Another fine day for Russia’s space program. A Proton crashes with three GLONASS satellites.
From Roscosmos:
An emergency commission led by Deputy Head of Roscosmos A.P.Lopatina has been created and begun its work.
AUTHOR
Doug Messier
WASHINGTON, July 2, 2013 (NASA PR) — NASA Tuesday issued a Request for Information (RFI) that will help agency officials better understand current plans in the U.S. commercial space industry for a robotic lunar landing capability. The RFI will assist NASA in assessing U.S. industry’s interest in partnerships to develop a robotic lander that could enable commercial and agency missions.
The RFI is available at: https://go.nasa.gov/17Pk12S
The K10 rover on NASA’s Roverscape in California. The robot has just been manipulated by an astronaut in space to roll out an antenna film that CU-Boulder researchers would like to deploy on the far side of the moon. (Credit: Jack Burns)
BOULDER, Colo. (UC Boulder PR) — An astronaut orbiting Earth in the International Space Station has remotely directed a NASA rover in California to unfurl an “antenna film” that scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder are developing for use on the unexplored far side of the moon.
When astronaut Chris Cassidy used a Space Station computer to pilot the robot across a mock lunar surface at NASA’s Ames Research Center on June 17, he demonstrated for the first time that an astronaut in an orbiting spacecraft could successfully control a robot in real time on a planetary surface. The technique could have future applications for humans visiting Mars, an asteroid or the moon.
At Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, construction workers continue to remove the flame trench deflector that sits below and between the left and right crawlerway tracks. (Credit: NASA/Jim Grossman)
By Linda Herridge
NASA’s Kennedy Space Center
For the first time since NASA’s Apollo-era rockets and space shuttles lifted off on missions from Launch Complex 39 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, one of the launch pads is undergoing extensive upgrades to support the agency’s 21st century space launch complex.
At launch pad B, construction workers are removing the legacy flame deflector that sits below and between the left and right pad surface crawlerway track panels, along with Apollo-era bricks from both walls of the flame trench. A contract to perform the work was awarded earlier this year to Vanguard Contractors in Paducah, Ky.
A mockup of the Lynx Cub carrier, which will take experiments to space. (Credit: U.S. Rocket Academy)
For those planning to attend the Space Hacker Workshop in Dallas later on July 20-21, the Early Bird tickets expire on July 4. After that date, ticket prices will rise by $10 to $99.
You can register at spacehackerdfw.eventbrite.com.
At the two-day workshop, citizen scientists and hardware hackers will learn how to do “space on the cheap”. Participants at the workshop will learn how they can build and fly experiments in space, and even fly in space as citizen astronauts, through the Citizens in Space program.
Washington, D.C. (CSF PR) — Dr. Steven Collicott has been named the new chair of the Suborbital Applications Researchers Group (SARG) following Dr. Alan Stern, who has stepped down after the completion of his term as the founding chairman. In addition, Dr. Makenzie Lystrup has been named vice-chair of the committee. Dr. Collicott is an experimentalist in fluid dynamics, and is currently a professor at Purdue University in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Dr. Lystrup is a planetary astronomer, and the Space Sciences Business Development Manager at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.
Some witnesses filmed this from a few miles away. You can see the entire, doomed flight.
Credit: Ken Brown
The guessing game has started up again here in Mojave with the perennial question: When will SpaceShipTwo fly next?
Artist’s conception of SpaceX’s Dragon in a propulsive landing. (Credit: SpaceX)
HAWTHORNE, Calif. (NASA PR) — Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, Calif., recently completed two milestones for NASA’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiative, which is intended to make commercial human spaceflight services available for government and commercial customers.
These were the fifth and sixth milestones for SpaceX, a partner in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP). The company is on track to complete all 14 of its CCiCap milestones by mid-2014.
Aviation Week reports that European space officials will spend the summer reviewing the prospects of NASA’s asteroid retrieval mission even as the proposal struggles to gain support in Congress: Jean Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency (ESA), told Bolden he has set up a multi-agency working group headed by ESA human-spaceflight chief Thomas Reiter “tasked to elaborate a coherent approach with regard to your new initiative.” Representatives […]