All Space articles – Page 212
-
News
Space Station will be delayed eight months
NASA administrator Daniel Goldin has admitted that the first launches to assemble the International Space Station (ISS) will be delayed by eight months, to June 1998. The admission confirmed a unilateral Russian Space Agency (RSA) announcement of the delay. RSA director Yuri Koptev says that it "-is entirely ...
-
News
Fractured moon
This is a composite of three images of the Minos Linea region of Europa. The colour variations reveal different contaminants in the ice. The icy plains - where no features rise above 30m in height - are fractured by many types of curved and straight faults. The surface of Europa ...
-
News
Galilean gallery
NASA celebrated THE Galileo spacecraft's first year in orbit around the giant planet Jupiter on 7 December, 1996. The highlights among its hundreds of images have not been of the planet itself, however, but of its four giant moons, Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa. These are called the Galilean moons, ...
-
News
Space freezer
Matra Marconi Space has been awarded a $2.5 million contract from the European Space Agency to develop the Minus Eighty-degree Laboratory Freezer (MELFI) for the International Space Station (ISS). Three flight models will be built for NASA and one for Japan. The MELFI, which will become the first European payload ...
-
News
NASA pays Russia $20 million
Amid concerns about Russian delays in the production of hardware for the International Space Station (ISS), NASA has paid Moscow an additional $20 million to support further joint missions aboard the Mir 1 space station in 1998. NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin has called the funding "seed money" to ...
-
News
Loral books Delta 3 launches
Space Systems/Loral has booked five launches of the McDonnell Douglas (MDC) Delta 3 booster from 1999 to 2001, to ensure that it can meet the demands of its communications-satellite customers. Loral has also reserved 16 launches on Arianespace, US/Russian ILS International Launch Services Proton and Japanese H2A boosters in addition ...
-
News
Japan launches M5
Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences launched the first M5 solid-propellant three-stage satellite booster from Kagoshima on 12 February. The 30m-high three-stage vehicle placed the 1,800kg Muses B radio-telescope satellite into orbit. The world's largest radio telescope will be created, combining radio waves detected by the Muses ...
-
News
Kurs docking system fails again
The Russian Soyuz TM25 manned ferry vehicle - launched on 10 February - was docked manually to the Mir space station on 12 February, after the latest failure of the Kurs automatic docking system. The erratic system, which has failed several times previously, is being phased out, and ...
-
News
Danger: space ahead
More research needs to be done to protect space travellers and their spacecraft from cosmic-ray radiation and debris, says the US National Research Council (NRC). Two recent NRC reports indicate that NASA does not yet fully understand the effects of long-term exposure to space radiation, and that agencies worldwide need ...
-
News
TTS moves Heathrow into its Orbit
THOMSON TRAINING & Simulation (TTS) is to relocate its Orbit Flight Training subsidiary from East Midlands Airport to a site near London Heathrow. As part of the move, planned for early 1998, the independent pilot-training centre has sold its two Boeing 737 simulators to Continental and Southwest Airlines. ...
-
News
NASA again curbs funding request-
NASA has kept its budget request for 1998 down to $13.5 billion as it continues to seek lower, but more stable, funding over the next five years. The space agency, which has agreed this approach with the White House, has asked for a $13.7 billion budget this year ...
-
News
-while Russia pledges fresh cash for the ISS
Better news has emerged for Russia's space industry, with the Russian Government pledging an immediate $100 million to pay overdue funds to the International Space Station (ISS) project, and the Khrunichev space-manufacturing concern securing a $36 million loan to support its Proton booster production work. The new cash ...
-
News
Moving production
Italy's Alenia Aerospazio has turned satellite manufacturing on its head at its new Centro Piccoli Satelliti (Small Satellite Centre) in Tiburtina, Rome. In a conventional production centre, satellites are generally built at a central point, with teams of different engineers coming and going, adding new components as they are manufactured. ...
-
News
EAS invitation
The European Space Agency (ESA) has invited the first proposals from European scientists to conduct scientific, technological and applications experiments aboard the Columbus Orbital Facility on the International Space Station in about 2002. Source: Flight International
-
News
Kistler awarded $100 million launch contract
Kistler Aerospace has received a boost for its plans to develop the K-1 satellite launch vehicle with a contract from Space Systems/Loral to launch ten communications satellites into low-Earth orbit between 1999 and 2002 (Flight International, 23-29 October, 1996). The likely payloads are Gloabalstar mobile-communications satellites. Kistler of ...
-
News
Alenia invests in ecology
THE ITALIAN Government has appropriated $40 million funding to allow Alenia Aerospazio's Space division to begin the development of a proposed remote-sensing-satellite system to monitor and manage the ecology and environment of the Mediterranean region. The project has so far also won the support of Spain and Greece. ...
-
News
Higher orbit
The US company CTA Space Systems, of McLean, Virginia, is making its first venture into the lightweight geostationary orbit (GEO) communications satellite market. It is building the Indostar 1 satellite for PT Mediacitra of Indonesia. This first direct broadcast satellite (DBS) dedicated to television transmissions for a single ...
-
News
Third orion
Hughes Space and Communications has been awarded a contract from Orion Asia Pacific to build the ten C-band, 33 Ku-band transponder Orion 3 communications satellite, an HS-601HP model, which will be launched aboard a McDonnell Douglas Delta 3 booster into a 139í position in geostationary orbit in 1998 (Flight International, ...
-
News
Russia worries about space station role
Yuri Koptev, director-general of the Russian Space Agency, has admitted that his country could be ousted from the International Space Station (ISS). The Russian energy module, the first element of the ISS, has been completed and will be launched on 27 November, but other hardware is behind schedule because of ...
-
News
Solar storm is suspected in Telstar 401 satellite loss
NASA scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland, believe that a Solar storm on 6 January created enough geomagnetic activity to knock out the AT&T's Telstar 401 communications satellite in geostationary orbit (GEO) on 11 January. The satellite is a total loss (Flight International, 22-28 January). The ...