Posted in Architecture, Demotivation, ESA, ISRU, Motivation, NASA, RLV:s, Suborbital, tagged Armadillo, COTS, ESA, fed up, Future, NASA, RAGA, RLV, SpaceX, XCOR on Wednesday 2008.06.18 | 6 Comments »
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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David Harris finally wrote the article on NSF that was a long time coming. Ares V might very well move to 5.5 segment SRB:s. There goes the commonality with Ares I.
Mike Griffin, Scott Horowitz, Doug Stanley and the others might have picked an architecture with too little margins and too many limits.
In other links, the [...]
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Nasaspaceflight.com’s Chris Bergin finally wrote the article on Ares I’s thrust oscillation mitigation options. There are three main ones: new pulsed brake rockets, a damper between stages and a tuned small mass damper in the SRB. All three could be applied. They also increase mass and thus reduce performance.
Ares I’s thrust oscillation coupled with the whole rocket’s already looming possible underperformance and the Orion spacecraft mass growth drives towards a possible no win situation. It’s a bit hard to know about the margins.
There is only one earlierdocument making a clear picture of the masses, performances, margins and
reserves out there:
Brian Muirhead’s presentation from 31 Jan 2008. (Thanks to Renclod on Nasaspaceflight’s forum for finding it.)
So it seems there could [...]
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Posted in ESA, NASA, Spacecraft, tagged ATV, ISS, Jules Verne on Thursday 2008.04.03 | No Comments »
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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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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