The competition heats up: Argentina to begin testing its own rocket for satellite launches before the end of 2013.
A Progress freighter was manually docked with ISS today when its automatic docking system suffered a malfunction 200 feet from the station.
This freighter was using a new rendezvous radar system, and had spent two extra days approaching the station to do rendezvous tests. What failed has not yet been released.
The Falcon 9 rocket had an abort at launch today at 5:39 Eastern.
The rocket is safe on the launchpad. They are assessing the situation. SpaceX has a remarkably good record of launching quickly and successfully after a launch abort, sometimes within an hour.
The countdown has been reset for a 6:44 pm Eastern launch, the latest they can in their launch window, and has resumed. You can watch it live here.
It appears that they have resumed the countdown, even as they continue to assess, so that if all is well they will be able to launch within their window. This means however they are not yet go for launch.
They now say they are go for launch, even as they assess. In addition, their customer, SES, has given them 20 more minutes on their launch window.
I just love how SpaceX seems to always have an abort-at-launch whenever I am free to watch. I think this is the fourth abort-at-launch nail-biter I have seen.
They have aborted the countdown again at T-48 seconds. They have also scrubbed for the day. It appears they had not completed their assessment of the original abort and decided to scrub. The next launch attempt date is not yet known.
The competition heats up: Two brothers, also college students, have formed a company to build cubesats for researchers.
Mark and Eric Becnel are aiming their company Radiobro at providing turnkey cube satellite services to researchers who have experiments they’d like to fly, but who don’t have the resources to build their own satellites to fly them. “There’s an unfilled niche there in supplying a need if a scientist wants to take an experiment and fly it in space,” Eric Becnel said. “The idea is to provide that researcher with an off-the-shelf solution.”
The solution will encompass both the hardware and software necessary for the research to take place and be monitored, the brothers said. “Maybe you’ve got a launch opportunity and a window to launch,” Mark Becnel said. “We can help you by delivering that satellite in as fast as 12 months.”
This is the kind of creative capitalism the American aerospace industry hasn’t seen from its new engineers in years. In my experience giving lectures at student chapters of the AIAA, aerospace students have routinely been focused on looking for a job, either at NASA or with one of the big aerospace companies. These guys are instead trying to create their own. I say, they have the right idea, and have picked the right venue at exactly the right time. If they do it right, they and their company Radiobro stand to be a big success.
Russia has now officially delayed the launch of its next module to ISS by at least a year.
The cause of the delay is because of a number of serious quality control problems by the company that manufactured it.
Uh-oh: It appears that two nitrogen tanks exploded at the SpaceX facility in Texas last night.
Police are investigating. This mishap is not connected with the Falcon 9 launch in Florida, but it is not good when such things happen.
The ingenious plan engineers have devised to do good science with the crippled Kepler space telescope.
They are going to use the spacecraft’s solar panels as a pseudo third reaction wheel. This will allow it to point with acceptable accuracy for short periods.
It appears firefighters saved a half billion dollar NASA satellite from burning up in a truck fire today.
A Progress freighter, launched yesterday, will not dock with ISS for four days in order to test upgrades to its rendezvou radar system.
Unlike recent Progress vehicles that used the 2AO-VKA and AKR-VKA antennas of Kurs-A system, M-21M is sporting a AO-753A antenna of the Kurs-NA system instead. Once the Progress reaches its preliminary orbit, it will conduct a series of automated engine burns to put it on track to fly within one mile of the station on Wednesday, allowing for the test of the lighter, more-efficient Kurs automated rendezvous system hardware for upgraded Soyuz and Progress vehicles.
After it finishes its flyby, the Progress will loop above and behind the station, returning Friday for a docking.
Cuirosity has resumed science operations after experiencing a short circuit and voltage drop.
Though the press release notes that engineers have apparently pinpointed the source of the voltage drop, it does not explain why the drop has disappeared. I wish they provided more information.
China’s next lunar mission, set to launch next month, will have a rover named “Yutu”.
In Chinese folklore, Yutu is the white pet rabbit of Chang’e, the moon goddess who has lent her name to the Chinese lunar mission. Legend has it that, after swallowing a magic pill, Chang’e took her pet and flew toward the moon, where she became a goddess, and has lived there with the white jade rabbit ever since.
Chang’e 2 is the name of the entire mission.
Faced with stiff competition from SpaceX, Arianespace is considering lowering its launch prices.
SpaceX has scrubbed today’s first geosynchronous launch of its Falcon 9 rocket.
The scrub occurred after the third unplanned hold. There was an issue with the first stage, but more information has not yet been released, though they also said that they have rescheduled the next launch attempt for Thursday, 5:38 pm, on Thanksgiving.
In an interview Richard Branson says that Virgin Galactic is working to replace SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid engine.
So for instance, the initial rocket which I’ll be flying on to space will be thrown away afterward. Within six to nine months, we will be using rockets that will have capability of being used maybe up to 1,000 times, but definitely up to 100 times. That will bring the cost of space travel down dramatically.
This timing fits with their new schedule for the first commercial flights of SpaceShipTwo sometime late in 2014. I suspect they are hoping to fly the ship a few more times with the troublesome hybrid engine, partly for engineering research and partly to keep interest up in the company, and then switch over to a new engine.
As said by the chief technology officer of one of the world’s largest satellite communications company, in reference to today’s scheduled 5:37 pm (Eastern) launch of Falcon 9’s first geosynchronous satellite payload. As this man and Elon Musk also added,
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A Russian rocket this morning launched a trio of European satellites designed to study the Earth’s magnetic field.
More information about the science goals of the Swarm mission can be found here.
SpaceX successfully completed a countdown dress rehearsal and launchpad hot fire engine test yesterday in preparation for the next commercial launch of its Falcon 9 rocket on November 25.
This was the first such fueling at Kennedy of the Falcon 9.
Update: This article gives some details about why the second engine burn of the upper stage rocket did not occur on the previous Falcon 9 launch, and what SpaceX has done to fix the problem. That failure caused speculation that the engine exploded at the attempt.
It is essential that engine functions in space on the November 25 launch in order for SpaceX to deliver its commercial satellite to its proper geosynchronous orbit.
ISS celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the launch of its first module yesterday.
Dennis Tito noted today that if the U.S. doesn’t partner with him to send a couple to fly past Mars, he’ll partner with Russia or China instead.
That’s nice, but how does he know they’ll partner with him? Based on his proposal, I would expect Russia especially to laugh him out of the room.
Construction of Russia’s new Vostochny spaceport is essentially back on schedule.
“I think we have reduced the lag and are getting back to the initial schedule,” Spetsstroy Director Alexander Volosov said on Thursday, November 21. While in July 2013, the lag was about three months, now it has been reduced to ten days. “Funding is provided on time and in sufficient volumes,” Volosov said. The first stage of the project – construction of roads at the cosmodrome – has been completed. The second stage is proceeding as scheduled and is to be completed in December 2014.
India’s Mangalyaan Mars probe has returned its first image, a picture of India on Earth.
Though you can always learn something from any image, what is significant here is that before even leaving Earth orbit engineers have proven that the spacecraft’s camera works.
The competition heats up: In a launch today a Russian Dnepr rocket sent 32 satellites into orbit, breaking the record of 29 set less than a week ago by a Minotaur rocket.
This is the future. Satellites are going to get smaller, and thus cheaper to launch.
Dennis Tito’s project to launch a manned fly-by of Mars by 2018 has issued its revised plans, and they call for NASA to use SLS to do it.
I will have more to say about this proposal shortly.
On Sunday Curiosity suffered an electrical problem that has caused a pause in operations while engineers troubleshoot it.
At the moment the rover has ceased its travel. Though they are trying to make this sound as if it isn’t that big a deal, it does not sound good to me.
On Tuesday NASA issued a solicitation for bids on providing the agency a manned ferrying capability to and from ISS.
The new solicitation asks for proposals for final design, development, test, evaluation and certification of a human space transportation system, including ground operations, launch, orbital operations, return to Earth and landing.
The article is unclear how this solicitation fits in with the commercial crew program that already exists and is funding the manned upgrade of SpaceX’s Dragon and the development of Boeing’s CST-100 and Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser.
Update: This article makes things much clearer, outlining how this solicitation is the next phase in development and is open to all bidders.
An Orbital Sciences’ Minotaur rocket tonight launched a record 29 satellites into orbit, 28 of which were cubesats.
More here.
To save money, NASA management has shut down a troubled program to build a more efficient plutonium power supply for its deep space missions.
The cancelled ASRGs would have generated electrical power from the expansion of gas warmed by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238. NASA says that the devices have the same power output as its current generation of Multi-Mission Radioactive Thermoelectric Generators (MMRTG) but use four times less plutonium-238, a scarce resource. One MMRTG with 4.8 kilograms of plutonium is currently powering the Curiosity rover on Mars.
The United States has less than 40 kilograms of plutonium-238 left, but the DOE restarted production this year. Green says he is confident that the DOE will be producing plutonium-238 at a rate of 1.5 kilograms per year by 2019. He says that the stockpiled plutonium-238, along with the new supply, will be enough to send another planned rover to Mars in 2020 and to complete other missions in the 2020s – without any need for the extra efficiency of the ASRGs.
The ASRG program had been a year and a half behind schedule and had had its management team replaced at one point.
A close look at another government program to try to lower the cost to orbit.
The latest program is know as the Experimental Spaceplane — or XS-1. The objective “is to demonstrate a reusable first stage launch vehicle capable of carrying and deploying an upper stage that inserts 3,000 to 5,000 lb. payloads into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), designed for less than $5M per launch for an operational system.” The system has to be able to perform with aircraft-like operations. And demonstrate the ability to fly 10 times in 10 days. It needs to reach Mach 10 at least once. And provide the basis for next-generation launch services and “global reach hypersonic and space access aircraft.”
Forgive me if I am skeptical. Despite DARPA’s reasonable success (It helped make possible SpaceX’s Merlin engine), these government efforts generally fail because they are unattached to the prime reasons for lowering cost: competition and profits. Consider this very accurate historical summary in the article above:
In the era of bell bottoms and Richard Nixon, there was the space shuttle. When Ronald Reagan ruled the roost, all hope rested in the National Aerospace Plane. During the Bill Clinton era, there were the X-33 and Venture Star. In Barack Obama’s first term, the Air Force pursued its Reusable Booster System (RBS).
Five programs. One objective: to radically reduce the cost to orbit. More than $14 billion spent on development. And the result? A super expensive shuttle program. Four vehicles that never flew. And access to space just kept getting more expensive.
Only when every effort in the aerospace industry is focused on making itself more competitive will we see the kinds of technical advancements this new DARPA program wishes to achieve.
NASA’s next Mars orbiter, MAVEN, is go for launch today at 1:28 pm.
Moreover, another launch on Tuesday night from Wallops Island will be visible along the entire east coast, and will put a record 29 satellites into orbit.
