Pilot dies in crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane | Spaceflight Now

http://spaceflightnow.com/2014/10/31/virgin-galactics-spaceshiptwo-suffers-anomaly-during-test-flight/


Sent from my iPad

Fwd: Investigators Complete Initial Assessment in Aftermath of Antares Explosion

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: October 30, 2014 11:42:29 AM EDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Investigators Complete Initial Assessment in Aftermath of Antares Explosion

 

 

 

October 29, 2014

RELEASE 14-303

 

NASA's Wallops Flight Facility Completes Initial Assessment after Orbital Launch Mishap

 

An aerial view of the Wallops Island launch facilities taken by the Wallops Incident Response Team Oct. 29 following the failed launch attempt of Orbital Science Corp.'s Antares rocket Oct. 28.

Image Credit: NASA/Terry Zaperach

The Wallops Incident Response Team completed today an initial assessment of Wallops Island, Virginia, following the catastrophic failure of Orbital Science Corp.'s Antares rocket shortly after liftoff at 6:22 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Oct. 28, from Pad 0A of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

"I want to praise the launch team, range safety, all of our emergency responders and those who provided mutual aid and support on a highly-professional response that ensured the safety of our most important resource -- our people," said Bill Wrobel, Wallops director. "In the coming days and weeks ahead, we'll continue to assess the damage on the island and begin the process of moving forward to restore our space launch capabilities. There's no doubt in my mind that we will rebound stronger than ever."

The initial assessment is a cursory look; it will take many more weeks to further understand and analyze the full extent of the effects of the event. A number of support buildings in the immediate area have broken windows and imploded doors. A sounding rocket launcher adjacent to the pad, and buildings nearest the pad, suffered the most severe damage.

At Pad 0A the initial assessment showed damage to the transporter erector launcher and lightning suppression rods, as well as debris around the pad.

The Wallops team also met with a group of state and local officials, including the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, the Virginia Marine Police, and the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Wallops environmental team also is conducting assessments at the site. Preliminary observations are that the environmental effects of the launch failure were largely contained within the southern third of Wallops Island, in the area immediately adjacent to the pad. Immediately after the incident, the Wallops' industrial hygienist collected air samples at the Wallops mainland area, the Highway 175 causeway, and on Chincoteague Island. No hazardous substances were detected at the sampled locations.

Additional air, soil and water samples will be collected from the incident area as well as at control sites for comparative analysis.

The Coast Guard and Virginia Marine Resources Commission reported today they have not observed any obvious signs of water pollution, such as oil sheens. Furthermore, initial assessments have not revealed any obvious impacts to fish or wildlife resources. The Incident Response Team continues to monitor and assess.

Following the initial assessment, the response team will open the area of Wallops Island, north of the island flagpole opposite of the launch pad location, to allow the U.S. Navy to return back to work.

Anyone who finds debris or damage to their property in the vicinity of the launch mishap is cautioned to stay away from it and call the Incident Response Team at 757-824-1295.

Further updates on the situation and the progress of the ongoing investigation will be available at:

http://www.orbital.com

and

http://www.nasa.gov/orbital

-end-

Stephanie Schierholz
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
stephanie.schierholz@nasa.gov

Keith Koehler
Wallops Flight Facility, Va.
757-824-1579
keith.a.koehler@nasa.gov

 

 

---

 

 

Decades-old Soviet engines powered US rocket that exploded

October 30, 2014 5:51am

US rocket explodes seconds after liftoff. The Antares rocket is seen exploding seconds after liftoff from a commercial launch pad in this still image from NASA video on Wallops Island, Virginia on Tuesday, October 28, 2014. The 14-story rocket, built by Orbital Sciences Corp, bolted off its seaside launch pad at the Wallops Flight Facility at 6:22 p.m. and burst into flames as it fell to the ground with the unmanned Cygnus Cargo Ship that was supposed to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. The cause of the accident was not immediately available. Reuters/NASA

WASHINGTON - The Orbital Sciences rocket that was detonated and exploded after launch was powered by a pair of rocket engines that were made during the Soviet era and refurbished, experts said Wednesday.

The rocket exploded about six seconds after it lifted off from the seaside launch pad Tuesday at 6:22 pm (2222 GMT, 6:22 a.m. PHL time).

 

A ground controller at Wallops Island issued a command to destroy the vehicle, Orbital representatives said in a press conference late Tuesday, but gave no details on why.

 

"It is kind of standard procedure, that if you get something in your readings that indicate it is going to fail, you would detonate it sooner rather than later," explained Caceres.

 

"You don't want that vehicle to fly very high if you know it is going to fail."

 

John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, agreed.

 

"There was something dramatic happening to lead the range safety officer to issue a destruct command," Logsdon told AFP.

 

"They know that something was really wrong and they have all the data from the rocket so it should not take long to find out what went wrong."

 

It was also the first attempt to launch the Antares 130, a more powerful kind of Antares than the 110 and 120 models that have flown in the past.

 

"I imagine they will be looking at a lot of issues," said Caceres, including whether there was too much weight on the rocket, or if there was a fuel leak or a corrosion problem.

 

"Commercial derivative"

 

The Ukrainian-designed AJ-26 engines date back to the 1960s and 1970s, and Aerojet Rocketdyne of Sacramento, California has a stockpile that it refurbishes for Orbital Sciences.

 

Orbital described the AJ-26 engine on its web site as "a commercial derivative of the engine that was first developed for the Russian moon rocket that would have taken cosmonauts to the moon."

 

In 2010, the company announced it would use the engines for its Taurus II rocket because "it achieves very high performance in a lightweight, compact package."

 

The Soviet Union poured $1.3 billion in investment over a 10-year period into developing the engines and building more than 200 of them in all, Orbital said.

 

Space analyst Marco Caceres of the Teal Group told AFP that the AJ-26 is "a powerful engine" that was designed to launch people to the moon, but never did.

 

"They did have problems with that engine back in the '60s and ultimately they stopped manufacturing it," he said.

 

In 1993, Aerojet began developing design modifications to make the engine suitable for commercial launches.

 

The staged-combustion, oxygen kerosene engines underwent testing at NASA's Stennis facility in Mississippi.

 

In May, an AJ-26 engine blew up during a ground test there, but in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's accident, officials declined to link the two incidents.

 

Orbital Sciences has begun investigating the cause of the rocket failure at Wallops Island, Virginia but has not released any conclusions yet.

 

Orbital engineers said there was no alarming signs leading up to the sunset launch.

 

The accident was the first catastrophic failure since private companies began supplying the International Space Station in 2010.

 

— Agence France-Presse

 

 

Copyright © 2014 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. 

 

---

 

AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
October 29th, 2014

Investigators Complete Initial Assessment in Aftermath of Antares Explosion

By Mike Killian

 

An aerial view of the Wallops Island launch facilities taken by the Wallops Incident Response Team Oct. 29 following the failed launch attempt of Orbital Science Corp.'s Antares rocket Oct. 28.
Image Credit: NASA/Terry Zaperach

NASA's Wallops Flight Facility Incident Response Team completed their initial assessment of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island today, only 24 hours after the launch of an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket exploded just seconds after leaving its seaside launch pad to resupply the International Space Station and its crew Tuesday evening. Today's assessment gave investigators their first real look at the damage caused to property, infrastructure and environment, but it will take weeks, and likely even months, before the investigation gives NASA and Orbital Sciences a better understanding of what exactly went wrong and how the catastrophic explosion has impacted the surrounding environment.

"I want to praise the launch team, range safety, all of our emergency responders and those who provided mutual aid and support on a highly-professional response that ensured the safety of our most important resource — our people," said Bill Wrobel, Wallops director. "In the coming days and weeks ahead, we'll continue to assess the damage on the island and begin the process of moving forward to restore our space launch capabilities. There's no doubt in my mind that we will rebound stronger than ever."

Antares exploding just seconds after liftoff Monday evening on Wallops Island, VA. Photo Credit: Alex Polimeni / AmericaSpace

Today's observations showed a number of support buildings in the immediate area of the launch site suffered broken windows and imploded doors, with a sounding rocket launcher adjacent to the pad and buildings nearest the pad having suffered the most severe damage. Damage to the transporter erector launcher and lightning suppression rods was extensive, two lightning rods were completely leveled in the explosion and the area is littered with debris.

Environmental assessments are being conducted as well, with the preliminary observations made today showing that the effects of the explosion were largely contained within the southern third of Wallops Island, in the area immediately adjacent to the pad. Wallops' industrial hygienist collected air samples at the Wallops mainland area, the Highway 175 causeway, and on Chincoteague Island as well, with no hazardous substances having been detected at the sampled locations. Additional air, soil and water samples will be collected from the incident area as well as at control sites for comparative analysis.

Investigators also met with a group of state and local officials today too, including the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, the Virginia Marine Police, and the U.S. Coast Guard. The Coast Guard and Virginia Marine Resources Commission have both reported no obvious signs of water pollution, such as oil sheens, and no obvious impacts to fish or wildlife resources have been seen, although investigators will continue to monitor and assess the impact of the explosion over the coming weeks and months.

"It is far too early to know the details of what happened," said Frank Culbertson, Orbital's Executive Vice President and General Manager of its Advanced Programs Group, in a statement released Monday night. "As we begin to gather information, our primary concern lies with the ongoing safety and security of those involved in our response and recovery operations. We will conduct a thorough investigation immediately to determine the cause of this failure and what steps can be taken to avoid a repeat of this incident. As soon as we understand the cause we will begin the necessary work to return to flight to support our customers and the nation's space program."

There have been no reports of debris being found on private properties (homes and businesses) located within a few miles nearby, but blown out windows and minor property damage have been reported around the island.

Looking north towards the destruction. Photo: NASA

"While NASA is disappointed that Orbital Sciences' third contracted resupply mission to the International Space Station was not successful, we will continue to move forward toward the next attempt once we fully understand today's mishap," said William Gerstenmaier, Associate Administrator of NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Directorate, in a statement last night. "The crew of the International Space Station is in no danger of running out of food or other critical supplies. Orbital has demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in its first two missions to the station earlier this year, and we know they can replicate that success. Launching rockets is an incredibly difficult undertaking, and we learn from each success and each setback."

As outlined by Ben Evans in our post-launch report, within six seconds of leaving the pad the booster burst into flames, showering burning debris across the launch site. Within minutes, the announcement came from officials at MARS that there was "no indication that personnel are in danger, although significant property damage and significant vehicle damage."

Although ORB-3 was an unmanned mission, unpleasant reminders of the STS-107 disaster were kindled in the clipped exchanges between flight controllers, who were directed to secure their checklists and their handheld notes and to begin the process of locking down all pertinent data which might support the impending investigation. Anything transmitted via their computers will also be scrubbed in the coming hours and days. The presence of classified crypto equipment aboard the ORB-3 Cygnus spacecraft required the area surrounding Pad 0A to be secured, not only as part of the accident investigation, but also in support of security needs. An interim accident investigation team was formed, encompassing representatives of NASA, Orbital, MARS, and launch team personnel, and will be headed by Richard Straka, the Senior Vice President of Orbital's Launch Systems Group.

Anyone who finds debris or damage to their property in the vicinity of the launch mishap is cautioned to stay away from it and call the Incident Response Team at 757-824-1295.

 

Copyright © 2014 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

 

---

 

NASA experts complete initial assessment after Antares rocket explosion

 

October 30, 9:37 UTC+3
It will take many more weeks to further understand and analyze the full extent of the effects of the event, NASA said in a statement

 

© EPA/NASA/JOEL KOWSKY/HANDOUT

Infographics Antares rocket explodes

Overnight to October 29, a US Antares carrier rocket exploded seconds after liftoff from the spaceport in Virginia. The rocket was to carry the cargo spacecraft to the orbit and deliver to the ISS more than 2 tons of payload. Infographics by TASS

WASHINGTON, October 30. /TASS/. A team of experts has completed an initial assessment of Wallops Island, Virginia, where the Antares carrier rocket with Cygnus cargo spacecraft exploded seconds after takeoff, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said in a statement.

"In the coming days and weeks ahead, we'll continue to assess the damage on the island and begin the process of moving forward to restore our space launch capabilities. There's no doubt in my mind that we will rebound stronger than ever," Bill Wrobel, director of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, was quoted as saying.

NASA said "it will take many more weeks to further understand and analyze the full extent of the effects of the event."

The buildings nearest to the launch pad have suffered the most damage, and a number of them have broken windows and imploded doors, the statement said.

Although no casualties have been reported in the accident, the loss for NASA and companies that had products aboard the spacecraft is estimated at around $200 million.

As for environmental effects of the launch failure, no hazardous substances have been detected in the air samples collected at the Wallops mainland area. "Additional air, soil and water samples will be collected from the incident area as well as at control sites for comparative analysis," the statement said.

Experts of the Ukrainian design bureau Yuzhnoye, which took part in designing and manufacturing the Antares carrier rocket, have launched their own investigation in the explosion, Ukrinform news agency reported.

The two-stage Antares carrier rocket exploded in the air just seconds after liftoff from NASA's space center on Wallops Island in Virginia. It was carrying the Cygnus cargo craft with two tons of payload to the International Space Station, including 720 kilograms of equipment and materials for research experiments.

One of the experiments was to do chemical analysis of the substances formed by meteorites burning in the Earth's atmosphere.

Antares, which was known as Taurus II in the initial phases of its development, was designed for orbiting small payloads of up to 5,000 kilograms. Its developers are the Orbital Science Corporation and Ukraine's Yuzhmash R & D Group.

Under the terms of the project, the Ukrainian side designed and manufactured the first stage of the rocket, while the US company took charge of the second stage and the ground launch site.

The program was partly financed by NASA and the entire cost of its implementation reached $1.9 billion. The first four launches of the Antares carrier rockets were successful.

 

© 2014 TASS

 

---

 

​

Orbital Sciences assesses Antares failure

10/29/2014 04:47 PM 

By WILLIAM HARWOOD
CBS News

A day after an explosion that destroyed an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket carrying a space station cargo ship, company officials said Wednesday they hope to zero in on the likely cause of the mishap within a week or so, based on a detailed review of telemetry, analysis of video and inspection of recovered debris.

The 130-foot-tall Antares rocket, powered by extensively modified Soviet-era first-stage engines, blasted off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Va., at 6:22 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) Tuesday, kicking off a flight to deliver more than 5,000 pounds of cargo and supplies to the International Space Station.

But just 15 seconds after liftoff, the rocket suffered a catastrophic first-stage failure, falling back to Earth and exploding in a huge fireball. The Cygnus cargo ship atop the rocket, loaded with station supplies, also was destroyed.

David Thompson, chairman and chief executive of Orbital Sciences, said an inspection of the launch pad and nearby facilities Wednesday revealed less damage than expected.

"Fortunately, no one was injured as a result of the accident," he told financial analysts in a conference call. "And based on the preliminary inspections that were conducted this morning at Wallops Island, it appears that the launch pad complex itself was spared from any major damage. In addition, the Antares Vehicle Assembly Building and related Cygnus spacecraft processing facilities at other locations within the Wallops area were not affected by the failure in any way."

He said it was too soon to determine what might have triggered the mishap, although a preliminary look at telemetry suggested possible explanations. He did not elaborate.

One natural suspect is the rocket's main propulsion system, powered by two Soviet-era engines originally built for a Russian moon rocket that later was abandoned after a series of in-flight failures. Engines left over from that program were mothballed, and Aerojet Rocketdyne bought about 40 of the high-performance powerplants in the 1990s. The renamed AJ26 engines were refurbished, equipped with modern avionics and exhaustively tested to ensure they were safe to fly.

But an AJ26 engine being test fired last May suffered a catastrophic malfunction. Orbital carried out a major investigation to find out what went wrong and while details were never provided, company officials said the likely cause had been identified and that new test procedures and inspections were implemented to prevent a repeat of the failure.

The engines worked flawlessly during an Antares launch in July and they may have worked as planned during the ill-fated launching Tuesday. But whatever went wrong appeared to start at the base of the rocket, raising questions about the propulsion system. Thompson warned against drawing premature conclusions.

"We still have a lot of work to do in the days ahead to analyze all of the telemetry and video data, to review the recollections and notes of the participants in the operation and to collect all other available information about the flight," he said. "This investigation may, or may not, lead us to the conclusion that the failure was caused by a problem with the Antares first stage main propulsion system.

"As most of you know, the AJ26 rocket engines used in that system have presented us with some serious technical and supply challenges in the past. So not withstanding the previous successful flights of Antares before yesterday, Orbital has been reviewing alternatives since the middle of last year and recently selected a different main propulsion system for a future use by Antares."

Thompson said the company may decide "to accelerate this change if the AJ26 turns out to be implicated in the failure. But this has not yet been decided."

As for how long it might take to figure out what went wrong, he said barring problems or major surprises "it will not likely take very long, I think a period measured in days, not weeks, for the investigation team to define the handful of most likely causes of the accident. It may take a little longer than that to zero in on the final root cause."

Orbital Sciences holds a $1.9 billion contract with NASA to build and launch eight space station resupply missions to deliver some 20 tons of cargo and supplies. SpaceX holds a similar contract valued at $1.6 billion for 12 resupply missions using that company's Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon cargo ships.

NASA officials said the loss of the Cygnus supply ship atop the Antares rocket will not have any near-term impact on station operations. A Russian Progress supply ship was successfully launched from Kazakhstan early Wednesday and SpaceX is on track to launch two more U.S. resupply missions in December and February.

But the next flight of an Antares rocket, which had been targeted for April, could face a delay.

"From our experience in the past, which is not altogether transferrable to this situation, I would anticipate that there will be some delay in the next scheduled Antares launch," Thompson said. "I think a reasonable, best-case estimate would bound that at three months, but it could certainly be considerably longer than that depending on what we find in the review. I would hope it would not be more than a year."

Asked if engineers had seen any clues about the cause of the failure in video or telemetry, Thompson said "the short answer is it's still a little too early to tell." But he said there were hints in the telemetry.

"There are certain specific elements of data that have been preliminarily analyzed to date that point in a particular direction," he said, "but my experience also suggests that sometimes first impressions are not correct ones, and it's very important not to focus too early on what may at first appear to be the cause of an accident like this.

"It's important to do a very comprehensive review and consider things that may at first not appear to be likely causes of a failure just to be sure you don't fixate early on on what initially appears to observers to be the likely cause and end up missing the real root cause. I think we will be substantially smarter on this over the course of the coming days, not weeks. I may be surprised, it may turn out to take longer, but my best guess right now, assuming we proceed in a very diligent and open minded way, we'll be zeroing in within a week or so on where the problem is likely to be found."

In opening remarks, Thompson took time to remind analysts and others listening in that launching rockets is a challenging enterprise and "although they are increasingly infrequent in our business, rocket and satellite failures do still occur."

"Building and launching vehicles into space are among the most challenging and demanding things that government organizations and private companies do," he said. "Despite the diligent efforts of some of the aerospace industry's best and brightest people, sometimes things do go wrong.

"Second and more generally, Orbital has experienced adversity in the past, some of which was more difficult that this. And the company has always emerged stronger as a result. I am determined that we will do so again this time."

 

 

© 2014 William Harwood/CBS News

 

---

 

Doomed Antares Rocket Powered by Refurbished Soviet Engines

by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer   |   October 30, 2014 07:00am ET

 

The Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket, with the Cygnus spacecraft onboard suffers a catastrophic anomaly moments after launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad 0A, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2014, at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky View full size image

The private American rocket that exploded shortly after liftoff Tuesday evening (Oct. 28) was powered partly by an engine built to get cosmonauts to the moon in the 1960s.

Orbital Sciences Corp.'s two-stage Antares rocket crashed in a fiery heap just seconds after launching from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Tuesday, ending an attempted cargo run to the International Space Station just seconds after it began.

Antares' first stage uses two AJ26 engines, which are refurbished variants of the NK-33 built by the Soviet Union for its ill-fated N-1 moon rocket during the height of the space race. While it's unclear at the moment whether or not the AJ26 played any role in Tuesday's mishap, the engines' age and provenance has already stirred debate, as well as a bit of criticism. [Orbital Sciences' Antares Rocket Explosion in Pictures]

An AJ26 engine is placed in a test stand at NASA's Stennis Space Center.
Credit: NASA

View full size image

How Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft service the space station. See how Orbital's Cygnus spacecraft and Antares rockets works here.
Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com Infographics Artist

View full size image

Some of the criticism long predates this week's accident. In 2012, for example, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said Antares "honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke."

"It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the '60s," Musk told Wired magazine back then. "I don't mean their design is from the '60s — I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the '60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere."

SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are competitors; both companies hold billion-dollar contracts to fly robotic cargo missions to the space station for NASA. To date, SpaceX has successfully completed four supply runs using its Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket. Orbital had executed two such missions with Antares and its Cygnus spacecraft before Tuesday's failure.

The massive N-1 moon rocket — the Soviet Union's attempted answer to NASA's huge Saturn V booster — lifted off four times, with the first launch coming in 1969 and the last in 1972. All of the launches ended in failure, and the N-1 program was canceled in the mid-1970s. But dozens of NK-33 engines remained in the nation's stockpile.

The California-based company Aerojet (now Aerojet-Rocketdyne) later bought some of these engines, then modernized, refurbished and renamed them to fly in American rockets.

The appeal of of the NK-33/AJ26 is clear, said Orbital Sciences executive vice president Frank Culbertson, a former NASA astronaut.

"There are not very many other options around the world in terms of using power plants of this size, and certainly not in this country, unfortunately," Culbertson said Tuesday night during a press conference after the Antares crash.

AJ26 engines are rugged and robust, he added, and they're tested extensively before flight, both at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and, after incorporation into Antares, at Wallops.

"These engines were taken through the normal testing — acceptance testing and pressure testing, et cetera," Culbertson said of the AJ26s inside the Antares that exploded Tuesday. "We didn't see any anomalies or anything that would indicate that there were problems with the engine."

An AJ26 engine did explode during a test at Stennis in May, however. The engineers investigating Tuesday's Antares failure are doubtless looking back at that mishap with fresh eyes now.

Antares isn't the only American rocket that incorporates Soviet or Russian tech. For example, United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 booster, which launches many payloads for the U.S. military and NASA, uses a Russian RD-180 engine in its first stage.

RD-180s are of much more recent vintage than the old NK-33s. Regardless, their provenance makes some policymakers, military officials and other influential people uncomfortable. The United States should not be dependent on Russian technology to launch important national-security missions, they say. 

 

Copyright © 2014 TechMediaNetwork.com All rights reserved. 

 

---

 

 

 

Fwd: Ukrainian aerospace company launches own investigation of Antares rocket explosion

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: October 30, 2014 11:44:53 AM EDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Ukrainian aerospace company launches own investigation of Antares rocket explosion

 

Orbital Sciences Corporation Considers Replacing Russian Engine Used on Antares: CEO

The Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft take off from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Wednesday.

© NASA/Bill Ingalls

05:35 30/10/2014

 

 

WASHINGTON, October 30 (RIA Novosti) - The Orbital Sciences Corporation, that built and launched Antares supply rocket crashed in Virginia, may replace the spacecraft's current AJ-26 Russian rocket engine, once their investigation of the crash is finalized, the company's CEO David Thompson stated.

"Orbital has been reviewing alternatives since the middle of last year and recently selected a different main propulsion system for future use by Antares," Thompson said during a press conference Wednesday. "It is possible that we may decide to accelerate this change if the AJ-26 turns out to be implicated in the failure, but this has not yet been decided."

Orbital along with NASA, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport and the National Transportation Safety board are conducting an accident investigation to determine the exact cause of the crash and to recommend corrective actions.

Thompson added that although Orbital was still planning to launch Antares again in April, the scheduled mission could be delayed depending on the investigation.

"At this time it's too soon to know exactly how long this process will take or whether Antares and Cygnus missions, that are scheduled for next year including our next flight, which had been set for early April, will be affected," said Thompson.

The Antares spacecraft that was carrying more than two tons of cargo to the International Space Station (ISS), crashed only six seconds after launching from the US Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Hours after the unsuccessful Antares launch, the unmanned Russian Progress supply spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan and successfully docked at the ISS.

The AJ-26 engine, otherwise known as the NK-33 engine, designed in Russia to launch the country's N1 Russian Rocket on lunar missions, is the engine that Orbital currently uses to power Antares.

Despite the crash, NASA says that the ISS will have enough supplies until March 2015, even if other space crafts are unable to make it to the station.

© 2014 RIA Novosti

 

---

 

No invitation to US rocket disaster probe for Russian experts

October 29, 16:17 UTC+3
Specialists from the Samara-based Kuznetsov engine-manufacturer are not in the fact-finding team

 

© EPA/NASA TV/HANDOUT

 

SAMARA, October 29. /TASS/. Russian space rocket engine-makers partnering US constructors of the ill-fated American rocket blown up on launch on Tuesday have not been asked to join the accident inquiry, officials at the firm have announced.

Specialists from the Samara-based Kuznetsov engine-manufacturer are not in the fact-finding team, press service officials said at the firm, producing engines then modified by the American side for launch into space.

Kuznetsov is Russia's leading manufacturer of aviation gas-turbine and liquid-fuel rocket engines, powering Russian manned spaceships Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz and space freighters Progress.

Disaster befell the American Antares carrier rocket on its launch from the NASA agency Wallops Island facility in Virginia on Tuesday. The rocket was lifting off to take the Cygnus space freighter to the International Space Station, delivering two tonnes of food and 720 kilograms of equipment and material for scientific experiments.

Kuznetsov engineers have been advising the US side on adapting the Russian engine but play no part in the modification process or in technical maintenance, the press service told TASS, noting its own engine's successful flight record.

"It would be incorrect to draw definite conclusions on causes behind the crash at this stage," Kuznetsov said.

Infographics Antares rocket explodes

Overnight to October 29, a US Antares carrier rocket exploded seconds after liftoff from the spaceport in Virginia. The rocket was to carry the cargo spacecraft to the orbit and deliver to the ISS more than 2 tons of payload. Infographics by TASS

 

 

© 2014 TASS

 

---

 

Ukrainian aerospace company launches own investigation of Antares rocket explosion

 

October 29, 16:55 UTC+3
Ukraine's Yuzhnoye design bureau developed the first stage of Antares

 

© EPA/NASA/JOEL KOWSKY

 

KIEV, October 29. /TASS/. Experts of the Ukrainian design bureau Yuzhnoye, which took part in designing and manufacturing the Antares carrier rocket, have launched their own investigation of an explosion of the Antares rocket Tuesday seconds after liftoff from a launch pad in Virginia, Ukrinform news agency said quoting officials at the design bureau.

"We've begun the 'hotwash' already and are scrutinizing the possible causes of the explosion," the press service of the design bureau said. "The results will be reported later."

The two-stage Antares carrier rocket exploded in the air just seconds after liftoff from NASA's space center on Wallops Island in Virginia. It was carrying the Signus cargo craft with two tonnes of payload to the International Space Station, including 720 kilograms of equipment and materials for research experiments.

Infographics

 

Antares rocket explodes

Overnight to October 29, a US Antares carrier rocket exploded seconds after liftoff from the spaceport in Virginia. The rocket was to carry the cargo spacecraft to the orbit and deliver to the ISS more than 2 tons of payload. Infographics by TASS

One of the experiments was to do chemical analysis of the substances formed by meteorites burning in the Earth's atmosphere.

Yuzhnoye design bureau developed the Antares' first stage.

Antares, which was known as Taurus II in the initial phases of its development, was designed for orbiting small payloads of up to 5,000 kilograms. Its developers are the Orbital Science Corporation and Ukraine's Yuzhmash R & D Group.

Under the terms of the project, the Ukrainian side designed and manufactured the first stage of the rocket, while the US company took charge of the second stage and the ground launch site.

The program was partly financed by NASA and the entire cost of its implementation reached $ 1.9 billion. The first four launches of the Antareses were successful.

 

© 2014 TASS

 

---

 

 

Antares carrier rocket's explosion to force adjustments in ISS program

 

October 29, 19:08 UTC+3
Resources of water, food, air, and fuel have been mostly lost and all the spare parts used in the maintenance of the life support system of the American segment of the ISS have been lost in full

 

© EPA/NASA TV/HANDOUT

KOROLYOV, Moscow region, October 29. /TASS/. Explosion of the US-Ukrainian Antares carrier rocket that occurred on Tuesday at a NASA space center in Virginia will necessitate changes in the program of experiments at the US segment of the International Space Station, Vladimir Solovyov, the supervisor of the flight program at the Russian section of the ISS told reporters on Wednesday.

"The Americans will now have to adjust their program of experiments," he said.

As for the program of Russia's Progress cargo ships launches, it will not be affected, Solovyov said.

Basic materials needed for experiments at the American segment of the station, resources of water, foods, air, and fuel have been mostly lost and all the spare parts used in the maintenance of the life support system have been lost in full, he said.

"The situation isn't critical if you take the experiments and all of the necessary materials will be delivered by the next cargo ship," Solovyov said.

"And if you take the resources of water, foodstuffs and air at the ISS, "we have their resources aboard the ISS that are enough for three to eight months," he said.

Overnight to October 29, a US Antares carrier rocket exploded seconds after liftoff from the spaceport in Virginia. The rocket was to carry the cargo spacecraft to the orbit and deliver to the ISS more than 2 tons of payload. Infographics by TASS

Impact of Antares explosion on commercial space flights

The Antares accident will not affect further progress of commercial space flights, Solovyov believes.

"I don't think this situation should have any major aftermaths but it's important to clear out the cause of the explosion and to refine the design of the carrier rockets in line with the findings," Solovyov said.

Solovyov also said NASA had not made any requests to Russia in connection with the Antares's explosion.

"We've had no requests from the Americans so far," he said. "They are clearing the situation out on their own."

The Antares project

The Antares, which was known as the Taurus II in the initial phases of its development, was designed for orbiting small payloads of up to 5,000 kilograms. Its developers are the Orbital Science Corporation and Ukraine's Yuzhmash R&D Group.

Under the terms of the project, the Ukrainian side designed and manufactured the first stage of the rocket, while the U.S. company took charge of the second stage and the ground launch site.

The programme was partly financed by NASA and the entire cost of its implementation reached $ 1.9 billion. The first four launches of the Antareses were successful.

 

 

© 2014 TASS

 

---

 

Fwd: NASA to Work With ISS Cargo Mission Partners Despite US Rocket Crash

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: October 30, 2014 11:50:52 AM EDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: NASA to Work With ISS Cargo Mission Partners Despite US Rocket Crash

 

 

NASA to Work With ISS Cargo Mission Partners Despite US Rocket Crash: Spokesperson

NASA will continue collaboration with its International Space Station (ISS) program partners on cargo resupply missions, despite the crash of the rocket Antares rocket in Virginia.

© Flickr/ Bernt Rostad

05:20 30/10/2014

 

WASHINGTON, October 30 (RIA Novosti) - The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will continue working with its International Space Station (ISS) program partners on cargo resupply missions, despite the crash of the supply rocket Antares in Virginia, a NASA spokesperson Stephanie Schierholz told RIA Novosti.

"We will continue to move forward toward the next attempt once we fully understand today's mishap," Schierholz said Wednesday.

"The International Space Station program partners regularly meet and discuss anything and everything related to the Station," she added.

Russia launched its resupply spacecraft Progress a few hours after the crash of Antares to provide cargo meant for the ISS crew, Schierholz said.

Progress is one of the several Russian supply spacecrafts that delivers cargo to the ISS throughout the year.

"NASA and its partners have an integrated schedule of cargo resupply to the space station," Schierholz said.

On Tuesday, the Antares spacecraft, that was carrying cargo to the ISS, crashed only six seconds after launching from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

A special commission has been set up in the United States to investigate the cause of the explosion, according to NASA.

© 2014 RIA Novosti

 

---

 

Fwd: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Thursday – October 30, 2014 and JSC Today

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: October 30, 2014 12:33:07 PM EDT
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Thursday – October 30, 2014 and JSC Today

Please let me know if you wish to come off the email list.

 

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Read JSC Today in your browser

View Archives

 

JSC 2.0 Space To Ground JSC External Homepage Inside JSC JSC Events Submit JSC Today JSC Roundup NASA News Connect Category Definitions

JSC TODAY CATEGORIES Headlines -  Joint Leadership Team Web Poll -  Free Flu Shots Today -  Institutional Data Center System Outage - Tonight -  National Cybersecurity Awareness Month Organizations/Social -  Deck the Door for Orion -  JSC Child Care Kids Trick-or-Treating -  Let's Celebrate JSC at the #JSCelebration: Dec. 12 -  JSC NMA Book Club -  Virtual Seminar Speakers Wanted -  Promote a Drug-Free Workplace: Red Ribbon Week -  Parenting Series: Talking to Your Teen Jobs and Training -  Correction: Modern Mentoring Agency Webcast -  JSC Imagery Online Training - Nov. 3 -  Virtual Workshop: Relationships Matter Community -  The Humans in Space Art Video Challenge is Open

Sunrise From the International Space Station

 

Headlines Joint Leadership Team Web Poll The Wildlife Management Coalition is not one of our sustainability teams, although our critters have been rather active lately. Texas A&M avoided the upset this past weekend with a convincing performance in their "bye" week. Tennessee … not so much. We are barely a month away from Exploration Flight Test-1, Orion's test flight. It's not launching on a Saturn V or "Little Joe," so what's the launch vehicle? Proton? Falcon? Ariane? Next Wednesday are the Country Music Awards, so I have a throwback question for you. Without Googling it, guess who won Entertainer of the Year way back in 1967. I saw him in concert, and he was the best singer I've ever heard. Cheating your Heart on over to get this week's poll. Joel Walker x30541 http://jlt.jsc.nasa.gov/ [top] Free Flu Shots Today The Occupational Health Branch is providing FREE flu shots to JSC civil servants and contractors who are housed on-site TODAY in the Teague Auditorium lobby from 8:30 a.m. until noon. To expedite the process, PLEASE visit the website below, read the Influenza Vaccine Information Statement and complete the consent form prior to arrival. Please wear clothing that allows easy to access your upper arm (short sleeves or sleeveless). This may be our last outreach session of the flu season, and flu vaccinations are the single best way to prevent seasonal influenza. Do not forget to cover your coughs and sneezes, wash your hands often—and, if you are sick, please stay home! Event Date: Thursday, October 30, 2014   Event Start Time:8:30 AM   Event End Time:12:00 PM Event Location: Teague Auditorium Lobby Add to Calendar Bob Martel x38581 https://sashare.jsc.nasa.gov/sd/SD3/SitePages/Flu%20Program.aspx [top] Institutional Data Center System Outage - Tonight The Information Resources Directorate is scheduled to work on the JSC Data Center distribution switch to repair a hardware issue. The activity is scheduled for TODAY, Oct. 30, from 6 to 7 p.m. CDT. End-user impact to data center resources will be minimal. There will be a 15-minute period between 6 and 7 p.m. where data-center resources may be unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working diligently to address this issue. For questions regarding this outage/update activity, please contact the Enterprise Service Desk at 281-483-4800 - option 2, option 2. JSC-IRD-Outreach x34800 [top] National Cybersecurity Awareness Month Cybersecurity Tip for Today: STOP, THINK, CONNECT Stop and think before you click on links and attachments. Most infections come in through "social engineering"—that is, convincing people to open up a file or click a link with a virus payload. Don't open email attachments from unknown sources. JSC-IT-Security x37682 [top]    Organizations/Social Deck the Door for Orion Today is the last day to sign up for the Deck the Door for Orion contest! Pick a door in your organization's building, decorate with an Orion-related theme and show your support for Exploration Flight Test-1. What's in it for you? A chance to join in the celebration of Orion's first flight and the following: 1st place: VIP tickets to view the launch 2nd place: Item flown on Orion's first flight 3rd place: Taking your selfie inside the Orion medium fidelity mockup to share with all your friends and followers Enter the contest by sending an email to jsc-orion-outreach@mail.nasa.gov with the name of your team, participants, organization and location of your decorated door by Oct. 30. We will only judge the doors of the first 15 teams to enter. Please limit teams to 4 people per team. All JSC employees are encouraged to participate! Door judging will take place Nov. 13 and winning teams will be announced in JSC Today Nov. 14. Orion Communications Office [top] JSC Child Care Kids Trick-or-Treating Join us Halloween morning (Friday) at 9:45 a.m. in front of Building 1. The children will start their Halloween costume parade and "creep and crawl" through the mall area, head past Building 12 and end up at Building 45. Dress in your best costumes! Bring candy, treats and all your friends to join in the JSC Child Care Center costume parade fun. Event Date: Friday, October 31, 2014   Event Start Time:9:45 AM   Event End Time:10:30 AM Event Location: Starting at B1 ending B45 Add to Calendar Brooke Stephens x26031 [top] Let's Celebrate JSC at the #JSCelebration: Dec. 12 You are invited, bring your family, too! All JSC team members are welcome to join the festivities on Dec. 12 at the #JSCelebration in Building 9 beginning at 4:30 p.m. Tickets, just $5, will be available at Starport in mid-November. There will be food trucks, a bounce house, robotic demonstrations, great photo opportunities, music, a cake decorating contest, Cosmo, Santa, door prizes, surprises and lots of laughter. Make plans to be there—it's going to be FUN! Event Date: Friday, December 12, 2014   Event Start Time:4:30 PM   Event End Time:6:30 PM Event Location: Building 9 and surrounding areas Add to Calendar Susan Anderson x38630 [top] JSC NMA Book Club JSC National Management Association (NMA) Professional Development - 4 Disciplines of Execution Do you sometimes allow the "whirlwind" of urgent activity required to keep things running day-to-day devour all your time and energy, so there's nothing left to execute your strategy for tomorrow? If so, you're welcome to join the JSC NMA Professional Development session covering the #1 national bestseller business book "The 4 Disciplines of Execution," facilitated by Dr. Jose Bolton. By following the four disciplines—focusing on the wildly important, acting on lead measures, keeping a compelling scoreboard and creating a cadence of accountability—you can produce breakthrough results. All JSC team members (civil servants and contractors) are welcome to participate. JSC NMA members who RSVP to Bridget Niese by Nov. 14 will receive a copy of the book's executive summary. Event Date: Nov. 19 Event Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Event Location: Building 1, Room 257A Event Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2014   Event Start Time:11:30 AM   Event End Time:1:00 PM Event Location: Building 1, Room 257A Add to Calendar Bridget Montgomery Niese x32335 [top] Virtual Seminar Speakers Wanted JSC is hosting an agencywide virtual seminar next month as part of an effort by the Early Career Scientists and Engineers Working Group to promote work being done by early career scientists and engineers. We are looking for four early-career speakers (two scientists and two engineers) to give 10-minute presentations to an agencywide audience. The seminar is scheduled for Nov. 19 at noon CST. For consideration, please send a title and brief (three- to five-sentence) description of the talk you'd like to give. Event Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2014   Event Start Time:11:45 AM   Event End Time:1:00 PM Event Location: Virtual Add to Calendar Aaron Burton x42773 [top] Promote a Drug-Free Workplace: Red Ribbon Week Did you know that according to the National Institutes of Health, an estimated 10 percent of Americans use illegal drugs or abuse prescribed drugs? Or that drug abuse is growing among people in their 50s, and that 15 percent of the population report becoming intoxicated at least once a week? Chances are that someone you know is struggling with substance abuse or addiction. Stop by our table and learn what you can do to intervene. The JSC Employee Assistance Program will be in Building 3 café today, Oct. 30, from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. Please stop by and show your support. Event Date: Thursday, October 30, 2014   Event Start Time:11:00 AM   Event End Time:1:00 PM Event Location: Building 3 Cafeteria Add to Calendar Lorrie Bennett, Employee Assistance Program, Occupational Health Branch x36130 [top] Parenting Series: Talking to Your Teen If you were to ask teens if they want more positive communication with their parents, the majority of them would say "Yes!" Can you believe it? Your teens want a connection with you as much as you want one with them! Your kids want to talk to you. No, this is not part of a late Halloween trick … but the "trick" with talking to teens is to listen before you talk. As with most of us, the most valuable and underused skill in talking, or communication, is the least verbal one—listening. We will discuss additional techniques that will help invite your teen to open up and allow him/her to listen to you, too. We will also identify the influence of teenage cognitive development and impact on their communication style. Please join Anika Isaac, MS, LPC, LMFT, NCC, LCDC, CEAP, as she presents "Talking to Your Teen." Event Date: Thursday, November 6, 2014   Event Start Time:12:00 PM   Event End Time:1:00 PM Event Location: Building 30 Auditorium Add to Calendar Lorrie Bennett, Employee Assistance Program, Occupational Health Branch x36130 [top]    Jobs and Training Correction: Modern Mentoring Agency Webcast In an effort to promote continuous mentoring opportunities around JSC, please join us by participating in the Modern Mentoring agency webcast. This webcast will provide valuable knowledge focusing on 21st century style mentoring; demonstrate best practices; and give tips on how to better connect across the agency, including the use of the NASA Connect tool. Date: TODAY, Oct. 30 Time: 1:30 to 3 p.m. **note time correction** Location: Tune in to the Adobe Connect session here, or attend a viewing party in Building 12, Room 146 Open to all JSC team members. Please contact Jennifer Rodriguez or Nicole Hernandez for more details. Jennifer Rodriguez or Nicole Hernandez x46386 [top] JSC Imagery Online Training - Nov. 3 Need to find NASA mission pictures or videos? Learn how during a webinar on Monday, Nov. 3, from 3 to 4 p.m. Mary Wilkerson, Still Imagery lead, will show users how to find NASA mission images in Imagery Online (IO) and the Digital Imagery Management System (DIMS). Leslie Richards, Video Imagery lead, will show users the video functionality in IO. Register here. For more information, go to: IO and DIMS This training is provided by JSC's Information Resources Directorate. Event Date: Monday, November 3, 2014   Event Start Time:3:00 PM   Event End Time:4:00 PM Event Location: Online Add to Calendar Scientific and Technical Information Center x34245 http://library.jsc.nasa.gov [top] Virtual Workshop: Relationships Matter Relationships Matter: Acknowledging the Importance of Relationships and Practical Ways to Improve Relationships at Work There are a few slots left in this mini workshop sponsored by the agency's LASER supervisory development program. Get some tips to help you understand others better and deal with people more effectively. Learn how to create an environment that supports other people in feeling significant, competent and likable, and how to work with your own and others' defenses as they arise. With this knowledge, you can make more intentional choices about how you want to lead your people and encourage them to fully engage and contribute to NASA's mission. Target Audience: First-line supervisors, as well as other interested supervisors, managers and team leads Date/time: Tuesday, Nov. 4, from noon to 3:30 p.m. CDT. Location: Gilruth Center Ballroom Register in SATERN: LMD-LASER-RM (ID: 76030) Nancy Garrick x33076 [top]    Community The Humans in Space Art Video Challenge is Open Join NASA's International Space Station Program and Humans in Space Art in a journey of exploration. Interested college students and early-career professionals worldwide are invited to influence the future of life on Earth and human space exploration. Individuals and teams should submit a three-minute video capturing their vision of "How will space, science and technology benefit humanity?" Video artwork may be any style. Younger participants may submit a video, but artwork from artists of all ages will be judged together. Winning artwork will be given worldwide visibility and flown in orbit on the space station! Entries are due Nov. 15. There are only two weeks left! Click here for details. Please share this information with interested artists, teachers, parents and more. A printable poster in multiple languages is also available on the website. Thank you, The Humans in Space Art Video challenge organizers Jancy McPhee x42022 http://www.humansinspaceart.org [top]

 

JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters.

 

 

 

NASA and Human Spaceflight News

Thursday – October 30, 2014

HEADLINES AND LEADS

Russian Cargo Ship Docks with ISS

Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com

 

Cargo launches to the International Space Station (ISS) usually are so routine that they barely get mentioned in the news, but the docking of a Russian Progress spacecraft this morning (October 29) is noteworthy following the failure of a U.S. Antares rocket last night. If nothing else, the Progress docking demonstrates that there are several ways to get cargo to the ISS and while the Antares failure is disappointing, it is not a showstopper for ISS operations.

 

U.S. Air Force Successfully Launches Eighth GPS 2F Navigation Satellite

Mike Gruss - Space News

The U.S. Air Force successfully launched another Boeing-built positioning, navigation and timing satellite Oct. 29, just days after saying first of its next-generation GPS satellites, developed by Lockheed Martin, is now expected to launch in December 2016.

 

Antares Rocket Explosion Leaves Questions and Dead Mosquito Eggs

Kenneth Chang – The New York Times

No people were hurt when a rocket taking supplies to the International Space Station exploded just after launching Tuesday night — but the mosquito eggs did not survive.

Wallops Launch Site Spared Major Damage

Jeff Foust – Space News

A launch site at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility sustained some damage in the Oct. 28 failure of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket, but company officials said the complex escaped major damage.

 

Antares Failure: Damage Not Too Bad, Identifying Likely Cause Days Not Weeks Away

Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com

 

Orbital Sciences Corporation said today that an initial survey of the Antares launch pad and surrounding areas at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, VA shows that the damage is not as bad as initially feared. Also today, Orbital's President said it should be days, not weeks, before investigators can identify a "handful" of likely causes though finding the root cause will take longer.

Trying to go to space on the cheap has had disastrous consequences in the past

Andrea Peterson - The Washington Post

 

When reporters asked the first U.S. man in space, Alan Shepard, what he thought about as he sat atop a Mercury launch vehicle, he's said to have responded, "The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder."

 

Ukrainian aerospace company launches own investigation of Antares rocket explosion

Ukraine's Yuzhnoye design bureau developed the first stage of Antares

TASS, of Russia

 

Experts of the Ukrainian design bureau Yuzhnoye, which took part in designing and manufacturing the Antares carrier rocket, have launched their own investigation of an explosion of the Antares rocket Tuesday seconds after liftoff from a launch pad in Virginia, Ukrinform news agency said quoting officials at the design bureau.

 

The Antares Explosion: Confronting the Inevitable Risks of Space Travel

Michael Lemonick – The New Yorker

No one seems to know why an Antares booster rocket, operated by the Orbital Sciences corporation, exploded in a fireball six seconds after it lifted off from a launch pad, on Wallops Island, Virginia, yesterday morning. The rocket was carrying a Cygnus capsule packed with about two and a half tons of food, equipment, and scientific experiments for delivery to the International Space Station (I.S.S.). There were no astronauts onboard; NASA handed the transport of humans to and from the I.S.S. over to the Russian space agency in 2011, when the Space Shuttle program ended.

How a 1960s Soviet Engine Appeared on an Exploded U.S. Rocket (Video)

Matthew Bodner - Moscow Times

A U.S. commercial rocket powered by a Soviet-built Russian rocket engine exploded seconds after liftoff early Wednesday morning Moscow time, adding fire to debates concerning the U.S. space industry's heavy use of Russian rocket engines.

Asteroid-Mining Tech Among Casualties of Antares Rocket Explosion

Mike Wall - Space.com

The rocket explosion that destroyed a cargo vessel bound for the International Space Station Tuesday (Oct. 28) also took out an asteroid-mining company's first spacecraft.

Lockheed Martin opens Colorado commercial space HQ as it adds hundreds of jobs (Video)

Greg Avery - Denver Business Journal

Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. Wednesday opened the new headquarters for its commercial satellite business, heralding the addition of hundreds of local jobs by Colorado's largest private-sector aerospace employer.

MIT scientist proposes asteroids as destinations before Mars

Carolyn Y. Johnson – Boston Globe

Asteroid scientist Richard Binzel is often preoccupied by questions about the rocky bodies that sit in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Spraypainted styrofoam asteroids hang from the ceiling of his MIT laboratory -- evidence of his passion for a topic that usually captures public attention only when one passes too close for comfort.

'Interstellar' Black Hole is Best Black Hole in Sci-Fi

Ian O'Neill - Discovery.com

Christopher Nolan's movie 'Interstellar' will be an epic space adventure encapsulating humanity's need to explore the Universe, but it's the visual effects for the movie that are garnering early attention.

COMPLETE STORIES

 

Russian Cargo Ship Docks with ISS

Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com

 

Cargo launches to the International Space Station (ISS) usually are so routine that they barely get mentioned in the news, but the docking of a Russian Progress spacecraft this morning (October 29) is noteworthy following the failure of a U.S. Antares rocket last night. If nothing else, the Progress docking demonstrates that there are several ways to get cargo to the ISS and while the Antares failure is disappointing, it is not a showstopper for ISS operations.

 

Russian Progress spacecraft have resupplied space stations since the 1970s. Developed initially to support the Soviet Union's Salyut and Mir space stations, today they routinely take cargo to the ISS. Progress M-25M launched at 4:09 am Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) this morning and docked with ISS at 9:08 am EDT. It is carrying 1,940 pounds of propellant, 48 pounds of oxygen, 57 pounds of air, 926 pounds of water, and 2,822 pounds of supplies.

Orbital Sciences Corporation's Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft would have delivered another 5,050 pounds of supplies, experiments and equipment on its third operational ISS cargo run if the launch had been a success.

Orbital's commercial cargo competitor, SpaceX, just ended its fourth operational cargo mission to the ISS and another is scheduled for launch on December 9. SpaceX's Dragon not only takes cargo to the ISS, but also returns cargo to Earth. It is the only ISS cargo spacecraft designed to survive reentry through Earth's atmosphere and splash down in the ocean.

Japan also launches cargo spacecraft to the ISS designated HTV for H-II Transfer Vehicle (H-II is the name of the rocket that launches it). The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has launched four HTVs already and the next is scheduled for early 2015.

Europe developed the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) to deliver cargo, but no more ATV launches are planned. The final ATV mission, ATV-5, is currently docked to the ISS.

In short, as NASA officials made clear last night, Antares was not carrying any cargo that was "absolutely critical" for ISS operations and the 6-person ISS crew is fine. The impact of the Antares failure is more likely to be financial in terms of who pays to build a replacement rocket and spacecraft, not to mention the cargo. Orbital's Frank Culbertson said last night that the company had "some" insurance for the launch, but was not specific about how much. He said the cost of the Antares and Cygnus was approximately $200 million. Costs will also be incurred for the investigation into the accident, making any needed changes to the rocket, and cleaning up the debris. Orbital provides cargo services to NASA under a fixed price contract ($1.9 billion to deliver 20 tons to the ISS through 2016), which may mean that the company will have to cover all those costs, but last night NASA's ISS program manager Mike Suffredini was vague about that issue. He said the contract was set up for such contingencies and NASA would work with Orbital to get the hardware replaced.

 

U.S. Air Force Successfully Launches Eighth GPS 2F Navigation Satellite

Mike Gruss - Space News

The U.S. Air Force successfully launched another Boeing-built positioning, navigation and timing satellite Oct. 29, just days after saying first of its next-generation GPS satellites, developed by Lockheed Martin, is now expected to launch in December 2016.

 

Col. Bill Cooley, director of the GPS directorate at the Air Force Space and Missile Systems in Los Angeles, told reporters in an Oct. 24 conference call that the service has been "spending a lot of time and attention" on its next-generation GPS 3 program, including the space and ground segment.

 

Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services of Dulles, Virginia, is developing the GPS 3 ground system, known as the Operational Control Segment (OCX), while Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver is prime contractor on the satellites. Both are behind schedule — the satellites originally were supposed to start launching in 2014 — and while Cooley said there is "some cause for optimism," he is nonetheless waiting for the contractors to "show" that they are making the necessary progress.

 

"We'd like to get the first GPS 3 on orbit as soon as possible," Cooley said.

 

Meanwhile, the Air Force on Oct. 29 successfully launched the eighth of the current-generation GPS satellites from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.

 

The GPS 2F satellites, built by Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems of El Segundo, California, provide better accuracy and resistance to jamming than the previous generation of GPS satellites, most of which are still in operation.

 

In a press release issued Oct. 29, Boeing said the first signals from the on-orbit satellite were acquired about three-and-a-half hours after its 1:21 p.m. EDT liftoff. The satellite is expected to complete in-orbit testing and begin operational service in December, Boeing said.

 

GPS 2F-8 will replace an older satellite, launched in 2000, that will be placed into a reserve mode, Cooley said. The current GPS constellation consists of 38 satellites, 31 of which are in active mode.

 

The launch was the fourth and last of a GPS 2F satellite this year, a pace Cooley described as "the most aggressive launch campaign schedule" for the GPS program since 1993.

 

"The schedule this year has put the GPS team through its paces, with launches occurring approximately every three months to continue GPS modernization," Dan Hart, vice president of government space systems at Boeing, said in a prepared statement. "We typically were processing two satellites concurrently at the Cape, requiring strong execution, an unrelenting focus on mission assurance and solid team work with the Air Force and United Launch Alliance."

 

The next satellite in the series is not expected to launch until March 2015, Cooley said. The 10th is tentatively manifested for June 2015, with the 11th and the 12th — the latter being final satellite in the series — to follow in September 2015 and January 2016, respectively.

 

The launch was the 50th mission for the Atlas 5 rocket and came a day after an Antares rocket built by Orbital Sciences Corp. exploded shortly after liftoff from Wallops Island, Virginia. Following the failure, the Air Force's 45th Space Wing at Cape Canaveral conducted an evaluation and found that "common components do not introduce any additional risk to the success" of the GPS launch, according to an Oct. 29 press release from the service.

 

Antares Rocket Explosion Leaves Questions and Dead Mosquito Eggs

Kenneth Chang – The New York Times

No people were hurt when a rocket taking supplies to the International Space Station exploded just after launching Tuesday night — but the mosquito eggs did not survive.

Julia Ellis, 13, was across the bay from the launching pad on Wallops Island, Va., less than two miles away, watching as the rocket lifted off. Amid the 5,000 pounds of cargo was an experiment that she and four classmates at Columbia Middle School in Berkeley Heights, N.J., had devised to study whether mosquito larvae can grow in zero gravity.

"Everyone was just so excited and happy," she said. "You could hear everyone cheering."

Then there was a flash, and the rocket fell. "It feels like someone smacked you in the chest," she said. "You hear one small explosion, one really large explosion and then two small explosions."

On Wednesday, investigators started looking through the wreckage of the Antares rocket, built by the Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., one of two private companies that NASA relies on to take cargo to the station. Four previous Antares launches, three of which went to the space station, were successful.

During a conference call with financial analysts, David W. Thompson, Orbital's chairman and chief executive, said the rocket experienced a catastrophic failure about 15 seconds after liftoff, destroying the rocket and its payload. "It appears that the launch complex itself was spared from any major damage," he said.

Garrett E. Pierce, the company's chief financial officer, said the failure would not affect the company's finances this year, because insurance would cover repairs to the launching site and the payments from NASA that might be held back.

Orbital has a $1.9 billion contract from NASA for eight cargo flights, or $237 million each.

NASA officials said the loss would have no immediate effect on the operations of the space station, which has several months of supplies. A Russian cargo rocket successfully launched on Wednesday, as scheduled, and docked at the space station six hours later.

Among the items lost in the Antares explosion were a suite of student experiments arranged by NanoRacks, a small company in Houston that flies commercial payloads to the space station. Also lost were 29 nanosatellites, the largest weighing about 22 pounds, that the company had arranged to be launched from the space station.

Jeffrey Manber, NanoRacks's managing director, spent the day like an airline customer service agent trying to rebook passengers from a canceled flight.

"We're sitting here right now working through the needs of our customers," Mr. Manber said. "What are the priorities of the payloads? Who can rebuild? Who's ready to go?"

SpaceX, the other company that NASA has hired to ferry cargo, completed its most recent flight to the station last week, and its next rocket is scheduled to launch in December. Mr. Manber said some of the rebuilt student experiments could be on that flight. Mr. Thompson said he expected that the next Antares launch, set for April, would be delayed by several months.

While he said it was too early to speculate on why the Antares crashed, Mr. Thompson added: "Itwill likely not take very long — I think a period measured in days, not weeks — for the investigation team to define the handful of most likely causes of the accident. It may take a little longer than that to zero in on the final root cause."

Certain to be scrutinized are the two engines in the rocket's first stage. They were built in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s to power a giant rocket to go to the moon. After NASA's successful moon landings, the Soviets abandoned their effort, and the engines lay in storage for decades.

Then an American company, Aerojet, bought and refurbished them, and Orbital incorporated them into the Antares design.

One of the engines failed during testing in May, delaying the previous Antares flight. Orbital officials said the company was considering accelerating its plans to replace the old Soviet engines.

Orbital has had two other high-profile NASA failures in recent years. In 2009, NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory on top of Orbital's Taurus XL rocket was lost when the nose cone protecting the satellite failed to separate, and the satellite crashed into the ocean.

Two years later, a similar failure destroyed NASA's Glory satellite, which was to have made climate observations.

Wallops Launch Site Spared Major Damage

Jeff Foust – Space News

A launch site at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility sustained some damage in the Oct. 28 failure of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket, but company officials said the complex escaped major damage.

 

"Based on the preliminary inspections that were conducted this morning at Wallops Island, it appears that the launch pad complex itself was spared from any major damage," Orbital Chief Executive David Thompson said in an Oct. 29 conference call with financial analysts.

 

In a statement issued late Oct. 29, the company confirmed that assessment. "The overall findings indicate the major elements of the launch complex infrastructure, such as the pad and fuel tanks, avoided serious damage, although some repairs will be necessary," the company stated.

 

A separate statement from NASA late Oct. 29 provided more details about the initial review of Pad 0A of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA Wallops in Virginia. In the statement, NASA said there was damage to the transporter erector launcher, the platform that supports the rocket as it is transported to the launch pad in the horizontal position, then erects it vertically for launch.

 

NASA also reported damage to lightning suppression rods surrounding the launch pad. The agency did not describe the extent of the damage to either the transporter or the lightning rods in the statement.

 

In addition to the damage to the pad itself, NASA said there was some damage to support buildings in the vicinity of the pad, in the form of broken windows and imploded doors. A sounding rocket launcher near the Antares launch pad and other buildings closest to the pad suffered the most damage.

 

Speaking at the American Astronautical Society's Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, Oct. 29, William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said that nitrogen, oxygen and kerosene tanks near the launch pad were holding pressure after the accident.

 

In addition, the Horizontal Integration Facility, the hangar where Antares is mated with the cargo-carrying Cygnus spacecraft that actually makes the deliveries to the international space station, is unharmed. The facility is more than a kilometer away from the pad and was outside of the blast zone, Gerstenmaier said.

 

Orbital executives confirmed on the conference call that the Horizontal Integration Facility and other Cygnus processing facilities at Wallops were not damaged in the Antares explosion.

 

NASA cautioned in the statement that a full assessment of the damage to the launch site, and the time and expense to repair the damage, will take weeks. "In the coming days and weeks ahead, we'll continue to assess the damage on the island and begin the process of moving forward to restore our space launch capabilities," Bill Wrobel, director of NASA Wallops, said in the agency's statement.

 

Orbital, in its separate statement, also said that additional evaluation is needed to determine what repairs are needed and the schedule for completing them. The company expects insurance to cover the cost of those repairs.

 

"The cost of any necessary facility repairs is also reimbursable by insurance," Orbital Chief Financial Officer Garrett Pierce said in the call with financial analysts Oct. 29. "Hopefully, repairs will not be extensive."

 

Dan Leone contributed to this article from Huntsville, Alabama.

 

Antares Failure: Damage Not Too Bad, Identifying Likely Cause Days Not Weeks Away

Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com

 

Orbital Sciences Corporation said today that an initial survey of the Antares launch pad and surrounding areas at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, VA shows that the damage is not as bad as initially feared. Also today, Orbital's President said it should be days, not weeks, before investigators can identify a "handful" of likely causes though finding the root cause will take longer.

Orbital's Antares rocket with a Cygnus spacecraft full of more than 5,000 pounds of experiments, equipment and supplies for the International Space Station (ISS) failed seconds after liftoff from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops last night. No one was injured.

 

David Thompson, Orbital's Chairman, President, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and one of the company's founders, held a telephone conference call with investors and financial analysts to discuss the failure this afternoon. The company's stock was down almost 17 percent. Orbital is in the midst of a merger with ATK. When asked if he was considering a delay in the shareholder vote with regard to the merger, Thompson said it is too early to tell.

"Too early to tell" was an oft-repeated theme throughout the teleconference as Thompson and Orbital Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer Garrett Pierce provided what information they could about the failure and attempts to ascertain its cause. Thompson said he thought it would take only days, not weeks, to narrow the list of potential causes to a few, although it would take longer to determine the root cause. Based on past experience, he anticipates that the next Antares launch, currently scheduled for April, will be delayed. "I think a reasonable best-case estimate would bound that at three months but it could certainly be considerably longer than that depending on what we find in the review. I would hope it would be not more than a year," he said.

Although Thompson cautioned that first impressions are not always the correct ones in accidents like this, there is a widespread assumption that the rocket's first stage engines were at least part of the cause considering how early in the launch the failure occurred. Antares is powered by two NK33 engines built by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and imported to the United States for refurbishment by Aerojet and redesignated AJ26. Orbital has been considering replacing the AJ26s with a different engine in about two years because they "have presented us with some serious technical and supply challenges in the past," he said, adding that the accident may accelerate those plans: "I certainly think we can shorten that interval, but at this point I don't know by how much." The company has not revealed what alternative engine it has selected.

Thompson said the launch complex "was spared from any major damage" and the Antares assembly building and Cygnus spacecraft processing facilities "were not affected ... in any way." The company issued a press statement later in the day reaffirming that based on an aerial survey and an on-site preliminary visit, serious damage was avoided, but the full extent of repairs or how long they will take will not be known until a more detailed inspection is conducted.

NASA posted an aerial view of the damaged area on its website. NASA Wallops Director Bill Wrobel expressed confidence that "we will rebound stronger than ever." NASA said there was damage at the MARS facility to the transporter erector launcher and lightning suppression rods. A sounding rocket launcher adjacent to the pad and buildings nearest the pad suffered the greatest damage, NASA said, and support buildings have broken windows and imploded doors. Environmental damage appears to be contained within the southern third of Wallops Island. No hazardous substances were detected in air samples at the Wallops mainland area, the Highway 175 causeway, or nearby Chincoteague Island. The Coast Guard and Virginia Marine Resources Commission have not observed any obvious signs of water pollution. Anyone who finds debris is warned not to touch it and to call 757-824-1295.

 

Thompson and Pierce said insurance would cover the cost of launch site repairs to its facilities as well as the loss of near-term receivables that the company would have collected if the launch had been a success. The company still plans to submit a bid for NASA's follow-on Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) 2 contract. Yesterday's launch was part of the original CRS contract under which Orbital was awarded a $1.9 billion contract to deliver 20 tons of cargo to the ISS by 2016.

An Accident Investigation Board (AIB) led by Orbital and including NASA, MARS, and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will determine the cause of the accident and recommend corrective actions. Orbital's Dave Steffy, Senior Vice President and Chief Engineer of the Advanced Programs Group, is chairing the AIB.

The loss of the spacecraft is not expected to affect ISS operations. None of the cargo on this third operational Orbital mission to the ISS, Orb-3, was critical and a Russian Progress cargo spacecraft docked with the ISS this morning on a regularly scheduled flight bringing fuel, water, air, oxygen, food and other supplies.

 

Trying to go to space on the cheap has had disastrous consequences in the past

Andrea Peterson - The Washington Post

 

When reporters asked the first U.S. man in space, Alan Shepard, what he thought about as he sat atop a Mercury launch vehicle, he's said to have responded, "The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder."

 

That sentiment may hang heavy over the launch failure at a NASA facility near the coast of Virginia on Tuesday night. An Antares rocket from contractor Orbital Sciences came crashing back down onto the launch pad within moments of the launch of a flight intended to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. The mission was unmanned, and there were no injuries reported on the ground.

 

The cause of the failure remain unknown. But Orbital has marketed the Antares as a "cost effective" way to launch payloads, due at least in part on its reliance on recycled Soviet-era rocket engines — a move that has drawn criticism from some, including competitor SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk. Here's what he told Wired in a 2012 interview:

 

One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the '60s. I don't mean their design is from the '60s — I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the '60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.

 

Orbital has previously acknowledged some issues with the engines, with Executive Vice President Frank Culbertson telling Space Flight Now last year that the company has done refurbishing work on the supply. "As we went through testing, we did discover there were some effects of aging since they had been in storage for a while, including some stress corrosion cracking," he said. "That's what we're correcting with the weld repairs and other inspections."

 

In May, one of the refurbished engines was destroyed in a ground test at a NASA center in Mississippi — with some sources saying it "exploded" — although the exact cause has not been disclosed. In a news conference Tuesday night, Culbertson said a thorough investigation would need to be completed before it could determine whether the engine was a factor in the failure.

 

NASA's share of the federal budget has shrunk dramatically since the peak of the space race, and it has faced significant challenges even maintaining its ability to support current missions in recent years.

 

Past U.S. launch failures have sometimes been blamed on poor work by contractors, who became more directly involved in U.S. government launches after a push toward privatization aimed at lowering costs in the 1980s and 1990s.

 

In the late 1990s, the U.S. space industry suffered a string of problems, including three military and two civilian flight failures. The military launch failures resulted in the loss of payloads totaling more than $3 billion dollars. A broad area review report of the issues ordered by President Bill Clinton cited contractor mishaps for the bulk of the problems, saying "factory-introduced engineering and workmanship errors predominate."

 

The final report from the board that investigated the 2003 Columbia disaster, which cost the lives of all seven crew members aboard the space shuttle, cited "years of resource constraints" as among the factors that resulted in the accident.

 

Ukrainian aerospace company launches own investigation of Antares rocket explosion

Ukraine's Yuzhnoye design bureau developed the first stage of Antares

TASS, of Russia

 

Experts of the Ukrainian design bureau Yuzhnoye, which took part in designing and manufacturing the Antares carrier rocket, have launched their own investigation of an explosion of the Antares rocket Tuesday seconds after liftoff from a launch pad in Virginia, Ukrinform news agency said quoting officials at the design bureau.

"We've begun the 'hotwash' already and are scrutinizing the possible causes of the explosion," the press service of the design bureau said. "The results will be reported later."

The two-stage Antares carrier rocket exploded in the air just seconds after liftoff from NASA's space center on Wallops Island in Virginia. It was carrying the Signus cargo craft with two tonnes of payload to the International Space Station, including 720 kilograms of equipment and materials for research experiments.

One of the experiments was to do chemical analysis of the substances formed by meteorites burning in the Earth's atmosphere.

Yuzhnoye design bureau developed the Antares' first stage.

Antares, which was known as Taurus II in the initial phases of its development, was designed for orbiting small payloads of up to 5,000 kilograms. Its developers are the Orbital Science Corporation and Ukraine's Yuzhmash R & D Group.

Under the terms of the project, the Ukrainian side designed and manufactured the first stage of the rocket, while the US company took charge of the second stage and the ground launch site.

The program was partly financed by NASA and the entire cost of its implementation reached $ 1.9 billion. The first four launches of the Antareses were successful.

The Antares Explosion: Confronting the Inevitable Risks of Space Travel

Michael Lemonick – The New Yorker

No one seems to know why an Antares booster rocket, operated by the Orbital Sciences corporation, exploded in a fireball six seconds after it lifted off from a launch pad, on Wallops Island, Virginia, yesterday morning. The rocket was carrying a Cygnus capsule packed with about two and a half tons of food, equipment, and scientific experiments for delivery to the International Space Station (I.S.S.). There were no astronauts onboard; NASA handed the transport of humans to and from the I.S.S. over to the Russian space agency in 2011, when the Space Shuttle program ended.

The Russians have been handling some of the station's supply runs, as well—an unmanned rocket blasted into orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, early this morning. But, despite official declarations of confidence from NASA, it's always been somewhat anxiety provoking to rely on the Russians, which is why the U.S. has increasingly been using Orbital and the SpaceX corporation for non-human cargoes. Despite yesterday's explosion, the privatization of space missions will certainly continue. NASA simply doesn't have the resources to carry out all of its own launches. SpaceX, which completed its fourth I.S.S. resupply mission in September, will likely mount a fifth next month, to fill the gap left by yesterday's explosion. Orbital Sciences will be out of the game temporarily, of course, until investigators figure out what happened.

One possibility is the presence of a flaw in the Antares, whose engines are modified versions of a Soviet rocket engine developed in the nineteen-sixties. But the history of rocketry is so full of failures of all kinds that it would be foolish to jump to any conclusions. "Spaceflight is tough," Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and the lead scientist for the New Horizons probe, which is en route to a rendezvous with Pluto next July, told me. "They don't call it rocket science for nothing."

It's easy to wax philosophical when you're talking about a supply rocket that exploded without a loss of human life. Things will get dicier in 2017, however, when two private companies, SpaceX and Boeing, begin carrying astronauts to the I.S.S., an arrangement that NASA announced in September. When those men and women start taking their privatized trips into space, a choice that the space agency made back in the sixties will reverberate once again. In order to get Americans excited about the manned spaceflight program and the race to the moon, NASA turned its first seven astronauts into media stars. This was in sharp contrast to the way that test pilots, a few of those seven astronauts among them, had been treated in the past. The men who flew jet fighters while they were being developed were mostly anonymous, so that when one of them died in a crash or a fire it wasn't an occasion for national mourning.

But space capsules and shuttles have never been more than experimental. There were fifteen Apollo missions, and the Space Shuttles flew just a hundred and thirty-five times—far too few to work out all the kinks. In this way, the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts on the ground in 1967, and the Challenger and Columbia disasters in 1986 and 2003, were, in a sense, inevitable. Problems were going to arise—the tragedy was one of timing, not of chance.

Similarly, no matter how carefully they focus on safety, Boeing and SpaceX will be operating experimental spacecraft. So will Virgin Galactic, if and when it begins flying tourists into space. Failures won't necessarily happen at a greater rate than they have on government spacecraft; private space companies have at least as much incentive as NASA to keep mishaps at a minimum, but given the scope of vision of some of what's been proposed, both by NASA and by private companies, there may be a point where great risk becomes impossible to avoid.

The probability of catastrophe only increases, for example, if astronauts fly beyond the moon, to visit a captured asteroid, or if they try to match orbits with a near-Earth asteroid—or, of course, if they eventually set out for Mars. It's not clear which, if any, of these adventures will actually happen, but given Americans' continued enthusiasm for space exploration, in principle at least, payloads will continue to be destroyed. And yes, people will occasionally die. This is nothing more than the nature of space travel.

How a 1960s Soviet Engine Appeared on an Exploded U.S. Rocket (Video)

Matthew Bodner - Moscow Times

A U.S. commercial rocket powered by a Soviet-built Russian rocket engine exploded seconds after liftoff early Wednesday morning Moscow time, adding fire to debates concerning the U.S. space industry's heavy use of Russian rocket engines.

While unfortunate, the incident does not threaten the International Space Station (ISS), which was hoping to receive supplies from the ill-fated rocket. The ISS crew has supplies to last until the middle of next year, and a Russian Progress cargo ship successfully lifted off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome on Wednesday with goods for the station.

Regardless, the failure of the Antares rocket — which uses a Russian engine and Ukrainian components in the rocket's body — shines light on the deeply co-dependent nature of space flight after the Cold War.

As Dr. James Oberg, a former NASA engineer and expert on the Russian space program, told The Moscow Times by phone on Wednesday: "In the end, we are too mutually co-dependent to do anything but scream and shout and then take the money."

The NK-33

The story of the engine used in Wednesday's launch — the NK-33 — is a perfect illustration of this co-dependence. Originally built for the Soviet's massive N1 moon rocket, Russia's Kuznetsov design bureau dumped its stock of NK-33s on the market in the 1990s for purchase by Western aerospace firms.

A testament to Soviet engineering prowess, the NK-33 today is purchased by U.S. middleman Aerojet-Rocketdyne in bulk from Kuznetsov for restoration under contract for Orbital Sciences another U.S. firm. Orbital Sciences then plugs them in to the first stage of its Antares rocket.

But the decision to use a 40-year-old rocket engine has not been without its critics. Shortly after the explosion on Wednesday, an excerpt from a 2012 interview in Wired magazine with Elon Musk, founder of U.S. space firm SpaceX, made the rounds on Twitter: "One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were built in the '60s. I don't mean their design is from the '60s. I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the '60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere."

But according to Oberg, this misses the point.

"High-pressure liquid engines [like the NK-33] were really perfected back during the moon race," Oberg said. "The designs since then have been marginally improved but not enough to justify the fabrication [production] expenses." This makes buying existing engines extremely economical for private space companies worried about their bottom line.

Glory Days

The NK-33 was a child of the 1960s space race, a result of failed Soviet efforts to answer U.S. President John F. Kennedy's challenge in 1961 to land a man on the moon by 1970.

The Soviets were slow to rally a response. Only in 1964 did Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev finally gave his ace in the hole — genius Ukrainian-born rocket designer Sergei Korolyov — the go-ahead to build a heavy-lifting rocket to eventually challenge NASA's Saturn V in the race to the moon.

But the program was troubled from inception. As with any large technological project, key design decisions and bureaucratic competition for lucrative contracts sparked serious internal power struggles between factions of Soviet space officials.

The most prominent internal struggle led to the creation of the NK-33. Korolyov had a long-standing dispute with another major player in the Soviet space industry — Valentin Glushko. The two had testified against the each other during Stalin's purges, resulting in both of them being thrown in the gulag.

Glushko and Korolyov tried to work together on the N1, but Glushko wanted to use a type of engine with poisonous fuel, something unacceptable to Korolyov. So, in an effort to find a designer that would remain loyal to his projects he had to look outside the space industry.

Nikolai Kuznetsov's design bureau, which had only ever built engines for aircraft and cruise missiles, stepped up to the task and produced the engines Korolyov needed for his massive rocket — first the NK-15, and later the NK-33.

Before the rocket even began testing in 1969, Korolyov died. Internal bleeding during an operation in 1966 took the rocket designer's life, and Soviet lunar aspirations went with him.

Without Korolyov to rally the disparate elements of the Soviet space-industrial complex, the N1 project was eventually torpedoed by Glushko and his political patrons in 1974, after the rocket had exploded on four consecutive launch attempts.

While Glushko would lead the Soviet space industry to several great accomplishments over the next 15 years, including its pioneering space station program and the Soviet space shuttle program, the Soviets would never land on the moon.

Korolyov's legacy lived on, however. His N1 was a huge rocket, using 30 of the NK-33 engines. Some 200 of the engines were built for the program, and after the N1 was scrapped no one was quite sure what to do with them.

Decades in Limbo

With the engines already built, the waning years of the Soviet empire saw numerous proposals to integrate the powerful NK-33s into existing and developing rocket designs. None of them came to fruition. The engines sat in storage.

"Evidently, the people who built these engines took very good care in mothballing them," Oberg said. "Russians use the word 'konservirovat' — which I always have fun translating into 'greasing', as they are referring to the process with [maintaining] weapons. Anyway, whoever did the onservirovat on these engines did a very good job."

When the Soviet Union collapsed and Soviet space firms were forced to improvise during the chaotic privatization process of the 1990s, they turned to Western markets and surprised aerospace companies with their high-quality hardware and relatively low prices.

Kuznetsov had hundreds of NK-33s sitting in storage. In the late 1990s, it went into partnership with Aerojet-Rocketdyne to refurbish the engines and sell them to commercial space upstarts in the U.S.

Lockheed Martin was interested in the engines for its Atlas V rocket, but in the end opted for another Russian engine — NPO Energomash's RD-180, which is still in production.

The engines waited in the U.S. for a new potential buyer until 2010, when Orbital Sciences bought 20 of the engines from Aerojet in 2010 for its Antares rocket, which was competing for a NASA contract to take over resupply launches for ISS from the retiring space shuttle fleet.

Back in Russia, there has been increasingly serious talk of restarting production of the NK-33 at the Kuznetsov factory in Samara, a city in central Russia. Russian media reports last year said Russian space officials were interested in resurrecting the engine for use in future Russian rockets.

The loss of the Antares rocket with a Russian engine on Wednesday is not likely to unravel U.S.-Russia commercial space cooperation. Both industries have become close over the past 20 years, engaging in a number of joint-ventures. Russian rockets are called upon frequently to launch Western commercial satellites, while the U.S. Air Force relies on another Russian rocket engine — the RD-180 — to power the Atlas V rocket for military launches.

Orbital will eventually have to find itself a new engine, as plans to restart production of the NK-33 have not materialized. Indeed, there appears to be no need for the engine in Russia or abroad, as the direction of the industry is changing to embrace cheaper and easier to produce technologies — philosophies enshrined in SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Russia's new Angara.

"Perhaps the future of high efficiency Russian engines like the NK-33 is already behind us. It's not the type of approach that the vehicles now on the drawing boards and approaching the launch pad are using," Oberg explained.

To view entire story and video visit How a 1960s Soviet engine appeared on an exploded U.S. rocket (video)

Asteroid-Mining Tech Among Casualties of Antares Rocket Explosion

Mike Wall - Space.com

The rocket explosion that destroyed a cargo vessel bound for the International Space Station Tuesday (Oct. 28) also took out an asteroid-mining company's first spacecraft.

Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket exploded in a huge fireball just seconds after launching from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia Tuesday evening. The crash caused no injuries but destroyed Orbital's unmanned Cygnus capsule, which was toting 5,000 lbs. (2,268 kilograms) of food, supplies and other gear to the International Space Station for NASA.

Among Cygnus' cargo was the Arkyd 3 satellite, a tiny technology demonstrator built by asteroid-mining firm Planetary Resources.

The plan was to deploy Arkyd 3 (also known as A3), which measured just 12 by 4 by 4 inches (30 by 10 by 10 centimeters), from the space station into free-flying low-Earth orbit, where it would test out avionics, control and other systems for future asteroid-prospecting spacecraft.

Planetary Resources is taking the loss of A3 in stride.

"While we are saddened about the unfortunate consequences of this launch failure, our own development schedule, budget and plan are practically unaffected," Planetary Resources President Chris Lewicki wrote in a blog post today (Oct. 29).

"In fact, we are already hard at work developing our next test vehicle, the Arkyd 6, which is planned for launch in Q3 2015," he added. "It will build on the learnings from our development of the A3 and iterate to our next level of design. Multiple spacecraft and safety in numbers is part of our strategy, and we will continue with it for just these occasions."

Representatives of the Washington state-based firm, which counts Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt among its investors, have said they hope to launch asteroid-hunting "Arkyd 100" scouts to low-Earth orbit in the next few years. Further down the road, Planetary Resources plans to launch other robotic probes to investigate potential mining targets up close, in deep space.

Eventually, the company aims to extract and sell asteroid resources, starting with water. Asteroid water can be split into oxygen and hydrogen — chief components of rocket fuel — allowing voyaging spaceships to top up their tanks without returning to Earth, mining advocates say.

Lockheed Martin opens Colorado commercial space HQ as it adds hundreds of jobs (Video)

Greg Avery - Denver Business Journal

Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. Wednesday opened the new headquarters for its commercial satellite business, heralding the addition of hundreds of local jobs by Colorado's largest private-sector aerospace employer.

About 200 guests gathered at the company's 4,000-employee campus near Waterton Canyon in Jefferson County to mark the opening.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems (LMSS) is moving its communications and remote sensing satellite-building operation from Newtown, Pennsylvania, a location it's closing as part of a larger restructuring.

LMSS' top executive, Rick Ambrose, told the Denver Business Journal that concentrating the commercial division at the same site where the company builds GPS III global positioning satellites, GOES-R weather satellites and other projects for the U.S. military makes sense because that work relates to the company's A2100 core satellite platform.

Other projects, such as the OSIRIS-Rex asteroid mining probe for NASA, add to the kinds of work LMSS employees in Colorado could have a hand in. That provides LMSS flexibility to keep highly trained workers on staff as space projects come and go, Ambrose said.

"We get a lot of knowledge sharing as people work across the many customers and technologies we have," Ambrose said. "And you provide some stability ... This is aerospace and defense — programs build up and ramp down, and it's hard if you're in a remote site with people and giving them the kind of security they want with their families."

LMSS is one of four large business divisions of Bethesda, Maryland-based defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp. LMSS is best known for its military and NASA work locally. But nationally, the company has built 100 commercial communications and remote sensing satellites for client companies dating back to the 1960s.

About 180 workers relocated from Newtown and other LMSS sites in recent months, filling about half of the positions LMSS ultimately plans to move in to the new commercial space headquarters.

The remaining jobs from the total of 350 commercial space positions being relocated to Jefferson County should be moved in by mid-2015, Ambrose said.

The positions are high-paying and span everything from engineering and software to supply-chain management and manufacturing, said Mike Hamel, general manager of the commercial satellite business at LMSS.

"The jobs that are coming here and will be created here are very, very important," he said.

The company expects growth across all aspects of its Jefferson County headquarters in coming years as both private sector space and, eventually, military and NASA space missions rebound and create more business, Ambrose said.

The commercial satellite headquarters building once was a testing site for Titan rockets but today has been repurposed as an office building. It's where satellite design, on-orbit operations and some testing is done. Manufacturing and some other facets of satellite production are handled elsewhere on the LMSS campus.

In September, the state office of economic development approved LMSS to receive up to $15 million in state tax breaks over the next eight years if it creates 500 new jobs.

It's money well invested, Gov. John Hickenlooper said in remarks before helping cut the ribbon on the commercial space headquarters building. The way the incentives are structured, the state will make more money in income taxes from each position added than is provided in tax-breaks to LMSS, he said.

Being home to the company's commercial satellite division is the kind of economic development win that states vie for nationally, Hickenlooper said.

"This is what it's all about," he said. "It's not just the 500 jobs, or the construction leading up to this — it's that Lockheed is a corporate leader."

With 3 percent of the workforce directly employed in aerospace, Colorado already has the highest rate of aerospace workers per-capita of any state, Hickenlooper said.

Other companies pay attention to that, and it adds to national recognition of the highly educated workforce Colorado offers and that draws the interest of employers, Hickenlooper said.

The state's aerospace industry roots are in military and civil government space projects, but federal budgets are tight and that's not expected to change in the next year or two.

Landing the commercial satellite production of Lockheed Martin is significant given aerospace trends, said Maj. Gen. Jay Lindell, the state government's aerospace and defense industry "champion"

"Commercial space is the way space is going — it's the growing segment right now," Lindell said.

About 40 of the commercial satellites that LMSS has built are based on the company's A2100 satellite platform, which LMSS is redesigning to be more capable and affordable.

The new version will be more compact inside a rocket fairing, allowing two to be launched side-by-side into orbit despite having larger solar arrays than current versions. The changes make the satellites cheaper to launch and give the satellite more power, the company says.

To view entire story and video visit Lockheed Martin opens Colorado commercial space HQ as it adds hundreds of jobs

MIT scientist proposes asteroids as destinations before Mars

Carolyn Y. Johnson – Boston Globe

Asteroid scientist Richard Binzel is often preoccupied by questions about the rocky bodies that sit in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Spraypainted styrofoam asteroids hang from the ceiling of his MIT laboratory -- evidence of his passion for a topic that usually captures public attention only when one passes too close for comfort.

Which is why it might be surprising that Wednesday in the journal Nature, Binzel makes a strong case for why we should think about asteroids not for their scientific value, but as destinations for human space travel.

Millions of near-earth asteroids sit further away from the moon, but much closer than Mars. Those, Binzel argues, offer appealing destinations for trips that could test equipment and protocols as technology and systems are developed capable of ferrying people further and further -- and eventually all the way to Mars.

"It's the destination that's important, not the object," Binzel said in an interview. "Certainly, some objects will be more interesting than others, but the fundamental goal is to have an interplanetary test flight."

Binzel is critical of a current multibillion NASA plan to lasso an asteroid and tow it into close enough range so that spacecraft and people could visit it, a feat that Binzel likens to putting an asteroid in a baggie. Such a stunt would, he argues, neglect the true power of these rocky bodies as landing spots between us and a two-year round-trip journey to Mars.

Binzel answered a few questions about his ideas. His answers, edited for length, are below.

Q: Why do you disagree with a strategy to tow an asteroid close to Earth and then visit it?

A: The main thing is that retrieving an asteroid is a misstep off the path to Mars. ... Mars is too far, Mars is out of reach of our first steps. When we first start flying our new system, we'll stay in the Earth-moon system because that is a safe place to test out your new hardware that makes great sense. And when we are confident that we are ready to try for the first time to leave the cradle of the Earth-moon system, we can simply go venture out into space and come back. That would be fine, but there are also an abundance of these asteroids and that's what is new -- the realization of nearly 10 million near-Earth asteroids larger than 10 meters. ... We have an abundance of destinations to go to when we're ready to take our first interplanetary baby steps.

Q: What kind of asteroid should we visit?

A: The flight matters more than the object you have right outside your window. Eventually, a scientist could say which [asteroids] out of 10 million -- maybe there are 50 to 100 that are more perfect [destinations]. Scientists could tell you which one they prefer, but the point is really having stepping stones for advancing toward Mars.

Q: What would you want to do once you get there?

A: I'm an asteroid scientist, but I downplay science. It is not the driver here. This is all about destinations, proving you have destinations capability. ... Yes, we can do experiments and explore what these asteroids are like once they're outside our window, but the most important thing is we're in interplanetary space.

Q: To identify destinations, you point out we would need to do a survey of nearby asteroids. Does this have implications for understanding hazardous asteroids that could strike Earth?

A: A survey should be of great interest to the human exploration side of NASA, because a survey will deliver thousands of destinations and sooner or later those destinations are going to come into play for human spaceflight. So isn't it interesting that the survey that will deliver human exploration destinations will, at the same time, address the long overdue assessment of impact hazards? So they converge. It's a win-win.

What I'm trying to insert that's new here is the survey is of enormous value to human exploration -- that adds a new element to motivate the survey.

'Interstellar' Black Hole is Best Black Hole in Sci-Fi

Ian O'Neill - Discovery.com

Christopher Nolan's movie 'Interstellar' will be an epic space adventure encapsulating humanity's need to explore the Universe, but it's the visual effects for the movie that are garnering early attention.

By combining the help of one of the world's leading black hole physicists with a cutting-edge visual effects (VFX) team, 'Interstellar' will depict the most scientifically accurate black hole in science fiction history. And, during production, some new discoveries were made as to how a black hole would appear if we could view it up close.

ANALYSIS: 'Interstellar' Feeds off our Exoplanet and Wormhole Dreams

"Neither wormholes or black holes have been depicted in any Hollywood movie in the way they actually would appear," said Caltech physicist Kip Thorne in a behind-the-scenes video released by Paramount Pictures (featured below). "This is the first time that the depiction (of a black hole) began with Einstein's general relativity equations."

General relativity describes the nature of gravity. How a black hole, being the most gravitationally dominant object in the known Cosmos, would look to an observer can therefore be totally described by Einstein's equations — except for when tangling with the Black Hole Information Paradox, then you'll need some quantum equations to boot.

Thorne is a lifelong friend of fellow black hole guru Stephen Hawking and between both of the theoretical physicists, our modern understanding of how these singularities work has flourished. So with the help of Thorne, Nolan has done something very smart; he's been able to provide the movie-viewing public with a rare sci-fi look into the actual science of a black hole while maintaining an artistic representation that we can easily comprehend.

OPINION: Interstellar Earth: The Future We See In Our Stars

"The visual effects department under Paul Franklin and everybody at Double Negative took Kip's mathematical data and they created real visual representations of what a black hole is meant to look like," said 'Interstellar' producer Emma Thomas.

Warped Spacetime

While crunching the mathematics and arriving at graphical representations of Einstein's famous equations, Thorne and the movie's VFX team realized that if a star is positioned behind the black hole, the starlight may become trapped in the warped spacetime close to the black hole's event horizon. Known as gravitational lensing, this spacetime effect can be used by astronomers to detect exoplanets, for example. But during the production of 'Interstellar,' the team realized a spacetime subtlety.

Intuitively, light from a star behind a black hole may circle the event horizon several times before being released in the direction of the observer (in this case the 'observer' is the camera). Visually, the edge of the black hole will be stunning — several different images of the same star will be created at the event horizon's edge.

This produces "a strange sort of funnel in the sky," with a black disk surrounded by gravitationally warped starlight, said VFX supervisor Paul Franklin.

The Matter of an Accretion Disk

Of course, no black hole would be complete without the addition of a radiating accretion disk. But how would that appear on film?

As matter falls toward the spinning black hole's event horizon, the gas collects into a hot accretion disk, shining brilliantly. By adding the disk, "we found that if you then render this whole thing and you visualize it all through this extraordinary gravitational lens, the gravity twists this glowing disk of gas into weird shapes and you get this extraordinary 'rainbow of fire' across the top of the black hole," said Franklin.

ANALYSIS: Alpha Centauri Bb: An Interstellar Target?

"When I saw this disk wrap up over the black hole and under the black hole, I'd known it intellectually, but knowing it intellectually is completely different from seeing it," said Thorne.

It's all very well having a scientifically accurate black hole, but if the visual interpretation of a black hole's mathematics makes no sense, Nolan was under no illusions that he may have had to take some artistic liberties to make the black hole appear more familiar to the viewing public.

"But what we found was as long as we didn't change the point of view too much … we could get some very understandable, tactile imagery from those equations. They were constantly surprising," said Nolan.

Now Thorne and the VFX team are preparing some technical papers about their findings for the astrophysical and computer graphics communities. The publications will say: "Here are some things that we've discovered about gravitational lensing by rapidly spinning black holes that we've never knew before," added Thorne.

ANALYSIS: What Would an Interstellar Spaceship Look Like?

Science fiction movies are produced to entertain, first and foremost. But as computer graphics become more sophisticated and the science fiction-viewing public becomes more savvy, there is a growing motivation by filmmakers to make space phenomena as 'real' as possible. And often that will mean employing the help of scientists to make our most extreme space fantasies as scientifically accurate as possible to maintain a credible storyline.

'Interstellar' is shaping up to be one of those rare movies that will combine science and fiction, exciting the viewing public, potentially engaging us with astrophysics in a way we've never experienced before.

'Interstellar opens in the US on Nov. 5.

 

END

More at www.spacetoday.net