 A Russian spacecraft docked with the International Space Station today, safely delivering the Expedition 13 crew of Pavel Vinogradov and Jeff Williams, along with Brazilian Space Agency astronaut Marcos Pontes. Guided by its automated KURS docking system, the Soyuz TMA-8 spacecraft linked up with the nadir port of the space station’s Zarya module while orbiting above China, close to the Kazakh, Russian, and Mongolian borders. The docking came exactly on schedule, at 8:19 am on Saturday Moscow time, 11:19 pm Friday night EST. Vinogradov and Williams will remain on the station for a six month stay. Pontes, the first Brazilian to fly in space, will return to Earth with the Expedition 12 space station crew in their Soyuz TMA-7 spacecraft on April 9.
 SpaceX have posted new still photos as well as video of last weekend’s failed Falcon launch. The views don’t show the rocket crash back into the sea, but what they do show is the beginnings of a beautiful launch. Alas, that day it was not to be, but there will be other days for Falcon, and I for one can’t wait to see SpaceX try again.
[Update]
In this recent NPR interview, SpaceX VP of business development Gwynne Shotwell explains that, though the official investigation has yet to release its findings, the company does know the cause of the Falcon launch failure. The interviewer in this piece is nursing an almost total misunderstanding of SpaceX’s approach to disclosure and public openness, but it’s well worth listening to for what Gwynne has to say:
The cause of the launch mishap was a “procedural problem,” “not an issue associated with the vehicle itself” and one that has a “very easy fix.” The next launch will likely be TacSat-1, in “three to five or six months from now.” That’s the amount of time needed to “pull the [TacSat] team back together, bring the satellite out of storage and get it ready for launch.” But SpaceX will also be taking advantage of that extra time to “go through, carefully, every other vehicle subsystem to make sure that the probability of success is as high as we can possibly make it on the next flight.”
 A Russian Soyuz rocket soared skyward from Baikonur Cosmodrome yesterday, carrying the next long duration crew for the International Space Station and a Brazilian astronaut who will return home with the current station crew in early April. US astronaut Jeff Williams, Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov, and Brazilian Marcos Pontes are now safely in orbit. Their Soyuz TMA-8 spacecraft will spend the two days following the launch matching orbits with the space station, where they are scheduled to dock on Friday at 11:19 p.m. EST (April 1, 0419 GMT). NASA TV will cover the docking live, from 10:00 p.m. EST (April 1, 0300 GMT).
Murphy, Ken
“25 Good Reasons to go to the Moon”
03/29/06
Selenian Boondocks
04/17/2006
Space News
 The MarsDrive Consortium, has announced a contest for the development of a Mars sample return mission and in-situ rocket propellant manufacturing.
The cash prize is for a paper study. In addition to the cash award, first prize will include an all expenses paid trip to the 26th Annual International Space Development Conference where the author may present the winning design.
With the Crew Exploration Vehicle grabbing most of the attention lately, U.S. Space News has some graphical data on the CLV just posted March 28th that deserves a look-see.
 Oh by the way, there was a Solar Eclipse today. Yeah, I missed the boat too.
A view of the shadow passing as seen from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
NASA TV provided live coverage of the event. Yeah I missed that too.
On their website they have video highlights and still images.
 Russian engineers are making final preparations for the launch that will carry the Expedition Thirteen crew and Brazilian astronaut Marcus Pontes to the International Space Station today, having rolled their Soyuz TMA-8 rocket to its launch pad on Tuesday.
READ MORE…
 Andrews Space has announced two new contracts in the last couple of weeks. One is an award from DARPA to test components of their in flight propellant generation system, ACES. the other is to test thermal protection concepts for a ballute re-entry system, which they have been studying under an SBIR contract for NASA Dryden.
READ MORE…
Stewart, Ian
“Ride the Celestial Subway”
New Scientist Magazine
03/27/2006
Publisher’s Web Site
 NASA senior management announced a decision Monday to reinstate the Dawn mission, a robotic exploration of two major asteroids. Dawn had been canceled because of technical problems and cost overruns.
READ MORE…
 I just absolutely had to link to this piece by Ben Bova. He says it infinitely better than I could hope to. Scientists are howling loudly at the cuts their projects are facing as a result of the VSE. Bova argues eloquently that they are (not for the first time) completely missing the point.
 Before the Columbia disaster, NASA was under intense schedule pressure to complete the International Space Station. Today they find themselves struggling to fly an aging and fragile space shuttle that has been placed squarely in the critical path for the new exploration vision. Two recent newspaper articles provide a sobering comparison of NASA’s actions then and now.
READ MORE…
The Washington Post has a good article about NASA’s current thinking when it comes to building a base on the moon, and the challenges that we will face when we next venture there.
I do take mild exception to this statement by Pascal Lee:
“The lunar base is not a ‘colony,’ ” Lee said. ” ‘Colonization’ implies populating the place, and that’s not on the plate. This is a research outpost.”
Not because of what he says - it’s perfectly reasonable that an early lunar base should be a research outpost. It’s what he doesn’t say, which is that, in the longer term, ‘colonization’ (or settlement if you prefer a gentler term), is exactly what our spacefaring efforts to the Moon and Mars should be about.
Kimbal Musk relates an amazing story at kwajelein atoll and rockets. When Falcon 1 crashed into the sea, its Air Force Academy payload was clearly unimpressed with the change in destination, and decided to find a better resting place than the ocean floor:
“Amazingly, the satellite was thrown high into the air when the rocket impacted and came crashing down through the roof of our machine shop, landing mostly intact on the floor! One helluva’ return trip.”
He goes on to say that the hole in the machine shop roof was the only damage sustained on the entire island.
 The maiden Falcon 1 rocket launch failed because of a fire caused by a fuel leak, according to an update released by SpaceX founder Elon Musk on the company’s website earlier today.
READ MORE…
Today’s inaugural Falcon 1 launch has ended in failure. Few details are available, but at this stage it looks like the vehicle veered of course after less than a minute of powered flight. Given that about 50 per cent of first launches of new rockets end in failure, there was always a chance that this would happen.
A new paradigm of cheap rocket launch is not going to come easy. Some detractors will point at Falcon’s loss, and say it proves that SpaceX’s approach doesn’t work. It doesn’t prove that. It doesn’t prove anything, except that new rocket designs often need debugging.
Our sympathies are with the SpaceX team, who have worked so hard to reach this point. I’m sure that once they have had time to gather their thoughts, they will press on, learn what they need to learn, and fly again.
Per ardua, ad astra.
Follow the launch in our Mission Status Log.
One of the first images from MRO’s HiRISE camera: Craters with parts that look scooped out show strange debris piles in the centers. Craters only 20 feet wide (about 7 meters) are very sharp and clear. Strange channels with various levels of some type of flows are showing up in some images. Credit: NASA/LPL
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Yahoo!!! Okay sorry for that, it was not a plug for the website site by that name, just my reaction to the news via Space.Com regarding the images.
Additional information available at:
NASA’s MRO Mission Page
(SpaceX press release - follow the launch at our Mission Status Log)
El Segundo, CA – On Friday, March 24 at 1 p.m. California time (9 p.m. GMT), the Falcon 1 rocket will begin its journey to orbit, accelerating to 17,000 mph (25 times the speed of sound) in less than ten minutes. Designed from the ground up by SpaceX, Falcon 1 is a two stage rocket powered by liquid oxygen and purified, rocket grade kerosene. On launch day, Falcon 1 will launch into the history books for several notable reasons:
It will be the first privately developed, liquid fueled rocket to reach orbit and the world’s first all new orbital rocket in over a decade.
The main engine of Falcon 1 (Merlin) will be the first all new American hydrocarbon engine for an orbital booster to be flown in forty years and only the second new American booster engine of any kind in twenty-five years.
The Falcon 1 is the only rocket flying 21st century avionics, which require a small fraction of the power and mass of other systems.
It will be the world’s only semi-reusable orbital rocket apart from the Shuttle.
Most importantly, Falcon 1, priced at $6.7 million, will provide the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any launch vehicle in the world, despite receiving a design reliability rating equivalent to that of the best launch vehicles currently flying in the United States.
The maiden flight will take place from the Kwajalein Atoll of the Marshall Islands. The customer for this mission is DARPA and the Air Force. The payload will be FalconSat-2, part of the Air Force Academy’s satellite program that will measure space plasma phenomena, which can adversely affect space-based communications, including GPS and other civil and military communications. The target orbit is 400 km X 500 km (just above the International Space Station) at an inclination of 39 degrees.
 The inagural launch of Space Exploration Technologies’ Falcon 1 rocket has ended with the loss of the vehicle. A fuel leak appears to have caused a fire that burned through part of the helium pneumatic system, causing the first stage engine to shut down prematurely and the rocket to crash into the ocean.
Given that about 50 per cent of first launches of new rockets end in failure, there was always a chance that this would happen. Our sympathies are with the SpaceX team, who have worked so hard to reach this point. I’m sure that once they have had time to gather their thoughts, they will press on, learn what they need to learn, and fly again.
READ MORE…
[More from SpaceX:]
We had a great static fire today. Falcon was held down for almost three seconds of thrust (T+0.5s), part of which was under autonomous thrust vector control. All systems were green and no aborts were triggered.
Unless we discover something negative after a detailed data analysis, launch will happen on Thursday at 1p.m. California time.
—Elon
[Update:]
SpaceX have posted a short video of the latest static engine firing on their updates page. They say that: “More details about launch time and date will be posted shortly.”
(via Kwajalein Atoll and Rockets)
SpaceX have today performed a short static test firing of the the first stage engine on their maiden Falcon 1 rocket. This is the second of two planned tests before the next launch attempt. The first test took place last weekend, and uncovered some minor issues with ground support equipment that pushed the second test back to today.
According to Kimbal Musk, brother of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the static firing appears to have gone well. Kimbal was not at the launch control center on Kwajalein atoll for this test, however, and so has yet to receive a definitive report.
Assuming all has gone well, Falcon 1 will launch later this week, with opportunities on both Thursday and Friday at 1pm Pacific time.
Elon, speaking prior to today’s test:
“The countdown and static fire this weekend went smoothly, except that we had a ground helium supply quick disconnect check itself prematurely during engine startup, preventing the engine from reaching full thrust. The next day, we had a glitch with one of our vehicle video cameras. Neither are difficult to fix, but they pushed back our timeline by a few days.
We are planning on another static fire today at about 4pm (CA time), followed by a 1pm launch on March 23 or March 24, provided no issues are detected following analysis of the static fire data.
Another lesson learned for Falcon 9 development: we will test the first flight unit with its actual flight launch mount on our big test stand in Texas. When development is done, the launch mount and the vehicle will be shipped together to the launch site. For Falcon 1, the test stand was quite different from the launch stand, because its primary purpose was engine development of Merlin. That forced us to do a lot of launch mount debugging, such as the helium QD problem, in Kwajalein.”
Mid-march saw the release of the last of the six DVDs in the Planetes anime series. These are adapted from the manga series of the same name.
One of the things that has always fascinated me is the culture of space. This series of 26 episodes touches on many of the universal themes of what it means for humanity to expand into space (and should it even do so?), as well as the impact on individuals, from old school spacers to rookie debris collectors to Lunarians.
The setting is the year 2075. Debris has continued to gather in cislunar space, and the corporations operating in space must work to keep the spacelanes clear, even if the activity doesn’t contribute to the bottom line. For this reason Technora Corp.’s Debris Removal Section gets half the staffing, half the budget, half the equipment and half the resources it needs to properly operate. Thus are they known derogatorily as the Half-Section, a band of misfits.
The story ranges from the garbage dump of LEO, to the Moon, and by the end of the series sets out for Jupiter on the Von Braun spacecraft in search of more sources of Helium-3 and other portable forms of energy. A strong effort is made to abide by the rules of physics, and when there are exterior shots of space craft maneuvering in space or people falling on the Moon it’s done in silence (or with musical accompaniment). There’s none of the booms, thuds or whooshes that you normally see with Americanized space presentations.
The human elements are profound and affecting, with violent clashes of ideals and ideologies. Love, in all three of its classical forms, is explored in great depth, and told in a compelling and engaging manner. Terrorism and its human toll are touched upon. Some episodes are an emotional roller-coaster. Hachirota Hoshino (aka Hachimaki) is a young man driven by motivations he doesn’t understand to be at the forefront of exploration. Ai Tanabe is an emotional young woman constantly preaching about love. Yuri lost his wife in a debris accident years ago, and seeks something she lost in the disaster. Fee is a chain-smoking, driven professional serious about keeping the spacelanes clear of the destructive debris. Claire is a highly capable young woman from a very poor country trying to get the professional respect she merits. There’s a whole array of secondary characters, like Nono, the 12 year-old Lunarian who teaches Hachimaki that people have different meanings for ‘home’, or the Lunar Flying Squirrel ninja squad who provide a goofy if fun episode that does make one wonder what kind of martial arts would be possible on the Moon.
As custodian of the Lunar Library I see a lot of stuff, very little of which is top-notch quality. ‘Planetes’ is definitely the closest example I’ve seen to date of a mythological epic for space. Taken as a whole it’s something akin to an ‘Odyssey’ for our times. While the story told in the anime is slightly different from the one in the manga books, especially with regards to plot devices, both are very fulfilling experiences. I whole-heartedly give each a Full Moon at perigee.
Would You like to know more?
DVD
Vol.1
Vol.2
Vol.3
Vol.4
Vol.5
Vol.6
manga
This item has gotten a bit of play around the blogosphere, but I thought I’d chime in on it too, in case someone out there missed it and of course so I can add my two coppers worth of comments.
On the heels of the success of the Swedish-built, ESA, Smart-1 probe, a Swedish scientist is promoting plans he has developed for a lunar colony.
Dr. Niklas Järvstråt, a well-reputed material scientist, devised a plan to put a colony on the lunar surface already a decade ago, long before President Bush revealed his grand plans for a moon base. Now Dr. Järvstråt and the Swedish SMART-Centre has assembled an international consortium to take these initial plans off the drawing board and turn them into reality. The consortium consists of over 50 partners, including industries such as the Japanese Shimizu Corporation and Orbitech, a US NASA-contractor, and academic institutions such as Ecole des Mines, France and Cranfield University, England.
I’m always for the concept of “the more the merrier…” when it comes to researching the steps needed to get back to the moon. That is, as long as we don’t simply get 50 solid studies of step one and never get to step two.
With its heavy emphasis on resource utilization this project is definitely something I’ll be keeping an eye on.
A brief note on US Space News’ website announces the official end of communications attempts with the Pioneer 10 space probe.
One final attempt was made to locate Pioneer’s 10 signal on March 3-5, 2006 but failed to receive a resonse detection of a carrier signal from the spacecraft.
Pioneer 10 is estimated to be over 8 billion miles from earth where its journey started over 34 years ago. However, the radioisotope power supply has decayed to the point it can no longer send postcards of its trip back home. The last very weak signal received, was on 23 January 2003.
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