Posted in Architecture, Depot, industry, Lunar, NASA, Spacecraft, tagged hypergolic, ISS, propellant depot, propulsion module, storable on Tuesday 2010.04.13| Leave a Comment »
For the ISS. The shuttle would transfer unused hypergolics to the ISS propulsion module. ATV as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS_Propulsion_Module
It was canceled and instead Progress and ATV are used directly for most boosting. Nevertheless the technology could be useful in developing hypergolic propellant depots.
Posted in Architecture, JAXA, Motivation, Spacecraft, tagged HTV, ISS, JAXA on Friday 2009.09.11| Leave a Comment »
It’s in orbit currently. Status updates on spaceflight now and an NSF forum thread. There’s some technical material on NSF L2 about the HTV, for anyone there.
Hope all goes well. This is also exciting, if everything works, there are soon four space agencies that have docked to a space station – a few years ago there were only two. Spacefaring is coming closer, although this is still baby steps in a sense – the vehicles as well as the rockets used to launch them are expendable, and have been developed with ultra expensive national programs. They are the forerunners, grandparents of real spacefaring hardware that will hopefully come in the not too distant future, and be much easier and cheaper.
Posted in ESA, NASA, Spacecraft, tagged ATV, ISS, Jules Verne on Thursday 2008.04.03| Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Depot, ESA, NASA, Spacecraft, tagged ATV, docking, ESA, ISS on Monday 2008.03.31| Leave a Comment »
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 project).
This is also important from the COTS point of view – possible new craft supplying ISS for NASA.
And of course propellant depots which require rendezvous and docking or berthing.
EDIT: apparently it came to a distance of just a few meters. Here’s a pic from NASA TV snapped to the thread on NASASpaceflight.com:
Posted in Depot, RLV:s, Spacecraft, tagged Arctus, COTS, ISS, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Progress, Spacecraft, Spacehab, SpaceX Dragon, ULA on Thursday 2007.12.20| Leave a Comment »
Gravity Loss (now moved to gravityloss.com) 