Space Race - Bad Business Proposition

How bad was last week for the commercial space industry? Two prominent launch disasters—a Virgin Galactic test flight that killed a pilot and injured another, and a failed Orbital Sciences contract mission that destroyed a $266 million rocket and payload—have dampened a wave of optimism about the burgeoning industry.

Its pitiful that the space industry (American) is caught-up with the idea of contracting their core competence in the name of a wonder strategy. NASA to the world is known by its significant missions to Moon, Mars and several coveted and clandestine missions it had completed thus far with a remarkable strike ratio is actually out-sourcing its launches to SpaceX, Antares and the like, is in itself hard to believe.

The Virgin Galactic accident has attracted particular ire, because of the loss of life and the fact that its big-talking CEO, Sir Richard Branson, has long been hawking $250,000 tickets for tourist flights to space that always seem to be just around the corner. The accident inspired commenters to paint the company’s efforts as a sign of global inequality or simply not worth the sacrifice of a life.

But these criticisms get at a problem with Virgin Galactic, not the space industry at large: Branson’s company doesn’t have a real business plan beyond the vague talk of space tourism, and the spacecraft it built was hardly able to accomplish even that.

Virgin says it has sold perhaps $80 million worth of tickets to space, but that is far less than the $490 million invested in the project, mostly from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund. The company has been reportedly looking to raise tens of millions more this summer.

But SpaceShipTwo, the rocket-plane designed by Virgin’s main contractor, Scaled Composites, to take people just above the 100 km altitude that roughly marks the border with space, has yet make it there—hence the decision to switch to a new fuel compound that promised more power in this last test.

Burt Rutan, the CEO of Scaled Composites, has been criticized for his cutting corners in his rocket designs while creating SpaceShipOne, the predecessor to the craft destroyed last week. In 2007, three employees were killed during an on-the-ground engine test, adding to concerns about the safety of the project. One reporter writing a book about Virgin Galactic became friendly with the pilots in the crash and says that some of her sources were concerned that the new engine was moving to flight testing too quickly.

Whether this contributed to the crash will become clearer when the National Transportation Safety Board releases its investigation in the coming year. For now, though, preliminary investigations are centered on SpaceShipTwo’s twin tail booms, which shift position as the craft descends to stabilize its return into orbit; they were apparently unlocked and deployed prematurely, just before SpaceShipTwo broke apart.

SpaceX, whose transition from vanity project to serious space firm we explored at length last month, has actually raised less private capital than Virgin Galactic, but was able to spend significantly more money developing its technology, thanks to a partnership with NASA to service the International Space Station. That also gave the company access to the space agency’s knowledge base and discipline. SpaceX also set its initial sights on the satellite launch market to establish a base of revenue, even as founder Elon Musk promises inter-planetary transport in the years to come.

Virgin Galactic, without revenue or even the capability to enter the satellite market until it proves it can reach low-earth orbit at the altitude of 300km, was in a somewhat desperate spot before the crash on Sunday. Now, it may be years before it can get off the ground again.

http://qz.com/290722/the-real-problem-behind-virgin-galactics-flight-test-disaster-is-bad-business/

Well.. that explains why im often lost looking up the sky night and day... :P

Jokes apart thatz a great message from C&H that quite often the problems we ponder with aren't as deathening as we used to think.. there are hell a lot more of important things in and beyond the world that we live today...

*** Credits to me for inventing the word deathening :P this isn't no big a problem either.. 

Shooting Star - Phobus Grunt falling back to earth after a failed mission

Love the smell of Hydrazine and Dinitrogen Tetroxide in the morning... Phobus Grunt decent has started... wonder if any Radio jove stations could catch it through their telescope. will the fuel chamber explode, would the al shell bear the brunt of the re-entry, will know in a day for sure.... keep ur webbs crossed...

Catch its path here....

Bhuvan, ISRO's new eye in the sky - ISRO's take on Google

AHMEDABAD : Imagine if you could count the lions in Gir or fishermen find concentration of fish in the sea, just by dragging a mouse on a computer screen. Space Applications Centre of ISRO has just made that possible by an innovation called Bhuvan.

Bhuvan, meaning earth, is the addition to the numerous scientific innovations by SAC and is a satellite mapping tool, just like Google Earth or Wikimapia, but allows you to zoom far closer than the aerial view from a chopper. If Google Earth shows details upto 200 metres distance and Wikimapia upto 50 metres, Bhuvan will show images upto 10 metres, which means you can easily see details upto a three floor high building and also add information.

Announcing this at the Indian National Cartographic Association (INCA) International Congress here on Tuesday ISRO chairman Dr G Madhavan Nair said, "Bhuvan will use the data recorded by the Indian satellites only. The prototype of Bhuvan will be ready by the end of November and ISRO is hoping to officially launch the service by March next".

He added that while other mapping sites take four years to update, Bhuvan will be upgraded every year. "This will be able to give you an image from only 10 meters away", he said to the excited gathering.

Unlike the other two webmaps, Bhuvan will focus only on the Indian sub-continent.

"With Bhuvan we will be able to produce very local information which will be specific to only to our own country. This information available from this mapping system will be useful in addressing very local problems like floods, famines, infrastructure development, education and much more," Nair said.

"The information on Bhuvan will be layer wise and the options of viewing filtered information will be available. Inputs from a lot of local players, like farmers, fishermen and likes who know the local area in and out, will also being integrated in Bhuvan. This is for the primary reason to make it of more use to the general public," he said.

WHAT BHUVAN MEANS

Google Earth Bhuvan

Zoom levels up to 200 mt Zoom levels up to 10 mt

Single layer information Multi-layer information

Images upgraded every 4 years Images upgraded every year

No alternate viewing options Options of viewing on different dates

Uses international satellites Uses Indian satellites

Why black holes could be antimatter factories

Here’s an interesting chain of thought…

Imagine a black hole sucking in protons and electrons. With their higher mass, protons are likely to be preferentially sucked, giving the black hole a positive charge. (That’s not so unusual in space: a similar mechanism can give planets a charge because electrons escape their gravity more easily.)

But black holes also create such strong electrostatic fields at the horizon that positrons and electrons simply appear out of the vacuum.

In those circumstances, it’ll look as if the protons being sucked into the black hole are being converted into positrons.

So these kinds of black holes will look and behave like antimatter factories, say Cosimo Bambi from Wayne State University in Detroit and pals.

How might we we spot these exotic objects? Bambi and friends say a sure signature would be an excess of positrons in cosmic rays with an energy between 1 and 100 MeV coming from a black hole.

Anybody seen any of these?

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0806.3440: Black Holes as Antimatter Factories

Japanese Spacecraft Records Full Earth Rising Over the Moon

The Earth as seen from the Moon
Japan's Kaguya spacecraft has relayed the very first Full Earthrise movie in high definition (HD) video, giving humans a uniquely beautiful view of our small blue planet just in time for Earth Day.

Japan's Kaguya lunar orbiter showing fields of wide- and narrow-angle cameras
Kaguya orbits the moon at an altitude of just 60 miles (100 km), allowing its HD television cameras to record the finest video footage ever taken in space. Although film and photos of the colorful earth rising above the desolate lunar surface have been taken before, most famously by Apollo 8 and 11 astronauts in 1968 and 1969 respectively, never before has a rising Full Earth been caught on video - truly the ultimate in "satellite TV"!

Waning Earth, photographed earlier by Kaguya

The following video sequence shows not only the spectacular full Earthrise, but also an Earthset:



Kaguya, named for a mythical moon princess from Japanese mythology, was launched (click here for launch info & video) late last year on a Mitsubishi H-IIA rocket from the JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) space center on Japan's southern Tanegashima Island. The orbiter, whose stated mission is to "gather data on the chemical composition and mineral distribution of the moon, its surface features and gravity field", has performed flawlessly to date.

The exquisite view of our planet provided by Kaguya is a poignant reminder that the Earth is just one small, fragile oasis in the vast emptiness of space... well worth taking care of! (via informitv, video c/o JAXA)

Space station astronauts land off-target, but safely

By Tariq Malik, SPACE.com


Smoke rises where the Soyuz capsule, carrying South Korea's first astronaut, Yi So-yeon, astronaut Peggy Whitson, cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko, landed in northern Kazakhstan. The capsule landed 295 miles off course, but safely.

The International Space Station's (ISS) first female commander and two crewmates are safely back on Earth, but landed well short of their intended landing site as they capped a marathon mission to the orbiting laboratory.

The Russian Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft ferrying Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson, of NASA, and her crew to Earth touched down about 295 miles short of its target zone on the central Asian steppes of Kazakhstan.

"The crew is alive and well. The landing was nominal, but by a backup design," said Anatoly Perminov, chief of Russia's Federal Space Agency, after the 4:30 a.m. ET landing on Saturday. "It was a ballistic descent and all the cosmonauts are feeling fine."

A ballistic re-entry is one in which a Soyuz re-enters at a steeper than normal angle that subjects astronaut crews to higher forces of gravity, NASA officials said.

Cosmonauts returning from the space station last fall also experienced a ballistic re-entry, as did the crew of Expedition 6 in 2003.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Texas Europe Japan Houston South Korea Columbus Kazakhstan Discovery International Space Station Peggy Whitson Kibo Yuri Malenchenko Expedition Garrett Reisman Steve Lindsey Federal Space Agency Anatoly Perminov Oleg Kononenko Sergei Volkov
Whitson returned home alongside Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, an Expedition 16 flight engineer, after a six-month mission that added new science and living space to the $100 billion station. South Korea's first astronaut, 29-year-old bioengineer So-yeon Yi, also accompanied the Expedition 16 crew to conclude her own 10-day spaceflight to the ISS.

Malenchenko, as Soyuz commander, used a satellite phone to contact recovery forces to relay that the crew was in good health.

"We went through the same thing on Expedition 6," said Steve Lindsey, NASA's chief astronaut who planned to greet Whitson at the original landing site. "Of course we didn't hear from them for awhile, so we were concerned. But eventually we got word that they were located so that's real good news."

Recovery teams located the Soyuz crew about 45 minutes after its scheduled landing with a complement of flight surgeons to begin traditional post-landing health checks, Lindsey added.

Back on Earth

Russian space officials promised an in-depth investigation to hunt down the source of the ballistic landing. Meanwhile, Expedition 16 crewmembers were eager to readapt to life on Earth.

"We've really had a very exciting mission," Whitson said this week. "And to have done so much, it was more than we could have asked for."

While she was not looking forward to returning to Earth's gravity after months of weightlessness, Whitson said she was eager for a wider variety of food at mealtimes and getting back to her roots, literally, at her home in Houston, Texas.

"I really like working in my garden and planting flowers," Whitson said. "It's about the right time in Houston to be doing that."

Whitson set a new spaceflight record on Expedition 16 for the most cumulative time spent in space by an American.

Today's landing ended a 192-day flight to the station, giving Whitson a career total of 377 days in space during Expedition 16 and her Expedition 5 flight in 2002. She is now 20th in the ranks of the world's most experienced spaceflyers, though Malenchenko — with 515 days across four spaceflights — now ranks ninth on the list.

"It was a wonderful time," he said of the mission.

Space station expansion

Whitson and her crew began Expedition 16 at a sprint, hosting the first of three visiting NASA shuttle crews about two weeks after their October launch. By late November, shuttle and ISS astronauts had moved a massive solar power tower, performed seven spacewalks and some tricky robotic crane work to attach a new module to space station.

Two more shuttle flights, in February and March of this year, delivered Europe's $2 billion Columbus laboratory and a storage room for Japan's massive Kibo lab, which is slated to launch May 31 aboard the shuttle Discovery. Whitson and her crew also squeezed in extra spacewalks to inspect one solar wing joint and repair another.

"It's so large that I can actually lose crewmembers at times now," Whitson said of the space station before turning it over to its new skipper, Expedition 17 commander Sergei Volkov. "It's so neat, and I think we're ready for a six-person crew now."

Volkov — a second-generation cosmonaut — and Expedition 17 flight engineer Oleg Kononenko are beginning their own six-month mission alongside NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman. They launched with Yi on April 8.

"I feel confident going into Expedition 17 with Sergei and Oleg," said Reisman, who joined the station's Expedition 16 crew last month and is due to return home in June. "It's going to be an all rookie station. I think that's a first."

Yi, meanwhile, flew to the space station under a reported $25 million commercial agreement between her country and Russia's Federal Space Agency and performed a series of education and science experiments.

She was selected from among 36,000 applicants to serve as backup to South Korea's first astronaut, artificial intelligence expert San Ko, but moved to the prime crew last month after Russian space officials pulled Ko from the flight due to reading rule violations.

"As a woman of Korea, and just a person of Korea, I'm so honored to be the one who flew in space," Yi told reporters this week, adding that she took special care with experiments designed to spark interest in science among Korean youth. "I want to make them dream about space."

A challenging half-year
Despite its ambitious construction work, the Expedition 16 crew was not without challenges.

Whitson, Malenchenko and their crewmates tackled a torn solar wing, damaged solar array gears and shuttle launch delays that ultimately kept one Expedition 16 astronaut — NASA spaceflyer Dan Tani — in orbit while he grieved over the unexpected death of his mother in December. Tani returned to Earth two months later, in mid-February, during NASA's first shuttle mission of this year.

"I actually think some of my proudest moments of this mission have been how we handled the problems that have come up," Whitson said.

In just the last few weeks, Expedition 16 astronauts bid farewell to last month's visiting shuttle Endeavour crew, watched over the arrival of Europe's first-ever unmanned cargo ship Jules Verne, and welcomed their relief crew before preparing for the trip home.

"I was likening it the other day to Grand Central Station," said Reisman, adding that he initially expected some bouts of down time and isolation aboard the outpost. "There hasn't been any tedium up here, it's all been action packed. It's like the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie of space missions."

Copyright 2007, SPACE.com Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Rocket Racing to Take Off This Summer

The Rocket Racing League announced this week that their first Exhibition Race would take place at the famed Oshkosh AirVenture EAA Airshow in Wisconsin August 1-2. Two racers will be on the course which combines the thrill of motorsports with the power of rocket engines in flight. The Rocket Racing League will also hold Exhibition Races this year at the Reno Air Races, at Aviation Nation (also in Nevada), and at the X Prize Cup in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Teams can also now opt for rocket engines provided by Doom and Quake creator and president of Armadillo Aerospace, John Carmack. The engines will run on liquid oxygen (LOX) and ethanol and include a special dose of salt water to make the rocket engines flare all the more visible from the ground (think colored smoke from an aerobatic plane). I can't wait to see one in person.

The two planes will race around a two lap course in the sky using heads up displays to see the virtual gates in the sky they must fly through at each checkpoint. Over 700,000 people are expected to watch the races at Oshkosh alone.

The Rocket Racing League was create in 2005 by X Prize Chairman Peter Diamandis and two time Indianapolis 500 winning team partner Granger Whitelaw. There are six teams in the league including former U.S. Navy pilots and former Air Force pilots and the league itself boasts former Space Shuttle Commander Rick Searfoss as a pilot.

The goal? "To advance the technology and increase the publics awareness of space travel." Having a couple dozen more people with extensive day in and day out knowledge of rocket engine design, maintenance, and operation would probably do a lot for aerospace. That is the kind of experience base we are going to need to be a space faring civilization. Then maybe all those video games you have been playing will pay off...

Rocket Racing League Announces First Exhibition Race [Rocket Racing League]

Japan Captures HDTV of Full Earth "Rise" from Lunar Orbit

The Japanese lunar orbiter "Kaguya" saw earth, moon and sun line up on April 6, 2008 and captured another "Earth-rise" and "Earth-set" HDTV video- this time when the Earth was full. (The original November videos were taken when the Earth was wanning (not quite full).

According to the website, the line up occurs only twice a year and allows the orbiter to take these movies as it comes from around the back side of the moon and into view of the Earth. If you haven't worked out how that happens (I haven't either), the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has kindly provided a diagram after the jump... (Thanks to Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society for the montage above).

Ok, I don't quite understand it either. But I love a good thought experiment. So...

For the Earth to look "full" the moon has to be between the earth and the sun and looking at the fully illuminated Earth. When the moon is between the Earth and the sun it would be a New Moon (since we on Earth are looking at its unilluminated side). The moon doesn't block the sunlight from falling on Earth since it's small and orbiting at a 5 degree tilt to the plane of Earth's orbit, so it is usually above or below the line of sight of the sun - see animation link below.) If you look at a lunar calendar April 6th was New Moon and the day these videos were taken.

Now, there is a New Moon every month, so why can it only capture the "Full Earth" twice a year? Check out this link for a cool animation of the moon orbiting the Earth from the perspective of the sun to help visualize why the moon only lines up directly with the earth and the sun twice a year. The animation gives a good sense of why lunar eclipses only happen twice (or four times) a year, but I am not clear about how that relates to Earth's fullness. I welcome comments from people who really know.

Note that the Apollo missions picture of "Earth-rise" did not happen to fall during "full-Earth" and had an Earth that was about 3/4's full. JAXA thinks this is the first full Earth picture to be captured, if not, it certainly is the first full Earth captured in HDTV...

JAXA has a beautiful flash site of the images it has taken with Kaguya. They also have a gallery of HDTV videos from Kaguya that are easier to navigate if you can read Japanese. The HDTV videos are not full resolution. JAXA has not released those versions yet. It is believed that their partner, the Japanese Public Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) are reserving them for future commercial and educational purposes.

I will also update this post as I learn more.

Original Press Release [JAXA] (in Japanese)

Beautiful New Earthrise and Earthset movies from Kaguya [Planetary Society]