Tag: spaceflight

The Russian investigation into the crash of their Proton rocket on Tuesday now includes a criminal prosecutor.

8:48 am

The Russian investigation into the crash of their Proton rocket on Tuesday now includes a criminal prosecutor.

“The investigative department of the Russian Investigative Committee at the Baikonur complex has opened a criminal case on this incident over evidence of a crime, put forward in the Russian Criminal Code Article 216 Part 1. The Baikonur prosecutor’s office is overseeing the investigation,” the statement said.

There is also another story from this news service claiming that the crash occurred because the rocket launched a half second early, confusing its computer systems.

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This week’s launch failure of the Proton rocket leaves two satellite communications firms in a quandary.

5:05 pm

The competition heats up: This week’s launch failure of the Proton rocket leaves two satellite communications firms in a quandary.

Luxembourg-based SES joins London-based Inmarsat among the commercial customers awaiting Proton launches later this year, a prospect that almost certainly disappeared in the fireball that engulfed Proton shortly after liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Inmarsat’s entire next-generation high-speed mobile communications product offer is booked on three Proton launches.

It appears that their only other launch options are Arianespace, which is booked up, and SpaceX, which is not yet ready to take on this much new business.

In other words, the launch industry has a need for more launchers from companies willing to compete for that business.

Update: Arianespace has said that if they get the orders quickly, they might be able to fit the launch’s into their 2014 launch manifest. That has the sound of a company that wants to make money, and is willing to do whatever it takes to capture the business.

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NASA has revised their plans for the 2017 and 2021 flights of its Orion capsule, making both flights more ambitious.

9:33 am

The competition heats up? NASA has revised their plans for the 2017 and 2021 flights of its Orion capsule, making both flights more ambitious.

[M]anifests have always pointed towards the first SLS/Orion launch being an uncrewed Exploration Mission (EM-1), which was baselined a validation flight that would send Orion on a 7-10 day mission around the Moon.

SLS and Orion would then endure a four year gap – again, mainly due to the advanced 2017 debut relating to ISS crew back up – before repeating a version of EM-1, this time as a CLO (Crewed Lunar Orbit) flight, with four astronauts spending three to four days orbiting our nearest neighbor, as opposed to heading directly home after passing around the Moon – a flight known as Exploration Mission -2 (EM-2).

Much to the surprise of some people deeply involved with SLS and Orion, the order came down from NASA HQ to realign EM-2, based around a 2019 mission tasked with hunting down and capturing an asteroid that would then be placed in the vicinity of the Moon within one to two years. EM-2 is also known as the Asteroid Redirect Crewed Mission (ARCM). [emphasis mine]

It has been my understanding that the plans for the 2017 unmanned test flight have previously described it as sending the Orion capsule into a high several thousand mile orbit, not to the Moon, in order to simulate a re-entry from lunar distances. Making that unmanned mission a lunar orbital mission makes it far more challenging. Similarly, it is incredibly risky to turn the next flight, the first manned flight for Orion, into a duplicate of this mission, or a flight to an asteroid. This will be the first time humans will have ever flown on Orion, and only the second time the capsule has been used. To then send those humans to the Moon or an asteroid seems downright foolish. Even the 1960s NASA, which was quite willing to run risks, would not have attempted such a plan.

It is my guess that the White House has recognized that SLS can’t survive politically with a launch rate once every four years and planned test flights that aren’t very exciting. They are therefore pushing NASA to accelerate the second mission (and first manned flight) from 2021 to 2019, while also making both flights more ambitious and therefore more salable to the public.

Whether this is possible, given NASA’s bloated bureaucracy, is the main question. Moreover, even at this accelerated pace SLS will be competing directly against the private sector, which I expect will continue to do things far faster and, more importantly, far cheaper. Against that competition SLS will be hard put to survive.

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The Proton rocket is now grounded pending an investigation into today’s launch failure.

5:52 pm

The Proton rocket is now grounded pending an investigation into today’s launch failure.

This is no surprise. What is more significant is that the crash today will likely delay all launches out of Baikonur for at least three months.

[C]ontamination will likely suspend activities at Baikonur Cosmodrome for two or three months, Ria Novosti reported, citing an unnamed source within the Russian space industry. The launch of a robotic Progress cargo ship to the International Space Station from Baikonur, currently scheduled for July 27, will probably be delayed as a result, according to this source. The next manned launch from Baikonur is Soyuz 36, which is slated to blast off on Sept. 25 to take three new crewmembers to the International Space Station.

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The Kickstarter campaign by the private company Planetary Resources has made its $1.5 million goal.

9:16 am

The competition heats up: The Kickstarter campaign by the private company Planetary Resources has made its $1.5 million goal.

That campaign reached its $1 million goal on June 19, opening the way for one of Planetary Resources’ Arkyd-100 space telescopes to be used for educational and personal imaging projects. The biggest crowd-pleaser was a $25 offer that will let backers take “space selfies” — orbital pictures showing a display on the telescope with an image submitted by a backer in the foreground, and Earth in the background.

The Asteroid Zoo plan was [the $1.5 million] stretch goal for the campaign. Planetary Resources will partner with Zooniverse to create a game-like online program to identify asteroids, modeled on other Zooniverse citizen-science efforts such as Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo and Planet Hunters. Users would be recruited to join in, and then trained to spot the telltale signs of an asteroid’s movement — for example, by “blinking” multiple images of the same patch of sky, or using more sophisticated techniques. The search would draw upon more than 3 million images from the Catalina Sky Survey.

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A Russian Proton rocket went out of control and crashed mere seconds after launch today at Baikonur.

8:58 am

A Russian Proton rocket went out of control and crashed mere seconds after launch today at Baikonur.

Video below the fold. It appears the rocket’s avionics had completely failed so that the engines could no longer control its flight. Obviously that is speculation. What is clear is that the failure was not because of a problem with the rocket’s Briz-M upper stage, which has been the source of the five Proton failures during the past three years.

This is very very very bad news for the Russian commercial rocket effort. They have been trying to recover from those earlier failures, and with the string of successes this year had appeared to doing so. Instead, they now have had their worst and most spectacular launch failure in decades, so spectacular it is reminiscent of the rocket failures of the 1950s. Worse, the failure is not because of the relatively new Briz-M upper stage, but in their well established, decades old first stage, indicating that there are some fundamental quality control problems in their manufacturing process that they have not fixed.

This cannot be good for their business, especially as they have some serious competition. Arianespace, though expensive, is very reliable. SpaceX, though new and essentially untried, is very competitive in price. So is Orbital Sciences.

Expect a lot of heads to roll.
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Voyager 1 has found the edge of the solar system to be far more complex than predicted by scientists.

8:44 am

The uncertainty of science: Voyager 1 has found the edge of the solar system to be far more complex than predicted by scientists.

Scientists had assumed that Voyager 1, launched in 1977, would have exited the solar system by now. That would mean crossing the heliopause and leaving behind the vast bubble known as the heliosphere, which is characterized by particles flung by the sun and by a powerful magnetic field.

The scientists’ assumption turned out to be half-right. On Aug. 25, Voyager 1 saw a sharp drop-off in the solar particles, also known as the solar wind. At the same time, there was a spike in galactic particles coming from all points of the compass. But the sun’s magnetic field still registers, somewhat diminished, on the spacecraft’s magnetometer. So it’s still in the sun’s magnetic embrace, in a sense.

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Kepler’s planet-hunting predecessor, COROT, has been shut down.

8:33 am

Kepler’s planet-hunting predecessor, CoRoT, has been shut down.

CoRoT suffered a computer failure on November, 2, 2012 and although the spacecraft is capable of receiving navigational commands, the French Space Agency CNES reports it can no longer retrieve data from its 30-centimeter telescope. After a valiant effort to try and restore the computer, CNES announced this week that the spacecraft has been retired. CoRoT’s journey will come to a fiery end as it will be deorbited and it will burn up on re-entry in Earth’s atmosphere.

CoRoT found 32 exoplanets with at least a hundred more candidates still to be confirmed.

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Two researchers have concluded that sterilizing spacecraft heading to Mars is largely a waste of money.

8:22 am

Two researchers have concluded that sterilizing spacecraft heading to Mars is largely a waste of money.

As far as Mars is concerned, say Fairén and Schulze-Makuch, such efforts are probably in vain since “Earth life has most likely already been transferred to Mars.” Meteorite impacts have had 3.8 billion years to spread Earth life forms to Mars. Several Earth spacecraft have visited Mars without undergoing the sterilization procedures now in place. If organisms transferred to Mars over the eons failed to survive, modern organisms would likely face the same fate. If they did survive, say Fairén and Schulze-Makuch, “it is too late to protect Mars from terrestrial life, and we can safely relax the planetary protection policies.”

They also note that NASA’s “Office of Planetary Protection is like an interplanetary Environmental Protection Agency” and that its “‘detailed and expensive’ efforts to keep Earth microorganisms off Mars are making missions to search for life on the red planet ‘unviable.’”

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Arianespace will not be able to set its launch manifest for the remainder of this year until late July.

7:09 pm

The competition heats up: Arianespace will not be able to set its launch manifest for the remainder of this year until late July.

The year’s third Ariane 5 mission is scheduled for launch in late July carrying the large Alphasat satellite for mobile satellite services operator Inmarsat of London and the European Space Agency (ESA); and India’s Insat-3D telecommunications satellite.

Beyond that, Israel said, it is unclear which commercial payloads will be placed on which of the two remaining Ariane 5 flights, scheduled for this fall, or what the Ariane 5 manifest looks like for 2014. A big question is whether Arianespace has any slots open in the Ariane 5 manifest in 2014 to accommodate new customers who want to switch to Ariane 5 because their selected vehicle is late.

This article not only suggests that Arianespace has more business than it can handle, it is also provides evidence that the company is scrambling to cut costs in order to compete.

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A Russian Soyuz rocket successfully launched four commercial broadband satellites today for French Guiana.

4:59 pm

The competition heats up: A Russian Soyuz rocket successfully launched four commercial broadband satellites today for French Guiana.

The constellation’s orbit is designed to provide high-bandwidth Internet links to land masses located between 45 degrees north and 45 degrees south of the equator, which means mainly the developing world.

An interesting historical note of this story is that

O3b and SES officials have said that the company has regulatory rights to sufficient spectrum to put as many as 120 satellites in the same unusual orbit. O3b is making use of radio spectrum originally won, following a long battle, by a U.S. company called Teledesic, which had envisioned more than 800 satellites to provide broadband links worldwide. Teledesic ceased operations before launching its satellites.

Teledesic was a $9 billion satellite constellation proposed by Bill Gates back in 1998. They only launched one satellite, Teledesic 1, which was a failure. That this project has essentially come back to life fifteen years later is most intriguing.

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The Chinese astronauts have undocked from the Tiengong-1 space station and will return to Earth tomorrow.

9:03 am

The Chinese astronauts have undocked from the Tiengong-1 space station and will return to Earth tomorrow.

Following a separation from the Tiangong-1 at 7:05 a.m. Beijing Time, the manned Shenzhou-10 moved back to a point from where the spacecraft changed its orbit and flew around the target module. Under the command of ground-based professionals, Shenzhou-10 adjusted its flight gesture at a point behind Tiangong-1, and approached and rendezvoused with the target module.

The fly-around and rendezvous was apparently controlled by ground controllers, not the astronauts on board.

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A NASA ion engine has successfully completed more than five and a half years of continuous operation.

9:56 pm

A NASA ion engine has successfully completed more than five and a half years of continuous operation.

During the endurance test performed in a high vacuum test chamber at Glenn, the engine consumed about 1,918 pounds (870 kilograms) of xenon propellant, providing an amount of total impulse that would take more than 22,000 (10,000 kilograms) of conventional rocket propellant for comparable applications.

So, now what? Will this engineering achievement be filed away, like so many other past NASA engineering projects, or will it be used for something?

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Two Russian astronauts completed a six-hour-plus spacewalk today, preparing the station for Russia’s science module.

9:48 pm

Two Russian astronauts completed a six-hour-plus spacewalk today, preparing the station for Russia’s science module.

This science module is many years late, delayed due to Russia’s financial problems after the fall of the Soviet Union. That the Russians are finally about to launch it is another indication, like their recent Proton rocket launch successes, that there space program might be experiencing a resurgence.

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Orbital Sciences is scrambling to find a reliable long term first stage engine for its Antares rocket.

3:05 pm

Orbital Sciences is scrambling to find a reliable long term first stage engine for its Antares rocket.

The NK-33 engine that powered Antares’ first flight was built decades ago by Russia’s Kuznetsov Design Bureau and is no longer in production. Further, Orbital is uncertain about the quality of Aerojet’s remaining stockpile of 23 NK-33s, beyond those set aside for NASA’s CRS-1. Aerojet Rocketdyne is Orbital’s primary subcontractor and overhauls the old NK-33 engines into a configuration for Antares, dubbed AJ-26. Orbital officials say its only current alternative is the RD-180 engine made in Russia by NPO Energomash. But the United Launch Alliance (ULA), which operates the U.S. Air Force’s Atlas V and Delta IV fleets, holds exclusive rights in the U.S. to buy the RD-180.

Over the last four years, Orbital has inquired about purchasing the RD-180 from ULA, RD Amross and Energomash. “We could never get to first base on that,” says Michael Hamel, the company’s senior vice president of corporate strategy and development. Requests for support from the Air Force, Office of the Secretary of Defense and Congress were also met with silence, company officials say.

What I find disturbing about this story is the complete lack of effort by Orbital, Aerojet, or ULA to build their own engines. Even if new NK-33 engines are made by Aerojet, they will be manufactured in Russia, as are ULA’s engines. Why can’t they do what SpaceX has done and make their own engines?

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Europe has successfully drop tested its experimental re-entry vehicle.

1:19 pm

Europe has successfully drop tested its own experimental re-entry vehicle.

The full-scale Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) prototype was released from an altitude of 3000 m by a helicopter, falling to gain speed to mimic a space mission before parachute deployment. The parachute slowed IXV for a safe splashdown in the sea at a speed below 7 m/s. This last step in a series of tests shows that IXV can be recovered safely after its mission into space.

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Europe admits that its planned accelerated upgrades to Ariane 5 are intended to counteract the competition from both Russia’s Proton and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets.

9:27 pm

The competition heats up: At a briefing at the Paris Air Show this week Arianespace admitted that its planned accelerated upgrades to Ariane 5 are intended to counteract the competition from both Russia’s Proton and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets.

I love competition. It energizes everything.

Update: This long article specifically discusses how Arianespace is scrambling to meet the competition. Key quote:
» Read more

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A 3D printer intended for installation on ISS in 2014 has successfully proven it can work in weightlessness.

9:12 pm

A 3D printer intended for installation on ISS in 2014 has successfully proven it can work in weightlessness.

Three prototype versions of space manufacturing startup Made in Space’s 3D printer showed their stuff during four airplane flights that achieved brief periods of microgravity via parabolic maneuvers, company officials announced today (June 19).

Then there’s this:

“The 3D printer we’re developing for the ISS is all about enabling astronauts today to be less dependent on Earth,” Noah Paul-Gin, Made in Space’s microgravity experiment lead, said in a statement. “The version that will arrive on the ISS next year has the capability of building an estimated 30 percent of the spare parts on the station, as well as various objects such as specialty tools and experiment upgrades.” [emphasis mine]

If this claim is true, this printer will do a lot to make interplanetary space travel far more likely. It will mean that travelers far from home will be able to manufacture the spare parts they need, on demand, should something break. This will save a lot of weight, compared to carrying pre-made spare parts.

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If you are hoping to buy stock in Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, Musk now says you will have to wait until they have begun regular missions to Mars.

9:45 am

If you are hoping to buy stock in Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, Musk now says you will have to wait until they have begun regular missions to Mars.

This is a change from earlier comments by Musk, which to me suggests that the company’s recent successes and sales has made it profitable enough that he’d rather maintain control than get cash from an IPO. By keeping the company private, Musk can avoid being beholden to stockholders. He can do what he wants.

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