Tag: NASA
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NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft reaches Mars
Following a ten month, 442 million miles journey NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) successfully entered into orbit of Mars this evening. The orbit insertion maneuver began with six thruster engines firing briefly to damp out deviations in pointing. Then, the six main engines quickly ignite and burn for 33 minutes to slow the craft,…
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SpaceX CRS-4 Mission Launches Successfully
At 1:52:04am EDT today a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station for the fourth CRS mission under the NASA’s commercial cargo program. The launch originally scheduled for yesterday had to be scrubbed due to weather constrains. Unlike the recent satellite launches which had long launch…
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Exciting times in Space
A lot has happened in Space or related to Space recently and the future is looking very bright. Below is a summary of some of the recent news and upcoming events. SpaceX and Boeing awarded CCtCap contracts – We now have two companies contracted to build manned spacecraft to deliver crew to the ISS. Currently…
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CCtCap awards announced
Today at 4pm EDT from Kennedy Space Center NASA announced the winners of the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts. And the winners are: Boeing – The CST-100 capsule seen to the right has been awarded $4.2 billion of the money. Over the next three years Boeing will have to complete a number of milestones below to…
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Will SLS ever fly
Following on from my previous article I wanted to explore the possibility that the Space Launch System (SLS) may never actually fly. While progress has been made on the SLS it will not be ready to fly when President Barack Obama leaves office and given that he cancelled the Constellation Program (CxP) when he came…
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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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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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5000 and counting
As of today the International Space Station has been continuously occupied for 5,000 days. The adventure began on November 2nd 2000 when the three member Expedition One crew arrived at the station. Since that time there have been 214 visitors on the station including the six that are currently on the station, there have been 37 shuttle visits,…
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Orb2 launch delayed
The launch of the Orbital Science’s Antares rocket carrying the Cygnus Cargo Vehicle named SS Janice Voss has been delayed until tomorrow 7/13 due to severe weather at Wallops Island that delayed several steps in the processing of the rocket on the launch pad. The launch is now scheduled for 12:52 pm EDT, for mission updates…
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Weekly Space News 6/27
This week in space… SpaceX causes a stir and has another delay Last Saturday SpaceX caused quite a stir on the Internet when they announced there would be no live web-cast of the Orbcomm OG2 launch attempt that evening. A spokesperson for SpaceX said they had been planning to move away from web-casting because launches…