The engineering test prototype of Dream Chaser has been shipped to California for drop tests this summer.
Checking the cracks on the first Orion capsule to fly.
In replacing a pump during Saturday’s spacewalk it appears the astronauts have fixed the coolant leak.
The astronauts will replace a pump tomorrow on their spacewalk in the hope this will fix the leak in ISS’s solar panel cooling system.
The spacewalk has still not been approved, though it seems likely it will happen.
Update: As of this morning the spacewalk has been approved, set to begin at 8:15 am (Eastern).
A high energy laser beam destroys a rocket from a distance of a little less than a mile.
Reagan was right: His proposed SDI laser-based defense system was a reasonable proposal, despite the ridicule of the leftwing elites in the 1980s. I have posted the video of this test below the fold.
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Astronauts today spotted an ammonia coolant leak in ISS’s left-side power truss.
They are monitoring it, but have so far not made any decision about what to do about it, if anything.
This problem is a perfect illustration of why a flight to Mars is more complicated in terms of engineering than first appears. We might at this time be able to build that interplanetary spaceship (with the emphasis on the word “might”) but could its passengers maintain it millions of miles from Earth? Right now I’d say no. We need to learn how to build an easily repaired and self-sufficient spaceship. ISS is neither. It is also not a very good platform for testing this kind of engineering.
Update: The astronauts on ISS are preparing for a possible spacewalk on Saturday to deal with the problem. More details here.
The International Space Station has switched all its computers from Windows to Linux.
I love this quote:
“We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable.”
I’ve been on Linux for almost six years, It crashes, but that is usually user error.
Real vs imagined human spaceflight.
He gets it. This was the same problem the Russians discovered when they were operating Mir.
SpaceX is moving its Grasshopper test program to New Mexico’s spaceport.
The move confirms big plans for the test bed. Flights to date have been conducted at SpaceX’s engine test site in McGregor, Texas. SpaceX received a waiver from the FAA to fly Grasshopper up to 11,500ft from McGregor, but Spaceport America is an FAA-certified spaceport where no where no waivers are required. “Spaceport America offers us the physical and regulatory landscape needed to complete the next phase of Grasshopper testing,” says SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell.
Feeling the heat of competition: Japan’s entire space program faces a major overhaul.
In the last few decades Japan has not done very well in space when compared to other Asian countries like China and India. Thus, this overhaul. Yet, based on this article, it doesn’t seem to me that they are making the real changes they need to do to successfully compete. If anything, it sounds instead like the actions of a bureaucracy that is merely rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship, in the hope that this will somehow save it.
Tonight David Livingston will air the 2000th episode of The Space Show, what has become the world’s leading media outlet for the discussion of space exploration and the aerospace industry.
The Space Show began in June 2001, and in the ensuing dozen years David has interviewed almost every single big mover in the business of space exploration. I myself have been honored to appear on his show more than thirty times, a fact for which I am deeply grateful, since there are people far more important than I in this field.
It is difficult to measure the significance to space of David Livingston’s effort during these past twelve years. When the Space Show began, SpaceShipOne had not yet flow, the X-Price had not yet been won, and the idea of private space and space tourism were considered wild and absurd ideas. Twelve years later, these ideas are now common knowledge and are likely to be main path for the human race into space. By giving a forum to supporters of commercial space, the Space Show under David’s leadership made this paradigm shift possible.
Thank you David! When the solar system is finally settled, the colonists should remember that without his important contribution their journey to get there would have been far more difficult.
Good news: North Korea has withdrawn two missiles from their launch site.
The article is very vague, unfortunately, about the rockets themselves and whether either were the orbital rockets that North Korea had been threatening to launch several weeks ago.
The competition heats up: Europe’s new Vega rocket made its second successful commercial launch today, placing three satellites in orbit.
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.
