Archive for the ‘Space’ Category
Cool photo:
Lt. Col. Gabriel Green and Capt. Zachary Bartoe patrol the airspace in an F-15E Strike Eagle as the Space Shuttle Atlantis launches May 14, 2010, at Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Colonel Green is the 333rd Fighter Squadron commander and Captain Bartoe is a 333rd FS weapons system officer. Both aircrew members are assigned to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C. (U.S. Air Force photo/Capt. John Peltier)
Glitch shows how much military relies on GPS – Air Force Times.
A problem that rendered as many as 10,000 U.S. military GPS receivers useless for days is a warning to safeguard a system that enemies would love to disrupt, a defense expert says.
The Air Force has not said how many weapons, planes or other systems were affected or whether any were in use in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the problem, blamed on incompatible software, highlights the military's reliance on the Global Positioning System and the need to protect technology that has become essential for protecting troops, tracking vehicles and targeting weapons.
And it’s not just the military that has become dependent upon it.
Plans to begin technology development for a reusable booster system to replace its existing expendable launch vehicles beyond 2025 are being finalized by the U.S. Air Force.
With the Air Force facing escalating costs on the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program, the new system offers the promise of cutting launch costs more than 50% by combining a reusable first stage with expendable upper stages. The booster would take off vertically and return to a runway landing at the launch site.
This sort of thing has been discussed to death dozens of times, hasn’t it? Doesn’t every discussion end along the lines of “adding all that crap to the booster means that only the crap can be boosted and there’s no room for payload”?
AF robotic space plane eyes Thursday launch
X-37B
It will launch from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas V and spend nine months in orbit before landing at Vandenberg.
UPDATE (12/4/2010): The X-37B landed yesterday at Vandenberg. Check out this post for images.
NASA: Space shuttles may stay on until 2011
Despite progress in its effort to retire the space shuttle fleet, NASA is now unlikely to meet its initial September deadline, according to a government report released yesterday.
The 32-page report from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General concludes that it will probably take NASA until the first or second quarter of 2011 to complete the last of the four remaining shuttle flights. The report was released just prior to today’s meeting of NASA directors at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a flight readiness review of the space shuttle Discovery’s upcoming mission to the International Space Station, which has a launch date of April 5.
The inspector general’s report said that while the space agency continues efforts to complete the four remaining shuttle flights by Sept. 30, fulfilling that plan is unlikely.
With the torpedoes recently fired into the belly of the foundering Constellation program, this could almost be seen as good news for the wreckage of the US manned spaceflight program.
TDRS-1
NASA Retires Pioneering Tracking And Data Relay Satellite
After a rocky start and then a stellar 26-year performance, NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite – 1 (TDRS-1) is scheduled for decommissioning on October 28.
Communications equipment that links TDRS-1 to the ground has failed and without this capability it can no longer relay science data and spacecraft telemetry to ground stations located at the White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, N.M., and on Guam.
Insecurity in Space
Space once was ours. Then came the space junk, collisions, and dangerous interlopers.
The recent expedition of space shuttle Atlantis on a major Hubble repair mission illustrated the dangers also.
Traveling up to the Hubble telescope’s altitude required transit through a major debris field. As Palowitch described it, the worst debris in LEO is right in the Hubble’s band. The known debris put Atlantis “at a one-in-200 chance of being totally destroyed by impact in flight,” he said. When it landed, Atlantis was pockmarked with more debris hits than any other shuttle in history.
Several factors contributed to the pummeling. First was the transit through debris fields. Then, once in position, the complex repairs required Atlantis to spend more time in the junk-strewn orbit.
More space blogging below!
Fifty years ago this month, the United States stepped briskly into the ICBM era, and it has never stepped out. Three long-range, liquid-fueled Atlas D missiles armed with nuclear warheads went on full combat alert at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., on Oct. 31, 1959.
A lot of great footage in this video:
UPDATE: Plus: United Launch Alliance’s 600th Atlas Mission
Space Aged: 10 Spacecraft from Decades Past That Are Still Ticking
Slideshow of oldies but goodies.
The moon-landing-hoax believers will never be convinced by anything, let alone something as easily faked as photographic evidence. After all, if NASA faked the moon landings in 1969, just think what they can fake today. Even when an Indian probe confirms it. Whatever.
Apollo 12 landing site photographed by the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter
Expedition 20 flight engineer Nicole Stott participates in the STS-128 mission's first spacewalk as construction and maintenance continue on the International Space Station. During the six-hour, 35-minute spacewalk, Stott and astronaut Danny Olivas (out of frame) removed an empty ammonia tank from the station's truss and temporarily stowed it on the station's robotic arm. Olivas and Stott also retrieved the European Technology Exposure Facility and Materials International Space Station Experiment from the Columbus laboratory module and installed them on Discovery's payload bay for return. Image Credit: NASA
Murdoc watched part of this on the tele. The daughter thought it was cool that a girl was out there getting it done.
Ares I-X Test Vehicle:
Standing tall at its fully assembled height of 327 feet, the Ares I-X is one of the largest rockets ever processed in the Vehicle Assembly Building's High Bay 3, Super Stack 5 at the Kennedy Space Center. Ares I-X rivals the height of the Apollo Program's 364-foot-tall Saturn V. Five super stacks make up the rocket's upper stage that is integrated with the four-segment solid rocket booster first stage. Ares I-X is the test vehicle for the Ares I, which is part of the Constellation Program to return humans to the moon and beyond. The Ares I-X flight test currently is targeted for Oct. 31. Image Credit: NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis
To the Moon – with extreme engineering
The Lunar Orbiter astonishes even today. It had to take pictures, scan and develop the film on board, and broadcast it successfully back to earth. Naturally, the orbiter had to provide its own power, orient itself without intervention from ground control, and maintain precise temperature conditions and air pressure for the film processing, and protect itself from solar radiation and cosmic rays – all within severe size and weight constraints.
