Space News thread

[Bettyboo]

That Emdrive stuff does look interesting.

[Takeovers]

Some info on the Bigelow BEAM module. A system built by a private space company Bigelow Aerospace and going to be attached to the ISS in January.



It is an inflatable module and is installed only for evaluation of that technology, not for practical use.

This is the module being readied for transport in the trunk of a SpaceX Dragon capsule.



An article on BEAM, Bigelow Aerospace and inflatable modules:

BEAM module waits for transportion to the ISS - SpaceFlight Insider

The article also gives some insight on the history of this technology. I will give a short overview, it is quite interesting.

Originally the technology was developed by NASA. ISS modules transported to space have volume limits due to transport in the SpaceShuttle. To make them bigger the idea was to transport them compacted and inflate them in space. A good technology but unfortunately someone from NASA mentioned in public that the modules would also be good for flying to Mars. At that time Congress was absolutely against going to Mars and so after that remark they cancelled the program by cutting the funding.

At that time Robert Bigelow was thinking of doing something in space. He made a large fortune with hotels and looked out how to spend some of that money in something he thinks worthwhile. So he founded Bigelow Aerospace and purchased the rights from NASA when they were forced to abandon it. He built two development models and flew them on a russian repurposed intercontinental missile to space. It worked well and they are still inflated but their electronics are long dead, designed only for a short lifespan.

Bigelow Aerospace also developed several spacestation modules. The smallest is the BA-330. Two of them would be equal to the total volume of the ISS as it presently flies. But then he had to freeze the develpment and scale down his company because it was not possible to deploy and operate the modules.

To operate a space station you need three requirements fulfilled.

1) Launch it. Presently there is only one launch vehicle capable of launching it, the very expensive Delta 4 Heavy. Next year very likely the even more capable Falcon Heavy will fly and be able to launch it for a much lower price.

2) Have customers. Bigelow says he has customers waiting but no one has made public the intention to buy or lease a station. Of course Bigelow has made his fortune with hotels and people assume he is planning for space tourism, no matter how frequently he says he will offer them for scientific purposes. Of course for private entities price is much more important than for NASA so a cheaper launch vehicle like the Falcon Heavy is important.

3) The most important requirement is crew/passenger transport. Presently only Russia and China have that capability and Bigelow cannot build commercial operations on them. So he is waiting for commercial providers to offer more capable and affordable crew launch capability. Unfortunately Congress has consistently underfunded Commercial Crew, prefering to send money for Astronaut transport to Russia over funding a program they see as a program by President Obama even though it was initially by President Bush, when he decided to cancel the SpaceShuttle. BTW the Republican Party blames the cancellation of the SpaceShuttle on Obama too. It is his fault because he has not reversed the decision by President Bush.

But now the Commercial Crew program finally nears completion. Both the manned Dragon 2 by SpaceX and the CST-100 Spaceliner by Boeing are scheduled to fly in 2017. So Robert Bigelow with consent of his wife has decided to restart Bigelow Aerospace and build two BA-330 modules. He is spending 300 Million $ to build them in anticipation of customers and resulting business. It is getting high time for him if he wants to see results. He is now 70 years old and is grooming his granddaughter Blair Bigelow to take over. She is very enthusiastic but if she is really capable of running the busines without her grandfather remains to be seen.

[harrybarracuda]

Poor old Eion Musk, gets his ugly mug on The Big Bang Theory and then days later finds out he's been beaten to the punch.

Bezos Team Lands Spent Rocket After Space Flight

The privately funded space company backed by Amazon.com Inc. founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos announced a historic coup by successfully landing a spent rocket back on Earth after an unmanned flight to the edge of space.

Blue Origin LLC said its reusable New Shepard vehicle flew a suborbital test mission to 333,000 feet on Monday—reaching nearly four times the speed of sound—and then both the unmanned capsule and its BE-3 liquid-fueled rocket separately landed safely back on earth.

According to a company release issued some 18 hours after the test flight, the rocket made a flawless return through stiff winds and touched down gently at the company's launch facility in West Texas. The single rocket engine reignited at an altitude of about 5,000 feet during the controlled return, according to the company, and it landed upright, 4 feet from where it started, traveling at a speed of 4.4 miles an hour.

The ability to reuse such a large rocket has been a long-standing goal of the global aerospace industry, and until now the efforts of Elon Musk's closely held Space Exploration Technology Corp. have garnered the most attention. The aim is to reduce costs and speed up the tempo of launches.

SpaceX, as Mr. Musk's company is called, has repeatedly tried but failed to land its Falcon 9 booster on a floating platform after operational launches. Those attempts came close, but weather issues and mechanical problems disrupted the returns and ended with the spent rocket failing to land vertically.

SpaceX, which has worked over the years to improve its guidance, propulsion and other systems, is expected to try again in coming months.

Blue Origin Vertically Lands Spent Rocket at Launch Site - NASDAQ.com

[Takeovers]

Here the video of the flight. Launch, deploying a capsule that will in future flight have passengers, separate soft landing of the stage and the capsule. A huge success of BO. And already the second try successful, only one failure, which is very good for something that new. Congratulations.



I am sure Elon Musk is not very happy about it. He really wanted to be first but that launch failure set him back.

But without diminishing the success of BO, landing the first stage of an orbital vehicle like the Falcon 9 is at least an order of magnitude more demanding and more important for the future of spaceflight than a suborbital vehicle like that of BO that has plenty of margin in its performance to achieve that goal.

[Neo]

Amazing !

[Takeovers]

Late success of the japanese Space Agency JAXA

JAXA | Venus Climate Orbiter "AKATSUKI" (PLANET-C)

The japanese Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki was sent to Venus and was initially scheduled to reach the planet on November 2011. Unfortunately the main engine burn to inject the probe into orbit around Venus failed and it drifted off into interplanetary space. The mission seemed failed at that point.

However Akatsuki was healthy and remained operational. It was calculated that it would pass by Venus again in 2015. A new maneuver was derived to get it into orbit, not using the failed main engine but the attitude thrusters. The maneuver was performed successfully last night. The orbit reached is not as good as initially intended but a lot of good science will still be performed.

More in the link I provided.



Note the small solar panes. Not much is needed so close to the sun.

[harrybarracuda]

Cracking new pictures of Pluto released by NASA.

[Takeovers]

I have written before about the state of russian space activities. They had some problems with quality recently but I stated that new quite good people are at the top now and hopefully things will get better. Maybe I was too optimistic.

From CNN money.

Economic crisis hits at heart of Russia's pride: Its space program

The Russian Federal Space Agency's budget will be slashed by 35% to 2 trillion rubles ($37 billion) over the next decade, the agency announced.
"The cost of the program's projects has undergone significant changes over the last year given the prevailing economic conditions, changes in exchange rates and changes in the level of inflation," the head of the space program Roscosmos Igor Komarov said at a news conference in Moscow.

The cuts came just after this:

The cuts were announced only days after President Vladimir Putin reassured Russians that the space program will remain one of the country's priorities.



During his annual marathon phone-in interview with Russian citizens, Putin said Russia is planning to have its own space station in orbit by 2023, a year before the International Space Station's planned decommission.

NOTE: The 37 billion $ are for the next 10 years, not an annual budget. As it is now the amount NASA pays the russian space agency ROSKOSMOS for transporting their astronauts to the ISS are ~ 10% of their budget. The cuts force to cancel nearly all their future plans, like building a heavy lift rocket, plans to build their own space station, plans to do more research on the moon, building a new larger capsule to replace their ancient Sojuz capsule. Their old systems are generally good but really outdated.

Also the russian space agency had another failure, this time a military payload. A very small failing can doom a whole launch. This time one of 4 bolts that would release the satellite from the upper stage failed, so they burned up together.

TASS

MOSCOW, December 8. /TASS/. The Russian satellite Kanopus-ST with the Volga upper stage lost orbit and its pieces burned in dense atmosphere over the Atlantic on Tuesday, a high-ranking source in the Russian Aerospace Forces headquarters told TASS.
"The satellite together with the Volga upper stage entered the atmosphere over the southern part of the Atlantic this morning. They have fully burned in the dense atmosphere," the source said.

[Looper]

Star Wars producer confirms Jar Jar Binks will not appear in The Force Awakens

Jar Jar Binks, the goofy amphibious character who irritated many Star Wars fans in the 1999 film The Phantom Menace, will not appear in the new movie The Force Awakens, producer Kathleen Kennedy has confirmed.

The film-makers have declined to divulge much about what audiences will see when The Force Awakens opens in cinemas on 18 December, but Kennedy did answer a question at a news conference about what is not in the film.

“Jar Jar is definitely not in the movie,” she said to applause and cheers.
Binks and his inexplicable cod-Jamaican accent annoyed hoards of cinema-goers in all three of the prequel films. A bumbling alien from the planet Naboo who George Lucas reportedly intended to provide comic relief and keep young children happy, he was voted the most annoying film character of all time in 2006 poll.

Audiences of the new film also won’t see any Ewoks, the furry creatures from 1983’s Return of the Jedi, Kennedy said. “That’s because Harrison insisted on it,” she joked, referring to Harrison Ford, who returns to play Han Solo in Force Awakens.

The Force Awakens is the seventh episode in the sci-fi franchise created by Lucas. Walt Disney Co took over the series when it purchased the Lucasfilm studio in 2012.

Star Wars producer confirms Jar Jar Binks will not appear in The Force Awakens | Film | The Guardian

Friggin good news that. Annoying little kunt that jar jar was.

[Takeovers]

I want to add one information about the ROSKOSMOS budget. It has been slashed before and is now less than half of what it used to be. It is very doubtful they can maintain a meaningful space program with that money even considered the much lower labour cost. Low pay in the space industry is a big problem in itself. They no longer attract the best and brightest who can get a lot better pay in other industries.

[Takeovers]

Mission DAWN

The DAWN spacecraft orbiting Ceres is in a good state. It has completed an orbit changing maneuver and is now circling at the final planned altitude of 240 miles, 385km. Some fine adjustment of the orbit is still planned. This altitude will allow very detailed observation.

Dawn Mission | Status

December 9, 2015 -Dawn at Lowest Orbital Altitude at Ceres
Dawn completed ion-thrusting on schedule on Dec. 7 and continues to be healthy and operating well in its new orbit. Over the last two days, the flight team has determined that the spacecraft did an excellent job in maneuvering to its planned orbit at an average altitude of 240 miles (385 kilometers). To match Dawn's orbital motion with the intricate plan for observing Ceres, the probe will use its ion engine to perform a small adjustment (known as a "trajectory correction maneuver") to the orbit. Long before the spiral descent began, engineers had calculated that such a maneuver was likely and already had a window planned for this purpose on Dec. 11-13. (This was described in the November Dawn Journal.) They are now developing the detailed flight plan for the spacecraft.

[Takeovers]

A foto shoot at the SpaceX factory. Nice shots of Rockets and Dragons, only with that woman in front.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/model-ka...off-1448295895

[Takeovers]

Mars rover Curiosity photo taken from orbit.

HiRISE | Curiosity Trek (ESP_043539_1755)

The Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, continues its exciting traverse of Mars. In an image acquired in September, it was exploring the boundary between two rock units: the light-toned Murray Formation and the overlying and darker-toned Stimson unit. We can clearly see the rover in a complex terrain marked by tonally varied rocks, which on the surface, can correspond to the contact between rock units and dark sand.

[Neo]

BBC News - International Space Station

[Looper]

Earth crosses the path of the 3200 Phaethon asteroid tonight giving rise to the Geminids meteor shower.

The slow moving meteors are easy to spot.

This asteroid has a highly eccentric orbit taking it as close as 20,000,000 kilometres from the sun.

Should be a few extra Christmas lights tonight!

[Luigi]

They said starting at around 8:30pm here in BKK.

Unfortunately cloudy and overcast. Can see some planes but no stars.

[palexxxx]

Clear in Chiang Mai, so looking forward to it.

Any particular direction that I should be looking?

[Luigi]

Up.

.

[harrybarracuda]

If you want to watch todays Soyuz launch, it's in an hour and a bit on Sky News.

You can watch "Sky News Live" by simply typing that into Youtube.

[withnallstoke]

^ Is it available in Syria?

[harrybarracuda]

^ Is it available in Syria?

Erm....

[palexxxx]

Clear in Chiang Mai, so looking forward to it.

Any particular direction that I should be looking?

Up.

.

Well, there's my mistake, I was looking to the east as that was the only direction where stray light wasn't getting in the way. Did nae see a one.

[Looper]

I saw 5 in about 20 minutes.

1 Excellent
2 Very small
3 Very small
4 Good
5 Quite good

But 5 was a pretty disappointing total really. I saw 7 in half an hour one night last month and that wasn't a meteor shower event, just an ordinary night.

Any particular direction that I should be looking?

They are called the Geminids because they appear to be coming from a location in the Gemini constellation. They can appear anywhere in the sky it is just the origin of their direction that appears to point to Gemini.

Anyway you can remember that for next December 14th!

2015 was a good opportunity though since it was a new moon.

[palexxxx]

They are called the Geminids because they appear to be coming from a location in the Gemini constellation. They can appear anywhere in the sky it is just the origin of their direction that appears to point to Gemini.

Yeah, I knew that they were called the Geminids because they appear to come from Gemini......... umm .... which way is Gemini?

[harrybarracuda]

They are called the Geminids because they appear to be coming from a location in the Gemini constellation. They can appear anywhere in the sky it is just the origin of their direction that appears to point to Gemini.

Yeah, I knew that they were called the Geminids because they appear to come from Gemini......... umm .... which way is Gemini?

That way.