CAPE CANAVERAL, FL (August 25, 2011) – Earlier this month, the new Space Florida Board of Directors held their first meeting of the 2011-2012 fiscal year at the Renaissance Tampa International Plaza hotel.
During the board meeting, Space Florida’s 2012 budget and numerous other projects were approved for the coming year. The meeting was held in conjunction with Enterprise Florida, due to the fact that the two organizations work closely together and now share many of the same board members.
SWF PR — While the advent of emerging space nations certainly creates opportunities, it also raises new concerns. Balancing these new sets of opportunities and risks requires an understanding of the rationale and development paths of all space actors, in particular, emerging space nations.
A new examination of six emerging space nations (South Africa, Brazil, and India compared against Nigeria, Venezuela, and Malaysia) reveals opportunities and challenges to space sustainability.
Learning his return to Earth from the International Space Station might be delayed for possibly up to two months, NASA astronaut Ron Garan sings the blues from the Soyuz spacecraft that will take him home. Eventually. It’s all in good fun, so enjoy. (Note: Since Ron and the Expedition 28 crew made this video during some weekend downtime, return options have been under review by NASA). The members of Expedition […]
An update from Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos via the company’s website:
“Three months ago, we successfully flew our second test vehicle in a short hop mission, and then last week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet. A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle. Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We’re already working on our next development vehicle.
Video Caption: We have an incredibly hard working team at Moon Express who pulled us through some tough challenges over the last few months. There were many days that just didn’t end… but it all paid off with a number of successful technical milestones, including the delivery of our Mini-Radar data package to NASA and our first free flight of the Lander Test Vehicle, sporting new hardware and software developed […]
An interesting update from Andy Pasztor at the Wall Street Journal on Blue Origin’s Aug. 24 test flight:
An unmanned spaceship funded by Internet billionaire Jeff Bezos suffered a major failure during a recent test flight, according to U.S. government and industry officials, highlighting the dramatic risks of private space ventures.
Team LegoAces. (Credit: Team LegoAces)
PLAYA VISTA, CA (August 31, 2011) —The X PRIZE Foundation and LEGO Group announced today winners of the MoonBots 2.0: A Google Lunar X PRIZE LEGO® MINDSTORMS® Challenge. The competition challenges teams of students ages 9 to 17 to design, program and build robots that simulate lunar missions mirroring the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE international competition for privately funded teams to build a rover to land on and explore the Moon’s surface.
The Grand Prize winner, Team LegoAces (Granville, OH), earned a VIP trip to LEGOLAND Florida® in October. Team Just Ducky (Woodbury, MN) was awarded second place and third place went to Team Lunar Lords (Bellevue, WA). All three teams will receive free team registration for the 2012 FIRST® robotics season.
Huntsville, Ala. (Sept. 2, 2011) – The Dynetics-led Rocket City Space Pioneers (RCSP) Google Lunar X PRIZE team has successfully completed a critical NASA contract milestone by delivering rocket engine hot-fire test data on Dynetics’ newly developed “green” rocket engine. NASA, through its Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) contract, selected Dynetics in October to supply flight component data to enable the development of future human and robotic lander vehicles and exploration systems.
The RCSP team conducted testing on a new, non-toxic “green” hydrogen peroxide-kerosene bi-propellant rocket thruster developed by Dynetics to meet the performance needs of the team’s robotic lander propulsion subsystem. The new rocket thruster was successfully tested in flight relevant environments, providing volumes of data for NASA on the design and performance of this technology. Teammates at Draper Laboratories developed initial guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) precision landing algorithms to provide testing profiles, and Teledyne Brown Engineering provided thermal analysis inputs used to optimize the design.
The Wall Street Journal visits Spaceport America in New Mexico.
NRC PR – WASHINGTON – Although NASA’s meteoroid and orbital debris programs have responsibly used their resources, the agency’s management structure has not kept pace with increasing hazards posed by abandoned equipment, spent rocket bodies, and other debris orbiting the Earth, says a new report by the National Research Council. NASA should develop a formal strategic plan to better allocate resources devoted to the management of orbital debris. In addition, removal of debris from the space environment or other actions to mitigate risks may be necessary.
The complexity and severity of the orbital debris environment combined with decreased funding and increased responsibilities have put new pressures on NASA, according to the report. Some scenarios generated by the agency’s meteoroid and orbital debris models show that debris has reached a “tipping point,” with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures, the report notes. In addition, collisions with debris have disabled and even destroyed satellites in the past; a recent near-miss of the International Space Station underscores the value in monitoring and tracking orbital debris as precisely as possible.
