HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE SPACEX TO RETURN TO SPACE? - It's not a rhetorical question -- it might be a question of financial life or death. For SpaceX, it's back to square one -- or more precisely, square zero. A little over three weeks ago, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket undergoing pre-launch testing at Cape Canaveral exploded on its launch pad. Along with the rocket, and an on-board Israeli satellite, the explosion sent SpaceX's year-long streak of successful launches up in smoke, resetting it to zero. Now the question is: How long will it take SpaceX to return to space? How long to get back to square one?   More
(Source: Motley Fool - Sep 19)

VOTING FROM THE ISS: VIDEO LINK FOR COSMONAUTS, EMAIL FOR ASTRONAUTS - Anatoly Ivanishin has joined a very select club of voters who have voted from space more than once. The only Russian currently on the ISS, who cast his ballot in Sunday’s parliamentary vote, was also on the space station during the last election in 2011. In a televised broadcast, Ivanishin, who has been on the International Space Station since July, publicly declared that he authorized Oleg Kononenko, deputy leader of the Russian cosmonaut squadron, to cast his vote for him. The two cosmonauts were then connected by a private uplink, in which Ivanishin declared his preference. Kononenko placed his paper ballot into a transparent polling box, placed in the middle of Mission Control, located outside of Moscow.   More
(Source: RT - Sep 19)

ATLAS V DELAYS WORLDVIEW-4 LAUNCH FROM VANDENBERG - The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket scrubbed an attempt to conduct a rare commercial launch on Friday, tasked with orbiting the WorldView-4 Earth-imaging satellite in a mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Launch was then expected to take place during a fourteen-minute window on Sunday. However, that attempt has been scrubbed due to wild fires in the area. The launch of WorldView-4 is the tenth commercial launch for the Atlas V rocket, although six of those launches were made more than ten years ago before the rocket was established as a workhorse for United States government customers.   More
(Source: NASASpaceFlight.com - Sep 18)

RUSSIANS DELAY NEXT SPACE STATION CREW LAUNCH - The next launch of a Soyuz spacecraft carrying three space station fliers has been delayed indefinitely after testing at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan revealed an unspecified technical problem, the Russian space agency announced Saturday. Soyuz MS-02 commander Sergey Ryzhikov, flight engineer Andrey Borisenko and NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough had been scheduled for launch from Baikonur on Sept. 23. After a two-day rendezvous, the spacecraft was expected to dock at the International Space Station on Sept. 25. But in a one-sentence announcement on its webpage early Saturday, Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, said the launch had been delayed “for technical reasons after tests at the Baikonur Space Center.”   More
(Source: CBS News - Sep 18)

VEGA ROCKET HAULS UP QUINTET OF EARTH OBSERVATION SATELLITES - Europe’s solid-fueled Vega booster vaulted away from a launch pad in the South American jungle late Thursday and deftly delivered five sharp-eyed Earth observation satellites into two different orbits for the Peruvian government and a Google-owned mapping company. The satellites will help Peruvian authorities control the nation’s borders and combat drug trafficking, and refresh imagery of cities and landscapes for Google Maps. The PeruSat 1 and four SkySat spacecraft started their journey with a flash as the Vega’s first stage P80 solid-fueled rocket motor ignited right on time at 0143:35 GMT Friday (9:43:35 p.m. EDT; 10:43:35 p.m. French Guiana time) Thursday. The rocket’s exhaust nozzle swiveled to steer the 98-foot-tall (30-meter) booster to the north from the Guiana Space Center, a sprawling facility managed by the French space agency — CNES — at the edge of the Amazon rainforest.   More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Sep 17)

RUSSIA TO OPERATE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION UNTIL 2024 - The International Space Station cost an estimated $ 100 billion with the help of five different space agencies and 26 countries. For all the high-tech hurdles scientists had to clear, the International Space Station does have a shelf life. CCTV America’s Sean Callebs reports. “Right now, the space station is slated for operation through 2024, what happens then, we are not sure,” former U.S. NASA Astronaut Leroy Chiao said. Chiao has spent about 230 days on the ISS as commander.   More
(Source: CCTV-America - Sep 17)

ESA'S GAIA SATELLITE MAPPED A BILLION STARS IN THE MILKY WAY - The European Space Agency launched the Gaia satellite and its one-billion-pixel camera to space back in 2013. Gaia has been mapping the Milky Way ever since, and now the ESA has released a 3D map featuring over a billion stars -- we've never seen 400 million of those before -- based on the data it collected from July 2014 to September 2015. As you can see above, it shows how dense a billion stars look. Don't dwell on those weird lines cocooning the structure too much: they're merely artefacts from the way the satellite scans the galaxy. Team member Timo Prusti said this demonstrates that "it is possible to handle the analysis of a billion stars."    More
(Source: Engadget - Sep 16)

CHINA TO LAUNCH WORLD’S FIRST ‘COLD’ ATOMIC CLOCK IN SPACE ... AND IT’LL STAY ACCURATE FOR A BILLION - The clock is ticking for the world’s most accurate working time piece, the NIST-F2 atomic clock operated by America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. And fittingly, the challenge is coming from the country that invented the mechanical clock almost 1,300 years ago – China. The US clock is a large, heavy machine, standing more than 2.5 metres high, with support facilities filling an entire room, but it is so accurate that it would lose just one second in 300 million years.   More
(Source: South China Morning Post - Sep 16)

CHINA’S TIANGONG 2 SPACE LAB SUCCESSFULLY BLASTS OFF - The next stepping stone in China’s human spaceflight program launched Thursday, delivering a destination and living quarters to orbit for two astronauts preparing for liftoff next month on a planned 33-day expedition, the country’s longest space mission to date. The Tiangong 2 space lab rode a Long March 2F launcher into orbit from the Jiuquan space center in northwestern China’s Gobi Desert. In live video broadcast from Jiuquan by Chinese state television, access platforms and electrical umbilical arms swung away from the 170-foot-tall (52-meter) Long March 2F T2 launcher in the final minutes of the countdown, and eight engines ignited with a puff of orange exhaust at 1404 GMT (10:04 a.m. EDT; 10:04 p.m. Beijing time) Thursday.   More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Sep 15)

Previous Next