So does this guy! Mike Hughes is shown with his steam-powered rocket constructed out of salvage parts. He plans to launch it Saturday. (Associated Press) A California man intends to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a home-built rocket to prove that astronauts faked the shape of the Earth. How could you have been so blinded all those years?
Happy 65th birthday to NASA astronaut James Wetherbee. After graduating from the Navy ROTC at Notre Dame in 1974, he was commissioned in the Navy, and trained as a Naval aviator. He trained with the A-7E Corsair II, and was stationed on the carrier USS John F. Kennedy for three years. He was selected to NASA as a pilot in 1984. He piloted Columbia on STS-32 (Leasat 5 deploy/LDEF retrieval) in 1990, then commanded five Shuttle missions: STS-52 (Columbia, USMP-1, 1992), STS-63 (Discovery, Mir rendezvous, 1995), STS-86 (Atlantis, Mir docking, 1997), STS-102 (Discovery, ISS assembly 5A.1, 2002), and STS-113 (Endeavour, ISS assembly 11A/P1 Truss, 2002). As you can see, he ended up specializing in space station missions. His last flight was the last successful flight before the Columbia disaster. He would spend a year as an assistant to the Safety & Mission Assurance Directorate at Johnson Space Center before retiring in 2005. After eight years as a safety auditor at BP, he became a consultant for leaders in hazardous environments. He is married and has two children. BTW: In unrelated news, idiot boy Mike Hughes "delayed" his launch.
Another failure for Russia. It was the second ever launch from Vostochny Cosmodrome as they aimed to launch the Meteor-M N2.1 satellite along with a host of microsats atop a Soyuz-2.1b rocket. This particular Meteor-M satellite contained joint experiments from NASA and ESA as well. It launched at 12:41am EST this morning (05:41 UTC, 14:41 local time) It is believed that the Fregat-M upper stage was misaimed, and didn't achieve orbit. It is believed to have re-entered over the Atlantic instead of entering a sun-synchronous polar orbit.
935569848507170817 is not a valid tweet id I have seen several tweets identifying an atmospheric entry over the north Atlantic at a time and location that would be consistent with Meteor-M N2.1's intended orbital plane.
That would be so wild to see from a plane. Coolest thing I've ever seen from the air was fireworks - a fiery satellite crushes that.
43 years ago today, Helios A was launched atop a Titan IIIE rocket from Pad 41, Cape Canaveral. The probe would become the first to fly inside the orbit of Mercury, looking to make close-up observations of the Sun. Its final orbit had a perihelion of 0.31 AU. It would observe the Sun for ten years, being retired in January 1985. NASA would keep contact with Helios A for an additional year afterward.
44 years ago today, Soyuz 13 was launched atop a Soyuz rocket from Site 1/5, Baikonur Cosmodrome. The primary mission was use of the Orion-2 UV telescope. It was a follow-on to the Orion-1 telescope which flew on the Salyut 1 space station. Cosmonauts Pyotr Klimuk and Valentin Lebedev would make observations for eight days. Landing took place 200 miles SW of Karagandy. They ended up landing in a blizzard, though that didn't really affect recovery very much.
Fair warning: I am leaving for my winter holiday tomorrow. I am spending time with my family for a week, a few days at our timeshare in the north Georgia mountains, then a few days in DC. After that, I'll be returning to Atlanta for the Peach Bowl. It's very difficult to gather info with just my iPad and phone, so my 2017 review may not come until the day after New Year's when I get back home. Spoiler: SpaceX alone already has more successful orbital launches than China will have.
Thank You for sharing such interesting space information again this year - have a great holiday vacation - wave west at me when you get to DC
It's too bad that this thread doesn't have a credible backup for your position. Sounds like DC United.
Astronaut Bruce McCandless II died yesterday, aged 80. No details on how he died were made immediately available.
Reporting live from Perimeter Square, Atlanta... China shunted its last three possible launches on the manifest to 2018, so we are done with 2017. The United States had 29 launches: 18 Falcon 9 6 Atlas 2 Delta 2 Minotaur 1 Antares The CIS had 21 launches: 15 Soyuz (two from Kourou) 4 Proton 1 Rokot 1 Zenit China had 18 launches: 6 Long March 2 5 Long March 3 2 Long March 4 1 each of Long March 5, 6, 7, Kuaizhou, and Kaituozhe-2 ESA had 9 launches: 6 Ariane 3 Vega Japan had 7 launches: 5 H-IIA 2 SS-520 India had 5 launches: 3 PSLV 2 GSLV And New Zealand had their first launch. We’ll start the.failures, of which we had SIX, there: The Electron rocket, designed by the US company Rocket Labs, failed on May 25 after a launch from Mahia Peninula on the southeast coast of New Zealand's North Island. Allegedly, the failure was caused by issues with ground tracking assets. A reflight attempt was delayed past the end of the year. The first launch of Japan's new SS-520 solid-fuel small-payload rocket lost contact before the second stage could be lit. Its reflight was also delayed to next year. In a partial failure, a Long March 3B-E rocket placed the ChinaSat 9A comsat in an incorrect orbit. It was able to achieve geostationary orbit under its own power, but at the cost of operational lifetime. A Long March 5 rocket failed to orbit the Shijian 19 comsat due to overpressure in the second stage. A PSLV rocket failed when the fairing didn’t separate, dooming the IRNSS-1H navsat to re-enter with the upper stage. A Soyuz-2 rocket launched from Vostochny Cosmodrome failed due to a programming error in the Fregat upper stage. Juno had seven more flybys over Jupiter, but not more due to engine concerns preventing NASA from lowering its orbit. Cassini ended its mission, and dove into Saturn. The ISS was visited by four manned missions, as well as three Progress ferries, two Cygnus ferries, and four Dragon ferries. So what’s in store for 2018? Well, Elon Musk is going to launch a car to Mars. Seriously. He decided to donate the very first production model of the Tesla Roadster to act as the dummy payload for the first Falcon Heavy rocket. The rocket was raised at Pad 39A for the first time last week, and is intended to finally launch in January. The car will carry several references to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It will be placed in a trajectory simulating a journey to Mars. (For the record, the Tesla Roadster, at 2,900 pounds, could probably be launched to Mars by a Falcon 9 rocket. But where's the fun in that?) Both the Dragon 2 and CST-100 Starliner will have their first manned flights. The Dragon 2 is anticipated to be launched on a lunar free-return flight, but not before successful CCDev demonstration flights are completed. NASA will launch the InSight lander to Mars, and ESA will launch the BepiColombo orbiter to Mercury. Asteroid sampling missions by NASA and Japan will also launch. ******** When I actually get home, I plan on posting pictures I took at the National Air and Space Museum. I can’t do it now, because my iPad is disagreeing with me uploading pictures. I had to link the picture of the packed-up Tesla Roadster from Wikipedia.
I'm going to get started with my pictures from the National Air and Space Museum last week. This is Pioneer H, the production backup to Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, the first probes sent into the outer Solar System. Many scientists were disappointed that this probe was not tasked with a mission of its own. As I have stated in the past, one plan in mind was using this probe as the basis of the International Solar-Polar Mission, which ultimately became Ulysses. But NASA felt it would be a good idea to have a working model in the National Air and Space Museum instead. (Well, working insofar that it could complete a mission. I'd like to hope they didn't load up the RTG's.) One of the first pictures I took was of this from beneath coming into the north entrance, right at the beginning of the centerpiece Milestones of Flight exhibit. But I found a much better vantage point on the second level. This is the re-entry capsule to Soyuz TM-10. It carried Mir Expedition 7, Gennady Manakov and Gennady Strekalov, in late 1990. The return trip featured Japanese journalist Toyohiro Akiyama, who was launched to Mir with the Expedition 8 crew on Soyuz TM-11. Probably the significance of this one is that Strekalov would later be the commander of the mission that brought American astronaut Norm Thagard to Mir in 1995, launching the meat of the Shuttle-Mir program in the mid-1990s. This is the command module of Skylab 4. Why isn't this Columbia, the command module of Apollo 11? Because early last year, that was removed from the National Air and Space Museum to be taken on a nationwide exhibition tour. I actually just now found out what happened to Columbia. I knew that was supposed to be in Milestones of Flight, but was dumbfounded when I couldn't find it. This is Skylab B, the production backup of the Skylab space station. You can actually walk inside the orbital workshop. Only one of the solar panels is attached. The docking adapter for it is at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, while its airlock module is location at Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. I don't see if they even produced a spare Apollo Telescope Mount. This is a model of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was originally a set of bare cylinders used for fitting tests for equipment for the final telescope, then was turned into a dynamic test article to test structural loads under launch conditions. In the late 80s and early 90s, it was outfitted to closely resemble the actual Hubble Space Telescope in case, as appears to be the case, they were unable to return the final telescope from orbit. Looking back, I never did locate the backup mirror. This is a TKS re-entry module, supposedly from Kosmos 1443, one of the TKS modules tested on Salyut 7. This is the return capsule for Stardust, which collected particles from Comet Wild 2. It is displayed in collection mode, along with a sample of the aerogel material used to collect samples. It returned to Earth on January 15, 2006, while its bus spacecraft went on to encounter Comet Tempel 1. This is the M2-F3 lifting body. It was used in drop tests to check out the aerodynamics of a possible spaceplane design. Related models are the M2-F2, HL-10, X-20 Dyna Soar, and X-24. This is the best image I could get of all three models of the Mars rovers to compare sizes of the three. Foreground is the Mars Exploration Rover, two of which landed in 2004. Behind it is Sojourner, landed as part of Mars Pathfinder in 1997. To the right at the back is Curiosity, landed in 2011. This is the actual Wright Flyer, currently in its own exhibition place in the Museum. It was originally hung in the Milestones of Flight gallery, but was given its own space in 2003, for the 100th anniversary of its flight. Its most recent restoration was in 1985.
The next time you are around you should get out to the Udvar-Hazy out by Dulles. It has the aeronautical exhibits too big to fit at the Air & Space.
It is an awesome place, but we find it hard to justify the $15 parking fee for the "free" museum. We've gone at 4pm when parking becomes free to run through the place before the exhibits close or see an IMAX show. My old boss at the Pentagon told me the SR-71 isn't as realistic without all the hydraulic fluids leaking out of it, but it's still damned cool to get that close.
Doubtful. The Metro station at Dulles won't be close to the museum. Anyway what I remembered about the parking fee is that it was to pay for financing connected with Udvar-Hazy.
57 years ago today, NASA conducted its first meeting of the Manned Lunar Landing Task Group. This would be the earliest stage that would bring the Moon to Project Apollo. Three steps were outlined in the initial meeting: A basic manned landing Limited exploration A full-time lunar base I guess you could say two out of three ain't bad. The initial launch estimate just for a basic lunar landing was a rocket capability to get 30-40 short tons of payload to escape velocity. The CSM and Lunar Module for Apollo 11 would end up exceeding 50 short tons.
Sorry I've been so quiet the past couple of weeks. Been going through some stuff lately. SpaceX has finally conducted the first static fire of the Falcon Heavy rocket. For the past couple weeks, they have been going through some "wet dress rehearsals". Yesterday, they were comfortable enough with the results to go ahead with the static fire. Although an exact date has not been set, SpaceX hopes to finally launch it within the next two weeks.
That was a crazy plume of steam (& smoke?) from that thing - 27 engines firing at once looked/sounded pretty dang cool.
NASA has re-established contact with a long-lost probe. IMAGE, the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, also known as Explorer 79, was launched on March 25, 2000, atop a Delta II 7326 rocket in a roughly 1,000 x 46,000-km orbit. Contact was lost with the probe in late 2005. However, amateur astronomers found, and established contact with, the probe last week. Analysis of its telemetry has determined that at least IMAGE's main controller is active. NASA is currently working on adapting its older software to newer systems, and may attempt to reactivate its scientific packages.
This afternoon at 3:45pm EST, Falcon Heavy was launched for the first time. The rocket launch performed perfectly. The strap-on boosters, both reflight Falcon 9 cores, landed back at Cape Canaveral. The center core, a new core, ended up missing the drone ship and crashed into the ocean. As for Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster, there was one last surprise: a mannikin in a SpaceX spacesuit. It is currently in a highly-eccentric orbit with an apogee of 7,000 km. This is to test the capability of the second stage to survive the Van Allen radiation belts. This test was requested by the Air Force to allow for future launches that would take payloads directly to geostationary orbit, instead of utilizing a GTO. There is currently a live feed from the Tesla Roadster. I have no idea if it is battery-powered, or they have solar panels, so no telling how long this live feed will last. The Trans-Mars Injection is scheduled for about 9pm EST.