Posted in Depot, ESA, NASA, Spacecraft, tagged ATV, docking, ESA, ISS on Monday 2008.03.31 | No Comments »
The first European Autonomous Transfer Vehicle is nearing the International Space Station as I write this. It’s demo day 2 and it will go to 250 meters distance. Docking will be a few days later.
ESA has a live blog here.
NASASpaceflight.com has a live thread here. Someone just posted a screen capture:
There’s video at NASA TVas well as ESA’s blog.
Hope all goes well. This is a bit of a competence test for ESA and the European space industry (well, those who are in this [...]
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There’s a Finnish bank called Sampo (Previously called Leonia, previously Postipankki) that has about a million customers. It was sold to danish Danske Bank some time ago. They did a renewal of the online account services during easter. It was a massive failure (like these things usually are).
Practically everybody in Finland uses their bank’s online [...]
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BEGIN EDIT
Oh well, there actually is more info about the vehicle outside XCOR’s press release (why didn’t they put that there?). Here, at Clark Lindsey’s Hobbyspace. Seems my speculations were a bit off-base, the dry mass was fine but the mass ratio is a lot bigger, about 3. I noticed after posting from the flight [...]
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Posted in RLV:s, meta, tagged snow, space access on Monday 2008.03.24 | No Comments »
I changed the blog title picture. Will see what I invent next, eh. Was out with a friend whose camera I used.
Also, there was the first snow this winter that stayed more than 24 hours. As well as some sunshine.
The sea hasn’t frozen over really at all this year. There are just some thin ice platelets melancholically clacking together near the shores. Been seing geese (Branta canadensis), swans (Cygnus cygnus) and other waterfowl like Bucephala clangula who didn’t bother leaving for winter. (EDIT: Also, Opera’s [...]
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A great visionary has passed.
I just browsed an astrophotography book in a library last week - the foreword written by Clarke was very captivating, showing such well conveyed clear arches of logic, spirit and imagination that you just had to read it through.
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ESA’s Architecture for Exploration Study (AES) is overviewed in Lunar Base Quarterly 1/2008 (EDIT: to be clear, the Quarterly was released in January):
Lots of Ariane 5, Angara and Soyuz launches with space docking, a space station in Earth-Lunar L1 and many new crewed and non-crewed craft and capabilities.
They had a red team / blue team [...]
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