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 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.
