Fragments from yesterday’s failed Russian launch crashed onto “Cosmonaut Street” in Siberia.
The view of Comet Lovejoy from ISS. With video.
The NASA shuttle simulator for training astronauts is going to Texas A&M.
Valasek said it won’t be a static display for viewing but a functional flight simulator. Visitors will be able to sit in the seats and cockpit and manually fly a simulated re-entry as the shuttle astronauts did. “When operational again, the SMS will be the centerpiece of many educational, outreach, and research activities for a long time to come,” Valasek said. “And it will be accessible. Until now, 355 astronauts have trained on the Shuttle Motion Simulator and flown on a space shuttle mission. Now the rest of us can experience at least a part of the excitement of space exploration, just the way the astronauts trained for it.”
The simulator will be used in aerospace engineering courses and accessible to all Texas A&M students, staff, and faculty. Spaceflight enthusiasts and fans of technology, whether affiliated with the university or not, will also be able to enjoy it.
Now, this is what an engineering school should be focused on, rather than the skin color of its students.
Doing the work NASA can’t do: Russia successfully launched three astronauts to ISS this morning.
Russia’s GPS system, Glonass, has returned to full operational capability, lost shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Seven predictions made in 1931 for the year 2011.
A Spanish company has announced it will build a space hotel by 2012.
The story suggests that Virgin Galactic will providing the tourist ferry to their orbital hotel, which is puzzling as that company is only building a suborbital spacecraft at this time.
Using the spacecraft’s last drops of fuel, engineers are attempting to aim Deep Impact to a 2020 rendezvous with near Earth asteroid 2002 GT.
Virgin Galactic isn’t the only one building a suborbital spaceplane: Europe plans to test fly its own suborbital spaceship in 2014.
Richard Branson talks to the Wall Street Journal about space.
Mr. Branson is still radiating enthusiasm. “We’ve got just short of 500 people now signed up to go, which is actually more people than have been up to space in the history of space travel, and we hope to put those up in our first year of operation,” he says, predicting the first commercial flight by “about next Christmas,” although he acknowledges that there have been many delays.
A Russian Soyuz rocket has completed its second launch from French Guiana, carrying six military satellites into orbit.
At approximately 6:00 pm, Lt Col Rankin concluded that his aircraft was unrecoverable and pulled hard on his eject handles. An explosive charge propelled him from the cockpit into the atmosphere with sufficient force to rip his left glove from his hand, scattering his canopy, pilot seat, and other plane-related debris into the sky. Bill Rankin had spent a fair amount of time skydiving in his career—both premeditated and otherwise—but this particular dive would be unlike any that he or any living person had experienced before.
Or since.
Alan Boyle describes the details behind NASA’s decision to go with simpler contracting for future commercial rocket contracts.
If you read the article, you’ll notice that the opposition to this decision comes from a Congressman and the GAO. In both cases they cite safety as an issue, as is by some magic giving NASA a lot of bureaucratic approval rights on every design is going to make the rockets or capsules safer. All this will really do is slow things down, increase costs, and possibly increase risks as the companies will no longer have as many resources to focus on design issues. Instead, they will have to spend a fortune pleasing NASA bureaucrats.
And yes, I call them bureaucrats. Any NASA engineer who spends his or her time looking over the shoulder of another engineer — who is doing the real design work — is nothing more than a bureaucrat. Better to quit NASA and get a job with one of these new companies where you can do some real work.
China’s Tiangong-1 space station today started its first planned monthly cabin check to test the status of the station’s atmosphere.
Johnson Space Center has gone to backup power after a truck crashed into the utility tower that provides the center power.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter today released an image of a really spectacular transform fault on Mars, a spot where the ground cracked and two sections moved sideways to each other. In this case, the sideways movement was about 300 feet. The image is posted below the fold.
Compare that with the Japanese magnitude 9 earthquake on March 11, which only shifted the seabed sideways 165 feet while raising it 33 feet. The quake that moved these two pieces of Martian bedrock sideways must have been quite a ride.
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Superstars of space: Rutan, Allen, Musk, and Griffin have teamed up to develop an air-launch rocket system to fire hardware and humans into orbit.
Their concept calls for Rutan, a noted aircraft designer, to create a carrier jet with a 385-foot wingspan and six engines to ferry a liquid-fueled, 120-foot-long rocket built by SpaceX and outfitted with five main engines to altitude where the winged booster will be released for launch into orbit.
The European Space Agency will make two more attempts to contact Phobos-Grunt.
Some good news: Southwest Airlines has ordered 208 of Boeing’s 737, a deal valued at $19 billion. Plus this:
Last month, Boeing said Indonesia’s Lion Air committed to pay $21.7 billion for 230 Boeing 737s. Lion Air also has options for 150 more planes, valued at $14 billion, bringing the deal’s total potential value to $35 billion. But the Lion Air deal is not a certainty; it still has to complete the order. Also in November, Emirates Airlines ordered $18 billion worth of 777s.
Maybe Boeing should pump some of those profits into building the CST-100 manned space capsule and thus win more profits in the space tourism industry.
Dawn has now lowered its orbit to an average elevation of 130 miles above the asteroid Vesta.
Expect lots of close-up images in the weeks to come.
Orbital Sciences has renamed its Taurus II rocket the Antares rocket.
To clear up any marketplace confusion and provide clear differentiation between this new launch vehicle and our Taurus XL rocket. Antares is significantly different – it serves the medium-class space launch market and its liquid fuel first stage technology is major departure from previous Orbital space launch vehicles. In addition, a project of this scale and significance deserves its own name like Orbital’s Pegasus®, Taurus® and Minotaur rocket programs that have come before it.
I think they have also realized they needed to distinguish Antares from the Taurus XL rocket’s recent problems, failing twice to put NASA climate satellites into orbit.
The Air Forces has awarded contracts to Andrews Space, Boeing and Lockheed Martin to develop a reusable first stage booster.
Your orbital trip on a Boeing spaceship.
NASA has announced a February 7 launch date for SpaceX’s next test flight of Falcon 9 and Dragon to ISS.
They also have approved allowing Dragon to do a test berth with ISS on this flight, assuming the first test approach goes well.
An audit by NASA’s inspector general has found that NASA can’t keep track of its moon rocks.
In a report issued by the agency’s Inspector General on Thursday, NASA concedes that more than 500 pieces of moon rocks, meteorites, comet chunks and other space material were stolen or have been missing since 1970. That includes 218 moon samples that were stolen and later returned and about two dozen moon rocks and chunks of lunar soil that were reported lost last year.
City lights as seen from space show the evolution and development of countries over time.
