SeekerBlog

Thanks to Space, Science & Robots for the heads-up on the Sentinel Spacecraft. We sure hope B612 get the funding they need. The B612 data sheet on the telescope project doesn’t say anything about the status of fund raising.

(…) B612′s mission is to launch a space telescope, called Sentinel, that will track asteroids in Earth’s region of the solar system. The telescope will follow a Venus-like orbit around the Sun. The goal of the mission is to catalog 90% of the asteroids larger than 140 meters as well as discover smaller asteroids. B612 plans to start building Sentinel in late 2012. It says it will take about five years to build the telescope. 

Interesting…

They are at the very edge of current U.S. technological capabilities; one is a supposedly mothballed technology test-bed, the other a super-secret space plane that is currently on orbit – but set to land soon. They are the X-planes, experimental spacecraft that are proving out concepts and capabilities whose beginnings can be traced to the dawn of the space age.

It would appear from amateur observers on the ground that the secretive U.S. Air Force X-37B space plane – will be landing soon. This prediction is based off the fact that the craft is dropping in altitude and the more basic fact that it is nearing the limit of its orbital capabilities and has to return to terra firma. According to the U.S. Air Force, the X-37B can remain on orbit for around nine months or 270 days at maximum, this means that the craft should be landing sometime in the middle of January.

The X-37B or Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Apr. 22, atop an Atlas V rocket. Not much is known after launch due to a media blackout imposed by the U.S. Air Force.

(…)

… held an event to celebrate the completion of the New Mexico spaceport’s new 10,000ft runway. Spaceport America is actively recruiting for a deputy director who will handle the operational issues with the spaceport, a position Homans called “one of the plum jobs” for someone with spaceflight operations experience.

“Governor Richardson, you and I stood five years ago and shook hands on a simple pledge,” recalled Sir Richard Branson: the state would build the spaceport and Virgin would headquarter its operations there. “You’ve kept your word, and I like to say I’ve kept my end of the bargain as well.”

That was the prelude to the main event of the ceremony: a flyover by Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) carrier aircraft, with the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) suborbital spacecraft attached between the plane’s twin fuselages. For nearly a half-hour the aircraft swooped over the spaceport, making passes low over the runway and soaring above the terminal building, to cheers and applause from the audience.

(…) Branson interrupted the proceedings. “I rang the pilot of the spaceship and said, ‘Look, we’ve got a runway here. Why are you going back to Mojave? Why can’t you come and sort of show it off?’ I’m not sure I managed to persuade him, but maybe we could all sort of put some vibes up in the sky.” What followed was the odd spectacle of several hundred people shaking their hands, clapping, and stomping their feet, all at the insistence of Branson, to try and get WK2 and SS2 to return.

At first nothing happened, and the press conference resumed. Several minutes later, though, he again called on the audience to clap and cheer and, sure enough, the aircraft returned to the skies, this time to land on the runway and taxi up near the stage for a round of photo ops with Branson and Richardson.

(…) Virgin, as typical for them, shied away from specific timelines or schedules for bringing the system into service, although Branson said it would be “somewhere between 9 and 18 months” before commercial flights began at Spaceport America. That schedule, he said, would be dependent on the outcome of the extensive test program planned, including additional glide tests and powered test flights. “If you’re building a commercial spaceship program, you’ve got to offer return tickets,” he quipped. “So we just want to be absolutely sure we’ve got the program absolutely right; we’re giving ourselves the flexibility not to be rushed.”

Read more »

The engine looks good to Stewart Money at Space Review.

“Those Merlin engines are fantastic,” offers Tony Stark to Elon Musk in a cameo for the summer movie Iron Man 2. The brief exchange, occurring as it does in the Monte Carlo Hotel de Paris prior to the Monaco Grand Prix, invites the space enthusiast in all of us to draw an analogy between the two industrialists—and for those inclined to stretch a cameo further than anyone should, between the aforementioned Merlin engines and the Formula 1 racers about to take to the track.

Jeff Foust at Space Review has the best coverage I’ve seen of the successful first flight of Falcon 9. Jeff wraps up the article with these notes on the future:

(…) The path ahead for SpaceX

With the Falcon 9 demonstration launch a success, the company is now planning to move ahead with the first of three planned missions that are part of its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) agreement with NASA to develop a capability to service the ISS. The first of those launches, a demonstration flight of a full-fledged Dragon spacecraft but one that does not visit the ISS, is on track for later this summer, Musk said. The Falcon 9 rocket for that mission has been built and is ready to ship to Cape Canaveral, while the Dragon spacecraft is undergoing final reviews.

The second COTS flight, planned for the second quarter of next year, will launch a Dragon that is currently planned to approach the ISS, but not berth with the station. However, Musk said prior to Friday’s launch that the company has been in discussions with NASA about adding that capability to the mission, which under the original plan would take place on the third and final COTS demonstration flight. “Our aspirational goal is to deliver cargo on COTS flight 2,” he said. “This makes COTS flight 3 effectively a backup flight to COTS 2.”

“This bodes very well for the Obama plan,” Musk said after the launch. “It really helps vindicate the approach that he’s taking.”

SpaceX remains interested in human spaceflight as well, with Musk reiterating past statements that the company would be ready to fly people within three years of contract award (including one year of schedule contingency) to develop a crewed version of Dragon. They key aspect of that development would be a launch escape system. Musk said they have “a very exciting new architecture” for that system: rather than an escape tower mounted on top of the capsule that would pull it away, as was done on previous capsules and was being developed for Orion, the escape thrusters would be built into the sidewalls of the capsule and be available through all phases of the launch. In addition, he said, those engines could be used to allow a Dragon spacecraft to make a return on land, rather than splashdown in the ocean. “I think that’s really the right way to land a spaceship,” he said.

Please continue reading…

NASA boffins report that an unknown object approaching the Earth from deep space is almost certainly artificial in origin rather than being an asteroid

Object 2010 KQ was detected by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona earlier this month, and subsequently tracked by NASA’s asteroid-watching service, the Near-Earth Object Program headquartered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

According to the NASA experts:

Observations by astronomer S J Bus, using the NASA-sponsored Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, indicate that 2010 KQ’s spectral characteristics do not match any of the known asteroid types, and the object’s absolute magnitude (28.9) suggests it is only a few meters in size.

The mysterious artificial object has apparently made a close pass by the Earth, coming in almost to the distance of the Moon’s orbit, and is now headed away again into the interplanetary void. The object has used no propulsion during the time NASA has had it under observation. However the spacewatch boffins believe that it must have moved under its own power at some point, given its position and velocity.

Please continue reading…

Falcon 9 on its Cape Canaveral, Florida, launch pad

Good reportage from The Register on the huge success of Elon Musk’s maiden launch. First launches of rockets have a poor success rate (for obvious engineering reasons).

(…) The SpaceX Falcon 9 launched on its maiden flight on Friday at 11:45pm Pacific Daylight Time, 15 minutes short of the end of its four-hour launch window.…

Shortly afterward, The Reg received a SpaceX email that quoted founder Elon Musk as saying: “Nominal shutdown and orbit was almost exactly 250km. Telemetry showed essentially a bullseye: ~0.2% on perigee and ~1% on apogee.”

Bullseye, indeed. Musk had earlier said that merely achieving orbit on the Falcon 9′s first flight would be “100 per cent success” — and his two-stage, 54.9m (180ft), liquid oxygen and RP-1–fueled rocket’s payload, what Musk described as “structural test article of ourDragon spacecraft,” is at this moment zipping merrily about the globe, enjoying that success.

And success on a maiden voyage is unusual. According to a BBC report on the Falcon’s feat, two-third of rockets introduced in the past 20 years have had unsuccessful first flights.

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Big congratulations to the whole SpaceX team. Please continue reading The Register coverage.

I recommend the status report on ballistic missile defense systems being developed around the world – by Taylor Dinerman.

Yet, as BMD systems proliferate, these satellites will be used principally to detect, track, and target ballistic missiles. This distances them from the world of intelligence and a Cold War-type nuclear exchange and makes them instruments of a new kind of missile warfare. Within a decade we could see war plans that depend on the early elimination of missile tracking satellites in order to degrade the enemy’s BMD capability. Defensive plans will be made to counter these attacks.

This may be what Chinese Air Force Commander General Xu Qilang was thinking of in an interview last November when he said, “As far as the revolution in military affairs is concerned, the competition between military forces is moving towards outer space… this is a historical inevitability and cannot be turned back.”

In the absence of space-based BMD weapons such as the old “Brilliant Pebbles” infrared-guided LEO based satellites, missile defense and space war are intimately linked. To imagine that an attacker is going to ignore space-based sensors and allow the target nation or force to employ its defense system at maximum efficiency is to ignore the lessons of history.

And another thing…, otherwise known as Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy volume 6 is out. This could be bigger than the Tablet iPhone! Here’s excerpts from an interview with author Eoin Colfer:

(…) “Nothing can really prepare the reader for the experience of reading [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy]. Imagine trying to describe to a five year-old how it feels to be struck by lightning, using words of one syllable or less. You can give it a go, but you know before you start that, no matter how hard you try, when that five year-old finally does get hit by lightning he is going to be totally flabbergasted, and will probably use a few one-syllable words of his own.”

Colfer has not tried to ape Adams’s style, though, so while And Another Thing… takes up the quirky characters – reassembles them, in fact, after the Vogons left them in tiny bits at the end of Mostly Harmless – and sends them on a journey that takes full advantage of the Infinite Improbability Drive, the twisting sentences that are quintessentially Adamsian are missing.

From Colfer’s blog on the challenge of extending Douglas Adams:

I first read the Hitchhiker’s Guide in my late teens when Ted Roche, a libertine friend of mine, pressed it into my sweaty palms and hissed at me with fanatical intensity that I must read it or be ridiculed forever by the school literati. Relax, dude, I remember saying with eighties’ insouciance. Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

But I was scared. Petrified in fact. If one was not a sportsman, the only other circle to belong to was the readers’ circle. Places were limited and expulsions were swift and ruthless. If one had not read the livre du jour then one would not be offered book swapsies on Friday. If this happened, then a person might be forced to turn to his own siblings for conversation.

So, in this spirit of quasi-persecution I scuttled home after double chemistry and found a quiet bathroom where I could settle down and read what I was certain would be a thinly veiled version of Star Wars. Vogons destroy the Earth and a single hero survives. Please. I could almost write the rest myself.

Never have I been so happy to be proven wrong.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was like nothing I had read before, or since for that matter. If you have read it then you know exactly what I am talking about. If you haven’t then read it now, moron. The problem is the hyperbole puts people off. If it’s so popular then it must be middle of the road, brimming with clichés and easily digested on the sands of Ibiza.

All false assumptions. The Guide is a slice of satirical genius. A marvel of quantum tomfoolery. A dissection of the absurdities of our human condition. A space odyssey that forces us to face ourselves and collapse in hysterics. Imagine if Messrs. Hawking and Fry were locked in a room with the entire cast of Monty Python and forced to write a book which would subsequently be edited by Pink Floyd, then the result would need a lot of work before it could be cut from Douglas Adams’ first draft.

For the next couple of decades I followed the exploits of Arthur Dent and his intergalactic troupe as they stumbled through space and time befuddled and bereft, drinking tea in the face of impossible odds and generally failing to find enlightenment at every turn. It’s like a quest for the holy grail where the grail is neither holy nor grail-shaped. I travelled with Arthur Dent as he lost his planet, learned to fly, found love, made sandwiches, got to know his daughter, found his planet again briefly and finally got blown to atoms.

Blown to atoms! Surely not, but no need to panic, Douglas Adams would surely reassemble Arthur somehow in the next book.

Please continue reading…

BTW, BBC has released a full cast dramatization of Mostly Harmless on iTunes, and on Audible.com (half price for members)

Colfer: I know Douglas said he was going to do a sixth book, so he had planned to bring it back. And that’s what Jane, Douglas’s widow, wants. It’s already working! Sales apparently have gone back up already, and they released the radio show out to iTunes now. So Hitchhiker’s has already been brought back a little bit by this, and I’m really hoping that when my book comes out people go back and check them all out. And they’re re-releasing the first one, I think, in a young adult edition. So we’re hoping that my book will bring Artemis Fowl readers into Hitchhiker’s, and that would be great.