Asking the important questions: What would happen if you shot a gun in space?
The fundamental design flaw of all of Tesla Motors’ electric cars.
A Tesla Roadster that is simply parked without being plugged in will eventually become a “brick”. The parasitic load from the car’s always-on subsystems continually drains the battery and if the battery’s charge is ever totally depleted, it is essentially destroyed. Complete discharge can happen even when the car is plugged in if it isn’t receiving sufficient current to charge, which can be caused by something as simple as using an extension cord. After battery death, the car is completely inoperable. At least in the case of the Tesla Roadster, it’s not even possible to enable tow mode, meaning the wheels will not turn and the vehicle cannot be pushed nor transported to a repair facility by traditional means.
This problem could destroy the company, which, believe it or not, might actually have a negative effect on the American space program! Elon Musk, the man behind SpaceX and the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon capsule is also the CEO of Tesla. If Tesla goes down, one wonders if that could have an impact on SpaceX’s effort to get Americans into space.
Orbital Sciences has delayed until late June the first test launch of its Antares rocket, which in turn will delay until late August the first flight of its Cygnus cargo freighter to ISS.
An evening pause: On the fiftieth anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital flight.
After putting a chimpanzee into orbit in November, NASA finally felt ready to send a man into orbit to answer the Soviets and their two manned orbital missions of Gagarin and Titov the previous year.
After Glenn’s mission and for the next few months, it looked like the U.S. was catching up with the Soviets in space. That would change before the year was summer was over.
The video below gives a nice summary of key moments in Glenn’s flight, though the special effects of the “fireflies” is poorly done. And we now know that the “fireflies” were nothing more than frozen particles of condensation coming off the capsule.
India’s second lunar probe, Chandrayaan-2, faces possible launch delays due to limitation in their rocket engine capabilities.
At last! The ISS is to finally going to get an experimental centrifuge.
I have studied at length all the research done on all the space station ever launched, from Skylab, all the Russian Salyut stations, Mir, and now ISS, and from I could tell, only once was a centrifuge experiment put in space, by the Russians. Though the centrifuge was small and the results inconclusive, they suggested that even the addition of a truly miniscule amount of force could significantly mitigate the effects of weightlessness on plants and materials.
To finally get an experimental centrifuge on ISS is wonderful news. In order to build an interplanetary spaceship as cheaply and as efficiently as possible using centrifugal force to create artificial gravity we need to know the minimum amount of centrifugal force we need. Less energy will probably require less complex engineering, which should also require less launch weight to orbit, lowering the cost in all ways.
Updated and bumped: I will be discussing this story on the the John Batchelor Show tonight, February 17, Friday, 12:50 am (Eastern), and then re-aired on Sunday, February 19, 12:50 am (Eastern).
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Someday, humans will be traveling far from Earth in large interplanetary spaceships not very different than the International Space Station (ISS). Isolated and dependent on these ships for survival, these travelers will have no choice but to know how to maintain and repair their vessels whenever something on them should break.
And things will break. Entropy rules, and with time all things deteriorate and fail.
Each failure, however, is also a precious opportunity to learn something about the environment of space. Why did an item break? What caused it to fail? Can we do something to prevent the failure in the future? Finding answers to these questions will make it possible to build better and more reliable interplanetary spaceships.
ISS is presently our only testbed for studying these kinds of engineering questions. And in 2007, a spectacular failure, combined with an epic spacewalk, gave engineers at the Johnson Space Center a marvelous opportunity to study these very issues.
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China’s next launch of its Shenzhou capsule this summer will be manned.
It seems those rumors weren’t true. Or maybe they were.
Just like in the 1960s with the Soviet Union, the only way to find out what exactly is going on in the Chinese space program is to wait for something to actually happen.
The decision by China to launch their next Shenzhou manned capsule unmanned has made at least one China space expert worried.
Why the sudden change? It seems clear that there must be technical issues at work, and they must be fairly serious. Statements in the Chinese media hint at performing tests on the small tunnel connecting the Shenzhou spacecraft to the Tiangong module after docking. If we decode the typically vague reportage, it seems fair to assume that there could be some sort of technical problem with the pressurization of this tunnel. This problem could have been exposed during the Shenzhou 8 docking.
Competition: Europe’s new Vega rocket successfully put nine satellites into orbit this morning on its first flight.
Want to buy a former NASA radio dish? All you need is $4.2 million.
For its second attempt to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, NASA has finally decided to dump Orbital Sciences’ Taurus XL rocket, the same rocket that failed on two previous launch attempts.
The decision to change launch rockets will delay launch by at least a year. Still, this is better than losing a third research satellite.
Japan’s space agency is lobbying its government for the funds to develop its own manned space capsule capability.
The final Russian investigation has admitted that it was a programming error that doomed Phobos-Grunt, not cosmic radiation or U.S. radar.
All NASA funding for ESA’s unmanned ExoMars mission appears to have been cut by the Obama administration.
A public announcement by Nasa of its withdrawal from the ExoMars programme, as it is known in Europe, will probably come once President Obama’s 2013 Federal Budget Request is submitted. This request, expected in the coming days, will give the US space agency a much clearer view of how much money it has to implement its various projects. “The Americans have indicated that the possibility of them participating is now low – very low. It’s highly unlikely,” said Alvaro Gimenez, Esa’s director of science.
Though this story doesn’t confirm the earlier rumors that the Obama administration was going to eliminate the entire NASA planetary program, it sure lends those rumors further weight. However, the new budget should be released any day now, when we will finally find out.
More and more the Atlas V appears to be “the vehicle of choice for manned missions.” Key quote:
NASA could have gone down this path last decade and possibly shaved years — and billions of dollars — off the development time of a capability to carry astronauts to the space station.
R.I.P: Roger Boisjoly, 73, has died.
Boisjoly was the engineer who in 1985 warned NASA about the danger of launching the shuttle in cold weather, that the solid rocket booster’s joints might not seal correctly under those conditions, thereby causing a catastrophic failure. Sadly, he was ignored, even ostracized, and on January 28, 1986, Challenger broke apart 74 seconds after launch, killing seven astronauts.
Iran’s state media today announced that the country had used its own rocket to put into orbit a small weather/Earth observation microsat.
Getting close: Virgin Galactic hopes to begin the first powered flight tests of SpaceShipTwo this coming summer.
“Over the next few months we’re integrating parts and pieces of the hybrid rocket motor into the SpaceShipTwo airframe, completing ground testing of the rocket motor, and then [will] try and start powered flight over the summer,” [chief executive officer and president George] Whitesides told SPACE.com. Those rocket-powered flights, he said, will continue for some period of time. Whitesides said it looks possible “to get up to space altitude by the end of the year, if all goes well.”
The company is also building a second WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo,
New dates, March 20 and May 15 respectively, have been set for the ISS launches of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and the next manned Soyuz capsule.
The launch date for Dragon, however, is far more tentative.
The following stories are all the result of statements made by Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Roscosmos, the Russian Federal space agency, during a radio interview yesterday.
This is the same guy that only a few weeks ago was throwing accusations at the U.S. for the failure of Phobos-Grunt.
What should we make of these statements? First, everything Popovkin says is aimed at fund-raising. Whatever his background, he is a political appointee whose job is to generate interest and funding for Russia’s space program. Everything he says in public must be weighed against this reality. That he first tried to shift the blame to the U.S. for Phobos-Grunt’s loss was an effort to absolve his program from any blame and thus reduce the possibility that the Russian government might cut his funding. Now that his agency has gotten approval of its insurance payment for the failure, however, he is free to say otherwise.
Second, these announcements give us a clear indication of where the Russia space effort is heading, and that effort looks both thoughtful and intelligent.
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You think Americans aren’t interested in space travel? Get this: The Orion test capsule arrived in Alabama for tests, covered in fan signatures.
Orion and NASA’s space launch system might not get us there, but that doesn’t matter in this case. The public is expressing its desire for space travel quite clearly. All they need is someone to provide it to them at a reasonable cost.
Space Adventures has set the date, sometime before February 2017, for its circumlunar tourist flight.
SpaceX successfully test fired today an upgraded engine to be used in the Dragon capsule in case of a launch abort.
The Japanese government has given the final go-ahead for a new Hayabusa asteroid sample return mission, set for launch in 2014.
The Great Moonbuggy Race is an engineering competition that requires a team of six students to design a “proof-of-concept” wheeled rover that will race over a half mile of simulated lunar terrain. In April, two team members, one male and one female, will drive the completed vehicle in competition at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. This contest will present design challenges that are similar to those encountered by the original lunar rover team. This is the 16th year of competition for high school teams, but it will be the first year for Chicago’s public high school students.
The Russians have announced that the loss of Phobos-Grunt was due to the failure of an onboard computer to be properly hardened against cosmic rays.
The fall of Rosat last October, which ended up in the Bay of Bengal, might have instead landed on Beijing had the spacecraft remained aloft a mere seven minutes longer.
The Russians now say the next manned flight to ISS will be delayed a month, until the end of April, due to defects found in the Soyuz capsule.
The story suggests some confusion over what caused the cracks, either defects to the capsule itself or a mistake in the testing process.
A commission set up to probe the setback said violations of the testing procedure caused the damage to the reentry vehicle incident, earlier reports said. Either excessive pressure was applied by the personnel, or the shell of the reentry vehicle had defects or was improperly welded up.
