Informing the general public about current events and history of spaceflight through relatively short and easy to read entries that avoid all the technical language. (I attempt anyway because sometimes the words take over and I lose control.) Often focusing on the ongoing development of commercial interests such as SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, Blue Origin, and others that are working in cooperation with NASA to develop the next generation of spaceships.
This upcoming Monday, November 25th, will be a busy day in the launch world with the flight of two very different missions.
The next resupply spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) is the Progress 53 mission flying out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, scheduled for lift-off at 3:53 pm Eastern and will typically dock with the station on Friday the 29th. The Progress vehicle is an unmanned version of the Russian Soyuz capsule that has been in use since the 1960s. These designs have had such a long lifespan because they are relatively simple (as simple as spaceships can be), very durable, and adaptable. Progress is able to carry a little over 3,700 lb of supplies in the somewhat spherical forward section called the Cargo Module. Typical supplies include food, water, replacement parts and new scientific experiments to be installed on station. The center segment of the vehicle is the Refueling Module and this will carry up to 3,800 lb of fuel that the ISS will need to maintain its orbit. Despite being at 250 miles above the Earth, there is still a slight presence of atmosphere creating drag on the station that, over time, slows it down and degrades its orbit. Progress will likely remain docked with ISS for up to 6 months, at which time the Cargo Module will be packed with the station's trash, waste water, and old station parts. After undocking it's sent back to Earth on a course that will lead to its incineration in the atmosphere above the Pacific ocean.
The other flight that day will be the commercial launch of the SES-8 communications satellite out of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. This satellite, which was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, will serve as direct communications satellite for southern Asia and has a designed service life of 15 years, according to the manufacturer's website. Interestingly, SES-8 will be put into orbit by a Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket built by one of Orbital Sciences' competitors: Space Exploration Technologies, more commonly called SpaceX. The Falcon 9 is a two-staged rocket designed and built in the United States, also used for commercial resupply of the ISS and is steadily evolving into what may be the first fully reusable rocket in the world.
The United States' next mission to Mars will be departing Earth this upcoming Monday, November 18th from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphereand Volatile EvolutioN mission, will take 10 months to reach Mars then enter orbit. Once there, it will spend one Earth year (0.53 Martian years) passing repeatedly through the red planet's atmosphere where it will use its scientific payload to analyze the composition and physics of the thin atmosphere. To give a general comparison, Mars' atmosphere has only about 1/1000 the mass of our own.
Ground-based rover and lander missions have studied geological records of the planet's past and through that data it's become apparent that long ago Mars had a far more robust and complex atmosphere, possibly one like the Earth currently enjoys. The prevailing theory is that solar wind and radiation has had an eroding effect and scientists want to measure the rate of gaseous loss and ultimately understand if this is something that may someday cause changes to our own world. The other major benefit of MAVEN's research will be an understanding of what kind of atmosphere we would encounter on the first manned mission, allowing for more effective design and construction that will increase the chances of a successful landing on the red planet.
For more detailed information about this mission, check out the official Fact Sheet.
We have reached the end a two-year gap in America's ability to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) from our own soil. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet in 2011 we lost our ability to regularly loft supplies and new experiments to the space station, leaving us no options but to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to companies and agencies across the planet to do our work for us. But that is now a thing of the past.
Yesterday NASA held a press conference to officially and successfully conclude the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program that created a partnership between NASA and private aerospace corporations to develop rockets and spacecraft that would meet NASA's technical, performance, and safety standards. NASA set the guidelines and the private companies entered into competition to build what they thought would be the best vehicle at the best price.
Several companies made efforts to enter this new space race and in the end Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Orbital Sciences Corporation were selected to fly demonstration flights. The selection of multiple companies will ensure that the market for NASA resupply missions will remain competitive, controlling costs and incentivizing increased performance. Both companies have had great successes with their rockets, the SpaceX Falcon 9 and the Orbital Sciences Antares and both vehicles, the SpaceX Dragon (above) and the Orbital Sciences Cygnus (right) have now successfully hauled cargo safely and efficiently to the ISS and Dragon is even able to bring cargo back for further scientific investigation after time in orbit.
The successful conclusion of this project is exciting, in part, because it certainly bodes well for NASA's other major vehicle initiative, the Commercial Crew Program (CCP). A parallel to COTS, CCP is an effort to develop, with industry cooperation, safe and reliable manned spaceflight vehicles to transport crews routinely to and from the ISS. Initial test flights for some of those commercial systems are scheduled for 2017 and upon their successful completion NASA would no longer have to sink a major portion of its budget into low-Earth orbit flights and can focus its time, efforts, and funding on sending manned missions to the moon, asteroids, and beyond.
The
Minotaur V rocket that will be carrying the LADEE spacecraft will be launching
from a complex on the eastern shore of Virginia that is no stranger to rocketry
activity. The Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport is located adjacent to, and
operated in conjunction with, NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island,
VA, a complex that has been launching rockets for aeronautical research since
1945 when it was established by the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, the predecessor to NASA. Some sources estimate that this facility
has conducted over 16,000 launches since its opening almost 70 years ago, but
this will be the first with a lunar target.
Many
flights have left Wallops/MARS aiming to place payloads into Earth orbit, and
in a few weeks a resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) will
be attempted there, but NASA Wallops specializes in sub-orbital science
missions that never reach Earth orbit. Those rockets are called "sounding rockets." The flights carry scientific
instruments up to 350 miles above the Earth, outside the atmosphere where they
can measure things like solar radiation, the Earth’s magnetic fields, astronomy
observations, and a whole host of other research topics. The missions are very
short duration and the instruments reenter the atmosphere to sometimes burn up
and sometimes to be recovered by parachute, but the short duration is offset by
the relatively low cost.
The
MARS complex has been slowly building up their capabilities over the years from
suborbital, to Earth orbit, and soon lunar orbit. While it’s unlikely that they
will ever conduct the large launches that we see out of Kennedy Space Center
and Vandenberg AFB, Wallops and MARS are setting themselves up as the ideal
launch site for lightweight orbital payload shots to the ISS and for
corporations looking to put satellites into orbit. Given the trend in the
miniaturization of electronics it looks like the Mid Atlantic Regional
Spaceport is due to become a key player in the commercial launch world.
Tomorrow's Topic: LADEE's Launch Profile and "Yo-yo de-spin" Later this week: Where and When YOU might see LADEE launch!
The first flight of the Orbital Sciences Minotaur V The LADEE mission will be riding its way to space aboard a rocket called the Minotaur V, the fifth in a series of rockets that increases its lofting capability with each successive generation. The fifth generation also happens to be a five-stage rocket, meaning five rocket segments that fire successively. When each stage is done firing it is detached from the rocket and left to burn up in the atmosphere. Staging allows the rocket to dump the dead weight and maintain efficiency as it reaches higher altitudes.
The Minotaur family of rockets have come into existence as a result of the US military's decommissioning of Minuteman and Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), once in place as our nuclear deterrent against the Soviet Union. The Orbital Sciences corporation was contracted by the US Air Force to convert these missiles into orbital and sub-orbital launchers. They have been used to put satellites into orbit and as targets for anti-ballistic missile tests during which the Air Force practices destroying an incoming, hostile missile. The first three stages of these rockets use solid propellants which make them very safe to work with, stable for long-term storage, and reliable when fired. In fact, the Minotaur family has a 100% success rate to date. This launch is the first time that the five-stage configuration will be employed for this family of rockets. To be completely honest, this is not a high-risk "first" because the two commercially developed upper stages have been flow successfully before, however, that's no guarantee that it will be smooth sailing. Each rocket stage has its own computer that controls its ignition and operations and if these computers do not work together properly the vehicle could very well destroy itself, though that is a very unlikely scenario for the Minotaur V. Here's wishing the best of luck to the Orbital Sciences team!
In the world of spaceflight, manned and unmanned alike, "firsts" are avoided whenever possible. "Firsts" are typically expensive, technically challenging, and inherently high-risk. NASA's upcoming LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer) mission will take part in several significant "firsts", which I'll be explaining over the next few days. We'll begin with the spacecraft itself.
The first flight of the Modular Common Spacecraft Bus
Every planetary science spacecraft before LADEE was a custom construction. Planners started with mission objectives and a budget, determined the scientific instruments needed to accomplish their objectives, and then designed the best structure within their budget that could accommodate those instruments. The Modular Common Spacecraft Bus is what it says it is. The MCSB is a system of component segments that can be mass produced to reduce cost and complexity. The spacecraft designers select the necessary modules for their specific mission and the spacecraft is then assembled in less time and with less cost than a uniquely engineered spacecraft. At least that's the concept. LADEE will be the first to put the concept into action.
Personally, I think it's a brilliant plan because an outstanding amount of a mission's funding goes into the hardware that will take the instruments to their destination(s). If the MCSB lives up to its full potential, planetary science missions have a chance of being flown more frequently and with a greater scientific return per dollar. I'm not usually one to focus on the funding of missions but the general public hasn't typically seen planetary science as being as exciting as manned spaceflight and there tends to be less funding sent in that direction. Thankfully, in the past year the Curiosity rover has brought more focus on science and MCSB might be the key to getting the costs low enough to maintain that focus and support.
Tomorrow's Topic: The first launch of Orbital Sciences' Minotaur V rocket
On September 6th, NASA will
be launching a new scientific probe to the moon. It’s called LADEE, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer. The mission’s scientific aim is to explore the moon’s atmosphere,
more accurately called an exosphere. An exosphere is a collection of gasses bound
to an object by its gravitational field but those gasses are so thinly
distributed that the atoms and molecules don’t even interact with each other. Because
of this, we’ve all been taught that the moon has no atmosphere.
LADEE, a car-sized robotic
vehicle, will enter an orbit around the moon at only 20-60 km (12-37mi) in
order to pass through the thin lunar exosphere that’s so close to the surface.
For 100 days it will use its onboard instrumentation to analyze which gasses
are bound to the moon and in what proportion they exist. The other phenomenon
that will be investigated is the presence of lunar dust in the exosphere. One lander, sent before our astronauts arrived, Surveyor 7 (1968), photographed strange glowing on
the horizon as the sun began to rise and when they arrived our Apollo astronauts also witnessed
the glow during their stays on the moon (1969-1972). The prevailing theory is
that this is the result of significant amounts of lunar dust above the surface.
LADEE will determine if there is indeed any dust present. The interesting part
about that experiment is that either way we’ll still have a mystery. If yes,
how did it get up there? If no, what caused the glow?
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more on LADEE and everything else spaceflight related!
The next resupply spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) is the Progress 53 mission flying out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, scheduled for lift-off at 3:53 pm Eastern and will typically dock with the station on Friday the 29th. The Progress vehicle is an unmanned version of the Russian Soyuz capsule that has been in use since the 1960s. These designs have had such a long lifespan because they are relatively simple (as simple as spaceships can be), very durable, and adaptable. Progress is able to carry a little over 3,700 lb of supplies in the somewhat spherical forward section called the Cargo Module. Typical supplies include food, water, replacement parts and new scientific experiments to be installed on station. The center segment of the vehicle is the Refueling Module and this will carry up to 3,800 lb of fuel that the ISS will need to maintain its orbit. Despite being at 250 miles above the Earth, there is still a slight presence of atmosphere creating drag on the station that, over time, slows it down and degrades its orbit. Progress will likely remain docked with ISS for up to 6 months, at which time the Cargo Module will be packed with the station's trash, waste water, and old station parts. After undocking it's sent back to Earth on a course that will lead to its incineration in the atmosphere above the Pacific ocean.
