Tag: space technology (page 1 of 3)

The Titanic Conspiracy – Was The Sinking An Inside Job?

May 27, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The Titanic Conspiracy? with special guest Popeye DtrhIs everything we have heard about the tragic accidental sinking of the Titanic just as we have been told?The sinking of the Titanic is one of most talked about events in history, but could it be that there was something far more nefarious at work than just an unfortunate date with an iceberg?After hearing the evidence that Popeye will lay out, i think at the very least it will cause the listeners to revisit the watery grave that is hom [...]

View Article Here Read More

Top Secret Government Programs That Your Not Supposed To Know About

March 23, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Originally Posted at in5d.com The following is the alleged result of the actions of one or more scientists creating a covert, unauthorized notebook documenting their involvement with an Above Top Secret government program. Government publications and information obtained by the use of public tax monies cannot be subject to copyright. This document is released into the public domain for all citizens of the United States of America. THE ‘MAJIC PROJECTS’ SIGMA is the project whic [...]

View Article Here Read More

If the Moon Landings Were Real, Then Why is NASA Stumped by This?

March 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Buck Rogers, Staff WriterWaking TimesDuring the cold war era the Soviet Union and the United States were locked in an arms and technology race, each nation wanting to prove their dominance over the other, each striving to be the next reigning superpower in a world still shattered by the second world war. The Soviet’s took the lead when in April of 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin successfully orbited the earth and returned home safely. In May, president John F. Kennedy ma [...]

View Article Here Read More

US Issuing Licenses for Mineral Mining on Moon

February 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from space-travel.comWashington DC (Sputnik) Feb 09, 2015Bigelow Aerospace plans to test a space habitat at the International Space Station this year, and then operate free-flying orbital outposts for customers, including government agencies...

View Article Here Read More

NASA prepares its science fleet for Mars comet encounter ~ Video

October 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments


NASA assets to observe Comet Siding Spring


Excerpt from
astronomy.com

Comet Siding Spring will pass within about 87,000 miles (139,500 kilometers) of the Red Planet on October 19.


NASA’s extensive fleet of science assets, particularly those orbiting and roving Mars, have front-row seats to image and study a once-in-a-lifetime comet flyby Sunday, October 19.

Comet C/2013 A1, also known as Comet Siding Spring, will pass within about 87,000 miles (139,500 kilometers) of the Red Planet — less than half the distance between Earth and our Moon and less than one-tenth the distance of any known comet flyby of Earth.

Siding Spring’s nucleus will come closest to Mars around 2:27 p.m. EDT, hurtling at about 126,000 mph (56 kilometers per second). This proximity will provide an unprecedented opportunity for researchers to gather data on both the comet and its effect on the martian atmosphere.

Siding Spring came from the Oort Cloud, a spherical region of space surrounding our Sun and occupying space at a distance between 5,000 and 100,000 astronomical units (1 AU is the average Earth-Sun distance). It is a giant swarm of icy objects believed to be material left over from the formation of the solar system.

Siding Spring will be the first comet from the Oort Cloud to be studied up close by spacecraft, giving scientists an invaluable opportunity to learn more about the materials, including water and carbon compounds, that existed during the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.

Some of the best and most revealing images and science data will come from assets orbiting and roving the surface of Mars. In preparation for the comet flyby, NASA maneuvered its Mars Odyssey orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the newest member of the Mars fleet, Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN), in order to reduce the risk of impact with high-velocity dust particles coming off the comet.

In addition, Earth-based and space telescopes, including NASA’s iconic Hubble Space Telescope, will be in position to observe the unique celestial object. The agency’s astrophysics space observatories — Kepler, Swift, Spitzer, Chandra — and the ground-based Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea, Hawaii —will be tracking the event.

NASA’s asteroid hunter, the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, has been imaging and will continue to image the comet as part of its operations. And the agency’s two Heliophysics spacecraft, Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory and Solar and Heliophysics Observatory, will image the comet. The agency’s Balloon Observation Platform for Planetary Science, a suborbital balloon-carried telescope, already has provided observations of the comet in the lead-up to the close encounter with Mars.



View Article Here Read More

Air Force Will Move X-37B Space Planes to Shuttle Hangars ~ Video

October 9, 2014 / / 0 Comments



Excerpt from

nbcnews.com

The U.S. Air Force will take over two mothballed space shuttle processing hangars at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for its secretive X-37B robotic space plane program, NASA said Wednesday. The agreement transfers two of the shuttle’s three processing hangars for the military’s X-37B Orbital Test Vehicles, built and managed by Boeing. 

The 29-foot-long (9-meter-long) space planes resemble miniature space shuttles. The Air Force currently has two vehicles, one of which has been in orbit since December 2012. The military has not disclosed what the X-37B is doing in orbit, nor when or where it will land. Two prior X-37B missions lasted 224 days and 469 days respectively, and landed autonomously at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Boeing is to use the third shuttle hangar for its NASA-backed CST-100 commercial space taxis. 

 Click to zoom

View Article Here Read More

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Glides Through Test Run ~ Space rides booking for $250,000

October 7, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, centered between its double fuselage WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane  nbcnews.com Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane soared into the air and glided ...

View Article Here Read More

Microsoft co-founder’s company may fund space-bound passenger plane

October 3, 2014 / / 0 Comments



Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser


thespacereporter.com


Stratolaunch Systems, a commercial spaceflight startup company, might purchase a three-passenger version of Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser in a bid to implement its goals of putting both satellites and people into orbit beginning in 2018.
Sierra Nevada recently filed a complaint against NASA for awarding commercial spaceflight contracts to its competitors, Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to develop vehicles to transport astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in three years, ending American dependence on Russia’s Soyuz capsule for the task.
The Colorado company is arguing its proposed vehicle, the seven-passenger Dream Chaser, would cost $900 million less than Boeing’s vehicle.
A decision on Sierra Nevada’s complaint is expected to be issued by the U.S. General Accountability Office in early January.
Stratolaunch, owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, envisions using a smaller version of the Dream Chaser as part of a space transportation system it is currently developing.
Its plans include construction of a huge airplane with a 117-meter wingspan that will carry both satellites and passengers into space. The airplane,which will be powered by six 747 engines, will be capable of carrying satellites of up to 6,124 kg.
The Dream Chaser, which will have its own upper stage motor, could ride on top of the airplane, which will be capable of launching objects as high as 2000 km over the planet.
While Stratolaunch has not made a final decision on the purchase, the company’s executive director Charles Beames publicly expressed confidence in Sierra Nevada’s vehicle.
“Dream Chaser seemed to be the logical way to go. We feel pretty good that we have enough analysis there,” he said.
Allen plans to make a decision by year’s end regardless of the outcome of Sierra Nevada’s complaint against NASA.
An infusion of funding from Stratolaunch could give new life to the Dream Chaser in the wake of its failed contract bid.

View Article Here Read More

Mysterious Mars ~ Why have so many Mars missions ended in failure?

October 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Mars as imaged by the Hubble telescopeWith so many failures of U.S. as well as Russian missions sent to Mars, one begins to wonder if there is another cause at the root of these mission ending failures other than technical glitches. Most intriguing are...

View Article Here Read More

NASA Challenges Public to Design a Piece of a Mars Probe

September 27, 2014 / / 0 Comments

  Kelly Dickerson, Space.com NASA has challenged the public to design part of a spacecraft that could land future spacefliers on the surface of Mars. The NASA Mars Balance Mass Challenge runs through Nov. 21. The agency will announ...

View Article Here Read More

India’s Mars mission a step closer to success with engine test

September 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C25), carrying the Mars orbiter, blasts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, about 100 km (62 miles) north of the southern Indian city of Chennai November 5, 2013. REUTERS/B...

View Article Here Read More

Spacecraft from US & India to arrive at Mars this month

September 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments



Two new orbiters, including India's first Mars probe, are due to arrive at the Red Planet by the end of September.

By Elizabeth Howell, SPACE.com

The planet Mars is about to have some company. Two new spacecraft, one from the United States and the other from India, are closing in on the Red Planet and poised to begin orbiting Mars by the end of this month.

The U.S.-built probe, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft, is expected to enter orbit around Mars on Sept. 21. Just days later, on Sept. 24, India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) orbiter is due to make its own Mars arrival when it enters orbit. Both MOM and MAVEN launched to space in 2013.

MAVEN is the first mission devoted to probing the Martian atmosphere, particularly to understand how it has changed during the planet's history. 

Before that happens, however, the spacecraft must burn its engines to go into orbit around the planet, and pass a commissioning phase while taking a few precautions for a "low-risk" situation where a comet will pass fairly close to Mars. 

"We've been developing MAVEN for about 11 years, and it comes down to a 33-minute rocket burn on Sept. 21," MAVEN principal investigator Bruce Jakosky, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Space.com.

The spacecraft can change tracks as late as 6 hours before entering orbit, but right now, it is so close to the correct path that a planned orbital maneuver on Sept. 12 won't be needed, Jakosky said.

Comet Siding Spring will pass near Mars on Oct. 19, and around that time, MAVEN will take a break from its commissioning to do observations of the comet and the planet's upper atmosphere. Although not much dust is predicted to result from the event, as a precaution, controllers will turn off nonessential instruments and move the solar panels edge-on to the dust. The spacecraft will also be behind Mars for 20 minutes during the comet's closest approach.

Where did Mars' atmosphere go?

One of MAVEN's primary scientific tasks will be to figure out how the Martian atmosphere changed during the planet's 4.5-billion-year history.

Several NASA spacecraft have found extensive evidence that water once flowed on the planet. For water to have flowed on Mars, the planet would have required a thicker atmosphere. But why and how the atmosphere got thinner, to the way it is now, is one question that puzzles scientists.

MAVEN is expected to last at least one Earth year, but with careful use of fuel, it could last a decade — long enough for controllers to watch the upper atmosphere change through almost an entire 11-year cycle of solar activity.

Most of Mars' water disappeared about 3.5 billion years ago, Jakosky said, and there will be two approaches for MAVEN to figure out how the atmosphere played into that.

One approach will be to look at the atmosphere today and try to extrapolate its changes to what it used to be billions of years ago. However, one complication of that approach is that the sun's output has changed over time. Early in the solar system's history, the sun's total output was 30 percent less than it is today. Therefore, Earth and Mars could have been colder, but the solar wind and ultraviolet energy would have been more intense.

The second approach will be to look at the ratio of stable isotopes (element types) in the atmosphere, specifically the ratio of hydrogen to its heavier cousin, deuterium. Over time, the sun pushes lighter elements out of the atmosphere, leaving the heavier ones behind.

Scientists already have gained a pretty firm understanding of the past deuterium-hydrogen ratio by examining known Martian meteorites and older Martian minerals that NASA rovers probed on the surface, Jakosky said. The next step will be to get more information on today's conditions, to make comparisons.

"It's a powerful way to determine the history of the atmosphere," he said. "We're hoping that will be one of the early results coming out of MAVEN."

India's Mars MOM on NASA's heels

The Indian Space Research Organization's Mars Orbiter Mission is India's first mission to Mars and is designed to search for elusive methane in Mars' atmosphere from orbit. Over the years, different orbital and surface missions have found variable amounts of the gas, which can be produced by nonbiological or biological means.

MOM is expected to last six to 10 months near Mars, and has five instruments on board. The spacecraft and all of its payloads are in good health, ISRO said in a Facebook update on Aug. 30.
One of the mission's greatest challenges will be to fire the liquid propulsion engine after it sat idle for nearly 300 days in space. The engine is required to bring the spacecraft into Mars' orbit. Media reports indicate that India plans to do a test fire of the engine on Sept. 22.

If the Indian space agency is successful in reaching Mars, it will be the fourth entity to have done so, following the Soviet Union, the United States and the European Space Agency.

View Article Here Read More

Up to a Point: A ‘Space Corvette’ in Every Garage

September 7, 2014 / / 0 Comments





thedailybeast.com

A visit to a private space travel company gives P.J. O’Rourke a look into the future -- and the opportunity to fool around in a rocket ship. 
I was in the passenger seat of a small rocket ship when I realized what’s wrong space travel these days: I can’t do it yet. I’m still flying on pokey old Boeings for six hours from Boston to LA. The trip would take 15 minutes at 17,500 mph low earth orbit speed.
Also, rocket ships don’t fly. Or they don’t properly fly the way the rocket ships of Buck Rogers and Captain Video did. Buck and the Captain could use a hayfield with a windsock. A modern rocket blast-off produces so much shockwave commotion that the nearest safe viewpoint at Cape Canaveral is eight miles from the launch pad. That puts the Starbucks a long way from the gate when your rocket ship’s final boarding announcement is made.

Plus current rockets lack anything resembling Buck Rogers’ style. They look like evil corn silos or upright storm sewers or a trio of escaped steroidal church organ pipes wearing party hats.
Furthermore, at the moment, there’s no such thing as a small rocket ship.
The first rocket to reach space, the Nazi V-2 (which transported people only in the sense of transporting them to the next life) was 45 feet high and weighed 27,600 pounds. The 363-foot Saturn V used for the Apollo moon landing was 52 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty and almost 15 times her weight. And Lady L, tipping the scales at 225 tons, is no Mary-Kate Olsen. Now NASA is building a new Space Launch System (SLS) that’s even bigger.
All my rocket ship disappointments are the result of there not being enough private companies like XCOR Aerospace. I learned this at the Space Foundation’s annual Colorado Springs Space Symposium exhibit hall, where there was a full-scale mock-up of XCOR’s Lynx that I sat in.
The Lynx’s 30-foot fuselage and 24-foot wingspan would fit in a McMansion garage.  And it’s as prettier than anything a rich car collector has in there now.
The Lynx is soft curving, bob-tailed, compound delta shape with a sharp glance of a cockpit and a pair of ample winglets too beautiful to describe without being sexist, so I wont try. Viewed in profile, they are upside-down mid-section silhouettes of Pippa Middleton leaning over to check your oil.
Alternatively, aerospace author and authority Michael Belfiore saw the Lynx’s sporty form, two seats, and body made from plastic and called it “Space Corvette.”
The Lynx will fly into space. It will take off and land on an ordinary runway. And when this rocket ship leaves earth it will have a pilot at the stick -- not a guy strapped on top of a pillar of high explosives like a mouse duct-taped to a frozen orange juice can with an M-80 under it.
The first flight will probably be early next year, and the first flier will probably be XCOR’s Chief Test Pilot Rick Searfoss, a three-time astronaut and Space Shuttle Commander who knows how the mouse feels.
I went to see the Lynx being built at Mojave Air and Space Port, near Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert. Outside, the XCOR facility is unprepossessing. Inside it’s a Martian hot-rodder’s dream shop.
The Lynx’s 30-foot fuselage and 24-foot wingspan would fit in a McMansion garage. And it’s as prettier than anything a rich car collector has in there now.
The XR-5K18, XCOR’s own rocket engine, is fully developed and surprisingly compact – an outdoor gas grill that when lit would blow your patio into the next country with 2,900 foot-pounds of thrust. The Lynx will have four of them.
The XCOR building’s barn doors are rolled open. Another quart-sized rocket engine, with the power of 40 foot-pounds, is being tested on a “tea tray” static platform. There’s a yard of flame the color of hell when Satan is in a good mood and a half-second whack that lets you know just what a foot-pound is. Let’s just say you wouldn’t want to drop 40 of them on your foot.
The Lynx will carry six of these in three redundant pairs to give the pilot control over pitch, yaw, and roll outside the atmosphere.
The Lynx’s fuselage is being turned on a sort of spit as its all-composite airframe is… I don’t know, basted?
I’m not a tech expert -- I’m a tech fan. The aerospace industry is the Green Bay Packers. I’m up in the stands wearing whatever’s the equivalent of an aerospace cheesehead hat – maybe a motar(circuit)board cap with a fuse for a tassel. I just came to meet the players. (Readers who are authentic techies should consult Michael Belfiore’s excellent article on the Lynx in Air & Space Magazine.)
I interviewed XCOR’s CEO Jeff Greason, President Andrew Nelson, and Chief Engineer Dan Delong. Greason started out at Intel but felt the zero-gravity pull of the rocket macro-process in which he now holds 22 patents. Greason introduced me to DeLong, who helped him found XCOR, saying, “All the ideas around here that work, or don’t work, come from him.”  DeLong has spent 36 years designing, fabricating, and testing space hardware. A decade was devoted to life support on the International Space Station, where it has been much appreciated. And Nelson might the only person on earth (or, soon, in space) who has a BS in electrical engineering and an MBA in finance and has had careers in both guidance systems and investment banking.
The most telling thing about the capitalists privatizing space is that they could be making a lot more money doing something else.
DeLong shrugs. “Baby steps,” he says. “Design a little. Test a little. Try to make a little money.”
XCOR makes some of that money through subcontracting, building complete rocket engines and for propellant and propulsion components. But, says Greason, “We only take work within 30 degrees of our base trajectory.” To translate from Engineerish, that means work that goes in the direction they’re already going.
They’re going for a cheap high, it tempts journalistic flippancy to say. Instead, I’ll say they’re going for a small and simple high.
An example of the small is an ingenious little XCOR-invented three-cylinder pump, based on automotive piston technology, that sends kerosene fuel and liquid oxygen into the rocket engine. Previously a big, fat tank of liquid helium was needed for the task.
An example of the simple is that testing the bearings on this pump would have cost $500 a minute on an engineering firm’s test stand. So XCOR bought a 3-cylinder Triumph motorcycle, installed it’s own bearings in place of the Triumph’s, and one of XCOR’s engineers rode it from Midland, Texas, to Mojave.
There is, of course, cheapness to be considered -- the dollar per kilogram bill for putting a payload into low earth orbit. Greason said that an old-fashioned NASA-type government launch costs between $5000 and $8000 per kilo. SpaceX charges $4000. But space really starts to make business sense at about $1000, and this is where XCOR is headed. At this price, sending your 110-pound daughter into orbit would cost $50,000, which is what you’d otherwise spend on a year of her majoring in Politico-Cultural Stereotype Studies at Swarthmore.
“There are two ways to approach orbit,” said Greason. “You can go orbital and figure out how to reuse the vehicle, or you can make the vehicle reusable and figure out how to go orbital.”
“The Space Shuttle tried to do both at once,” said DeLong.  “It’s a miracle the Shuttle worked.”
Greason said that NASA hadn’t taken into account the maintenance costs per flight for the Space Shuttle, a gigantic airplane “covered in firebrick.”
Several companies are, like XCOR, trying to get people and things into space on reusable vehicles. In fact, it’s been done. In 2004 SpaceShipOne, funded by Microsoft’s Paul Allen, was piloted above the “Karman line” -- the 100-kilometer mark that’s the boundary of space -- twice in two weeks without needing to be rebuilt, thereby winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize for doing ditto privately. It cost Paul Allen $25 million to win $10 million, and SpaceShipOne, though reusable, was not reused.
It did, however, lead to Richard Branson’s Bransonsationally publicized Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo. But this 6-passenger rocket, like its smaller predecessor, has to be hoisted into the stratosphere by a mother ship, White Knight Two.
WK2 is also being tested at Mojave.  One landed while Andrew Nelson and I were standing outside the XCOR building. It was as complicated as a pair of dragonflies mating in the air but bigger – a 78-foot long, 141-foot wide four-engine jet with two complete fuselages and a dihedral arch of a third wing between them where Sir Richard in his rocket will go.
The Virgin Galactic rocket, once it’s dropped from the WK2 and ignites, uses a hybrid engine – solid fuel boost followed by liquid fuel combustion. Solid fuel makes refueling complex because it’s a solid. Try it with a funnel. The Lynx can be refueled like a car and will be able to fly four times a day.
The Lynx Mark I now being readied won’t technically get you into space.  (A higher-flying, three-passenger Mark II is on its way.) But in the Mark I at 200,000 feet you’ll get the full romance of curvy planet, midnight at noon black sky, and better-than-Nutrisystem weightlessness for a not-unthinkable $95,000. A regular Corvette costs $53,000. And the heck with my kid going to Swarthmore.

View Article Here Read More
Older posts

Deep Space Leaderboard 728x90

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License.
unless otherwise marked.

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy



— Up ↑ —