The competition heats up: Russia has confirmed Sarah Brightman’s tourist flight to ISS, now scheduled for October 2015.
The first Cygnus/Antares demo flight to ISS has been delayed at least one month, to no earlier than August.
Overall, this delay is not a big deal. They want to swap out an engine to check a seal, plus they then have to coordinate the flight date with other missions to ISS.
The three phonesats launched piggyback on Antares several weeks ago beamed down images of Earth that have now been released.
The three cube-shaped satellites were launched on Sunday, April 21, 2013 atop Orbital Science Corporation’s Antares rocket from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. The three satellites were all built around a standard cubesat frame about four inches (10 cm) square, with a larger, external lithium-ion battery and a radio powerful enough to reach Earth. The smartphone components not only provided cameras for snapping pictures of the Earth, but also acted as the spacecrafts’ avionics for maintaining attitude control.
In keeping with the PhoneSat’s mission’s goal of getting into space on a budget, the images were transmitted back to Earth in the form of image-data packets that were received not just by NASA’s Ames Research Center but also by amateur radio operators around the world, who volunteered their services to collect 200 of these packets.
Today I attended an space industry conference here in Orange County, California, sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Unlike the Space Hackers conference which also occurred today and to which I was also invited, this was not a New Space get-together, but a standard aerospace event which included a lot of old time engineers from the big old-time companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Most of the talks today were engineering related. For example, one described in detail the engineering advantages of building ion engines and solar sails at the molecular level, nanotechnology to the max. Another talk, which I found astonishing and exciting, was an analysis of the orbital mechanics of getting to Mars. This analysis found that using constant acceleration as low as .01 G it would be possible to get to Mars in weeks, not years, and without the necessity of waiting for the perfect launch window. You could launch almost anytime. Though we don’t have engines that as yet can provide this much constant low acceleration, these numbers are not so high as to make it impossible. With some clever refinements, it might be possible to come up with propulsion systems capable of these constant Gs, and to do it in the near future. If so, it will open up the entire solar system to manned exploration very quickly. Not only will we be able to travel to the planets in a reasonable time, the constant Gs would overcome the medical problems caused by prolonged weightlessness.
It wasn’t these interesting engineering presentations that got my juices flowing however. Instead, it was presentation on public policy issues that completely surprised me and made me think the future of the American aerospace industry is really going in the right direction. This significant take-away was further reinforced by the audience’s reaction to my lecture in the evening.
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The robotic demonstration of remote satellite repair on ISS resumed this week.
The latest round of demos follows a breakthrough round of ground-controlled activities in January using the 70-ft.-long Canadian robot arm/Dextre combination to sever lock wires and remove a mock fuel cap to flow 1.7 liters of ethanol fuel into the RMM.
The new tests will see if the robot arm can do even finer and more difficult tasks, such as unscrewing and storing a small screw.
After four tries the Air Force X-51A Waverider test craft finally succeeded in achieving sustained, scramjet-powered, air-breathing hypersonic flight above Mach 5 in its final test flight on May 1.
The European Space Agency is investigating the possibility that the Progress docking to ISS on April 26 might have damaged equipment needed by their ATV cargo ship.
The damage, caused by the undeployed Progress antenna, appears to have involved a navigational aid needed for ATV-4 … the Laser Radar Reflector (LRR) target. The LRR is needed for the automatic docking of the European ATV during the last part of the rendezvous operations. If the damage is confirmed, the device, recently replaced during an EVA by the Russian crew due to contamination of the optical section, will need to be replaced again. In this event, the European cargo ship could potentially be delayed for several months. ATV-4, named Albert Einstein, has been already delayed from April to June because of a glitch in an avionics box.
NASA revealed Tuesday that last April the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope barely avoided a collision with an abandoned Russian satellite.
Fermi mission scientists first learned of the space collision threat on March 29, 2012 when they received a notice that the space telescope and Cosmos 1805 would miss each other by just 700 feet (213.4 meters). The mission team monitored the situation over the next day and it became clear that the two spacecraft, traveling in different orbits, would zip through the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of one another, NASA officials said.
They used Fermi’s thrusters to shift its orbit enough so the two spacecraft missed each other by 6 miles.
Good news: Opportunity is out of standby mode and has resumed normal operations.
A rose by any other name: In a NASA contest, a nine-year-old has named asteroid 1999 RQ36 after the Egyptian god Bennu.
1999 RQ36, or Bennu, is an important asteroid for two reasons. First, NASA is sending an unmanned sample return mission to it in 2016. Second, some calculations suggest the asteroid has a 1 in a 1000 chance of hitting the Earth in 2182.
In other naming news, the private space company Uwingu has launched its “Adopt-a-Planet” campaign.
This open-ended campaign gives anyone in the public—worldwide—the opportunity to adopt exoplanets in astronomical databases via Uwingu’s web site at www.uwingu.com. Proceeds from the naming and voting will continue to help fuel new Uwingu grants to fund space exploration, research, and education.
As noted earlier, they are ignoring the IAU’s stuffy insistence that only the IAU can name things in space.
The competition heats up: In NASA’s new contract with Russia to launch astronauts to ISS, announced today, Russia has raised the ticket price from $63 million to $70.6 million per seat.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union the Russians have become very good capitalists indeed. Consider: the price the Russians were charging for a single ticket on Soyuz was about $33 million in 2004, when George Bush announced the planned retirement of the shuttle. Since then they have repeatedly jacked up the price, knowing that we have no where else to go.
In the end, these price increases are actually a good thing, as they will make it easier for the new American companies to undercut them while simultaneously making a bigger profit.
Schools from Puerto Rico dominated the competition at this past weekend’s Great Moonbuggy Race.
The competition heats up: Better buy your tickets now because in a week the price for a flight on SpaceShipTwo is going up 25%.
Opportunity went into safe mode during the communications pause in April when the Sun was between Mars and the Earth.
Mission controllers for Opportunity, which landed on Mars in January 2004, first learned of the issue on Saturday (April 27). On that day, the rover got back in touch after a nearly three-week communication moratorium caused by an unfavorable planetary alignment called a Mars solar conjunction, in which Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the sun. The Opportunity rover apparently put itself into standby on April 22 after sensing a problem during a routine camera check, mission managers said.
It sounds like this is a recoverable problem and the rover will be back in operation momentarily. Stay tuned.
The Herschel Space Telescope has closed its eye on the universe.
After four years of operation, the telescope’s supply of helium coolant has run out, leaving the infrared telescope blind to the sky.
SpaceShipTwo broke the sound barrier on its first powered flight.
Below the fold is video of the flight.
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The competition heats up: SpaceShipTwo has successfully completed its first powered flight. Some images here.
The excitement builds in Mojave for SpaceShipTwo’s first powered flight, expected on Monday..
The flight window appears to stretch from 6 pm (Pacific) Sunday to noon Tuesday.
A new report from Russia suggests that the undeployed antenna on the Progess freighter will interfere with ISS’s docking port and prevent a docking.
It appears that the antenna would allow a soft docking but prevent the hard docking necessary to allow for the opening of the hatch. Something similar to this had happened on the Russian Mir station in the 1987. Two astronauts did a space walk to clear the hatch of a piece of debris. Now the Russians are suggesting again that if a hard dock becomes impossible a spacewalk be performed to get the antenna out of the way.
An antenna used to orient a Progress freighter during docking, launched today to ISS, has failed to deploy.
Though astronauts can manually dock the spacecraft, they still need proper radar data to gauge its location, spin, orientation, speed, and distance. If the remaining four antennas cannot provide all this information, it will be very dangerous to try a docking.
A problem like this has not happened on a Progress freighter in literally decades. When I consider the spate of other recent failures experienced by the Russian space industry, I can’t help wondering whether they have developed an overall quality control problem.
Update: Russian mission control said today that even if they cannot solve the deployment failure and get the antenna working it will not prevent a docking with ISS on Friday.
I tend to believe them. With four other antennas plus additional radar equipment on ISS it does seems reasonable that there is sufficient redundancy to allow the docking to proceed. Also, considering the Russians past problems with collisions on Mir, I would expect them to be very careful about proceeding if they had any doubts.
This year’s Great Moonbuggy Race, the 20th, has attracted 600 international competitors.
The race itself will be held this coming weekend.
The competition heats up: SpaceX’s test vertical-landing rocket Grasshopper successfully climbed to 250 meters in its most recent test flight.
Video below the fold.
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Yesterday, Orbital Sciences successfully completed the first test launch of its Antares rocket, developed, designed, and built in less than five years under a commercial contract with NASA to provide cargo to the International Space Station. The launch went like clockwork, perfectly, with no hitches at all, something that is quite remarkable for a new rocket on its first launch. Kudos to the engineers at Orbital Sciences for a job well done!
Besides demonstrating the skill of Orbital Science’s engineers, however, this successful launch illustrated in stark reality a fundamental fact about the culture of the United States that continues to allow it to stand out from the rest of the world, even as a large percentage of the present generation of Americans are doing their darndest to try to destroy that culture. Moreover, that fundamental cultural fact is basic to human nature, not just the United States, and if we recognize it, it will provide us all the right framework for what to do and not to do in trying to maintain human societies, both here on Earth as well as in the future in space.
In order to understand the true significance of Orbital Sciences’s success yesterday with Antares, however, we must first review the capabilities of the world’s launch industry. I am not going to list all the rockets capable of putting payloads into orbit, only those that are successfully competing for business in the open commercial market.
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All systems are now go for the first launch of Antares at 5 pm (Eastern).
We have liftoff. All is nominal. The first stage has shut down and separated after operating perfectly. The fairings protecting the dummy payload have separated perfectly, which for Orbital is a big deal, as they have had problems with fairing shrouds on previous launches with other rockets.
The second stage engine has ignited, as planned. All is nominal, as the launch director keeps saying.
The second stage engine has shut down, as planned. Antares is in orbit. After a 90 second pause the dummy payload has separated, as planned.
A perfect launch. The United States now has two companies capable of putting cargo and payloads into orbit at reasonable prices. The competition continues to heat up.
The countdown for the first launch of Antares today at 5 pm (Eastern) has begun.
The launch is now been delayed to 6:10 pm to allow more time for the winds to settle.
Update: due to the winds, they have decided to scrub the launch until Sunday, 5 pm (Eastern).
A Russian spacewalk on ISS today.
What is especially interesting about this spacewalk is its participants, Pavel Vinogradov and Roman Romanenko. Vinogradov at 59 years old is the oldest person to do a spacewalk. It is his seventh EVA. Roman Romanenko meanwhile is following in the footsteps of his father, Yuri Romanenko, who spent three months in space in the late 1970s on Salyut 6 followed by a ten month mission on Mir in 1987. As far as I can remember, this makes Romanenko the first second-generation astronaut in history.
Update: a reader has noted that Richard Garriott was the first second generation astronaut, beating Romanenko by one year. See the comments.
The next Antares launch attempt has now been scheduled for Saturday, April 20, 5 pm (Eastern).
The Antares launch was scrubbed at T-12 minutes because one of the umbilical lines to the rocket separated prematurely.
Update: in a press release Orbital Sciences now says they’ve set the tentative new launch date as no earlier than April 19.
The countdown has begun for the first Antares launch. Go here for regular updates.
Right now the weather looks to be the biggest question mark, with a 50% chance it will cause the launch to be scrubbed.
