Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Abu Dhabi's aabar Investments PJS, have successfully completed the second rocket-powered, supersonic flight of its passenger carrying reusable space vehicle, SpaceShipTwo (SS2).
PARIS — NASA will seek a supplemental role aboard the European Space Agency’s (ESA) next two large astrophysics missions, including a new-generation X-ray telescope and a gravitational wave observatory.
The U.S.-led search for the existence of extraterrestrial life has reached a threshold, primarily through the discovery of alien planets made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, making it theoretically possible that the biosignatures of gases produced by microbial life on planets circling nearby stars could be detected within a decade, experts told the House Science, Space and Technology Committee in a Dec. 4 hearing.
NASA’s Technology Capabilities Assessment Team is finding new acceptance of the agency’s need to improve efficiency by eliminating duplication across its scattered field centers, with some center directors actually willing to give up assets if they can use the savings to fund their core competencies.
Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) launched its first Falcon 9 v1.1 mission to geosynchronous transfer orbit Dec. 3, marking the Hawthorne, Calif.-based startup’s entry into the commercial launch market and positioning it to unseat United Launch Alliance (ULA), the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture that launches most NASA, U.S. Air Force and intelligence community missions.
Comet Ison, once hailed as a potential “comet of the century” for amateur sky watchers, faded dramatically after executing a Nov. 28 hairpin turn that took it through the Sun’s million-degree corona, leaving little optimism that any significant remnant will be visible to the naked eye late this week in the skies of the Northern Hemisphere.
NASA has failed to anticipate probable changes in funding for space science in its next strategic plan, increasing the likelihood that important exploration capabilities will fall by the wayside and “a generation of scientists” may be lost in some disciplines, according to a highly critical outside review of the plan draft.
GLSV LAUNCH: India will make a fresh attempt to launch its Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-D5) in January, carrying the GSAT-14 communications satellite, a scientist at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) says. The exact date and time has yet to be determined. The announcement comes more than three months after a previous launch attempt was called off due to a fuel leak in the rocket. On Aug. 19, a leak was spotted in the fuel system of the second stage during the prelaunch pressurization phase.
LOS ANGELES — Blue Origin, the secretive commercial space company established by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is readying for qualification tests of its liquid hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine for a suborbital flight following completion of a key ground demonstration that simulated a full mission of its New Shepard vehicle from launch to vertical landing.
BEIJING — The lander of China’s Chang’e 3 lunar mission should reach the Moon’s surface around the middle of this month, officials said following a successful launch on Dec. 2. A Long March 3B launched the spacecraft into a lunar transfer orbit with an apogee of 380,000 km (240,000 mi.).
India’s first Mars orbiter has propelled out of Earth’s orbit and embarked on a 10-month voyage to the red planet. The critical maneuver to place the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft (MOS) in the Mars Transfer Trajectory was successfully carried out Dec. 1, says K. Radhakrishnan, chairman of the state-run Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
FAA has decided a NASA astronaut may engage in operational flight functions up to and including piloting a commercial space vehicle for aborts, emergency response, and monitoring and operating environmental controls and life support systems during FAA-licensed commercial space launches and re-entries. But astronauts beware: training to become employable by commercial providers may force a take-it-or-leave-it proposition: either commit to becoming a NASA astronaut, or commit to a career as a commercial space pilot.
HOUSTON — Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Takuya Onishi will begin training in December for six months aboard the International Space Station. Onishi will be the sixth Japanese astronaut to serve aboard the orbiting science laboratory since 2009. Liftoff of his Expedition 48/49 mission is planned for mid-2016.
BANNED: The U.S. State Department said Nov. 27 it has issued an order administratively debarring LeAnne Lesmeister, former compliance officer at Honeywell International, from participating in any activities that are subject to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). According to State, Lesmeister — Honeywell’s senior export compliance officer in Clearwater, Fla., from 2008 to 2012 — used her position to circumvent Honeywell’s export compliance program in the fabrication of various export control documents that she presented as State authorizations.
Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) on Dec. 2 again postponed the first launch of its Falcon 9 v1.1 to geosynchronous transfer orbit from Cape Canaveral to allow for more time to double-check various fixes following the mission’s aborted Nov. 28 attempt. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that the 24-hr. delay to Dec. 3 will be spent “rechecking to be sure.” The launch window opens at 5:41 p.m. EST.
Launch of a Minotaur-1 rocket cobbled together from surplus ICBM stages and carrying a record 29 satellites underscores—again—the growing importance of nanosatellites in the overall spaceflight endeavor.
Comet Ison is providing the world’s astronomers and planetary scientists with a scientific bonanza as it makes a much-anticipated sweep around the Sun on Nov. 28, which is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. Whether it provides as much of a spectacle for backyard stargazers in the Northern Hemisphere remains a mystery.
NASA’s Ames Research Center and Ball Aerospace think they have found a way to resume the Kepler Space telescope’s search for Earth-like exo-planets. In May, the spacecraft lost the ability to point precisely in the direction of the new worlds it is trying to locate when the second of four of its reaction wheels failed.
HOUSTON — NASA and startup Planetary Resources, Inc. have formed the first public/private partnership under the space agency’s Asteroid Grand Challenge (AGC) initiative to accelerate the search for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that pose a collision threat by using government sky surveys and crowdsourced algorithms. The Solar System’s population of known asteroids is 620,000, but that is estimated to be less than 1% of the actual total.
