December 2008 Archives

Today is the 40th anniversary of NASA's Apollo 8's broadcast, a mission that saw humans witness Earth rise for the first time

Without a Lunar Module (LM), Apollo 8 had a Lunar Test Article that was a representative mass of the LM

credit: ARCA

The Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA) has unveiled its rocket for getting its Moon roaming European Lunar Explorer vehicle to the planetoid with engine tests planned for next year and a first flight in 2011

click on images in this blog post to see larger versions in the same browser window

credit Flight

Go through to the extended portion of this video to see video of the take-off and landing

And read more about the maiden flight of SpaceShipTwo's mothership here

Hyperbola has finally posted its blog roll, Hyperbola Recommends, a longish list of the blogs that inhabit the blogosphere's final frontier and post often enough to be deemed worthy of your precious time

Scroll down to find it on the right hand side. How Cosmic Log ended up on it twice I don't know but just to reassure readers, its not favouritism, just good luck on Alan Boyle's part

So this NASA RFI on sending Orbiter's to museums has done the rounds on the internet but the reality is that the fleet won't be retired in 2010. Why, you may ask?

credit: Xcor Aerospace

Kindly provided by Xcor Aerospace, click on this image for a gigantic version that can brighten up your desktop background

And dare I say it but feel free to use Hyperbola's share it feature to share this image, all in the Christmas spirit, of course

We are becoming more sharing and maybe even caring here at Hyperbola with new functionality, as the IT jargon goes

When you click on an individual blog entry to see the entire post you'll now see the words share this beneath my name and if you click on those words you'll get a dialogue box appear - see image above

With that you can social book mark stuff you see on Hyperbola and email links to my, always exciting, postings to your friends or maybe even relatives

Expect more "community" related stuff and, eh, "functionality" from Hyperbola in the new year. It has something to do with user created profiles... Who comes up with this gubbins?

credit: Khrunichev Space Center / caption: this KSLV first-stage mock-up helped with the SLC tests

Russia's Khrunichev Space Center has reported that qualification testing has been completed for Korea's space launch vehicle's (KSLV) launch complex's pre-flight assembly and testing procedures ground equipment at the South Korean Naro Space Center. The Korea Aerospace Research Institute personnel and their Russian prime contractor used the KSLV-I booster first-stage mock-up, delivered in August, to perform the tests

credit: Federal Space Agency

Assembly of a Khrunichev Space Center Proton-M rocket took place at Baikonur cosmodrome today. It was mated with its DM upper stage and its three Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS)-M satellites covered by the fairing. A technical management review also occured for pre-launch processing progress for the planned 22 December roll-out to launch site 81. The triple GLONASS-M satellite launch is planned for 25 December at 13:43 Moscow time

credit: NASA/ caption: STS-61

Beyond these words NASA should continue to support commercial and European
development of crew and cargo alternatives, particularly for cargo return, during and after the gap the report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology space, policy and society
research group is pretty unimaginative and if I were a member of George W. Bush's administration or NASA's current leadership I'd be thanking the New England based-institute for the free positive PR

credit: Spaceport America

So Spaceport America got there eventually. It was the US Federal Aviation Administration environmental impact assessment that held it up

A while ago the then spaceport authority chairman and New mexico government cabinet secretary for economic development Rick Homans (now New Mexico Secretary of the New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department) told me that they had under estimated how long that assessment would take

Go through to the extended portion of this blog for a trip down memory lane with Flight's coverage of the development of the world's first dedicated commercial spaceport

credit: Xcor Aerospace 

Four of these 5K18 engines will power Xcor Aerospace's Lynx suborbital spaceship. Detail about Lynx's development can be read here  

The company's 5K18 engine test press release says:

The new engine, designated the 5K18, produces [up to 2900lb (12.9kN)] thrust by burning a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene.  The engine was fired Monday, December 15th, 2008 at XCOR's rocket test facility located at the Mojave Air and Space Port.  The first test of the engine was performed using pressure-fed propellants whereas the final version of the engine will be fed using XCOR's proprietary cryogenic piston pump for liquid oxygen and a similar piston pump for kerosene.

credit: Flight / caption: click on Santa to see a larger version in the same browser window

It is that time of year again for Hyperbola's annual 'something to do when not sleeping and eating' over the festive period. Click through to the extended section of this blog to see the recommended reading list, in no particular order

As revealed by Flight back in August NASA will help its former astronaut Franklin Chang-Díaz "flight" test his engine, the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMIR), on the International Space Station following a space act agreement deal

Announced by Chang-Díaz's company, Ad Astra Rocket, on Saturday 13 December the VASIMIR developer will have to achieven agreed milestones to meet certain "gates" (who comes up with this terminology?) before any decision is made to send the engine to ISS

Although the COTS rockets have been identified as one possible way of getting VASIMIR to the station, Hyperbola's speculation is that there is probably enough room in the orbiter payload bay for STS-134, when the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment is taken up. The AMS takes up about a third of the payload bay from the CGI images I've seen

Congratulations to the Mojave resident that won Hyperbola's $100 Virgin Galactic video bounty. That will be with you shortly via electronic banking

credit: Flight / caption: click on this image to see a larger version in this browser window

Hyperbola has obtained video of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo mothership WhiteKnightTwo travelling down the runway during a low speed taxi trial, with pitot tube fitted, at Mojave air and spaceport on Friday 12 December at about 1500h local time (2300h GMT)

Watch the video and read more about what happened with WhiteKnightTwo at Mojave air and space port on 12 December at flightglobal.com/spaceflight or click through to the extended portion of this blog post and see the video there

credit: NASA

Find in the extended section of this blog post my notes from reading through NASA's Ares V cargo launch vehicle procurement documentation. The notes are the over matter from the news analysis I wrote this week and the supporting timeline and CaLV point of departure design specification   

Soon to be a regular feature of Hyperbola, OK, well when I feel like it 

credit: NASA/Flight

Following on from this blog and this story Hyperbola has received more responses from NASA and the US government's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding the issue of perchlorate

Just to recap the EPA has been rethinking the issue of perchlorate and its levels in water with the possibility of it deciding that limits need to be placed on this chemical

At the same time that EPA is considering this issue, with a possible decision later this month, NASA's Glenn Research Center (GRC) decided to procure technology from Sweden, of all places, to find an alternative to ammonium perchlorate (AP) called ammonium dinitramide (ADN)

 

Following on from yesterday's NASA image of the first man, Neil Armstrong, and (for now) last man [on the Moon], Gene Cernan, in an Altair Lunar lander mock-up I found this video clip from the US current affairs show 60 Minutes at this blog that is all about Apollo and Constellation

credit: NASA / caption: (L-R) foreground, Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan, background, Wayne Ottinger, Jack Schmitt  

NASA has released this image of Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong and Apollo 17 commander Eugene 'Gene' Cernan touring one of the agency's Altair Lunar Lander mock-ups at its Johnson Space Center on 9 December. Behind Cernan is Harrison 'Jack' Schmitt, Cernan's fellow Apollo 17 crew member and lunar module pilot 

credit: Spaceport America

On Tuesday 9 December CBS Television Network affiliate KRQE ran a local news story about the progress of New Mexico's $225 million Spaceport America. The US Federal Aviation Administration's environmental impact assessment recently found no problems with the spaceport's construction and operation. And in what could be another boost for the spaceport, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson has been named as president-elect Barack Obama's candidate for secretary of commerce

You can watch the video here at krqe.com's report. I tried to embed it but it refused to work

credit: Airlaunch LLC / caption: Virgin Galactic cites parachute re-orientation as an air launch method

Following Flightglobal's exclusive regarding Virgin Galactic's discussions with potential developers of an unmanned satellite booster that could be air launched from the mothership WhiteKnightTwo, its president Will Whitehorn has emailed to Flight the name he prefers the proposed launcher to be known by

credit: EADS Astrium / caption: this ESA/Russian Federal Space Agency funded design seems very distant now

Hyperbola has come into possesion of the figures for the European Space Agency's transportation and human exploration budget for the next three years

A couple of related figures were kindly provided last week by ESA human spaceflight and microgravity directorate coordinator Piero Messina but Hyperbola has managed to obtain more sums including the spend for the European robotic cargo lunar lander

credit: Blue Origin

Whatever happened to Blue Origin? was to be the title of a blog I had planned to write and then publish over the festive holiday. As Clark Lindsey has done it again and chanced upon a new entry to the Blue Origin website now seems as good a time as any to speculate wildly about this secretive effort funded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos 

At the end of October I had contacted Blue Origin's media relations people about any forthcoming news as it is literally years since anything has been heard from them

With the expected first flight of Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo mothership occuring in the next seven days Hyperbola is placing a deadline on the video bounty. That deadline will be 24h before Virgin Galactic makes public any video of WK2 moving under its own power

credit: JAXA

Following on from the comments made about the last post concerning Hyperbola's lunar architecture I thought it a good idea to set out a few more parameters and set the scene in a bit more detail before going forward (aka do some flaming mitigation). And I need a bit more time to assess the Bush 41 Space Exploration Initiative reports and Bush 43 Vision for Space Exploration's Constellation programme Lunar Architecture Team stuff as well

credit: Virgin Galactic

Watch Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn talk about WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo at the 4th Appleton space conference held at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on 4 December

In the video, you can watch in the extended portion of this blog post, you can see Whitehorn talk about having $40 million in the bank, SpaceshipTwo being almost finished, WhiteKnightTwo's high speed taxi runs, Whitehorn's expectations for external investors in late 2009 and up to 400 people asking Virgin Galactic about sending relative's ashes into space

http://twitter.com/flighthyperbola

credit: NASA / caption: more changes are ahead for Ares I crew launch vehicle

NASA's troubled Ares I crew launch vehicle (CLV) faces more change as the agency's Glenn Research Center (GRC) investigates a different oxidiser, ammonium dinitramide (ADN), that will eliminate the perchlorate from the CLV's first-stage solId rocket booster's (SRB) propellant

When will it fly?

At twitter.com/flighthyperbola and via an embedded frame in the flightglobal.com/Hyperbola entry Live Twitter: Virgin Galactic @ UK space conference, tomorrow you can read Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn's answer to that question and more as I'll be twittering via my Blackberry from a UK space conference

Whitehorn is speaking at the 4th Appleton space conference in Oxfordshire, England, on 4 December at about 1040h GMT (1140h CET or 0540h EDT) and Hyperbola will be there to cover it

Parts of the conference will be video taped (if they will let me) and uploaded to flightglobal.com on Friday (5 December)

In good aerospace project fashion the Hyperbola alternate vision for space exploration architecture update, part 2b, lunar operations, will be delayed to Friday 5 December

credit: SpaceX

This Dragon spacecraft qualification unit is going through leak and structural integrity testing. For the leak tests the capsule is pressurised to ensure there are "no leaks in the structure itself, or through the hatches, and windows," says SpaceX

I can't see this image on the SpaceX website

At 1000h local time in California (1800h GMT) Xcor Aerospace has its press conference about its first customer, now known to be Danish citizen Per Wimmer, its first travel agent and technical advances for its proposed suborbital Lynx vehicle

I have been provided with the webcast logon details. Assuming that works I'll be twittering while watching the webcast from here in London, England. You can follow that twittering here 

credit: JAXA / caption: even frugal Japan is looking at human missions

After 50-years of robotic space science leading the way and the prospect of an orbital transportation system being stood up for less than the price of the development of the Airbus A380 you might think that space scientists should accept that the time has come for human's to take the lead in scientific discovery of the solar system...

Hyperbola's vision for space exploration part 2b will now be posted tomorrow 

credit: Xcor / caption: Per Wimmer is on the left

Yes, as a P. W. Mothman has commented (on this earlier post) the Xcor customer is Danish born, UK resident Per Wimmer. Xcor cheekily, and perhaps at some risk, published the above photo but without caption so unless you knew Per you would not have known that he was the customer in question

I knew this when I published my post and thought I could break the news just before Xcor did today but it seems that the Daily Mail made it all public yesterrday - you can tell I'm not a Daily Mail reader

Remember: Hyperbola is now on twitter and by following Hyperbola on twitter you can find out the latest stuff being worked on and who has been talking too whom

credit: ESA

Back in August (how time flies!) I began to set out Hyperbola's architecture for exploration and with the Obama NASA transition team now questioning the agency's officials I better get on with these postings before I'm over taken by events!

That post back in August said that my next splurge of ideas would be about the scientific objectives. Click through to the extended section of this blog post for more of my lunar architecture musings

Remember: Hyperbola is now on twitter and by following Hyperbola on twitter you can find out the latest stuff being worked on and who has been talking too whom, including Obama's NASA transition team