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Archive for the ‘ESA’ Category

I’m quite that just right now. It will pass. Perhaps.
There’s been some discussion in various places about both NASA and potential future launch vehicles. Everything’s just so static in a large sense. Completely hopeless. I’ll throw in the towel for now.
Almost nobody has the required long attention span or patience to make any useful progress [...]

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ATV Docking Right Now

ESA live video here and live blog here, NASASpaceflight.com live thread here. Distance now a few meters.
EDIT: Success! ATV is now docked to ISS. The live streaming video worked great perhaps for the first time ever. Now ESA has the Columbus lab and the ATV on the ISS. This success will probably raise space awareness throughout Europe, I hope the media will note it.

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First ATV nearing ISS

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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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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