Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Japan rocket lifts supplies to space station

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: August 20, 2015 at 8:52:25 PM CDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Japan rocket lifts supplies to space station

August 20, 2015
Japan rocket lifts supplies to space station after failures
TANEGASHIMA, Japan (Kyodo) — Japan successfully launched a rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture on Wednesday, the nation's space agency said, after similar missions by other countries failed recently.
The H-2B rocket lifted off at 8:50 p.m. Japan time, delivering the Konotori 5 cargo transporter into orbit some 15 minutes later, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency or JAXA said.
The unmanned transporter, carrying 5.5 tons of supplies and experimental equipment, is due to reach the ISS, which flies about 400 kilometers above Earth, at around 8 p.m. Monday.
The launch of the Konotori, which means a stork in Japanese, had been postponed twice due to bad weather. Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, 45, who is on the ISS, will use a robotic arm to dock the transporter with the ISS, JAXA said.
The mission follows the recent failures to send U.S. Dragon and Russian Progress cargo spacecraft to the ISS.
JAXA has succeeded in all five launches of the domestically developed H-2B rocket. When adding launches of its predecessor, the H-2A rocket, the agency has succeeded 27 times in a row, with a success rate of 97 percent.
A large number of people waited for the rocket launch on Tanegashima, an island located 115 kilometers south of Japan's southwestern main island of Kyushu.

Copyright © 2015 Kyodo News Agency. All rights reserved.

H-2B rocket launch sends supply shipment to space station
August 19, 2015 by Stephen Clark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDQQUnyMtFM
A cache of critical cargo stowed inside a solar-powered Japanese resupply freighter is speeding toward a rendezvous with the International Space Station after a successful launch Wednesday.
Among the supplies inside Japan's fifth H-2 Transfer Vehicle are spare parts for the space station's water filtration system, spacesuit components and medical gear to replace items lost during a SpaceX rocket failure in June.
While the space station has weathered recent cargo launch failures without sacrificing the crew's health or scientific objectives, Wednesday's flight took on extra importance because it is the last resupply run expected to fly to the U.S. segment of the complex until at least December.
"We need to fly HTV to continue to operate on-board, so it's of significant need," said Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager. "We've got resources, I think, into November right now, so (HTV) give us resources into the next year."
A commercial Cygnus freighter owned by Orbital ATK is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral on Dec. 3 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. It will be Orbital ATK's first space station flight since an Antares rocket crashed seconds after liftoff in October 2014, grounding the privately-developed booster.
NASA officials do not expect the next SpaceX supply mission to fly before December, Suffredini said. He added that NASA has asked SpaceX not to put the next Dragon cargo flight to the space station first in line when the Falcon 9 returns to flight after a June 28 mishap traced to a weakened bracket in the rocket's second stage.
The 33-foot-long HTV cargo delivery craft blasted off at 1150:49 GMT (7:50:49 a.m. EDT) Wednesday, roughly the moment Earth's rotation aligned the Tanegashima Space Center with the path of the high-flying research lab's orbit.
After a smooth countdown, the 186-foot-tall H-2B rocket lit two hydrogen-burning LE-7A main engines and four powerful solid rocket boosters and climbed away from Launch Pad No. 2 at Tanegashima's Yoshinobu launch complex nestled on an island in southern Japan.
Lighting up its surroundings with a pyrotechnic display of brilliant orange exhaust, the rocket raced into the night sky over the launch base, where it was 8:50 p.m. local time Wednesday.
The four strap-on boosters jettisoned to call into the Pacific Ocean about two minutes after liftoff, followed by release of the two-part payload fairing enshrouding the HTV supply ship. A second stage engine took over the launch sequence and fired more than eight minutes to propel the HTV into orbit about 14 minutes after liftoff.
The HTV cargo craft, shaped like a soda can and covered in power-generating solar cells, separated from the rocket's second stage moments later, kicking off a five-day pursuit of the space station set to conclude Monday.
Japan's fifth HTV resupply spacecraft is pictured here before launch. Credit: JAXA
Nicknamed Kounotori 5, the Japanese word for white stork, the HTV will guide itself to the space station with a series of engine burns, then acquire the huge 450-ton research lab with a suite of laser navigation sensors for the final rendezvous profile.
Approaching from underneath the station, the Japanese cargo craft will slow its speed and hold about 30 feet from the complex, close enough to grapple the free-floating spaceship with the outpost's robotic arm. Japanese flight engineer Kimiya Yui will control the robot arm during the maneuver to capture the HTV.
Once the supply vessel is bolted to the space station's Harmony module, the astronauts will unpack more than 8,000 pounds of cargo packed inside the HTV's pressurized cabin.
The breakdown of the supply load includes 3,101 pounds of crew supplies, such as food, clothing and items to restock the space station's pantries. Another 2,753 pounds of gear will support the space station's research regimen, focusing on how the human body responds to extended stays in orbit and the behavior of super-hot melts in microgravity.
The experimental hardware includes a high-temperature furnace and a platform made by NanoRacks to host commercial payloads on an exposed facility outside the space station.
A package of CubeSats strapped inside the HTV will be ejected from a special deployer mounted on the end of the station's Japanese robot arm in the coming months.
A refrigerator-sized rack designed to host future small plug-and-play research payloads will also be transferred over to the space station from the HTV's cargo compartment.
The HTV is carrying 172 pounds of spacewalk equipment and 119 pounds of computers, printers, batteries and chargers.
The remaining 1,915 pounds of cargo inside the HTV's internal cabin are parts to maintain and improve the space station, including a new galley conceived to be a one-stop location to help crew members prepare meals.
"A lot of times the ISS is described as a four-bedroom house or a five-bedroom house, and that's very true, but the one thing the ISS doesn't have is a kitchen," said Royce Renfrew, NASA's lead flight director for the HTV 5 mission. "It has the ability for the crew to get water out of a potable water dispenser in the lab. There are suitcase-sized food warmers that are scattered around, there are a couple of what are called MERLINs, which are refrigerators where they can keep their food cold when they want it cold. But it's not all consolidated in one space.
"So we're going to get a kitchen — a galley rack — that's going to go in the (Unity) module," Renfrew said. "We'll move the potable water dispenser there. It comes up with its own little refrigerators called MERLINs, and it has its own food warmers. so it has water, it has a refrigerator, and it has a stove, if you want to think of it that way. That will all be in one place in (Unity), and I'm sure the crew will appreciate having that."
An astrophysics sensor designed to search for elusive evidence of dark matter is latched inside the HTV's external cargo hold. The station's robotics systems will transfer the dark matter instrument to a port on the Japanese Kibo laboratory's exposed experiment platform shortly after the HTV's arrival.
Led by Japanese scientists, the Calorimetric Electron Telescope, or CALET, instrument will search for sources of high-energy cosmic rays in local regions of the Milky Way galaxy. Researchers hope data from the sensor will include signatures of dark matter, the unexplained material that makes up more than one-quarter of the universe.
"To ascertain the existence of dark matter, electromagnetic waves flying about in space, as well as cosmic rays and high energy gamma rays (both rays hold energy with much higher than these of ultraviolet rays and X-rays) should be closely examined," explains an overview of the CALET experiment on JAXA's website.
Scientists expect the cosmic ray detector to operate between two and five years.
The resupply ship will turn into a trash collector at the end of its mission, when astronauts will replace the items brought to the space station with garbage. The HTV will depart from the station in late September and plunge back into Earth's atmosphere for a destructive re-entry over the South Pacific Ocean.
Japanese engineers are constructing at least four more HTV spacecraft for launch through 2020. The Japanese delivery craft is the space station's largest resupply ship currently in service, and NASA is negotiating with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to procure more HTVs for flights in the 2020s, Suffredini said.
NASA has committed to continue the space station program until at least 2024.
"It's got a very large volume inside so we utilize it quite a bit for up-mass, but also for trash," Suffredini said of the HTV design. "We fill it and we stuff it when we're done, and when we close the hatch, it's completely full all the way to the hatch, so it's very, very good in terms of taking off trash."
The next HTV mission is set for late 2016, followed by flights about once per year through the rest of the decade.
"HTV is on the larger side for a resupply vehicle, which is good," Suffredini said. "You don't fly as many flights with a larger vehicle, so that's significant. It's pressurized volume is very big. It will be the only vehicle that will carry racks to orbit, so that's a unique role that it will have for us in the future. We intend to retain that capability because nobody else can do it."

© 2015 Spaceflight Now Inc.

Japanese Cargo Spacecraft Heads To Space Station
by Jeff Foust — August 19, 2015
A Japanese H-2B rocket carrying the HTV-5 cargo spacecraft lifts off Aug. 19 from the Tanegashima Space Center. Credit: NASA TV
WASHINGTON — An H-2 rocket successfully launched a Japanese cargo spacecraft carrying more than four tons of supplies and equipment for the International Space Station Aug. 19.
The H-2B rocket lifted off from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center at 7:50 a.m. Eastern time carrying the fifth H-2 Transfer Vehicle (HTV) spacecraft, releasing the spacecraft into low Earth orbit about fifteen minutes later. The spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at the station Aug. 24.
The spacecraft is carrying about 3.7 metric tons of cargo in its pressurized compartment. That cargo includes supplies for the station's crew as well as hardware and experiments, including a mouse habitat and electrostatic levitation furnace.
The HTV also carries a number of cubesats that will be deployed from the ISS, 14 of which are Earth imaging spacecraft built by San Francisco-based Planet Labs. The HTV mission brings the total number of spacecraft launched by Planet Labs to 101, although most of those are no longer in orbit. The company lost eight satellites on the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch failure in June, and 28 on an Orbital ATK Antares launch failure last October.
Another commercial payload on the HTV is an external platform developed by Houston-based NanoRacks. That platform, which will be located outside the station's Kibo module, will provide space for experiments needing access to the space environment.
In addition to the pressurized cargo on the HTV, the spacecraft is carrying nearly one metric ton of unpressurized cargo, including the Calorimetric Electron Telescope astrophysics experiment. That experiment, to be mounted on the exterior of the station, will study high-energy cosmic rays that scientists think could provide insights into dark matter.
The arrival of the HTV will further ease concerns about the station's supply of food and other consumables that were under strain by a series of cargo mission failures in the last year. The additional cargo on board the HTV will extend station's supplies through at least the end of the year.
© 2015 SpaceNews, Inc. All rights reserved.