Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘international space station’

We need a private means to reach the ISS. Like, yesterday

The agency isn’t just looking for spaceships. It wants complete systems--spacecraft, launch vehicles, ground and mission operations, etc.--that can completely take over the task of shuttling back and forth between Earth and the ISS. And NASA wants them fast--the new Integrated Design Contract will start doling out funds in July of 2012 after reviewing proposals and will award $1.61 billion between then and April of 2014, at which point it hopes to have a viable solution to the current problem.

That problem is the single-string approach we now have to resupplying the space station. With the shuttles out of the picture and ESA’s ATV vehicles still essentially under development, Russia’s Soyuz and unmanned Progress spacecraft are the only two making regular runs to the ISS. That means not only is NASA paying a bundle to get American astronauts to the ISS, but should the Russian hardware fail or be grounded for any reason, there’s no ready-to-launch method of getting to the crews aboard the ISS or resupplying the orbital station.

That point was driven home on Aug. 24 when a Russian Progress cargo ship bound for the ISS crashed about five minutes after launch, scattering tons of cargo and wreckage across the Russian frontier. That’s another way of saying we have a $100 billion space station and no redundant systems to support it should one method fail.

For their part, commercial space companies are scrambling to get into position to take over ISS duties from Roscosmos and NASA. Just today The Spaceship Company, a joint-venture between Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, opened up its first facility dedicated solely to the manufacture of spaceships. Right now the company is working to provide Virgin with the suborbital fleet of spaceships and carrier aircraft it needs to get its space tourism venture off the ground, but in the future it could work with a variety of partners on a variety of spaceships, suborbital and orbital alike.

The very existence of a dedicated spaceship manufacturing facility shows that the nascent private space business is further turning into a full-fledged industry, and that’s exactly what NASA wants. Another $1.6 billion for further development won’t hurt either.

[NASA]

The movie starts in the Pacific Ocean and flies over North and South America before sunrise over Antarctica. The neuronal network of nighttime cities is marvelous to behold — not to mention the lightning storms off the southern coast of Mexico and into the Pacific.

It takes roughly a minute to fly from Vancouver Island to the southern portion of Chile. A real latitudinal arc on the ISS takes much longer, of course, but I like this fast view because it’s somewhat humbling — this planet is not really that big. Plus, you get an appreciation for just how much if it is oceans.

Raw data was downloaded from the Gateway To Astronaut Photography of Earth, a Johnson Space Center project. Visit the site to see even more astronaut images, which should keep you sated until the ISS gets a pair of streaming video cameras sometime next year.

[Bad Astronomy]

Click to launch a gallery of the capsule's Kazakh landing.

Three astronauts remain on board the ISS: Russian Sergei Volkov, American Michael Fossum, and Japanese Satoshi Furukawa. All three are due to return to Earth on November 22nd, which, as we noted, may leave the ISS unmanned for the first time in a decade, as the preceding launch of three new astronauts has been repeatedly delayed.

[AP]

If only we had invented a reliable American-made reusable transport system

The reason for the delay is pretty simple: when a spacecraft crashes into the ground due to some kind of unforeseen engine trouble, it's just good sense to perform as many tests as needed to ensure whatever caused the crash can't cause another. According to unnamed space official sources, that'll entail two test launches of the unmanned Soyuz rocket.

As it stands, three of the remaining crew--Alexander Samokutyayev, Ron Garan (who likes to take pretty pictures of Earth), and mission commander Andrey Borisenko--are due to come home on September 16th, pushed back from September 8th. Three additional crew were supposed to blast off on September 22nd, but with this delay, that's been pushed to late October or early November. If there are any further delays, Roskosmos will have to decide whether to bring the remaining three astronauts back home, leaving the ISS unmanned.

It's no simple thing to leave the ISS unmanned; it can be controlled remotely from Earth, but not nearly as easily or effectively. In the wake of the delay, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is said to be calling for extra security checks and analyzing the state of the beleaguered space agency. Times like this we wish we still had a working Space Shuttle, right?

[Reuters]

“Those electrons feel GOOD!,” R2 tweeted yesterday as its visual systems were powered on. “One small step for man, one giant leap for tinman kind.”

Har har. But humanoid humor aside, this is a big step for those who have been following R2’s progress from the labs at NASA to his launch aboard Discovery to his arrival at the ISS (R2 has been tweeting all of this along the way). It is the first humanoid robot ever taken into space, and he very well could be the model for many future generations of humanoid helper ‘bots launched aboard orbiting spacecraft and perhaps even on a future deep space mission. Along the way, future versions of R2 may even assist ISS astronauts during spacewalks.

Right now, R2 is only a waist-up humanoid; his torso is anchored to a pedestal from which he can use his arms to help human crew members in the orbiting lab. But a pair of legs is being designed for R2 and could launch to the ISS in 2013, at which point it will become something of a real life C-3PO capable of following around its human counterparts, getting into all kinds of scrapes, and providing somewhat flat comic relief.

[io9]

We heard last month that NASA agreed to speed up SpaceX’s flight demo schedule, as SpaceX, eager to start making deliveries under its $1.6 billion NASA contract, asked NASA for permission to combine two planned missions into one. That mission is now targeted for the week after Thanksgiving, according to SpaceX.

In this demonstration under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, SpaceX will launch its Dragon capsule aboard a Falcon 9 rocket Nov. 30, and dock with the ISS nine days later. It will carry a limited payload to the station, which is fully stocked through next year thanks to the final shuttle delivery.

SpaceX will apparently use the opportunity to launch some other stuff, too, using the Falcon’s second stage that will deploy after the Dragon capsule separates from its fairing.

The Dragon capsule, the first privately built reusable spacecraft, made its first flight in December, and SpaceX has been conducting tests and dry runs in the months since. The company said it is working out the kinks in its COTS plans so that NASA will give final approval for a single mission.