A small engineering firm on Florida's Space Coast is looking to recover some of the revenue and jobs the region lost with retirement of the space shuttle fleet by offering maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services to the commercial spaceflight industry that the Obama administration hopes will take the shuttle's place.
Amy Svitak (London), Frank Morring, Jr. (Washington)
Thales Alenia Space and Gazprom Space Systems are confident that efforts to recover Russia's Yamal 402 Ku-band commercial telecom satellite will succeed, but it remains unclear how much of the spacecraft's 15-year service life will be lost. A premature shutdown of the Briz M upper stage on its International Launch Services (ILS) launch vehicle Dec. 9 left Yamal 402 in the wrong orbit, and controllers are using its onboard station-keeping/attitude control propellant to adjust it.
NASA will spend the next 16 months nailing down exactly how its three commercial crew contractors plan to meet the agency's detailed requirements for flying astronauts to the International Space Station and bringing them back to Earth in one piece. The agency will spend almost $30 million with the three companies—Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corp. and SpaceX—on the first phase of the “certification products contracts” (CPC) that will bring the vehicle designs they are developing into line with NASA's formal safety requirements.
A probe into an upper-stage low-thrust anomaly during an October GPS launch has verified that a leak occurred in the RL10B-2 engine. But, a root cause continues to elude investigators, and satellite owners are proceeding with Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) missions only if they are willing to accept any extra risk resulting from the unknowns surrounding the incident.
NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory A and B lunar mission spacecraft are scheduled for a violent but potentially scientifically productive end as they carry out a controlled plummet into a mountain ridge near the Moon’s north pole on Dec. 17. The impacts, within seconds of one another at 5:28 p.m. EST, will be monitored by ultraviolet sensors on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter for the presence of water vapor and other potential volatiles in lunar soil exposed to long periods of sunlight.
A new, satellite-based, 8-hr. weather forecast prototype covering remote areas of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is available to industry as a research tool on the website for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
European Union foreign ministers say they would consider the launch of a satellite by North Korea a “provocative act” that would violate Pyongyang’s U.N. Security Council obligations and merit an international response.
NEW DELHI — The launch of the Indo-French Saral navigational satellite has been delayed until early next year, an Indian space scientist says. The satellite was initially slated to be lofted on Dec. 12 on board the Indian space agency’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C20) – from the space center in Sriharikota in south India.
Golden Spike Company, a startup initiated by former NASA Associate Administrator Alan Stern, has gathered a group of aerospace companies and spaceflight experts to mount commercial human missions to the Moon. Prices for a two-person surface sortie would start at $1.4 billion, according to Stern, who sees a market in national space agencies, corporations and scientific research.
They could not have timed it better: One day after France launched its second high-resolution Pleiades satellite, shareholders of U.S. commercial imagery provider GeoEye approved a buyout by the company's chief U.S. competitor that will leave Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe operating the largest fleet of high-resolution optical Earth-imaging satellites.
As Hurricane Sandy wound its way north along the Atlantic Coast in late October, the storm appeared to be on a track to head harmlessly out to sea. But data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) polar orbiting weather satellites indicated that the deadly storm would take a sharp left turn and hit some of the most densely populated regions of the U.S., providing days of warning.
A Washington Outlook item in the Dec. 3 issue (page 23) incorrectly stated the outcome of pre-flight pressure testing on the International Space Station's Unity node. According to NASA, the 1996 tests were halted before the node structural test and flight articles reached the maximum design pressure of 23 psia “based on predefined sensor cutoff data being met.” Those strain gauges were positioned to test anticipated “high stresses on the radial port gussets,” and no cracks were discovered in the hardware by subsequent inspections, NASA says.
