Recently in NASA Category

credit: NASA

The AIAA SPACE 2008 conference saw an update yesterday on the progress with NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services demonstration programme. I was a bit bemused with this slide above as it seems to me to be rather hard to undertake COTS crew capability D activities when the NASA FY2009 budget published in February had nothing in it for this option; admittedly unfunded in the funded space act agreements but some NASA cash is going to be expected  

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Tuesday 9 Septemer
1112h

Tony Lavoie, is Lunar Precursor Robotics programme manager at MSFC

Talking about Lunar Reconnassaince Orbiter and need for good lunar pole data
Talking about LCROSS and lunar mapping project, nothing new
We decided that we could get the human mission going, get most of the information we need with just LRO and LCROSS
In medium term have plans to shift focus to scientific focus

Credit: NASA

Lockheed Martin's Orion project team recently assembled a full-scale low fidelity Orion crew exploration vehicle module aft bay, subsystems mock-up in Johnson Space Center's space vehicle mockup facility, also known as building nine

The official line apparently, if anyone cared to ask NASA, is that "the game is still in development" but for those in the know legal action between the company employed to write the game code and the game-engine provider has frozen progress on a NASA stand alone, single player video game


credit: Virgin

This is not to be confused with the 1986 Virgin Dan Dare video game pictured above or NASA's Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing (MMPORG) project or the recent Glenn Research Center's procurement process; although Glenn's game is very similar to the game held in legal hell

Credit: NASA

According to the 13 August 1964 issue of Flight International NASA test pilot E. P. Hetzel is trying out the paraglider system of spacecraft recovery, then under consideration for Project Gemini flights, in this photo

It is the first manned test of the recovery system at what became NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards, California

More such reports about the development of American, and Soviet, manned spaceflight systems can be found in the Flight archive, a completely free to access archive of every issue ever published since Flight's inception in 1909

credit: NASA

This image is from a video of a compressed air cylinders propelled prototype Modular Common Spacecraft Bus, tested by NASA Ames Research Center. The octagon-like common bus will be used for NASA's 2011 launched Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) orbiter

According to NASA's science mission directorate LADEE will be followed by lander missions for the International Lunar Network (ILN) and now we know that those landers could be nuclear powered

NASA had been planning to create its own massively multi-player online game but its Glenn Research Center's Educational Programs Office has decided to enter the games arena with a request for proposals for a $200,000 contract to develop an interactive educational lunar base design and exploration simulation


credit: NASA / caption: will the LunarSIM Moon base look like this?

NASA Ares V cargo launch vehicle (CaLV) integration manager Steve Creech visibly shook and his voice wavered with a very nervous answer to my question about why, when they already have a 6,000kg payload margin to trans-lunar injection (TLI), they were considering changes to the CaLV to add another 3,000kg of margin?


credit: NASA

NASA has posted a press release about the International Lunar Network (ILN) that the World's major space agencies are discussing

Details about the ILN could be read here in a Flightglobal article back in May

Talking of the Moon go here for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's high-definition video of the Moon taken by its Kaguya probe

NASA administrator Michael Griffin told an audience at the Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin that he could not serve a president who did not want to carry on with the Constellation programme

Indicating that he did not expect to serve the next administration, Griffin explained that as a presidential appointee it was customary for someone in such a position to hand in their resignation and that those resignations were rarely rejected