it for biological research? What is it for exactly? I honestly can’t imagine how this kind of research or medical monitoring on ISS can cost this much. My skeptical nature has me wondering if this contract might instead be a bit inflated, much like SLS and Orion, in order to funnel pork to congressional districts to employ as many voters as possible.

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First 3D part manufactured in space

11:07 pm

Astronauts on ISS have used a 3D printer, shipped to the station on the last Dragon flight, to print the first item ever manufactured in space.

“Everything worked exactly as planned, maybe a little better than planned,” Kemmer told NBC News. He said only two calibration passes were needed in advance of the first honest-to-goodness print job, which finished up at 4:28 p.m. ET Monday and was pulled out of the box early Tuesday. “It’s not only the first part printed in space, it’s really the first object truly manufactured off planet Earth,” Kemmer said. “Where there was not an object before, we essentially ‘teleported’ an object by sending the bits and having it made on the printer. It’s a big milestone, not only for NASA and Made In Space, but for humanity as a whole.”

The part made was a faceplate for the printer itself. This printer is a demonstration project, launched to test the engineering and to see how 3D printing operates in weightlessness. Eventually the goal is to have most of the spare parts on a interplanetary vehicle manufactured in space in this manner, using a supply of standard material, called feedstock, that would be much cheaper to ship from Earth.

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Italy’s legislature rejects additional funding for space

12:11 am

The Italian legislature has refused to add an additional $250 million to the budget of its space program, money requested to help pay the country’s share in the development of Arianespace’s next generation commercial rocket, Ariane 6.

The money was also needed for several other ESA space projects. Not having it puts a question mark on Italy’s future in space. The article also illustrates how the committee nature of Europe’s cooperative space effort makes it almost impossible for it to compete in the commercial market.

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Cygnus on Falcon 9?

11:36 pm

The heat of competition: Industry rumors now suggest that Orbital Sciences’s first choice for launching its next ISS freighter Cygnus is SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

The articles offers this explanation for why Orbital is favoring its chief competitor:

While flying on a competitor’s launch vehicle might be viewed as awkward, the decision could boil down to one simple determining factor – cost. It has been estimated that a flight on a F9 would set a customer back $62 million. By comparison, United Launch Alliance’s (ULA ) Atlas V 401 launch vehicle, a booster with similar capabilities to the F9, costs an estimated $100 million per mission. Moreover, SpaceX has a proven track record with the Falcon 9.

All true, but I can think of two more reasons SpaceX is the top choice.
» Read more

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Obama proclaims he will fail to do what every President has failed to do since Carter and the right goes crazy.

11:17 pm

I was reading Newt Gingrich”s commentary blasting Obama for his immigration amnesty announcement and was struck by this paragraph:

[Under Obama’s directive] there will be one group, estimated at 4 million or so, who are eligible for the new work authorization program. But at the same time, there will be no resources directed at enforcing immigration law against the other 7 million people here illegally as long as they do not fall into a few narrow categories, according to the President’s Office of Legislative Affairs. And indeed, a “senior administration official” told Roll Call that the administration “will order immigration agents to prioritize deportations of criminals and recent arrivals — and let people who are not on that priority list go free.”

I read this and realized that what Obama is doing, or not doing, depending on your point of view, is exactly what every President since Carter has done or failed to do. For the right to blast him for this unconstitutional behavior is fine, but we mustn’t forget that Republican presidents have been just as corrupt and as unconstitutional. Since the 1970s the executive branch of our federal government has simply failed to enforce the immigration laws that exist, in exactly the way Obama outlined it, and the result has been the arrival of millions of illegal immigrants inside the United States.

All Obama has done is admit to this failure, and draped it in the mantle of his approval. Past presidents had instead made believe they were doing their constitutional duty, even as they quietly allowed immigration officials to cease enforcing the law. Why else are so many illegals here?

It is this failure, by Presidents of both parties, that ipitomizes the corruption and failure of the federal government on all issues. From the budget to immigration to healthcare to pushing for wasted funding for SLS, our federal government is a pile of garbage that is choking the life out of American society, on all levels. It is for this reason that I heartily and without fear routinely support the election of untried and sometimes foolish sounding tea party candidates: they can’t possibliy be worse than what we already have and — because of their passion for smaller government — are far more likely to be much better.

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Accidental freon release inside ISS

12:44 pm

While doing maintenance to the air-conditioning system on the Russian portion of ISS two Russian astronauts accidently vented freon into the station’s atmosphere.

“Cosmonauts Samokutyaev and Serova performed steps to release pressure in the Russian segment’s air conditioner system by venting khladon gas (Freon 218) overboard. However, several of the quick disconnects that were actuated during the procedure exhibited leaks. As a result, the Khladon was vented into the cabin instead. The quantity released was approximately 100 g, which results in a density of 117 mg/m3 over the volume of ISS, which was below the stated ISS zero risk flight rule limit of 150 mg/m3. As part of nominal air scrubbing process, the Russian Air Purification System and the USOS Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) will remove residual Khladon from the atmosphere,” the NASA blog said.

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MAVEN in safe mode

9:10 pm

A timing conflict between two computers on board MAVEN has put the Mars probe into safe mode.

The issue seems relatively minor and something that engineers should resolve without difficulty. Even so, I refuse to use the bureaucratic term “glitch” to describe it, as the article does, as this term is often employed by government employees to disguise much more serious problems. Journalists shouldn’t help them do this.

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