Recently in Constellation Category

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At the International Astronautical Congress 2008, held in Glasgow, Scotland last week NASA's crew launch vehicle implementation office manager Charles Cockrell gave a briefing on the 3 October about the Constellation programme's vehicle testing plans

Click through to the extended portion of this blog post to see the Ares testing briefing video

credit: NASA

At the International Astronautical Congress 2008, held in Glasgow, Scotland last week NASA's Constellation operations and test integration associate director, Thomas Rathjen, gave a briefing on the 3 October about the programme's flight test strategy

Tomorrow I will post a video briefing about NASA's Ares testing plan

Click through to the extended portion of this blog post to see the Ares strategy briefing video

NASA's John Connolly spoke at the 59th International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow on Friday 3 October about the process of designing the Altair Lunar Lander and where the project is today. On that Friday there were a series of NASA presentation's about the Constellation vehicles and I will be publishing my videos or audio recordings of them this week

click through to the extended portion of this blog post to see the video of Connolly's presentation

credit: NASA

These slides, from a presentation given at NASA's Lunar exploration concepts briefing held on 25 September, give an indication of quite how far away the mature technology is to achieve a lunar landing even by 2020


credit: NASA

The announcement in 2005 of a return to the Moon effort that was "Apollo on steroids" may have seemed feasible with a 13-year duration between the announcement and the original 2018 target date for a manned Moon landing - even with a NASA that has to cope with a flat budget half that of the Apollo programme era

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Thursday 11 September
1400h
Lunar comms architecture

Jim Schier
space comms and navigation office at NASA hq

Space comms and nav came out of LunarAechitectureTeam-2 study
Requirements include pervasive mobility, flexibility, global connectivity and long duration including outpost implemented to emulate Mars surface scenarios
Expect to require HD cameras and high bandwidth comms

Tuesday 9 September
1137h

Frank Peri
Exploration technology development programme manager

Rehashing overall Constellation goals
Meeting critical near-term Orion crew exporation vehicle technologies, Ares launch vehicles and EVA
Work is moving tech from TRL 3 to 6, demos in labs and putting them into subsystems and vacuum chambers

Tuesday 9 September
1030h

Brian Muirhead, JPL systems engineer and Constellation prg team member

He's giving the basic Constellation presentation. Jeff Hanley Constellation programme manager was supposed to give this presentation
System baseline review this week for Orion to decide on when to have its PDR
Altair and Ares V gone through concept review in June and now going towards requirements review
He just said that Ares I-X could fly "April to May maybe a little later in June"

NASA Ames Research Center is to study the uncertainty in simulations of Ares launch vehicles propellant tank explosions, in particular the "potential consequences of leakage" through a liquid hdyrogen (LH2), liquid oxygen (LOX) tank common bulkhead with simulations of bulkhead leaks, LOX/LH2 tank drop tests and boiling liquid, expanding vapour explosions (BLEVEs)


credit: NASA

NASA is concerned that the flight hardware for Orion crew exploration vehicle's (CEV) extra vehicular activity (EVA) system is too heavy for its CEV and is working towards a preliminary design that is light enough for April 2009


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Learn about how to use NASA's simulation software, based on first-person-shooter computer game engine technology, in this video with narration by a British women. The software was developed by NASA with the help of the Virginian company Valador