The launch of China’s first space station module has now been scheduled to late September.
Japan plans to test fire the engine of its failed Venus probe Akatsuki twice this month, in anticipation of another try at Venus orbit in 2015.
China’s lunar probe, Chang’e 2, has reached the L2 point in space, almost a million miles from Earth.
China has delayed the launch of its first space station due to the failure of an earlier rocket launch.
British company tests engine of for commercial space plane.
Pete Harding at NasaSpaceflight.com has written a very thorough review of the changes to the flight manifest to ISS expected due to the August 24 failure of the Soyuz-U rocket.
The space shuttle program officially ended on Wednesday. Note however:
Closeout of the shuttle program is an enormous effort expected to take two years. The program occupied 640 facilities and used more than 900,000 pieces of equipment with a value exceeding $12 billion, according to NASA. Much of the work will take place at Kennedy Space Center, where orbiters have been maintained and prepared for launch. NASA requested $89 million for shuttle transition and retirement work in the 2012 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, but Congress has not yet approved a budget.
Orbital Sciences has gotten its launch license from the FAA for the first test launch of the Taurus 2 rocket, scheduled for later this year.
This rocket is Orbital’s version of the Falcon 9. It is a new rocket, never before flown, yet after this test it is scheduled to fly the Cygnus capsule on its first flight only two months later. Talk about cutting things close!
More details on why the rocket carrying the Progress freighter to ISS failed last week.
Ground controllers successfully replaced a failed circuit box on ISS this weekend, using the two-armed Dextre robot.
Up to now, exchanging the boxes was done by spacewalkers, which always carries a certain level of risk. Dextre was designed to reduce the need for astronauts to conduct spacewalks for routine maintenance, therefore freeing up the crew’s time for more important activities, like conducting science.
Clark Lindsey has written a very nice and short summary of the present political battles over NASA’s budget and its future manned space rockets.
The launch of a Progress freighter to ISS today has failed, with the freighter ending up crashing into Siberia.
This is very bad news for the station. Everyone in the space industry knows that with the shuttle gone, it will be a challenge to maintain supplies to the station’s the six-person crew. Losing just one supply ship will strain the station’s supplies, if not now in the long run for sure.
Worse, this is the first launch failure of the Soyuz rocket that puts both Progress and manned Soyuz capsule into orbit in more than eleven years. The next manned crew is scheduled for launch on September 21. Whether this failure will delay that launch remains unknown.
Blue Origin, one of the four commercial companies NASA hopes to use to get crew up and down from ISS, plans to do a test flight tomorrow. Hat tip to SpaceRef.
This company, founded by Jeff Bezos of amazon.com, has generally released very little information about their effort.
Bigelow Aerospace is in negotiations with both NASA and Japan to supply ISS with privately-built modules
The module could be rented out as an ISS storage unit, making the station less dependent on frequent resupply flights, says Hiroshi Kikuchi of JAMSS. To show that the modules are capable of safe, crewed operation, Bigelow is also negotiating with NASA to attach one to a US-owned ISS module.
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NASA has announced three awards for technology demonstration space missions, all set to fly within four years. More details here.
The three missions are:
I especially like the solar sail mission because of its long range possibilities, though the other technologies would probably be put to practical use more quickly.
Rocket shortage: NASA is reconsidering the Delta 2 rocket as a vehicle to launch its unmanned science satellites.
The new commercial space companies are challenging NASA’s new contracting policy.
The article covers the conflict that I described in this post, whereby NASA is abandoning the more flexible contracting approach used for the commercial cargo contracts of SpaceX and Orbital Sciences and going instead with the contracting system it used for all past NASA subcontracts.
The article is errs badly when it calls the new contracting approach that NASA wants to use “non-traditional.” It is instead the way NASA has been doing things for decades, whereby the agency takes full control of everything and requires contractors to fill out so much paperwork that the costs double and triple.
Some results from the HTV-2 hypersonic flight: the glider flew successfully for about three minutes at 20 times the speed of sound.
Fixed the stupid error. The speed of SOUND is of course correct. Sorry for the lapse in thought.
The Pioneer anomaly is fading.
The analysis shows that the anomaly is not constant, as researchers had believed, but is decreasing with time. The finding points toward a conventional explanation of the phenomenon, most likely asymmetric radiation of heat, and against some of the more exotic proposals.
Another rocket launch failure today, this time by the Chinese.
The Titan Mare Explorer: A nautical mission to an alien sea.
If [NASA] green-lights the mission, the capsule will lift off in 2016. By 2023, TiME will be about 800 million miles away in Titan’s north-polar region, home to its biggest lakes and seas. The capsule will take photographs, collect meteorological data, measure depth, and analyze samples. TiME will have no means of propulsion once it is on Titan, so it will float, carried by breezes across the sea’s surface. Then, by the mid-2020s, it will enter a decade-long winter of darkness as the moon’s orbit takes it to the dark side of Saturn, away from the sun and communication. It won’t have a line of sight to Earth to beam back more data until 2035.
Fly me to the moon! Two stories today (here and here) from Russia about a possible tourist flight around the moon by 2016-2017.
American manned space: dependent on the Russians in more ways than you think.
As commentators from around the country gnash their teeth at U.S. dependence upon Russia to move cargo and astronauts to the mostly U.S. built/funded International Space Station (ISS), they’ve missed the bigger boat: With one exception, all the commercial spaceflight offerings currently in the works have Soviet or Russian engines as a key part of the rockets involved.
According to Russian space officials today, the next Soyuz tourist flight to ISS will be in 2014.
The article above contradicts yesterday’s story where the head of the Russian space agency suggested that Russia is going to shift its focus from manned space. I suspect both stories reflect an underlying political battle going on within the Russian government.
Saving a failed orbiting satellite with engineering.
Remarks by the head of the Russian space agency on Thursday suggested Russia is going to shift its space effort away from manned space.
Here are some additional stories describing today’s test flight of the Hypersonic Test Vehicle.
I have several questions, and no answers:
Contact was quickly lost today soon after a hypersonic glider was released by its rocket launcher during a test flight. More here.
Virgin Galactic’s suborbital shuttle: Sydney to London in 4 hours.
I’ve been told that there are engineering reasons why SpaceShipTwo could not make this flight. Nonetheless, the possibility is quite alluring.
Boeing has now officially chosen the Atlas 5 rocket to launch is manned capsule.
