LADEE ARRIVES: NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (Ladee) has reached lunar orbit, one month after lifting off from Wallops Island, Va., on a Minotaur V solid-fuel rocket. Operated by a skeleton crew at Ames Research Center during the federal government shutdown, the 884-lb. orbiter fired its main engine early October 6 to enter an elliptical orbit. The orbit’s apogee will be lowered with subsequent burns to move the spacecraft into its commissioning orbit at 124-186 mi., where it will spend 40 days.
There always has been a clear objective for potential human space explorers who are alive today—Mars. After the lunar landings, the red planet was the next natural goal. If the papers presented in Beijing at the 64th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) are an indication—and they are—nothing has changed in the subsequent 40 years.
Russia's Proton M launch vehicle returned to flight Sept. 30, nearly two months after a July 2 mishap sent the heavy-lift rocket and three Russian Glonass M satellites crashing to the ground at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Early peer-reviewed results of soil-sample analysis by an instrument on the Curiosity Mars rover hold potentially good news for future human explorers who will need to live off the land as much as possible, and bad news for scientists looking for evidence of past life on the planet.
NASA has exempted the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) mission preparations from the federal government shutdown, primarily because the orbiter will be needed as a communications relay for the two rovers operating on the planet’s surface. Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder said in a post on the mission website that the agency “has analyzed the Maven mission relative to the Anti-Deficiency Act and determined that it meets the requirements allowing an emergency exception.”
Golden Spike is looking to 2015 for U.S. prime contractor selections to develop hardware for a series of $1.5 billion, two-person commercial lunar expeditions marketed primarily to foreign powers, industry and possibly a few wealthy adventurers.
NAVAL RESEARCH: The non-profit Center for the Advancement of Science in Space has awarded the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) a $250,000 grant to use the International Space Station’s hyperspectral imager to study halmful algal bloom in coastal areas around the world. Also known as red tide, the algal bloom releases toxins that are harmful to humans and marine life.
PRIME TIME: NBC plans to broadcast a reality TV competition called “Space Race” that will offer a flight to the edge of space on the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo to its winner. The U.S. network signed a deal with Virgin Galactic and One Three Media, which produced Survivor, Celebrity Apprentice and other “unscripted series.” The production team will have “unprecedented access” to Virgin’s operations at Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, N.M., and will begin distribution activities at an upcoming marketing conference in Cannes, France.
Early peer-reviewed results of soil-sample analysis by an instrument on the Curiosity Mars rover hold potentially good news for future human explorers who will need to live off the land as much as possible, and bad news for scientists looking for evidence of past life on the planet. A scoop of geologic fines — dust and finely grained soil — collected for the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite inside the rover body detected water molecules that someday may be recovered by astronauts practicing in situ resource utilization (ISRU).
At NASA, which celebrated its 55th anniversary by furloughing 97% of its workforce, concern is centered on two programs trying to stay on schedule for their launch windows.
STILL SPENDING: A U.S. government shutdown and debt ceiling fight on Capitol Hill notwithstanding, nominal federal spending plans for fiscal 2014 and beyond entail $117 billion in defense information technology (IT) contracting opportunities, according to federal IT consulting company Deltek. Another $38 billion will come from civilian agencies like NASA, FAA and others. Furthermore, despite a common industry complaint that budget caps in recent years have essentially derailed new-start programs, that is not the case. Deltek said in a webinar to clients Oct.
BEIJING — With the success of its high-resolution Pleiades optical imaging satellites, French space agency CNES is preparing a demonstration of a potential follow-on system that would launch in the early 2020s, most likely on a European Vega rocket from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou. The OTOS technology demo, formerly known as CXCI, is the precursor to a dual system designed to capture up to 750 images per day per satellite at 20- to 30-cm ground resolution and a swath width of 15-20 km in panchromatic mode.
PARIS — Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) says a new version of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle aborted a planned restart of its upper stage engine during an otherwise successful Sept. 29 debut of the upgraded rocket.
HOUSTON—The shutdown of the U.S. government that began Oct. 1 may have stalled NASA’s Asteroid Initiative Idea Synthesis Workshop, but not the determination of two dozen of the 140 participants to collaborate independently on how to address the near-Earth object collision threat. The three-day, NASA-sponsored, invitation-only workshop was shuttered after the Sept. 30 half-day opening session. The agency expects to reconvene the final two days of the dual-track program via webcast, though the details are yet to be formulated
NEW DELHI — India on Oct. 2 moved its Mars Orbiter to the launch pad at Sriharikota range for its scheduled launch to the red planet on Oct. 28. After a series of tests, scientists at the India Space Research Organization (ISRO) gave the green light to transport the 1,340-kg orbiter to the launch pad for integration with the 350-ton rocket, which is an extended version of the space agency’s workhorse launcher, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-XL), an ISRO scientist says.
BEIJING — Chinese engineers are proposing a Moon rocket more powerful than the Saturn V of the Apollo missions and matching the payload of NASA’s planned Space Launch System (SLS) Block 2, the unfunded launcher that would put the U.S. back into super-heavy space lift.
NEW DELHI — India will make a fresh attempt to loft its GSAT-14 communications satellite aboard a Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-D5) on Dec. 15, nearly two months after its launch was called off due to a fuel leak in the rocket’s second stage, a senior space scientist says. On Aug. 19, a leak was spotted in the fuel system of the second stage during the pre-launch pressurization phase on the vehicle. Propellants were drained and the GSLV was moved back to the vehicle assembly building to assess the cause of the leak.
LOS ANGELES — SpaceX says post-launch indications of a larger-than-expected debris field scattered in the orbital path of its recently launched Falcon 9 v1.1 upgraded launch vehicle do not represent a possible explosion of the rocket’s second stage.
BEIJING — Top scientists here are citing China’s burgeoning population, growing energy consumption and severe pollution problems to press the case for more research in space solar power (SSP) technology, which would place large solar-energy collectors in orbit to beam gathered energy to Earth as microwaves or laser light.
BEIJING — Engineers in Russia believe the Zarya cargo module, the oldest pressurized module on the International Space Station (ISS), can last in orbit until about 2028 — twice its design service life — despite microcracking in the hull during pressure and loads cycling of a test article on the ground.
HOUSTON — Some of the brightest in global aerospace are poised to pitch their recommendations for NASA’s proposed Asteroid Retrieval Mission and Grand Challenge. They will offer suggestions for an unbudgeted, multi-year demonstration of human and robotic strategies to thrust explorers out of low Earth orbit for the first time in 40 years, while assembling defenses against the collision threat posed by Near Earth Objects.
