Category: Space
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The true cost of getting the US back to manned flight
To date we have seen a lot of talk about the cost of the SLS program, however that isn’t the only cost that has been incurred by the US tax payer since the announcement that the Space Shuttle was to be retired. This article will look at everything that has happened since then and how…
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SLS Launch Date slips but not really
Today NASA announced they had completed the Key Decision Point C (KDP-C) review of the new Space Launch System their heavy launch rocket. With this milestone meet they can now proceed with the manufacturing of the actual flight hardware, while also performing reviews of the Ground Support systems and the Orion payload. As a result of…
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SpaceX talk to NASA FISO
This afternoon SpaceX’s Garrett Reisman gave a talk to NASA’s Future In-Space Operations Group regarding SpaceX. During the talk he mentioned the up coming milestones for CCiCap. The Dragon Pad Abort test will be performed from the top of a test structure from SLC-40 as SLC-39 will not be ready in time. The vehicle will…
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AsiaSat-6 launch scrubbed
SpaceX announced this afternoon that this evening’s AsiaSat-6 launch has been scrubbed. This follows last Friday’s F9R test failure and almost certainly is to allow the team more time to review the data from that test and ensure that the problem won’t happen to the F9 launcher. While this is yet another delay for SpaceX…
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New Horizons Mission to Pluto/Charon
Today NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft passed the Orbit of Neptune exactly 25 years after Voyager 2 passed the same planet. At the time it passed the orbit Neptune was 4 million kilometers away as it proceeded on it’s orbit around the sun. To celebrate this milestone NASA talked about the mission of New Horizons as…
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Galileo Satellite’s launched to wrong orbit
Update to our previous story regarding the Soyuz Launch of two Galileo satellites. At the end of the webcast yesterday ArianeSpace believed the satellites had been deployed to the planned orbits, however U.S. military orbital tracking data indicated the satellites were flying in a lower orbit than planned. Officials confirmed a launch anomaly in a…
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SpaceX Test Rocket Explodes during Test
A serious anomaly occurred during the latest flight of SpaceX reusable test rocket F9R resulting in the Flight Termination Software destroying the rocket. This was the first test flight of the three engine test vehicle which is designed to fly higher than the single engine vehicles that had been tested up to this point. Elon…
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ArianeSpace launches two Galileo satellites
This morning a Soyuz rocket lifted off from the French Guiana Space Center carrying the first two fully operation Galileo satellites. Galileo is the European’s version of the Global Positioning System, there are currently four satellites which were used to prove the system worked as needed, now that phase has completed the rest of the satellite…
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Georges Lemaître docks to ISS
Two weeks after lifting off from French Guiana the final European Automated Docking Vehicle Georges Lemaître (ATV5) docked with the International Space Station today. During the two week voyage the vehicle tested different technologies before performing a successful automated docking today. Following the docking the latches between the vehicles were successfully closed. Over the next two…
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Power Generation on Mars
While researching a longer blog post, to come soon, on Mars we were struck by the question of Power Generation, from most mission previews we have seen they plan to use Nuclear generators. While there are benefits to Nuclear generators there are also problems, the biggest of which is the public’s negativity towards launching anything that mentions…