International Space Station
ESA Unable To Secure Commitment to Station Extension
Space News
The European Space Agency (ESA) was unable to win its member governments’ approval of NASA’s proposed five-year extension of operations of the international space station because of an unrelated dispute over financial support for Europe’s Arianespace commercial launch services consortium, ESA and European government officials said….
December 24, 2010 – Dextre, the Canadian Space Agency’s robotic handyman aboard the International Space Station (ISS), successfully passed his final exam yesterday and is now officially certified for duty.
While riding on the end of Canadarm2, Dextre performed a series of steps to remove a 442-kg storage box known as a cargo transport carrier (a generic platform for ISS cargo and payloads) and relocate it to another worksite a short distance away. The move was necessary to free up the worksite for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, scheduled for delivery on STS-134 (the final Space Shuttle flight) in 2011.
JPL ANNOUNCEMENT
JPL, in coordination with the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), present the 23rd Annual High-Tech Small Business Conference on Tuesday, March 1 and Wednesday, March 2, 2011.
The conference affords small businesses the opportunity to meet purchasing and technical representatives from major corporations and Federal Agencies during the Marketplace Forum to discuss contract opportunities.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 on the pad at Cape Canaveral. (Credit: Chris Thompson/SpaceX)
SpaceX’s success in launching two Falcon 9 rockets and recovering a Dragon capsule from orbit last year has captured the attention of foreign space officials, who are eager for the services the company can provide and believe that valuable lessons can be learned from how the California-based start-up operates. Simonetta di Pippo, ESA’s director of human spaceflight, said:
“SpaceX certainly got our attention. This is a kind of revolution. We now know they can make it, and so we have to concentrate, on the government side, on new developments. We cannot just stick with our ATV now that the commercial sector is able to do this. Having visited the SpaceX facilities, I am not surprised by their success. But we need to react to it.â€
Launch Statistics for 2010 (Via Roscosmos) Total Launches: 74 Successes: 70 Failures: 4 Launch Breakdown Russia — 31 launches (42 percent) United States — 15 launches (20.3 percent) China — 15 launches (20.3 percent) ESA (Arianespace) — 6 launches (8.1 percent) India — 3 launches (4 percent) Japan — 2 launches (2.7 percent) South Korea — 1 launch (1.35 percent) Israel — 1 launch (1.35 percent) Launch Failures India — […]
Dragon being recovered in the Pacific. (Credit: SpaceX)
A brief look at developments in commercial space in 2010 with a look ahead, primarily focused on developments in the United States related to the so-called “New Space” sector.
Milestones
Coming Up in 2011
GSLV F06 Failure — Preliminary Findings and Further Steps
ISRO Press Release — December 31, 2010
1. The performance of the GSLV-F06 flight of December 25, 2010 (with GSAT-5P Satellite onboard) was normal up to 47.5 seconds from lift-off. The events leading to the failure got initiated at 47.8 seconds after lift-off. Soon, the vehicle started developing larger errors in its orientation leading to build-up of higher angle of attack and higher structural loads and consequently vehicle broke up at 53.8 seconds from lift-off (as seen visually as well as from the Radars).
As per the Range safety norms, a destruct command was issued from the ground at 64 seconds after lift-off. The flight was hence terminated in the regime of the First Stage itself.
NASA faces a number of technical challenges to overcome for is Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. One can get a good sense of what those obstacles are by looking at the Small Business Innovative Research projects that the agency selected to fund earlier this month.
Below are summaries of the projects that were selected. They are broken down into key phases of the mission: aerocapture, entry, descent and landing; sample collection and surface operations; planetary ascent; and orbital rendezvous with the return vehicle.
An Ariane 5 rocket soars into orbit on Dec. 29, 2010. (Credits: ESA / CNES / Arianespace / Photo Optique vidéo du CSG)
ESA PRESS RELEASE
This evening, an Ariane 5 launcher lifted off from Europe’s Spaceport on a journey to place two telecommunications satellites, Hispasat-1E and Koreasat-6, into their planned transfer orbits. Flight V199 was the sixth Ariane 5 launch of 2010 and the last of the year.
The Las Cruces Sun-News says that incoming New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez can keep Spaceport America on track by leaving its leader in place: Spaceport Authority Director Rick Homans has overseen the steady progress at the facility this past year. With the spaceport on schedule to open in 2011, this would be a poor time to change leadership. Homans, who served as Richardson’s first secretary for Economic Development, has been […]
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev fired RSC Energia’s vice president Vyacheslav Filin and Roskosmos Deputy Head Victor Remishevsky over the Dec. 5 failure of a Proton rocket, which sent three expensive GLONASS navigation satellites to the bottom of the Pacific. The Russian leader also reprimanded Roscosmos Head Anatoly Perminov.
The failure resulted from the fourth stage transfer module being overloaded with fuel, causing the first three stages to under perform. The failure was deeply embarrassing to the Russian government because the three satellites would have completed the 24-satellite GLONASS constellation, allowing it to provide full global coverage for the first time. GLONASS is the Russian equivalent of the American Global Positioning System (GPS).
The Russian government has been eager to recover its Soviet-era space prowess and to prove that it can equal the technological achievements of the United States and other Western powers. Officials are making a major push to install receivers on buses, cars and other vehicles both domestically and aboard. The government is working with India and a number of countries that formed the former Soviet Union to install receivers there.
The California Space Authority has released a fact sheet on the impact of the state’s space sector, which accounts for $37.7 billion in direct revenue and more than over 450,000 jobs overall. Key excerpts below: Economic Impact of California Space Enterprise Totals $93 Billion (1) Supports 450,000 Jobs Provides $23 Billion in Wages Represents 46% of the $81.9 Billion U.S. Space Market Constitutes a Direct Impact of $38 Billion Representing […]
