So there you go, you can read the Google translation of the Russian Federal Space Agency aka Roscosmos statement here about this conical capsule choice (or read the text in the extended entry to this posting) but is anyone surprised?
My first thought is, is it this conical capsule from the CIRA presentation I saw in Ohio?
Continue reading "Roscosmos: Crew Space Transportation System is a conical capsule" »
Well it has been a while since I did the ol' news bites, as you may have noticed there has been plenty of material to focus on anyway. Last couple of days I have been on training and the blog software has been updated - just to explain the lack of new posts from myself and the rest of the Flight blogging team I guess the surprising news today is the BBC's scoop on this EADS Astrium manned capsule, based on the Automated Transfer Vehicle technology
caption: SpaceShipOne in SpaceShipTwo's Virgin Galactic livery
credit: Scaled Composites/Flight
A while ago Sir Richard Branson's special projects guru Alex Tai, then Virgin Galactic chief operating officer, was talking to me about the whole space tourism enterprise's development and Tai suddenly mentioned an interesting what-if; that in 2004 he and others at Galactic had considered flying SpaceShipOne commercially
Continue reading "Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipOne-point-five: a future that could have been" »
source: a NASA/United Space Alliance internal briefing obtained by Flight
Checking with my ISS programme sources I have got confirmation that the Soyuz TMA-11 descent module did indeed incorrectly separate from its equipment module and been informed about the engineering changes Energia is making to try to solve the problem
source: a NASA/United Space Alliance internal briefing obtained by Flight
Continue reading "The Soyuz TMA-11 descent did see module separation failure say ISS sources" »
Earlier this week I asked by email those nice people at Zvezda (whom I visited in 2005) whether or not they had ever sold an Orlan suit to the Chinese government. This is the reply.
"Dear Rob,
We are not in the position to confirm or disprove this information.
We congratulate you and your colleagues with the Victory Day!
Best regards,
Boris A. Ivanov
Foreign Business Relations
"RD&PE Zvezda" JSC"
Victory day, by the way, for the Russians, is 9 May, the day in 1945 when apparently the Allies signed Germany's unconditional surrender, so I am told
This video was shown at the 23 January Virgin Galactic unveil of SpaceShipTwo (SS2) and White Knight II (WK2) and has since emerged on Youtube so here it is at last in full on Flightglobal-o-vision
There appears to be growing evidence that TMA-11 suffered a repeat of an incident known to have occured in 1969 with the descent of Soyuz 5
Former Flight International contributor James Oberg has had an article published on IEEE Spectrum online that has information from an internal NASA report that indicates a fault with the separation of TMA-11's descent and equipment modules
Flight is also investigating sources that suggest that TMA-11 is not the only recent repeat of the Soyuz 5 equipment module problem
Continue reading "Did Soyuz TMA-11's equipment module not separate?" »
credit: DLR
This is an image of a proposed robotic lunar sample return mission from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Its return vehicle design (seen in the centre of the lunar vehicles' stack) is based on a sharp edge configuration that is a development of the DLR's planned Micro-g Free Flyer (pictured below). And that is a proposed follow on to the current SHEFEX missions
credit: DLR
Click through to the extended section of this posting for the CIRA Hopper graphics and text
Continue reading "CIRA's Hopper and Germany's unmanned lunar sample return vehicles" »
The following pictures are from a brief video report broadcast on China's CCTV7 state run channel (CCTV9 is that government's English language channel) that has found its way onto Youtube - see the video embedded in the extended section of this blog posting along with older related videos
Below is what appears to be the first picture of the Chinese EVA spacesuit, albeit modified for underwater operation, and unsurprisingly, like this video obtained by Flight in 2007, it looks very much like a Russian Zvezda Orlan suit
While this image shows the orbital module model in the bottom of the tank it also looks very similar to the shape and design of the module shown in the aforementioned video
The following two images appear to be pictures of the two astronauts to undergo water tank training and perhaps they are candidates to carry out the mission?
Click on for the water tank training video
Continue reading "VIDEO: China reveals water tank training and spacewalk suit?" »
