Tag: spaceflight

ArianeSpace will make a profit in 2011, the first time in three years

1:15 pm

ArianeSpace will make a profit in 2011, the first time in three years.

Helped by the two Soyuz campaigns, which occurred in October and December, Arianespace in 2011 apparently averted a third consecutive year of losses. Its financial accounts are not finalized until June, but Le Gall said the company expects to report a slight profit on about 985 million euros in revenue.

In other words, it was the addition of the Russian low-cost Soyuz rocket to their fleet that helped avoid another year’s loss. This doesn’t reflect well on the profitability of the Ariane 5 rocket.

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A NASA inquiry into the ownership of a variety of space artifacts, including Jim Lovell’s Apollo 13 checklist, has halted their sale at auction.

10:56 am

Power grab: A NASA inquiry into the ownership of a variety of space artifacts, including Jim Lovell’s Apollo 13 checklist, has halted their sale at auction.

In other words, it appears that NASA management has decided that everything ever built by NASA belongs to NASA, forever, even if NASA would have thrown it away at some point.

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China issues a white paper on space, outlining its future goals

9:46 am

China today issued a white paper on space, outlining its future goals. In addition to additional launches of its manned Shenzhou manned capsule,

China also plans to launch space laboratories, manned spaceship and space freighters, and will start a research on the preliminary plan for a human landing on the moon, the document said.

As an important part of deep-space exploration, the country’s lunar probe projects follow the idea of “three steps” — orbiting, landing and returning. In next five years, the country plans to launch orbiters for lunar soft landing, roving and surveying to implement the second stage of lunar exploration, then it will start the third-stage project of sampling the moon’s surface matters and get those samples back to Earth, the white paper said.

You can download the full white paper here [pdf]. Hat tip to Spaceref.com.

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The NASA shuttle simulator for training astronauts is going to at Texas A&M

9:15 am

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.

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Richard Branson talks to the Wall Street Journal

9:23 am

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.

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Rider on the Storm

9:23 pm

Rider on the storm.

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.

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Alan Boyle describes the details behind NASA’s decision to go with simpler contracting for future commercial rocket contracts

2:06 pm

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.

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