All Space articles – Page 203
-
News
Seventh Proton blast-off Khrunichev figures
Tim Furniss/LONDON Khrunichev's Proton K/DM booster had its seventh commercial launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on 3 December. The Russian company says that it hopes to earn $850 million from its Proton satellite launcher business, covering 22 flights in the five years between 1996 and 2000. The launch mirrors ...
-
News
TRW has to delay delivery of AXAF
The launch of NASA's third Great Observatory spacecraft, the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), aboard the Space Shuttle STS93/Columbia, scheduled for August 1998, will be postponed, possibly by "several months", because main contractor TRW has experienced delays in "assembly and testing". International Space Station Shuttle flights scheduled later in 1998 ...
-
News
Spaceball camera makes debut on Columbia
NASA's first test flight of the $3 million spherical Aercam Sprint robotic camera has been completed from the Space Shuttle Columbia STS87. Like the German-built Inspector craft which will be evaluated outside the Russian Mir space station this month, an uprated version of the Sprint will be used during International ...
-
News
Dasa delivers first European ISS component to Russia
Daimler-Benz Aerospace (Dasa) has delivered the first European component of the International Space Station (ISS) to Russian partner RSC Energia. The Bremen-based Space Infrastructure unit of Dasa has handed over the computer and software for the Data Management System - Russia (DMS-R), a control, navigation and data-processing centre for ...
-
News
Satellite Launcher directory
Tim Furniss/LONDON The success of the European Space Agency-funded demonstration launch of the Ariane 502 in October buoyed the European space industry after the calamitous failure of the 501 in June 1996. Assuming a successful 503 demonstration flight in May, the Ariane 5 will be taken over by Arianespace ...
-
News
Mars Express plan gathers support
The European Space Agency's (ESA) Science Programme Committee has endorsed the preliminary stage in the development of the Mars Express mission. The craft will enter orbit around the Red Planet and deposit up to four landers on the surface after launch on a Russian Soyuz U booster scheduled for 2003 ...
-
News
X-38 orbital and re-entry test planned for 2001
Tim Furniss/LONDON NASA's X-38 crew-emergency-return vehicle (CERV) for the International Space Station (ISS) will have its first orbital and re-entry flight test in 2001. The vehicle prototype is undergoing atmospheric flight tests from a NASA Boeing B-52 operating from Edwards AFB, California, (Flight International, 18-24 June). Glide flights ...
-
News
Ariane roll
The European Space Agency says that the cause of the "roll torque" experienced by the Ariane 502 launcher on 30 October, resulting in it reaching a lower-than-planned orbit, was an unexpected reaction to the separation of the solid-rocket boosters. The attempt to recover the boosters in the sea, as planned, ...
-
News
On the ball
NASA has selected Ball Aerospace, of Colorado, to build the first spacecraft in its rapid-delivery satellite programme, in which eight companies were awarded initial contracts to prepare for work on "catalogue" craft (Flight International, 22-28 October). The Quick Scatterometer, QuickScat ,will be launched by a Titan 2 from Vandenberg AFB, ...
-
News
Dasa plans commercial Eureca
Andrzej Jeziorski/MUNICH Daimler-Benz Aerospace (Dasa) is planning to launch a commercially funded industrial-applications mission using the free-flying, retrievable Eureca space platform from the US Space Shuttle in 2000. A European Space Agency-funded flight of the German-built Eureca, equipped with 71 different experiments, was conducted in 1992-3 after deployment ...
-
News
JV venture will market SS-18 satellite launchers
Kosmotras, a joint venture between ten Ukrainian and Russian companies, has been set up to market the former Dnepr SS-18 ballistic missile for commercial launches into low Earth orbit. The firms, led by the Russian and Ukrainian space agencies, plan to convert 150 SS-18s into the Dnepr booster and ...
-
News
ISS completion may slip back
Tim Furniss/LONDON Completion of the International Space Station (ISS) is likely to be delayed until 2004 - ten years later than planned when the project was first announced in 1984 and about one year later than the date announced by NASA in 1996. Earlier this month, NASA and ...
-
News
The Mars burn
Tim Furniss/LONDON British Aerospace Defence wants to sell its Royal Ordnance Rocket Motors division - which supplies about 50% of the world's spacecraft liquid apogee engines and thrusters. Among the potential buyers are Primex, Marquardt and AlliedSignal (Flight International, 5-11 November). The sale offer comes at a time ...
-
News
Secure communications
Tim Furniss/RAF OAKHANGER Matra Marconi Space (MMS) of Stevenage, UK, is completing production of the first of three uprated Skynet 4 UK-dedicated military-communications satellites, which are to be launched on a Boeing Delta booster from Cape Canaveral in January 1998. The Skynet 4D will be followed by crafts ...
-
News
Dasa wins satellite contract
Daimler-Benz Aerospace's (Dasa) Dornier division in Munich has won an $18 million contract from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to build two Dasa Flexbus spacecraft platforms for NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission. The 380kg satellites will be launched aboard a Russian Cosmos booster from Plesetsk in 2001 and placed ...
-
News
Towards hypersonic flight
Ian Sheppard/LONDON Progress in the development of airbreathing powerplants for hypersonic vehicles has been hampered since the 1960s by unexpected complexities encountered with the scramjet (supersonic-combustion ramjet), until recently the only real candidate for powering such high-speed craft. In an effort to address the impasse, leading international figures in ...
-
News
Going commercial
While the astronauts and flight directors work on improved flight operations, directors are preparing the Shuttle to re-enter old territory - commercial activities. Daniel Goldin, NASA administrator is giving his full support and encouragement to the United Space Alliance to take the Shuttle back into the commercial launch business, possibly ...
-
News
Global Surveyor mission delayed
Tim Furniss/LONDON NASA has revealed a year's delay - to March 1999 - of the mapping mission to be undertaken by the $250 million Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). The announcement came almost simultaneously with the news that the Agency's successful four-month Mars Pathfinder-Sojourner mission had ended. ...
-
News
Spacewalks restore power to the Mir
Russia's Mir 1 space station is operating at 85% electrical power after two spacewalks carried out on 3 and 6 November were used to install a new solar panel. Cosmonauts Anatoli Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradev removed an old solar panel on the station's Kvant 1 module and replaced ...
-
News
Role reversal
Tim Furniss/LONDON Six minutes into the flight of the Space Shuttle STS87 on 19 November, the orbiter Columbia, arcing over the Atlantic Ocean heads-down, still attached to its external tank (ET) and with its main engines firing, will perform a 20s, 180íroll to a heads-up position, travelling at ...