As the Boeing 787 fleet remains grounded due to safety issues with its lithium-ion batteries, the Joint Strike Fighter program office is not saying whether the issue will prompt any review of the F-35's electrical system, which incorporates a lithium-ion battery that is larger and higher-voltage than the 787's and has a once-per-sortie charge/discharge cycle. Made by a U.S. subsidiary of France's Saft, the JSF battery is the only onboard means of starting the fighter's integrated power pack, which starts the engine.
PARIS — The launch of Europe’s Swarm Earth explorer mission atop a Russian Rokot is on hold as Moscow looks into the cause of a January launch mishap involving the vehicle’s Briz KM upper stage.
PARIS — German aerospace center DLR is moving ahead with its Sharp Edged Flight Experiment (Shefex) hypersonic demonstrator, a project that aims to validate a subscale version of an operational reentry vehicle that could fly at speeds of Mach 20-24. DLR Chairman Johann-Dietrich Woerner says the agency was prepared to sign a contract Jan. 24 with EADS-Astrium Space Transportation GmbH of Bremen, Germany, to begin work on the €20 million ($26 million) project under an agreement that could culminate in a flight test by 2016.
North Korea said last week it would conduct its third nuclear test and continue long-range missile trials designed to reach the U.S. just as the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) was gearing up for a long-awaited return to flight of the system designed to protect the U.S. homeland from such an attack. The vow came a day after the U.N. Security Council agreed to a Washington-backed set of sanctions for Pyongyang in response to its December rocket launch.
HOT-FIRE: Orbital Sciences Corp. engineers are preparing for a static first-stage test of the company’s Antares liquid-fuel rocket next month, with only one wet dress rehearsal to go before the on-pad test at Wallops Flight Facility, Va. A month to six weeks after that test, the company plans to launch an Antares with an instrumented test version of its Cygnus cargo carrier. And if that test flight goes well, first flight of an Antares/Cygnus stack to a grapple-and-berth linkup with the International Space Station in May or June, depending on ISS scheduling.
John Shannon, the NASA human spaceflight manager who restored space shuttle operations after the disastrous Columbia crash, has joined Boeing as its International Space Station program manager. As the shuttle program wound down and the historic orbiters were prepared for museum display, Shannon oversaw secretive exploration-architecture studies in the headquarters Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) mission directorate. Some considered him a logical choice to eventually succeed William Gerstenmaier as the associate administrator for HEO.
DARK PARTNERS: NASA will join the European Space Agency’s effort to learn more about mysterious dark matter and dark energy in the Universe, supplying hardware and scientists to ESA’s planned Euclid mission. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory will deliver 16 advanced infrared detectors and four spares for one of the two instruments planned for Euclid, a space telescope designed to operate at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), following launch in 2020.
BEIJING — China estimates it will account for about 30% of the world’s space launches for the rest of the decade, more than doubling its recent launch pace, according to national space group CASC.
HOUSTON — The International Space Station program is looking to a late March launch of a Russian Soyuz capsule with three crew as its first opportunity to demonstrate a much-abbreviated, four-orbit crew transfer to the orbiting science laboratory, NASA ISS Program Manager Mike Suffredini said Jan. 17. The planned March 27 launch of the Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft would carry NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin.
BEIJING — China will have the capacity to build six to eight large spacecraft a year, including space station modules and big reconnaissance satellites, at an assembly and test plant due for completion in August 2014.
PARIS — Ankara is planning development of a national satellite launch system capable of delivering military and civil spacecraft to orbit, according to Turkish Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz. Following a Jan. 3 meeting of Turkey’s Defense Industry Executive Committee, Yilmaz said the government will enter negotiations with Turkish weapons builder Roketsan Inc. for the early concept design phase of a new launch system “to ensure that military and civilian satellites can be sent into space,” according to a Jan. 3 statement.
Engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center have test-fired a gas generator built from parts originally manufactured for the F-1 first-stage engine that sent men to the Moon on the Saturn V. One reason for the tests is to learn if the old technology can help the planned Space Launch System (SLS) heavy lifter get off the pad for missions beyond low Earth orbit. Some of the engineers on the test series had not been born when the 40-year-old hardware was machined by North American Aviation's Rocketdyne Div.
NASA will pay Bigelow Aerospace $17.8 million to test this subscale inflatable habitat module at the International Space Station, using instruments and station crewmembers to study whether the technology will allow the housing of astronauts and their gear on their way to Mars.
SATELLITE EXPORT: The U.S. Export-Import Bank has authorized an $87.1 million loan guarantee to facilitate the assembly and sale of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Ku-band satellite to Hispasat Canarias, a subsidiary of the Madrid-based Hispasat. The Amazonas-4A satellite is expected to launch in 2014 and occupy Hispasat’s orbital slot over Brazil to provide high-definition television broadcasts to the Americas.
EDWARDS AFB, Calif. — NASA is preparing to flight test a scaled version of a towed-glider air-launch concept that it believes has the potential to “dramatically” reduce the cost of launching payloads into orbit.
