IRVINE STUDENTS ARE ON A MISSION TO LAUNCH A SATELLITE - It's a new kind of space race, 21st century style. More than 100 students from five Irvine high schools and a dozen more from a local middle school are on a mission named Irvine01, a yearlong collaboration to engineer, launch and place an operational nanosatellite in orbit. The Irvine students would be the first high schoolers in the country to accomplish it. The goal is to send a 4-by-4-inch device known as a CubeSat into low Earth orbit for the first in a series of missions. It is designed to carry a camera and a solar panel propulsion system and collect data such as temperatures and the satellite's speed, direction, location and altitude. The launch is planned for March 2017.   More
(Source: Los Angeles Times - Mar 26)

SPACEX LOADS INFLATABLE HABITAT FOR LAUNCH TO THE SPACE STATION - Putting balloons in outer space may not seem like the best idea on the surface, but it's exactly what's about to happen. On April 8, SpaceX is scheduled to launch its uncrewed Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station, and among the various supplies in tow will be an inflatable space habitat called the BEAM designed by Bigelow Aerospace. Once up in orbit, the BEAM habitat will be attached to the space station and inflated with oxygen and expand from its 8-feet wide packed form into a new room with 565 cubic feet of volume.    More
(Source: Popular Science - Mar 26)

DMSP-19 WEATHER SATELLITE DEAD AFTER AIR FORCE ENDS RECOVERY EFFORT - The Air Force has stopped trying to recover a two-year-old weather satellite after operators lost the ability to command the spacecraft last month, an Air Force spokesman said March 24. Operators at the 50th Space Wing at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado have “ceased all recovery efforts” of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 19 satellite, Andy Roake, a spokesman for Air Force Space Command, said in a March 24 email to SpaceNews. NOAA satellite operators unexpectedly lost the ability to command the Air Force’s DMSP Flight 19 satellite on Feb. 11.   More
(Source: SpaceNews - Mar 25)

ULA REVIEWING EARLY SHUTDOWN BY ATLAS V ENGINE - The main engine of United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket shut down six seconds earlier than planned Tuesday night, but the glitch did not prevent the rocket from delivering an International Space Station resupply mission to its intended orbit, the company confirmed Thursday. ULA said the premature shutdown resulted from the kerosene-fueled RD-180 engine burning with a higher than normal ratio of liquid oxygen, for reasons now under review. To make up for the booster's early cutoff, the rocket's Centaur upper stage RL10C engine, provided by Aerojet Rocketdyne, performed an extended burn before dropping off Orbital ATK's unmanned Cygnus cargo ship in an orbit about 150 miles above the planet.   More
(Source: Florida Today - Mar 25)

SOYUZ LAUNCHER PUTS RUSSIAN MILITARY SPY SATELLITE IN ORBIT - A Russian military spacecraft with a high-resolution digital mapping camera is in orbit Thursday after a successful ascent aboard a Soyuz rocket. The Soyuz-2.1a rocket lifted off at 0942 GMT (5:42 a.m. EDT; 12:42 p.m. local time) from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, a military spaceport about 500 miles (800 kilometers) north of Moscow, according to a statement released by the Russian Ministry of Defense. The launch went normally, Russian defense officials said, and the rocket deployed its secretive payload in orbit less than 10 minutes after liftoff.   More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Mar 25)

RUSSIAN GEO-IK-1 GEODETIC SATELLITE TO BE LAUNCHED IN MAY - A geodetic satellite Geo-IK-2 of the Russian defense ministry is scheduled to be launched in May 2016, the Izvestia daily said on Thursday citing Nikolai Testoyedov, the director general and general designer of Academician M.F. Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems, a leading Russian provider of satellites for a wide range of uses. "The launch is scheduled for May but the exact day will depend on the final technological cycles," Testoyedov said. "The spacecraft is ready. It has been tested and is now at our enterprise. It will be shipped to the space center after the state commission issues a relevant resolution."    More
(Source: TASS - Mar 24)

PH MICROSATELLITE DIWATA-1 HEADS TO INT'L SPACE STATION - A routine resupply mission for the International Space Station (ISS) made history for the Philippines after it carried the country's first-ever homegrown microsatellite, the Diwata-1. The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, carrying the Cygnus resupply cargo ship, lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Tuesday, March 22 (Wednesday, March 23 Philippine time), with the Diwata-I microsatellite forming part of its 3 1/2-ton payload. The rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral at 11:05 pm local time (11:05 am in Manila).   More
(Source: Rappler - Mar 24)

PRIVATE CYGNUS SPACECRAFT BLASTS OFF WITH NASA CARGO IN STUNNING NIGHT LAUNCH - A commercial Cygnus cargo ship launched into space late Tuesday (March 22), streaking into the Florida night sky on a mission to deliver a record-breaking load of NASA experiments and gear to the International Space Station. The Orbital ATK-built Cygnus blasted off atop an Atlas V rocket at 11:05 p.m. EDT (0305 GMT) in a smooth liftoff under the light of a nearly-full moon from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here. The cargo ship, filled with more than 3.5 tons of supplies, is expected to arrive at the space station early Saturday (March 26). This flight is the second for Orbital ATK's enhanced Cygnus craft on an Atlas V rocket provided by the United Launch Alliance.   More
(Source: Space.com - Mar 23)

HAMS IN SPACE: PROJECT OSCAR - In early December 1961, a United States Air Force rocket took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California carrying a special payload. The main payload was a Corona surveillance satellite, but tucked just aft of that spacecraft was a tiny package of homebrew electronics stuffed into something the looked like a slice of cake. What was in that package and how it came to tag along on a top-secret military mission is the story of OSCAR 1, the world’s first amateur radio satellite.   More
(Source: Hackaday.com - Mar 23)

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