Two Russians have completed a spacewalk today at ISS. They not only prepared the station for future Russian upgrades, they released an amateur radio microsat.
The Atlas 5 is the rocket that Boeing, Blue Origin, and Sierra Nevada plan to use to get astronauts into orbit.
A lack of U.S. government interest in a privately designed satellite refueling technology has caused the company to pull back its plans.
MDA had signed a contract with the communications satellite company Intelsat to refuel some of its orbiting satellites, but needed additional customers to make a go of it. It had hoped the U.S. Defense Department would show interest, but they have not.
This is exactly where the government should be investing its capital, and that it is not tells us a lot about the real lack of sincerity behind the Obama administration’s claims that it wants to encourage private space. I also suspect that the turf war with satellite companies and defense contractors helped discourage Defense Department interest.
A look at the more than 450 tourists who have paid a deposit to Virgin Galactic to fly in space.
They include comedian Russell Brand, Dallas star Victoria Principal, film director Bryan Singer, designer Philippe Starck, scientist Professor Stephen Hawking, property developers the Candy brothers, and PayPal developer Elon Musk.
Chris Bergin at NASAspaceflight.com today wrote a report on the four companies NASA is subsidizing to build manned capsules. The status of each company tells us something of whether they can eventually provide the United States with a replacement for the shuttle, and do it soon. Let’s take a look at each.
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The Dawn science team today released what they are calling “the first full-frame image” of Vesta. The image is shown below the fold.
The picture was taken from 3,200 miles, and shows a pockmarked irregularly shaped world. While many features that resemble the Moon (the craters, the rays radiating out from those craters), that Vesta itself is not spherical makes it very much unlike the Moon. It is probably going to take scientists several months at least to decipher the data they are getting and come up with some concrete conclusions about this strange dwarf planet.
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Wondering why there have been no recent test flights of SpaceShipTwo? Virgin Galactic is taking a summer break.
Two modified off-the-shelf 3-D printers have passed their first zero gravity tests for making tools in space.
Tiangong-1 is not a space station hub.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released this picture yesterday of what the Orbiter’s scientists have labeled “The crazy floor of Hellas Basin.” Below you can see a cropped image of only one part of the large higher resolution image. The NASA caption says that the wild colors probably “indicate that diverse minerals are present,” meaning that any settlers of the red planet will probably take a close look at this location with the reasonable hope of finding the resources they need to colonize a planet.
To me, these colors also indicate that this place on Mars would probably one of its most popular tourist spots. As I look at the image my eye instinctively wants to trace out the best trail route along the ridges and down into the gullies in order to give hikers the best view of this colorful terrain.
A look at the Chinese space program.
Now why didn’t they think of this before? The ISS partners met today to discuss how to use the space station as a test bed for missions beyond low Earth orbit.
As I wrote in Leaving Earth, a space station is nothing more than a prototype interplanetary spaceship. This kind of research is really its main purpose, and I am glad that the governments running ISS are finally beginning to recognize it, even though their engineers have known it for decades. Note too that the press release above also gives a nice overview of some of the ongoing research on ISS that is directly related to learning how to survive in space for long periods.
Juno, the U.S.’s next Jupiter probe, headed to the launchpad on Friday for a planned August 5 launch.
In a piece today at the Huffington Post, science journalist Seth Borenstein declares the wonders of NASA’s next mission: to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, as declared by President Obama.
If you believe this is going to happen, then I have a bridge I want to sell you. To do it we need a spaceship in which people can live for at least a year, and a rocket to get that ship into orbit. Not only do we not yet know how to build such a spaceship, we no longer have the capability of putting it into orbit. In case you’re unaware (Borenstein acts like he is), the space shuttle no longer exists. And under this administration and Congress, any replacement we get isn’t going to be able to launch such an interplanetary spaceship anywhere in the near future, especially faced as we are with the present federal debt.
The disgraceful thing about this article, however, is the lack of skepticism shown by Borenstein.
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A public test of privately built moon lander has been delayed by gyro problem. Key quote:
One customer has already bought a ticket with Moon Express, asking them to deposit a small telescope on the dark side of the Moon. Jain says the company will also offer low cost ways for anyone to use the moon as a kind of time capsule. “If something goes to the moon it stays there forever, people will pay to sends things like photos, or maybe your hair or DNA.”
Turf war: At conference yesterday at the Johnson Space Center, NASA proposed changing how it issues its commercial space contracts so as to give it more control over their design and construction. The commercial companies are not happy.
Brett Alexander, a space industry consultant who counts among his clients the secretive aerospace startup Blue Origin of Kent, Wash., said at the July 20 briefing that industry needs to know NASA’s legal reasoning for dismissing SAAs as an option for the next CCDev round. “From an industry standpoint … we’re kind of flying blind because [NASA] has not divulged what its legal reasoning is, and I think they need to do that in writing. Not a couple charts, not things that you brief, but a legal brief that says ‘here’s why’” a traditional procurement is necessary.
My own sources say this change in contractual approach will significantly slow development of the new commercial manned space rockets and ships, possibly beyond 2017.
The only reason I can see for NASA to do this is to maintain control over manned space, even if they are not building anything. I think NASA is instead going to find out that doing anything to slow this development will be politically very dangerous for them.
The delay until early next year of the first Taurus 2/Cygnus launch was in order to install required launchpad upgrades.
Via Clark Lindsey: Orbital Sciences has announced an updated launch schedule for its cargo ship and rocket for supplying ISS.
The first test flight of Taurus II is set for late this year, with the first flight of the Cygnus cargo ship set for the first quarter of 2012.
Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as other lawmakers from Congress, blasted Obama today over the shuttle retirement.
Bah. Perry claims to be a so-called small government conservative, yet he wants the government to spend a fortune to build and run the space program. Meanwhile, Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Kate Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) were around in Congress when President George Bush announced the shuttle’s retirement seven years ago. Their effort since then to fund pork through NASA and thus have NASA build a giant new rocket system, either Constellation or its new Congressionally-designed replacement, has been a disaster. Right now it would be better, and far cheaper, if they stopped fighting the new commercial space companies and instead get behind them, especially since the Obama administration itself has done a very poor job of selling this new industry.
A little support from Congress could go a long way to not only reinvigorating the aerospace industry, it could speed our country’s return to manned space, with multiple competing companies.
The shuttle Atlantis has landed, ending the shuttle program.
The planning dates have been set for the first Dragon cargo mission to ISS.
Bumped: I posted this essay last July 20th on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. I think it is worth rereading again, even as the shuttle is about to return to Earth for the last time.
Today, July 20th, is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, the first time ever that a human being arrived on another planet. Americans love to celebrate this event, as it symbolizes one of the finest moments in our history, when we set out to achieve something truly great and noble and succeeded far better than we could have imagined. Not only did we get to the Moon as promised, over the next three and a half years we sent another five missions, each with increasingly sophisticated equipment, each sent to explore some increasingly alien terrain. Forty-plus years later, no one has come close to matching this achievement, a fact that emphasizes how difficult it was for the United States to accomplish it.
There is one small but very important detail about the Apollo 11 mission, however, that most Americans are unaware of. In mounting the American flag, the astronauts found the lunar surface much harder than expected. They had a great deal of trouble getting the flagpole into the ground. As Andrew Chaikin wrote in his book, A Man on the Moon, “For a moment it seemed the flag would fall over in front of a worldwide audience, but at last the men managed to steady it.” Then Armstrong took what has become one of the world’s iconic images, that of Buzz Aldrin standing on the lunar surface saluting the flag of the United States of America.
What people don’t know, however, is that when Armstrong and Aldrin blasted off from the lunar surface, the blast wave from the Lunar Module’s rocket knocked the flag over. As Chaikin also wrote, “Outside, a spray of gold foil and debris from the descent stage flew away in all directions. The flag toppled to the dust.”
Thus, for the last four decades this American flag, shown so proudly unfurled on the surface of the Moon, has actually been lying unceremoniously on the ground, in the lunar dust.
It might actually be possible to see this, though the photos at this time remain unclear and quite blurry.
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Worth reading: Nature has put together a special section of articles on the history of the space shuttle.
The space shuttle has undocked from the space station for the last time.
That’s so nice of them: Russia vows not to exploit its manned space flight monopoly.
Actually, this isn’t really news. Since the fall of the Soviet Union the Russians have always driven a hard bargain when they have sold tickets to get crew or cargo into space. However, once the contract has been signed they have also honored those contracts, to the letter. As the U.S. already has a signed contract to get its astronauts to ISS using Russian rockets and capsules, there won’t be any opportunities for Russian exploitation — until that contract expires.
In other words, the U.S. had better get some manned launch capability on line before too long. And on that note, see this article: NASA considers man-rating the Atlas V.
SpaceX has broken ground on its Falcon Heavy launch site.
Another image of Vesta from Dawn has been released. This image was taken on July 9 from a distance of 26,000 miles away. It is definitely an improvement over the previous image, with more small details becoming visible. However, I once again wonder about the softness of the image. Look at the limb of the planet. It is soft against the black sky. This is not what one would expect from perfectly focused camera.
Dawn goes into orbit around Vesta next week. We sure learn then for sure if there is a problem with its camera, or whether I am merely being a bit too nervous.
And in a related note: Long, cramped road trips ahead for US astronauts.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: In a bipartisan effort, Texas lawmakers roast NASA administrator Charles Bolden for not meeting mandated Congressional deadlines for Congress’s personally designed rocket, the program-formerly-called-Constellation.
The heavy-lift rocket and capsule that Congress insists NASA build is a complete waste of money and nothing more than pork. It will never get built, mainly because Congress has given NASA less money and less time to build it than they did for Constellation under the Bush administration. Unfortunately, the reason they continue to require NASA to build it is to provide pork to their districts.
In a perfect world this funding would be cut now, especially considering the state of the federal debt.
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